I'm a bit on the fence here. Yes, arts degree is far not the wisest solution but not having a CS degree is not the end of the world. It will however dramatically slow you down in the job market(unless you are truly exceptional). Which goes for anyone reading this: you are better off having a CS degree than not, so unless you have some life circumstances which prevent you from getting it(which some employers would be willing to understand and turn a blind eye), you should do it. I've personally given the green light on hiring people without a CS degree on two occasions and on both occasions it was a good call. However, seeing that someone doesn't have a degree raises less flags than someone having a degree in a completely different field: degrees are expensive, even if the education in your country is free - you still need to invest 4+ years of your life. The fact that you have one and are looking elsewhere might look like someone who simply whats to deep dive into an industry for the larger paycheck and nothing else: There are individuals which are motivated only by money and have 0 interest in anything beyond that. I'm not going into the "romance and passion for your work" type of thing - that's all bullshit. Yet you have to an absurdly curious individual in order to have any value in the IT industry. An example would be one of the people I picked at an old job without a degree. He had only done small, unfinished personal projects on github. 3 years later I had full confidence in him to give him any task. Telling him "hey we are going to experiment with X, wanna give it a shot?" resulted in him reading the entire documentation of X, buying books and literally not going to sleep with days. You can't imagine how many people with masters degrees in cs have been unable to answer a simple question like "what's heap and stack and how do they differ". My advice: don't shoot for the stars(yet) - look for a very entry level job(yes, django, rails, even php) and prepare yourself for a lot of surprises. I remember coming out of university, thinking I'm on top of the world and half way through my first day at my first serious job as a software engineer feeling like I was dropped on another planet. It took me at least 4-5 months to start feeling somewhat comfortable. With this in mind, your jump would be magnitudes larger and slower.
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I'm a bit on the fence here. Yes, arts degree is far not the wisest solution but not having a CS degree is not the end of the world. It will however dramatically slow you down in the job market(unless you are truly exceptional). Which goes for anyone reading this: you are better off having a CS degree than not, so unless you have some life circumstances which prevent you from getting it(which some employers would be willing to understand and turn a blind eye), you should do it. I've personally given the green light on hiring people without a CS degree on two occasions and on both occasions it was a good call. However, seeing that someone doesn't have a degree raises less flags than someone having a degree in a completely different field: degrees are expensive, even if the education in your country is free - you still need to invest 4+ years of your life. The fact that you have one and are looking elsewhere might look like someone who simply whats to deep dive into an industry for the larger paycheck and nothing else: There are individuals which are motivated only by money and have 0 interest in anything beyond that. I'm not going into the "romance and passion for your work" type of thing - that's all bullshit. Yet you have to an absurdly curious individual in order to have any value in the IT industry. An example would be one of the people I picked at an old job without a degree. He had only done small, unfinished personal projects on github. 3 years later I had full confidence in him to give him any task. Telling him "hey we are going to experiment with X, wanna give it a shot?" resulted in him reading the entire documentation of X, buying books and literally not going to sleep with days. You can't imagine how many people with masters degrees in cs have been unable to answer a simple question like "what's heap and stack and how do they differ". My advice: don't shoot for the stars(yet) - look for a very entry level job(yes, django, rails, even php) and prepare yourself for a lot of surprises. I remember coming out of university, thinking I'm on top of the world and half way through my first day at my first serious job as a software engineer feeling like I was dropped on another planet. It took me at least 4-5 months to start feeling somewhat comfortable. With this in mind, your jump would be magnitudes larger and slower.