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.