1) There are a lot of people doing engineering without a degree. One example: many makers are not engineers and they do a lot of good stuff anyway. What they don't do is taking legal responsibility because they are not allowed to. It's no warranty / no fitness for a purpose stuff. Similarly there is a lot of software with no warranty / no fitness clauses. History demonstrated that it's good enough to keep the world spinning.
2) Most people in the software industry do engineering jobs no matter if they have a degree in Computer Science or Software Engineering (I didn't check the USA name for that, sorry) or in anything else. I know very good software developers, maybe with an architect / engineer job title, with no degree at all or with a degree in Graphic Design or Philosophy or Agronomy. They moved to software development because they tinkered with their computers, wrote some programs and discovered that they are good at it. Nobody notices the difference after 5 or 10 years of work. The only downside it's a little narrowness of expertise: they have many more unknown unknowns because nobody systematically told them what's there outside and how it works, even at high level. One example: that good software developer with the Graphic Design degree told me once that he doesn't really know how networking works. To him it's the configuration screen of his Mac and HTTP calls from Node.js.
1) There are a lot of people doing engineering without a degree. One example: many makers are not engineers and they do a lot of good stuff anyway. What they don't do is taking legal responsibility because they are not allowed to. It's no warranty / no fitness for a purpose stuff. Similarly there is a lot of software with no warranty / no fitness clauses. History demonstrated that it's good enough to keep the world spinning.
2) Most people in the software industry do engineering jobs no matter if they have a degree in Computer Science or Software Engineering (I didn't check the USA name for that, sorry) or in anything else. I know very good software developers, maybe with an architect / engineer job title, with no degree at all or with a degree in Graphic Design or Philosophy or Agronomy. They moved to software development because they tinkered with their computers, wrote some programs and discovered that they are good at it. Nobody notices the difference after 5 or 10 years of work. The only downside it's a little narrowness of expertise: they have many more unknown unknowns because nobody systematically told them what's there outside and how it works, even at high level. One example: that good software developer with the Graphic Design degree told me once that he doesn't really know how networking works. To him it's the configuration screen of his Mac and HTTP calls from Node.js.