Any other self taught devs terrified of interviewing these days?

I am an old timer, back in 1978 after getting my PhD, I interviewed with a bunch of companies. One was Bell Labs. I remember the recruiter, did not make me take a test on programming or anything. He just asked me to explain the most interesting project that I had worked on. I told him about a music synthesizer chip I had designed... after about 20 minutes of going on about it, I stopped and said sorry, I went on too long. He just said, nope, you are exactly the type of person we are looking for and hired me on the spot.

I think there is a piece missing now days, I could just be an old fart that does not know what I am talking about (probably), but it's the idea of finding someone with passion, even if they are not the slickest programmer in town.

I'm not only terrified, but petrified...literally!

After getting rejected for years, I have decided to stop from even trying.

It has cost me a lot of pain, physical and psychological, not to mention the emotional damage.

You know, panic attacks, stomach ulcer, colitis...the whole package!

I have been telling this for years, but people think I lost my mind :/

I'm fortunate enough that more and more friends that are around my age (40+) or even younger have noticed the same thing and don't know what to do.

I have no idea how to interview anymore; whatever I say it's either wrong or not enough.

  * If I speak more than they want, I'm wrong.
  * If I say near nothing, again I'm wrong.
  * If I say EXACTLY what they want to hear, they go "meh".
  * If I show my skills, I'm considered a smart ass.
  * If I don't show my actual skills, again I'm considered an asshole for hiding my knowledge from them, therefore I'm considered untrustworthy.

...I could go on and on and on and on, but this is your "Ask HN", not mine LOL!

Feel free to check my submissions and my comments on related topics and you will find you are not alone in this.

Virtual hugs my friend, we are together in this.

Update: I forgot to mention that I have a CS diploma which is basically worthless...trust me, the toilet paper you use has higher value than my degree, HA!

Interviewing is absolutely terrifying. I've been a software engineer for over 40 years and I still get the shakes. And freeze. It sucks hard.

Don't worry about the degree. After ten years (even after five) it doesn't matter. If it does matter to the company in question, you probably don't want to work there anyway. Seriously.

Lean heavily on your contacts. After ten years you almost certainly know good people at other companies, and you may be surprised how well they regard you. Most of my jobs have been through such connections, and they have been the ones I've enjoyed the most. Reach out.

During interviews, I find it helpful to communicate a little of my emotional state as well. "Let's see, I'm pretty nervous, just so you know, and I'll probably make a few mistakes here until I get it right. Now, the obvious thing is N-squared and clearly terrible, but let's do it anyway and see if we can get some insight and improve it..." And once you decide to have fun with a problem and can stop pretending that you're a giant, perfect brain, I've found things go a lot better. If your interviewer is an emotionless robot, you probably don't want to work with that person.

My own lack of a degree has never been a problem. You're fine, man. As long as you keep up some kind of continuing self-education (doesn't need to be fancy, just read interesting conference proceedings, maybe learn a new language every few years) you're going to do great.

I feel this. I’ve done pretty well for myself — I have decades of practical experience and have risen to be a principal engineer at my work. I can write what I feel is pretty solid, robust, performant, and well-architected code in many different languages across all ends of the stack from high-level UI to low-level system-level components. I don’t have a CS degree and am largely self-taught. I tend to struggle a lot with theory and I stink at algorithms. (I can generally understand them, but coding one from scratch would be a struggle since these fundamentals aren’t committed to memory and in the real world are rarely necessary to recall at the drop of a hat.)

Given my non-traditional background and keen awareness of my blind-spots, I really struggle with impostor syndrome. I also fear the interview process because I don’t want to look stupid and come to realize my past success was driven by chance rather than smarts. I also know how much of a grind the entire process can be and how it seems like many interviewers are more interested in making themselves look smart rather than honestly assess a candidate.

All of these things are probably more of a function of projection and insecurity rather than reality, but they all feel real to me.

I'm not terrified of interviewing. I just think it's an even bigger pain in the ass than dating. The older I get the less patience I have for people who need me to sell myself to them as if I were a commodity and not a human being.

I don't think you need to be a feminist to say "WE ARE NOT THINGS".

I am not a resource.

I am not "human capital".

I'm a man who happens to need to work for a living. Deal with me as such or not at all.

With the demand for software, I don't think it matters that much how many devs are churned out. Most of them are going to be mediocre and have poor interviewing skills. Boot camp grads really don't pose serious competition to anyone besides other junior developers. With a resume that has good formatting and spelling, people skills, networking, and maybe a few personal projects, it's entirely possible to get hired today. With 10 years of experience, I'd be surprised if anyone gave a f--- about whether you have a degree in most cases.

I don't know if I can relate.

Was the industry really "almost entirely" autodidacts 10 years ago? Were CS graduates "nerds" in a way that autodidacts weren't?

It's still very possible to get into tech without a traditional CS education, and it's not clear why it seems hopeless to you to compete against someone with a degree -- ACAICT most interviewers don't even look at candidates' resumes.

I’m not in the US but from France.

I know two things for sure : - Hiring is stupidly hard. There is basically nobody applying. - For any non junior position, we dont even care about the degree. Personally, I don’t even read this part of the CV. Experience matters way more.

For me, as long as you are doing decent work, nobody will avan care about what degree you have. Furthermore, I’d say that companies filtering you on this is a good thing : you really don’t want to work for a company that recruit people based on a piece of paper they got decades ago.

Change your mindset. With 10 years of experience, in my last two job searches I felt incredibly well positioned to interview for senior roles, and ended up with dream jobs in both cases. I have no degree. I've noticed a trend in the last 3 years where companies require a degree OR equivalent experience. Which is awesome. If you're a great engineer and you're friendly, be confident in yourself!

I did struggle initially with the "coding challenge" nonsense used as a candidate filter these days, then realized I'd never paid attention to data structures and algorithms (which is covered heavily in computer science degree), so I spent time learning this and I was fine. I still wish these would go away.

TLDR: Don't worry about competition. Worry about yourself.

Nope.

I'm self taught in the sense I never went to university but I like to think of it more as self guided. I've read thousands of blog posts and learned a ton from other people. If you asked me to whiteboard a red-black tree on the spot I'd insta-fail but if you asked me to Google an implementation of it I'd find it and have it running in a few minutes with a few languages.

I don't worry about algorithm grinding because if their interview process expects that then I won't apply. There's lots of options out there where folks will hire you based on skill sets more in line with solving problems directly related to their business. I tend to gravitate towards those which are focused on building and deploying web apps.

Of course not all apps are created equal. If you plan to be operating at a super low level for critically important / number crunchy domains like a custom high frequency trading platform or you're writing Mars rover code then sure having a strong CS background seems reasonable, but you don't need to know shit about time-scale calculus or pulse-coupled neural networks to create a CI / CD pipeline to help a 100 million dollar a year business deploy their apps faster and more dependably which in turn helps them become a 110 million dollar a year business. The same goes for planning out, building and deploying a huge variety of SAAS apps.

The only way I found to get over this is to interview more and get successes. Interviewing without success is draining but interviewing with success is draining and rewarding.

I’ve done over 500 technical interviews. I only started interviewing more seriously in 2015. (I had done less than 10 before then) It took me years to get more comfortable with interviewing. It’s all about knowing the gauntlet and what you’re getting into. The mental warfare of interviewing is almost all in prep and once you’re in the interview - it should practically be autopilot.

This takes hundreds of hours of prep (usually outside of work hours) and a lot of dedication. This is the industry now for many of the more competitive positions. (FAANG-etc, more known startups, anything in SFBA)

Get on leetcode. Solve 20-30 easy problems to get your confidence up and familiar with it. Start doing the problem sets that are targeted at special types of problems (binary search, dfs, graph traversal, dp, backtracking, etc.) Do mock interviews once you’ve solved 40 mediums without looking at the solution and at least 15 hards. (Might be helpful to just look at solutions of a lot of hards to get some pattern recognition going) Use whatever service you want for that - they’re usually free.

Interview with companies you don’t care about. Get offers. Figure out what you’re doing wrong. Practice more. Start interviews with companies you want to work at and some others that will give an offer you can leverage in talks. Schedule onsites - get offers. Don’t schedule more than 3 onsites a week unless you have endurance. I’ve done 6-7 in a week - wouldn’t recommend. This was when they were in person too. Driving from one office immediately to another to grind was intense. Wouldn’t recommend - tbh.

Get your target offers. Get them to compete for another. Maybe pay for advice as to get salary band info and what you can do. Accept whichever you want - don’t burn any bridges here. Let them know you’ll keep in touch if things don’t work out - if things at new place suck - go to other places.

Repeat until you’re FI. Probably RE because this toxic grind set is unbelievably taxing.

Considering how many candidates are out there who have B.S., M.S., or even Ph.D. degrees in Computer Science, but can't even manage to write FizzBuzz, I think your fears are a bit overstated IF you are actually reasonably competent and are capable of showing it.

Anyway, in my experience degrees are more about simply getting past the first-level HR filter than anything, and don't get you hire per-se. And with 10+ years of experience, you'll get past the first-level HR filter just as easily, so really it comes down to demonstrated competence. Can you show/convince (an) interviewer(s) that you are competent? If you can, you'll be fine.

I was at Amazon over 10 years and did several hundred interviews. I tried my best not to contribute to the problem, but here’s my experience:

First, the interviewing culture optimized for fresh computer science college grads, and specifically Indian nationals who excel (from my experience) at memorizing specific patterns and applying them decently in interviews. It doesn’t mean they’re better employees or better engineers, but it does mean you can hire someone as an H1B. And they’ll work pretty damn hard and out in more hours, because otherwise they fear getting managed out and with their visa situation, they have to leave the country.

Secondly, we’ll hire H1Bs from other companies. They often times don’t pass our hiring bar and fall significantly short. But as an Indian national, there are plenty of other Indian SDMs, Senior SDMs, and directors who will still give you an offer and bring you on board. It’s sort of a nepotism, and there are ways you can extend an offer without even going through an interview loop.

So… a culture of engineering talent who look great on paper, but you end up building a lot of mediocre products and services, or simply using this “talent” to keep existing, well designed services up and operationally sane. Mostly ticket loads.

And that’s really just it. The system is designed that way to extract a certain amount of labor. The skill doesn’t matter. Certain nationality brings in more of its own people.

We talked a lot about diversity, but we hired practically zero Hispanic, black, women, or other (tech) minority groups. Our damn HR didn’t even bring them into interview loops. If you worked at Amazon, you’d think that only Indian people graduate with CS degrees.

If you get rejected by Amazon, trust me as a 10 year veteran who finally abandoned ship late last year - you’re better off not being there. I regret the 10 years of my life I gave to that company. I regret the relationships I abandoned, the toll it took on my physical and mental health.

I'm self taught first programming 36 years ago. I have some college experience in a computer engineering program but I did not graduate.

My experience has been that once someone is a few years in to the industry, their degree or lack of one is largely unimportant. Schools and especially boot camps simply cannot compare with hard earned experience.

I'm never dishonest about my school experience although I do not mention it unless I'm asked about it or someone assumes I have a degree.

Interviews are largely about connecting with the interviewer and getting them to like you, consider you as someone they would want to work with.

Focus on what you have done, how you solve problems, how you work with others. Are you up front when you don't know something? Can you consider another's viewpoint and even change your mind? What is your reaction to making a mistake? Confidence and security in one's self go a long way here. Let your curiosity be infectious.

Interviews are an inexact science and there are plenty of bad or even abusive companies out there. Take your time and try not to take rejection personally.

Try to keep in eye out for what your next move will be. You'll likely learn more and earn more through some job hopping every 2 to 3 years. That's okay.

Practice, practice, practice! Code in your free time. Work on an open source project. Find an itch, scratch it and share the results.

Once you're past the interview Leetcode rituals gatekeeping, and the undisguised ageism many places, remember that there's no substitute for experience.

An entire product or company can hinge to a large degree on an engineering team doing wise things, to avert problems, and occasionally to solve them.

Experience helps you be much more wise than when you had no experience -- and were just going on what you heard from professors, read in blog posts, or imagined with the confidence that comes from not yet knowing any better. :)

Just stay enthusiastic and curious, keep learning, and get past the interviews.

Two words, my friend: Grind leetcode. In fact, solve leetcode problems with a friend. Write down the solution in a notebook (pencil and paper) and read it to your friend, see if they can evaluate your solution. Because apparently this is a valid way to phone screen.

One more word: network! Make friends in high places in the industry. If you come in as a nobody, and nobody will vouch for you, why will companies choose to take a risk on you?

It's not the 80s and 90s anymore, when only nerds touched computers and companies were willing to work through an employee's issues to develop them and get access to that rare programming talent.

Programming is now more like acting: it's on you now to make the right connections and prove that you are perfect for the role. Not perfect = no hire. No social proof from people on the inside = no hire. This is what the market looks like now. Adapt or perish.

One more thing: if you are cishet, AMAB, and white, you will have to work harder for that job now. Many tech companies have policies to prefer people of color and marginalized communities including LGBTQ over privileged candidates.

Kinda, although I am a CS grad (graduated in 2014), I practically self-taught myself engineering. I have always been an OK interviewer, but it's gotten worse with time as the market's expanded. I regularly freeze up during whiteboarding or my stomach acts up and I can't concentrate.

Nearly 8 years later, and I've noticed bootcamp grads with half my experience are surpassing me on the corporate ladder and getting better paying jobs. The way I see it is that the market + colleges saw a demand for a certain type of programmer, and created programs to form newcomers into that mold. More importantly, I find that these younger engineers that are surpassing me are typically not anymore knowledgeable or skilled than I am, but they are much more confident.

I try not to let that bother me, so long as my current position can support me financially, gives me the means to enjoy time with my family, and support my hobbies (of which my favorite is programming & open-source), I am happy.

I'm pretty sure 85% of the people I interviewed with didn't read my resume and my education never came up.

Not at all -- I have no degree with ~8 YOE. Recruiters and hiring managers don't even inquire about my education anymore.

I assume your worries come from the leetcode trend in interviews.

Personally, I let recruiters that are knocking down my door via LinkedIn or email my expectations up front. Salary & no leetcode (algorithmic problems), I have found a lot of success. There are many companies willing to give sane interviews with real world SWE problems.

Experience is highly valued in this field. Someone with 10 YOE isn't really competing with someone with 5 YOE. If you talk to anyone involved in hiring nowadays it's extremely difficult to find experienced devs. Experience will always trump education.

I'm a senior software engineer at a FAANG making 7 figures and meaningful contributions. There's zero chance I would pass an interview at the same company now.

Back in 2007-2008 I, an economics graduate, was snubbed by developers, even though I showed a working prototype and examples of works since 1998!

DB developers also snubbed, even though I asked to show a working database app made at analyst position.

I showed a hand-made website with Javascript and PHP backend, and they snubbed that I didn't use frameworks.

Finally, in 2009 I got a web dev position with humiliating remarks. Only at the next company, a small web studio, the chief dev said "great, because if you did it by hand, it means you know the internal gears better than the framework guys", hired me and taught me some frameworks, which I learned quickly.

I understand that people are afraid they'd have to babysit the new developer, but I showed them lots of things, and it still didn't matter. Maybe they were afraid I'd leave their shitty job, IDK.

So, some standard framework used in the industry is a must. Plus, if a company is bigger than 20 people, snobs start running the hiring process.

Nowadays, well, if you want to slightly change the field of work, you're given a huge task to build a whole app, and then are nitpicked at insufficient comments, not clear code, not making useless classes, not using useless async, and so on. Nobody looks at your github project where you have those features. I guess, a single child-less guy could do this in 3 nights on RedBull, but I don't think I could. I'm quite discouraged.

I'm reading this post and replies and how people are terrified of interviews... and they are right in that all that's going on is wrong. But I don't understand what's there to be afraid of. I have 20+ years of experience and I can do a lot of things, yet as of right now I have maybe 500 bucks left, but I finally decided I'm not taking any more jobs. I'm not exactly sure how I'm about to survive the next month, but, I suppose, being worried, or let alone afraid of it, isn't going to help it. I must say, I had a lot of money a few years ago, but I was also running a company that I didn't want anything to do with. Hiring and employing people seemed very much like just the other side of the coin. And having money doesn't change much about you - it only changes the behavior of people around you, that's for sure.

To all the folks who are frustrated with the interviews - quit doing them. You already know they don't want you. They want the mindless code monkeys and submission. But what you had always probably felt is that you are an artist. It's time to be one. No one gets it easy. And the actual choice you might have is famine vs oppression. Which one do you choose?

Why do you think it’s hopeless? Having a CS degree is just one attribute a candidate brings. I’d personally value 10 years without that 5 with but there are so many other factors to consider in candidates.

I think that if the tech bubble collapses, the hiring market will once again swing in the favour of those with CS degrees. When the best tech jobs going are at banks, government departments, etc. hiring managers will probably look less favourably on those that worked at some over valued startup that produced nothing of value, vs somebody with an actual CS degree from a good college and with some work experience. The days of the "went to bootcamp for 4 weeks and got a 200k job at a startup making CRUD APIs to solve world hunger" Dev are nearly over.

It's important to keep in mind that the vast majority of people who are currently employed had to work through rejections before landing their current role. Meaning that rejections are nothing to fear, they are simply part of the process. So it's important to not internalize a rejection as some deficit in yourself, just understand that it comes with the territory and move on to the next evaluation. The more zen you are about each rejection, the more motivation you will have for the next opportunity, and the quicker you will complete the process.

I haven't been scared about interviews nearly as much as when I started. When I was getting started, I was a newbie with no degree. Now, I've got over a decade of experience with no degree. Granted, I haven't interviewed a lot: two processes in the last few years. Both times, the interviews felt like much more of a two way street and conversations between peers as opposed to me feeling like I have to prove myself to some way more senior decision maker.

Don't get me wrong, I still get nervous for interviews and want to make sure that I come off as a competent person. I still have doubts about what kinds of questions I'll be asked right beforehand. I also tend to apply for roles that are different from what I've done before, so I already know I probably won't know everything about the immediate subject matter. The process as a whole just seems less nerve-wracking now, though. Regardless of how nervous I might be right before an interview, at the end of the day I feel much more at peace with my own abilities.

I think there's a high chance this would change if I was more actively looking for different positions and interviewing a lot. Some caveats that make this easier for me:

* I don't bother with processes that do Leetcode-style whiteboarding interviews. I prefer take-home tests. Pretty sure if I was going for the former, I'd be much less "zen" about it.

* Both times I already had a good job and was just exploring other opportunities that came up. If I had a sense of urgency without stable employment, I'd surely be much more nervous.

The thing about Computer Science nowadays is that the machines are stupidly fast so that a lot of the algorithm stuff is redundant. Bubble sort can be good enough or isn't even required for implementation as the higher order primitives are already implemented. In a lot of ways it's why SW development nowadays is nauseatingly awful. Sprints and all that web baggage have killed the enjoyment and challenge. The only challenging SW roles I see nowadays are close to the HW.

> When I got into this industry 10 years ago, the world was a completely different place. Bootcamps weren't a thing. Computer Science programs were still something just for the nerds. And the industry was almost entirely autodidacts like myself who grew up immersed in technology and did it for the joy of it.

I don't think any of these things are really much more true now than they were ten years ago. Computer science programs have been booming since the first dot com boom, and the industry has been mostly people with degrees since I've been in it (I started in the aforementioned boom, also with no degree). I've worked at brand new startups, post-VC startups, and two letters of FAANG.

In my experience, both as a person involved in hiring and as a person looking for work over those 20+ years, once you're proven with a couple jobs under your belt no one gives much of a shit about your educational background. This is a "need credit to get credit" kind of situation, where a person with no experience and no degree will have the hardest time getting a job, but someone with 10 years experience? Yeah I'd be shocked if you get dinged for no degree on an interview unless you're trying to do degree-heavy work like ML or something.

It's normal to feel fear of rejection and failure. I'm interviewing again now for the first time in several years, and I can totally empathize.

Your lack of a degree is not as much as an issue as the coding screen test. If you can ace those tests then you'll be able to get a job. I hate the idea of these coding tests -- I have decades of coding experience and even I must practice these coding test problems. It's the reality we must face, and we must deal with it. For those of us who enjoy coding for the joy of it, we can self-study data structures, algorithms, and system design for the joy of it too.

I know from previous job searches that I'll fail some coding tests at first, but as I get more practice then I'll start passing the interviews. Like everything else, it takes iteration.

Luckily there are lots of open job positions to apply for. You just need to believe that you can will get better with practice, and you can keep interviewing over and over until you beat the tests. You taught yourself to code; you can teach yourself to pass these interviews.

P.S.: These tech interview coding tests have been around for a long time. I remember going through some tough ones back in the 90's, even before Joel Spolsky promoted writing code during interviews in The Joel Test.

I'm more-so terrified of taking the risks that would be required to break "back into" that part of the industry. I have been developing since I was a kid in some capacity. Life took me down a different path career wise that put me in just enough of a comfortable spot to make me nervous about switching it up. I feel like I have a lot of intuition and experience throughout the years - it's just not enterprise-level nor something that someone in a senior dev role could attest to.

I finished my BSCS recently because it was paid for (GI Bill), and I kind of feel the opposite about it than you do. The amount of "shotgun" messages from recruiters from LinkedIn, etc have certainly increased, but I don't feel any closer to breaking into a dev role high enough up the food-chain to make it worth the risk of leaving my cush fringe-industry position. I have been asked internally if I'd like to help out more with dev-related things, so I guess that's a start.

I'd look first at the contacts you've amassed throughout your decade in the field. I'd be willing to bet that's where your best opportunities will come from. Good luck and stay confident!

I used to be, but I have maintained the habit of sending out a handful of resumes every week, and interviewing once at the very least (3 times this week). Even while I am in a job that I am currently not planning on leaving in the next year. It has made things easy, articulating who I am, what I am working on and how I got there. Must have had a few dozen interviews in the past year, and while I still get a rush of anxiety every time, I've been enjoying getting better at them.

I do get the usual interviews where I very well know that I am either over my head. Or where I get the feeling that they must have interviewed some very skilled people before me. But it doesn't really matter. As I see it, with 5 years of experience (self-taught), I am a good dev in my own right. And I am very sure that my experience and drive has a job ready for me at enough places not having to worry about job security (for now, in this buyers economy).

As a retired software development manager (among other roles throughout the years), the problem is that industry, collectively, has no idea what determines success. The infatuation with boot camps, certifications, specific frameworks/libraries, even languages is detrimental to identifying real talent. Worse is CIO lust for a new technology regardless of its applicability to the particular domain, e.g., cloud and cypto. Consequently, interviewing and hiring an experienced software developer, who may be extremely talented, can be an uphill battle if they don't check all the right boxes. Up until the last two years prior to retirement, I worked for a very large, well known insurance company. The HR staff wouldn't even pass along resumes that didn't check the boxes or pass the automated review by the application software. The problem is further exacerbated by the ready availability of "certified", cheap resources from companies like Cognizant, et al. I went to the HR department and insisted that I see all the resumes which caused a bit of firestorm but fortunately the CIO supported my request. I was looking for talent, degreed or otherwise, for which I was willing to pay more, regardless of their specific technical backgrounds. All they had to do was be confident, frequent readers/learners, and convince me that they could learn our environment and deliver. In the end, my team had a higher average salary but a lower head count than competing teams (around 45 persons, mostly cheap Cognizant contractors vs. my 15, all employees) and we tended to hit our project targets with greater frequency. And never forget, particularly in technical interviews, the interviewers will often be out to show their peers and managers that they are smarter than the candidate. For example, around 2010, I interviewed for a VP position at a company that required nine phone interviews with different peer and subordinate managers prior to the in person interview. I scored well on 8 of the 9 but the last was with a potential subordinate who wanted to focus on optimizing Java/Oracle on a server. Every question was some technical minutia about Java, which fortunately, I had never had to learn. He, of course, voted against me. I withdrew my candidacy because the last interview suggested a culture I didn't want to be part of or fight to change. I explained the reasons but I doubt anything changed. So interviewing, if not terrifying, is at least intimidating and a royal PIA. Just be confident of your talents, continue to read and learn, and if it doesn't go well, F it, and keep looking.

Why be scared? Worst case is they don't hire you and there were good odds of that regardless. Take an interview-- if it doesn't go well, you'll know what to beef up for later.

if you learned it for the joy and have 10 years work experience on top of that you've got some massive advantages that many new graduates will lack.

I have no degree and less experience than you, big companies are knocking down my door to hire to me. I don't think you're in trouble.

Something perhaps worth mentioning: The fast growth of the industry means that there are a lot of junior engineers who need wrangling, those of us who can wrangle them are valuable!

I’m self taught, worked in my career for 15 years, went back and finished my degree.

My interviewing skills are not substantially different. I still probably can’t invert a binary tree, and I get hung up on the abstract CS problems. The revelation I had after finishing my degree was that I was the same person with just a little more knowledge, and that if I didn’t check it, I’d be chasing after the “now I’m qualified” label indefinitely.

The interviews I do very well in are the ones where I’m asked to take something home and produce something real. If a company is really important to me and I know it’s coming, I know how to practice leetcode. If a company is rejecting you for not having the degree, then you’re not even getting to the phone screen.

For me personally it ranges from random successful highs to very depressing lows. I have a degree, but I feel I am more self taught (I barely took my degree seriously). With 9 years of experience under my belt, most times interviews are hit/miss for me. I spent time on Leetcode, but sometimes the interviews go well and I pattern match because I have seen that sort of problem. Other days I look like I have no idea what is going on.

It is exhausting, but everywhere I look people say this is the best way so far. I prefer freelancing now because I still love coding, I do it on my downtime, I do it on the weekends. It energises me. Unfortunately I am not good at solving puzzles/IQ tests under 30-60 mins.

as someone who is responsible for hiring in this space: i miss the autodidacts.

I see too much buzzword-hype-cycle candidates, and not enough people who have really built something, including real world stuff like badly performing apis, broken edge cases, etc.

There have been so many interview fads it's hard to remember them all, but a particularly disagreeable fad was the "surprise question." You're being questioned about some programming-related thing, and then in the middle of it they want to know how many monkeys you can stuff in a milk crate, or how to develop an optimal strategy for playing roulette.

I suspect a lot of interviewing fads are because interviewing is a long and boring process, so changing things up brightens their workday. But I never had any reason to believe any of them had any connection with discovering the optimal candidate.

Can you dig further into the specifics of your worry? I find that most interviews focus on my knowledge or experience, I’ve never really had the degree come up. You are somewhat alluding to two problems though, interviewing with 10 years of experience and the path you took to get there. Starting out may be harder(although it’s an employees market out there right now so it may be a great time to start)

But it’s funny you say 10 years ago. I started 20 years ago and don’t feel like 10 years ago is that much different from today(though would say it seemed easier to start out 20 years ago)

I had been programming for over ten years when I first ran into FizzBuzz, suffice to say I failed the exercise and wasn't offered the job. So I just moved onto the next interview and passed that one.

Sure, you can't prove that finding subcycles in a directed-graph is an NP-Hard problem on a whiteboard, or implement a linked-list or invert a binary tree by hand: But what you have is hard-earned common sense and a meaningful understanding of how software evolves over time. This is valuable to any company and many have identified that they are in desperate need of it.

I think it comes down to supply and demand as with everything else. There are tougher filters (interviews) now because there way more people applying for jobs than ever.

Even for people with CS degrees the competition is fierce. To most companies especially Big Tech experience matters little they just care that you can pass an interview which includes leetcode and system design, and if you really put the effort you can learn both from scratch without even having any experience. Unfortunately such is the current market.

I've learnt to enjoy them and trying to connect with people. Especially after the pandemic, I think everyone is currently struggling or did struggle with life stuff so in some ways we can all relate more easily to each other.

Some companies culture just suck and you can tell it really quickly, trying to pursue those positions is a waste of valuable energy.

I think the worst interviewers are developers that are not senior yet and will try to favor cleverness over what's actually valuable. They tend to ask the questions you can easily google.

>> When I got into this industry 10 years ago, the world was a completely different place.

10 years is a lifetime in the tech industry.

>> The thought of competing against someone credentialed with 5 years experience vs. myself with 10 years and no degree, feels hopeless.

This is a vague comparison. Someone with 5 years of stack-specific experience vs. someone with 10 years of general experience?

Personally, I am very bad at interviewing. I need lots of practice before any interview. Don't be afraid to ask others for help for interviewing prep.

I've found it very difficult to find places that give a damn about personal projects or anything a self-taught developer can do.

If you're hiring and care about these things hit me up :)

I graduated in early 2000s, and I heard same things from CS students/graduates and self-taught developers. They all said the golden age of computer science was 60s, 70s, 80s, or early 90s when people got into computers for love of it not money. Now everyone is computers for money.

Sadly though I did meet a lot of students in my CS program who were in it for money and openly admitted they hate programming, logic, etc and cannot wait until they get a job and then move into management.

I'm a self taught with 5YOE and I'm having a screening interview at a FAANG in a few weeks. I'm afraid I'm nowhere near the knowledge I should have to perform well in those interviews.

DS&A is huge and although I read a book about it when I started learning to code, there's a ton of stuff that I'll need to learn in depth that I'll use scarcely during real life work and I've never used so far in my professional experience.

Been this way since there was a tech industry. I felt the same way 23 years ago with no degree. Just keep learning and be more motivated than the competition.

Remember, you're self taught. You didn't go to school you had a goal, you sat and stared at a screen, problem after problem and worked through them until it clicked. You have drive, tenacity, and the ability to problem solve, no one held your hand. For these reasons you are an ideal candidate to someone. Learn to explain the problems and how you overcame them and you'll do well!

Same for me. I'm also astonished about the amount of time that is often expected to be put into an interview process especially speaking about take home tasks. But apart from interviews, I think self-taught engineers are still in high regard at most places because solving blocking problems and building things that last is not something that can be learned easily.

Sheesh, most jobs just want a warm body that can type so many lines of compiler-ok code per day.

"Show up on time" is not just for Hollywood.

Everyone has value to someone.

Most people talk about 'what they know'. The people who get hired (and get hired at a better rate) know how to explain the 'value' of what they know.

The ability to communicate your value is a skill that most people don't learn and work on. Getting better at this will make you stand out from the crowd.

One thing I know for sure - if you go to an interview terrified, you most probably will be terrified. People feel your mind set and attitude even through zoom, through your "interview face".

In my experience the less i care about a specific interview (after some reasonable preparation from my side of course), the better it usually goes.

I can't agree. I find most interviewers are very utilitarian here--they want proof you know your stuff, not proof of formal education. A CS degree is great, and I wish I had one (for the knowledge more than the sheepskin), but talented developers with some soft skills should not have a problem finding work in this industry.

It's especially hard for people who like me who choke during interviews and freeze like a deer. :(.

If your Interested in switch jobs, just try :).

Are you interested working in a particular domain? If you have experience , that will be helpful.

Also, you’re generally hired to provide value. If you’re able to enable your team to solve challenges the company is interested in, you’ll be fine.

If you feel a degree is that important to your confidence level, you could go get one.

I will say that when we interview people, for senior positions, we hardly look at their education. You have 10 years of experience, so your interview would most likely depend on that.

Good luck, in the same boat here and yeah it's tough.

The problem I think for me may stem from the fact that I actually enjoy the work. I always feel gutted when I'm rejected from a job that I know I could do well.

I also joined the industry (over) ten years ago, and I'm pretty sure people were saying similar things.

if you're good, you're good. no need to be terrified.

Did a web dev bootcamp in 2004. ASP and VB Script. Got many jobs. Finally took data structures and algorithms class in 2020. Am better programmer now.

you have ten years of exp, you shouldn’t be worried about having no degree at all… unless you are not in US?

I'll probably never be able to go through whiteboard leetcode questions :/

Have you (did you) consider hiring an interview coach?

Often the first few layers of interview are the most difficult, then it eases up as you get to just talk to real human beings.

Having someone help you play the game to get to the next step could be helpful.

(None of this is to say I condone the asinine hiring paths so many companies have adopted.)

If it bothers you so much why not do a degree? It’s like 2 years

No. I learned algorithm complexity in secondary school and started early enough that coding my own hash table was a normal exercise because the standard library didn't come with one (Turbo Pascal).

I also discovered competitive coding via the International Olympiad in Informatics (also a school thing, pre-college), and the kinds of problems in those turn out to be almost identical in form to today's style of coding interview. I only had to learn recursion and I could start hacking away at problems.

Fancy techniques like "dynamic programming" are normally amenable to memoized (i.e. cached) recursion implementations, but in practice most interview problems aren't even that hard.

Now, I went to college, but it was a mixed degree with business and it didn't teach things like hash table implementation, let alone pointers. Algo analysis material was weak. I was the best student only because I knew it already. The degree is mostly useful for visa qualification. I also got very good at pool.