In my experience, once you have a very basic sense of 'how to program', your programming skills don't matter a lot anymore. If you work in a team that underdocuments and underspecifies their project (which is practically every team ever), communication and motivation are much more important than knowing how to reverse a linked list in-place.
I have masters in two STEM degrees, which most employers seem to value at exactly nothing. They are very enthusiastic about hiring me. At the same rate they would hire someone without a degree, that is.
The thing they want, is multiple years of professional experience with a very specific set of 4-8 technologies. These are 'must-haves', and then there are probably 4-8 'nice-to-haves', which are even more exotic demands. And then companies complain 'that there are sooo little people skilled people in IT' and 'the IT people have such ridiculous demands!'. In my environment, I see people with a lot less experience make a lot more in other fields.
(This is how it goes in the Netherlands, at least.)
I have masters in two STEM degrees, which most employers seem to value at exactly nothing. They are very enthusiastic about hiring me. At the same rate they would hire someone without a degree, that is.
The thing they want, is multiple years of professional experience with a very specific set of 4-8 technologies. These are 'must-haves', and then there are probably 4-8 'nice-to-haves', which are even more exotic demands. And then companies complain 'that there are sooo little people skilled people in IT' and 'the IT people have such ridiculous demands!'. In my environment, I see people with a lot less experience make a lot more in other fields.
(This is how it goes in the Netherlands, at least.)