Ask HN: Self taught programmers without CS degree working at one of the big 5?

Self taught programmer WITH a CS degree, worked at 2 of the companies you mentioned. I got a master's degree in CS a while ago. I still call myself a self taught programmer because I started learning as soon as I started practicing CS at work. A degree is like a passeport, hard to move around without it and people assume you do have a passeport because it's easy to get.

So, it could be just a memory exercise. If you practice on leetcode and memorize about a 100 different problems, then you should be able to get in any of these companies (as illustrated by other people here).

Last but not least, to really answer your question, you basically feel pressured to deliver a lot in a small period of time. Not once, not twice, always. You get judged a lot on your abilities and at the end of the day, you still work on products that solve very basic problems - web app, mobile app, e-commerce, social, etc.

It's all about fear and ego. Was I able to work at one of these top companies? Am I the smartest employee in my group? Is my annual package bigger than my friends packages? Am I wearing a t-shirt of my employer during the weekends? Things like that... from experience, you should be hunting for a much bigger opportunity in life. Go where things don't exist yet and don't get distracted by very successful people like zuck, jobs, gates, etc. who have built empires. Do you want to work for their missions or yours? Use them as examples, don't work for them!

I don't have a CS degree and work at Amazon. I picked a specialty completely unrelated to academic CS that's generally welcoming of beginners (PHP development).

After getting a very entry level PHP job based on reading a few O'Reilly books, I spent a couple years getting progressively less shitty jobs with progressively higher pay and levels of responsibility. By the time I got an interview with Amazon, I was a legitimate PHP expert. I read a book on Amazon's leadership principles and worked through Cracking the Coding Interview to prep for my interview loop at Amazon, and I'm pretty sure only one or two of my interviewers knew I didn't have a CS degree -- the rest didn't look at my resume.

Now that I've been at Amazon for two years, I don't think any employer would care about my lack of a CS degree. I'm certainly happy to be making several times more than I did in my previous career (French teacher).

>I actually found Algorithms 4th ed to be the perfect level of difficulty

This book - http://algs4.cs.princeton.edu/home/ ?

I'm honestly not sure what to tell you - the recruiting side of things is so opaque that I'm not sure what you can do to get past the initial screen. I personally had a strong referral at Google, but everywhere else I applied through the front door and had no issues.

If I were to take a guess, I'd say that I got a bit lucky - right place/right time sort of thing. I had a few years of experience under my belt, which separated me from the new grads, but not so many years of experience that I'd be competing with senior engineers. On top of that, I applied for front end positions, which I think tech giants have only recently started to value - this has left a bit of a void that needs to be filled, which possibly made it easier for me to get the initial recruiter calls.

My resume was also relatively strong for someone with two years of experience. Solid university, strong GPA, and at my previous jobs I always tried my best to wiggle myself into taking on large projects and write tooling to make everyone's lives easier. This gave me a lot of stuff to talk about during the interviews and made for some impressive looking bullet points.

This is the same impression I got by interviewing at the big 5. Everybody there drinks the Koolaid while building things that have a negative impact on the world