The Engineer Without a CS Degree: Why I Chose Business School and Never Looked Back
I’ve been programming since I was twelve. I shipped my first real product as CTO of a startup at twenty. I’ve never completed a computer science degree.
This is not a story about dropping out. It’s a story about choosing what to learn when you can’t learn everything — and discovering that the “wrong” choice was exactly right.
The Kid With the Formatted Hard Drive
When I was twelve, my dad gave me a computer. Within weeks, I’d formatted it and installed a Linux distribution. Not because I was a prodigy — because I was curious and reckless, which at that age amounts to the same thing.
My dad noticed. He told me about Ruby on Rails and Python. Said if I liked computers that much, I could learn to program. I didn’t fully grasp what that meant yet, but the seed was planted.
In middle school, a close friend and I programmed our first video game. It was good enough to take us to a science fair in Mazatlán — one of my most treasured memories from that era. Not because we won, but because for the first time, something I’d made with code existed in the real world and other people interacted with it.
By high school, I was leading the programming team in our robotics club. I had years of experience as a Linux user, a hobbyist programmer, and someone who genuinely loved computers.
So naturally, I went to college to study business.
The ITAM Decision
I entered ITAM on a scholarship for engineering. The plan was computer science. The plan lasted until my first business class.
Something clicked immediately. The ability to quantify scenarios, to model decisions, to plan — it felt like a superpower I didn’t know existed. And it felt necessary in a way that was deeply personal.
In 2019, my family was starting their first business. None of us knew the legal requirements, the accounting standards, the operational fundamentals. We were learning everything from scratch. ITAM was an extraordinary university for business education, and I realized I was learning things I couldn’t learn anywhere else — certainly not from a terminal.
I loved my engineering classes too. I’ll always be grateful to Dr. Franzoni for bringing clarity to that confusing period of my life. But when the pandemic hit, something had to give.
I was working in the family business. I didn’t have time to study full-time anymore. Pursuing a double degree was expensive. And I had to make a choice.
Here’s what I knew: I would always love technology. That love had been with me since I was twelve. It wasn’t going anywhere. But business knowledge? Finance? The ability to read a balance sheet, structure a deal, understand what makes a company viable? I’d never been exposed to that world before. I didn’t know business people. I didn’t come from that environment.
The things that are hardest to learn on your own are the things you should learn in school. Programming has Stack Overflow. Corporate finance does not.
I chose finance. It terrified me. I don’t regret it.
Back to Code (It Never Really Left)
Shortly after, I fell into smart contracts. A friend and I started exploring an idea called Circle — peer-to-peer lending on-chain. One thing led to another, and I joined a new project called YaLlegó as CTO.
“CTO” is a generous title for what I was: the person on the team who had the most experience writing code. We were all students. We were all very young. But someone had to build the thing, and that someone was me.
I had to learn React quickly. Web development captivated me from the first day I touched it. And from that point on, I never stopped writing code for any extended period.
The irony wasn’t lost on me: I’d left computer science to study business, and ended up building software full-time anyway. But I was building it differently than I would have otherwise.
The Linux Loop
There’s a subplot worth mentioning because it captures the organic nature of this whole journey.
At some point, my laptop was too old and underpowered to run Windows. So I installed Linux — again. Not out of ideology or preference, but out of pure necessity. That forced reacquaintance with the filesystem, the terminal, and system administration planted seeds that would bloom years later.
When it came time to scale applications beyond Vercel and Supabase — tools I’m deeply grateful for, but which have limits at scale — I already had the instincts. Provisioning servers, understanding networking, navigating Linux in production: these weren’t skills I’d studied. They were skills I’d accumulated by living with the operating system for over a decade, mostly because I couldn’t afford not to.
The Advantage Nobody Planned
Here’s what I’ve come to understand: the combination of finance and engineering isn’t a compromise. It’s a compounding advantage.
Engineers who’ve never studied business build technically impressive products that nobody pays for. Business people who’ve never written code make promises that nobody can deliver. The intersection — understanding both what’s possible and what’s viable — is remarkably underpopulated.
When I started collaborating on more professional projects, I realized I had a unique perspective: I could sit at the co-founders’ table and analyze the incremental impact of a software project, or build a budget for the architecture I was proposing. Not just “here’s what we should build” but “here’s what it costs, here’s the expected return, and here’s why this technical bet makes financial sense.”
I’m sure many engineers can do this too. But I learned it in a specific order — business first, engineering second — and that sequence shaped how I think. I don’t evaluate an architecture and then ask about cost. I evaluate cost as part of the architecture decision. They’re the same conversation.
When I sit in a due diligence meeting, I can speak to both the cap table and the Kubernetes cluster. That’s not because I’m especially smart. It’s because I happened to study one thing formally and the other thing obsessively.
The Question I Get Asked
“Has it been hard to be taken seriously as an engineer without a CS degree?”
Honestly? Sometimes. There are moments — usually in hiring processes — where the absence of that credential creates friction. Some companies filter for it. Some interviewers assume gaps that don’t exist.
But in practice, in the room, writing code and shipping products? Nobody has ever asked to see my diploma. They ask to see my work. And the work speaks for itself — not because it’s perfect, but because it exists, in production, serving users.
The Finance Certification, the Kubernetes certifications, the hackathon wins, the shipped products — these aren’t substitutes for a CS degree. They’re evidence that the learning never stopped, and never depended on a classroom to continue.
What I’d Tell My Younger Self
Don’t panic about the fork in the road. It’s not actually a fork. It’s a braided river — the streams separate and reconnect in ways you can’t predict from where you’re standing.
Choose the thing you can’t learn alone. The other thing will find its way back to you.
It always does.
Diego Jiménez Vergara — Financial Management, ITAM. Self-taught engineer. Building at the intersection because that’s where the interesting problems live.