Ask HN: What’s the best city/state for self-taught web devs without a degree?

I gotta second the above statement. A software engineering job often has so many unqualified applicants that it's just not practical to give every applicant a courtesy phone call. In these cases, a CS degree requirement is a way to filter out the people who are spamming their resume; or the crazies who just don't understand the kind of experience that the job requires.

That being said, it doesn't hurt to couch-surf in Silicon valley for a week or two. There are a lot of (cough) "startups" that need dirt-cheap developers that you can meet at every single networking event. You'll have 2-3 years of putting up with stupid ideas that go belly up every few months, but as you build your network, you'll eventually find someone who values your skills and forgets that you don't have a pedigree.

Personally, I have zero degrees and no formal education in ANYTHING, not to mention a general distaste for traditional classroom training in general, yet starting with a graphic design job that fell in my lap in 1998 (it's who you know...), I've simply developed my skills "organically" (?) and parlayed each position into the next, having worked as a web developer (at loosely-run non-profits and for very traditionally-structured government contractors), UX architect (at a very well-known company/domain name provider), UI developer (financial institution), and now as software engineer building web apps for a very narrow vertical market.

While my first "real" office job was Southern California (in an inland bedroom community 1 hour north of San Diego), the bulk of my career has spanned 2 geographic areas: Phoenix and Denver (mostly the suburbs, at that.) Relocating to both did entail factoring in the availability of relevant jobs but was more about what I wanted for my life at the time the decision was made.

It's highly unlikely I'd ever be a strong candidate for a Silicon Valley-type company or a startup, which is fine wth me since I'm a work-to-live type temperament and have never been the "work hard, play hard" type. But I also have a seemingly natural desire to be a good employee & coworker and like to be proud of the quality of work I do. Some of that might be a result of the "leadership development" that was unofficially required in my first job.

The foundations for my career are only based in teenage dabbling in software (coding BASIC on a TRS-80 in the early 90s, reverse engineering the HTML in webpages to build my own in the mid-90s) and a general technical bent overlaid with creative tendencies. Having a nearly insatiable thirst for knowledge probably helps too...

Anyway I put them under "projects," right next to a couple company projects. The projects section is structured very similarly to the "work" section.