- I don't have a CS degree. - I've never taken a DSA class. - I've never taken a computer science course. - I didn't land my first job from cold applications or referrals. We've been fed the "traditional tech career path" story for so long. CS degree → Internships → Big Tech → Success It's inspiring, yes. But does it mean it's the only way? No. Here's what's also possible: ✓ You can break into tech through bootcamps, self-learning, or career pivots ✓ You can build real projects that showcase your skills better than any degree ✓ You can network authentically through communities, not just cold outreach ✓ You can start in smaller companies where you'll learn faster and have more impact The tech industry needs diverse perspectives and non-traditional backgrounds. Your unique journey isn't a bug—it's a feature. Stop apologizing for the path you didn't take. Start owning the one you're on. Do you know anyone who doesn't have a CS degree but has successfully broken into tech?

When I started my career, I thought being a “real” developer meant typing everything out by hand and not relying too much on shortcuts. I rolled my eyes at things like autocomplete, code snippets, or frameworks that seemed to “do too much” for you. My mindset was: if you can’t build it all yourself from scratch, do you really understand it? Looking back, that thinking held me back. Experienced engineers helped me realize that good developers don’t reject tools, they figure out how to use them to build faster, cleaner, and more reliable software. I learned to embrace modern IDEs, linters, frameworks, and CI/CD pipelines, and my productivity skyrocketed. Now I see the same skepticism with AI coding assistants. Some devs scoff at them the way I used to scoff at autocomplete. But here’s the truth: these tools aren’t here to replace your skills, they’re here to amplify them. Sure, if you don’t know the fundamentals, AI might just help you make mistakes faster, but that’s not the fault of the tool. The developers who grow the fastest are the ones who stay curious, adapt, and leverage the best tools available. That was true when I got started, and it’s even more true today.

Forget the 10x engineer myth. Focus on being a 1% better developer every day. Got a function to work? That's a win! Fixed your first bug? Celebrate it! Made your first API call? You just connected to the entire internet. Each small victory is building your technical confidence muscle. The compound effect of daily progress is more powerful than sporadic bursts of genius. You don't need to build the next Facebook. You need to build the next version of yourself. And that happens one solved problem at a time.

The moment before every career breakthrough looks exactly like failure. Your code crashes. Your model won't converge. Your interview gets rejected. But here's the secret every successful tech professional knows: the person who gets hired isn't the one who never fails, it's the one who fails forward fastest. That "impossible" bug you're debugging right now? It's teaching you patterns that will make you unstoppable. That rejection letter? It's redirecting you toward something better. Every expert in this community has a graveyard of failed projects behind them. The difference? They kept building anyway.

Here's a somewhat "not so" controversial take but id love to hear the group's thought on it. In 5 years, will knowing how to code be more or less important than knowing how to effectively collaborate with AI? What skills do you think will be truly irreplaceable? Will technical jobs be entirely replaced, or will we look back at this time and say that tech employees were merely given more powerful tools to do their jobs? For those of us not upskilling with AI, then are we training for the right future or preparing for yesterday's job market?"