A few days ago I went to an opening ceremony, after a little while I found myself talking to a colleague I just met, BTW now he’s a good friend of mine, and we were talking a lot about career, christianity, faith and other topics we share opinions and found many similarities between each other.

One of the many topics that popped out throughout the conversation was the formal education and I realized something that, even though I knew I already knew it (yes, sometimes you know that you know something you know).

I’ve work in plenty of industries, with several companies around the globe and the only single thing I actually use my bachelor’s degree is for my main, full-time job as a primary school teacher. As you probably already know, I’m a software developer and I’ve been making software for the last 10 years, professionally for 7 years now. But one thing you may ignore about this is that, actually I’ve no formal education in that single field, as well, as most of my current knowledge base.

Actually, and it may sounds surprising, but I haven’t even, ever, completed an online course on Software Development, of course I have started several of them, but I’m a reading/writing learner so I learn the most through reading material and synthetising the content or teaching someone what I understand, and for years, that was an action figure of mine, Tony Stark. It’s a POP next to my monitor. I use a custom version of the rubber duck technique to check my understanding, explaining to Tony how he must program or use the knowledge I was learning.

Most of my knowledge on software development comes from books (and no, usually I don’t finish my books neither), documentation and real world practice, yes you guessed it, is practical usage and real life challenges what have taught me the most.

Many times I got rejected in job applications because of my english, so I started learning and using english more and more until I started feeling more comfortable using it in a daily basis. Another thing I have no way to show how or where I learned from. Graphic design, make your guess… studying behance, deviantart and pinterest designs from experts plus Krita docs, Gimp docs, InkScape docs and a few ‘tips and tricks’ videos on YouTube were enough to learn what I know on the topic.

And I can go over and over coming with examples from my very own experience that demonstrates my point, in today’s world, by 2025 it doesn’t really matter if you have or not completed a 4-year degree. Businesses cannot trust universities and have to ‘teach you the real world’ before you’re making money for them, so, it’s a lot better if you have the knowledge and practice they need to get you the opportunity.

I have’t need yet to demonstrate how or where I have learned how to code, but my portfolio (almost inexistent now) talked about a man that’s serious about creating software and deeply understanding how it actually works.

My final thoughts are that in today’s world, education (if have not yet) is getting democratized and finding a way to perpetually be owned by people, not universities, not companies, no more centralized high paying skills or high quality education. Even better when you take in account LLMs, the bigger revolution of our era.

In my country, most people haven’t realized that, actually, there’s no more (significant) economics behind a good education, and of course, we don’t need degrees no more. Now, don’t get me wrong, I think there’s a value in many subjects when it comes to a degree level, like engineering, most health careers and other fields, but, like, in general, you can make a life, a good one just by learning how to learn, investing your time wisely and putting in some effort, practice and a lot of repetition.