Ask HN: How to get a job without degree?

Here’s how I went from being generationally poor to that:

1) Taught myself the skill. Really put my head down and learned.

2) Demonstrate you know what your doing and have a passion for it (fake it if you don’t and just want to get paid) through projects, contributions, volunteering, having your own site with mentioned projects writing etc. You’re building an image here.

3) Literally get your foot in the door anywhere, doesn’t matter how bad. Mine was at a local web dev shop locally as an “intern” in a tiny office w/ 4 people.

4) Start racking up XP and use that XP as leverage going forward. I mean really sell it. And always talk up your previous experience.

People tend to care more about experience, ability to get shit done, and personality over education in this field.

But yeah that was my experience having been in the same boat.

In the case of malware analysis I would expect somebody to analyze malware and write a report, I am sure you have seen these. These aren't too different from the kind of reports you would write in school; if you blogged about how you took apart a bad SD card you bought, that would demonstrate you have the research and communication skills that somebody might have learned in school.

Malware analysis also requires a holistic understanding about computers that a CS education is supposed to give you. You can get that understanding through reading and tinkering if you have aptitude for it, enjoy it, work hard at it and manifest that.

I never once looked at someone's education. Quite frankly, I do not give a singular shit.

Management/HR might be different, other devs may have different attitudes. But I thought it might be worth putting my recent experience out there. Which, to reiterate, is that I care what you've worked on, and what you have experience with, not what credentials you have.

Build a strong portfolio of projects.

Supplement missing courses with MIT, stanford, etc from Youtube.

Don't take short cuts. Learn data structures and algorithms.

Be upfront about not having a degree. Call yourself "self-taught" it will cause you not to be so anxious. Well, that helped me be less anxious.

They aim too high.

“I’m going to go from total unknown to hotshot JS developer at a VC-backed startup in 1 year”

That’s a tall mountain to climb. Maybe 1% of people accomplish that.

Consider starting off more modestly?

There’s lots of client facing or biz-dev like jobs that would love someone who knows the command line, and isn’t too proud to do that work.

“Yeah, your tool is alright, but I could build a web app...” No doubt you could. But learn the tool. There’s an undersupplied world of jobs for people willing to do that.

From there, escalate to ever more arcane jobs for tooling or enterprise or for devs, escalating in skill level at each one.

From that point in - 3 to 5 years from the start of your journey - you can pick up a client who would like you for your by-now-formidable programming skills.

But don’t try to jump to the 5 year mark from square one - my advice.

Keep making stuff, make new libraries to fill niches etc. As you get older AND have made more things your college experience will have less and less meaning.

But importantly, make lots of stuff, contribute to open source where possible (making stuff is more important though in terms of getting a job since it's easy for your contribution to get lost in open source if the project is big)

Don’t think of software as a regulated profession. Software is a trade skill. When you practice in those terms you will become a better and more desirable job applicant.

Find a place to get your foot in the door, hit up the local meetups if there are any and talk to folks and see what you can learn about local places and where you might get in.

being scared has process to conquer. once its done, you can fly with wings.