I have worked in software dev for over 40 years with no degree at all. Mostly self-taught, but I got quite a bit of employer-provided training and mentoring especially early in my career. I got recruited by a big company while in school, put university on hold and never got around to finishing. I'd have a history degree if I had gone back to school -- programming started as an interest and hobby for me, one that took over all of my spare time in high school and college.

My kids (two with degrees, one went to a vocational program) all have jobs, but none of them work in tech or software. I can't imagine trying to get a job today as a junior, especially without a STEM degree. Plenty of employers (or freelance customers) will overlook credentials if the candidate has experience and a reputation, but young people fresh out of school don't have any of that.

Employers seem completely unwilling to take a chance on young people eager to work and learn. I get the impression that very few employers put any resources into training or mentoring their programmers, instead they want to hire people who exactly match some checklist or "skill set" and fob the screening and interviewing off to HR, recruiters, and now AI.

I came here to ask OP if they mean "without STEM degree", "without STEM education" ... Would physics degree (while STEM, it's supposedly not as close to Software/Tech as math or other types of engineering studies).

Loads of such not strictly TECH folks end up in Big Tech as data scientists, as well as programmers.

I only have ~25 years of "work" experience. I finished electrical engineering/electronics highschool (in parts of Europe you're 18 y/o by the time you finish highschool). And then just as I started with (computers focused) EE College - I also started freelancing. I started making websites/scripts/etc in the early 2000s.

It turned into full time contracting, and then even moving countries for "Software Engineering" job - all before I finished college.

Anyway - although in the last 2-5 years (Covid/Wars/etc) it became less common for companies to accept "graduates".

My impression is that it's more about hiring freeze in general, than the more recent "AI makes 100x developers possible" hype.

And by "graduates" I've seen both young folks with tech education but 0 work experience, as well as no (complete or at all official) tech education yet self taught and much more "work experience" from personal projects, competitions, hackathons.

And of course there's also other tech stuff - UX/design, db/net/sys admins and such.