Ask HN: Is it possible to get a tech job without a degree?

Serious question. If you have a story, success or cautionary, please share.

I think the best answer you're going to come away with from here is this: Yes, it is possible, but it is more difficult. YMMV.

I'm occasionally a hiring manager for engineers, and yes, it's very possible to get a job without a tech degree. Tech interviewing usually has four major steps: 1) sourcing candidates, 2) filtering resume candidates, 3) technical phone screen, 4) in-person interview.

For most companies, having a degree only matters in the first two phases, and ability/interviewability matters in the last two.

Experienced engineers avoid getting filtered out in the first two phases by working through their network, which allows them to skip those phases entirely. If you're trying to break in without any experience, it's much harder because you probably don't have a network and degrees are often used as a filter during candidate discovery and resume filtering (especially when the engineering manager is working with a recruiter).

My thought would be to proactively send your resume directly to a bunch of job postings, especially ones which go to a "jobs@$company.com". Anecdotally, I know I don't get many direct resumes these days, so I'd end up reading them, skipping any explicit filtering.

I have one semester of college, in which I took psychology and political science.

I've worked as the lead network architect for a large ISP, as a developer and then lead developer of a network security tool, as a security researcher (I have a pretty decent cite record and a fun list of universities with courses that have taught papers I wrote), as a 2-time startup founder, the first of which was VC-funded, as a lead developer for a large-data Internet backbone monitoring system, and as a product marketing manager for several years. The shortest of these roles was 2 years; the longest 8 (and counting).

No. You do not need a degree. Early on in my career, I was asked for my GPA and then my SAT scores, by HR, after passing a job interview on Wall Street; I declined to continue the process. I've walked from all similar requests ever since. Not only do I think it hasn't cost me, but I think it has also helped me, by keeping me out of jobs at companies that suck.

If you're going to skip college, be very serious about your craft. Opt for difficult jobs. Tune your career so that you are always on the verge of being overwhelmed. Read like crazy; particularly, read papers, not blog posts. Learn a systems programming language and a functional language, then stop with the languages and start building things from papers. Be careful about getting wedged into things that are just barely programming, like CRUD web apps and iOS design. You can do good work in those settings, but the median project is (technically) boring. You know something is going wrong when you start promoting your unit test or A/B testing tools.

Watch out for IT. IT for people without a degree is a trap.

Consider staying in school long enough to pick up math. Math didn't matter much in my first 10 years or so, but it matters a lot to me now, and doing it on my own is a slog. I would pay a lot of money to be taught serious linear algebra and calculus instead of hacking and slashing my way through the subject on my own.

Absolutely.

When hiring, i'm much more inclined to take someone straight out of school (or someone currently, I dunno, working in a bar or not working at all) who has some good code up on github or some personal side projects over someone who has a degree and no other apparent interest in coding.