Ask HN: I have a 6th-grade education. Should I hide this in interviews?

At some point that goes away. Your future educational history eclipses and sort of "hides" all that.

I got a GED in 1991, in lieu of traditional high school graduation. I'd been in foster care. Once I'd been in college, the pre-college educational history no longer matters.

Since I finished my degree in 2013 (finally!) that I'd started in 1991… anything before it is irrelevant. There may be an outlier company where this doesn't apply, but I feel like that's the exception and not the rule.

Explicitly advertising your past might not help you to progress over your "typical" engineering career.

That said if you want to become a vigilante for "how to be successful with bad childhood and no education" - that might work really well.

Unless they ask you to, you tell them. And I think that by doing that and telling that you come from that background and maybe give them a bit of display how you have learned everything by yourself(Great quality!!!), you mind end up even with more respect.

But I would only talk about it if I had to. When I go to interviews, even though that I have a BS in CS, I don't talk about it, it's already on my CV and people should know it. As I'm a Senior/Lead whatever developer with many years of experience, that makes no difference whatsoever. Because even my deep knowledge I've learned in CS about B-tree algorithms already has been mostly forgotten and can be revived only by Googling it a few minutes, and if I'm preparing for a interview, I'll review it... and those things are better proven live(in a whiteboard or in a coding challenge) than with a Diploma(which very rarely they will ask).

I suggest you do an experiment, and try it on some companies you don't care if you get an offer or not.

Do 10 interviews. 5 of which you hide this fact to the best of your ability, and the other 5 embrace it as a positive part of your history.

You don't have to wait for a call back, you should just be able to read the interviewer's expression as you tell him this.

And again, it depends upon how you sell it. If you sell yourself as "damaged goods", you probably won't get an offer. If on the other hand you sell yourself as someone who has "overcome" a terrible life story, it might work in your favor, and you never know, it might open doors you wouldn't expect to open.