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Comment by rubicon33 | Hacker News Reader

Build something.

This transcends geography. Show competency by building something that demonstrates your technical ability. Better yet, build 2 things.

Be able to demo your projects, and talk at length about the technical challenges in building them.

That said, your best best is always going to be small / medium sized companies. Google, Facebook, Twitter, etc. are mostly going to be looking for solid CS fundamentals in their interview. Unless you've taken a Data Structures & Algorithms class recently, you can forget working there.

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> Google, Facebook, Twitter, etc. are mostly going to be looking for solid CS fundamentals in their interview

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.

You misread apparently. No one said anything about a CS degree. And your intuition is wrong. The Facebooks and the Googles are the companies who are confident enough in their screening that they don't care much about your formal education anymore.

CS fundamentals absolutely. CS degree nope.

Should I be able to get an interview with a pure math degree, but data structures + algorithms study on the side?

Sure. Just put something on your resume that gives a recruiter some confidence in your capability with respect to those data structures and algorithms. A computer science degree is only one way of doing that.

You misread apparently. "self-taught devs w/o college degrees?"

Cosign. I live in the Washington, DC area. I hired a Web Dev from Boulder, CO because he had Udacity training and a impressive portfolio of projects. The projects showed me that he loved to build things. I also noticed that he had a ton of comments on Youtube, Stackoverflow, and Github showing that he was actively learning more about new web frameworks.

This is the only answer. I'm self taught, but even after working with different software companies for years, side projects are always the thing that gets me my next role.

> This is the only answer. I'm self taught, but even after working with different software companies for years, side projects are always the thing that gets me my next role.

Under what section in your resume do you put your side projects? Is it under Work Experience?

I think a sociologist could write a thesis on the never ending argument of how a resume "should" look.

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

I have a section called "notable projects", which lists about 4 or 5 in detail (I don't believe that resume's need to be a single page). But generally - the cover letter is always more important anyway (and especially if you don't have an intro). I usually like to try and tie why I'm the right person for a role, to some specific work I've accomplished in XYZ side project.

> Unless you've taken a Data Structures & Algorithms class recently, you can forget working there.

IMHO, if someone claims to be a self-taught programmer but doesn't understand these things at the same level as someone who graduated and have had a few years of real experience since, he isn't really a competent programmer. Putting together libraries without understanding of underlying mechanisms isn't programming.

> Build something.

Fish got to swim, birds got to fly, artists have to art. Why isn't this the only answer people are posting?

You can brush up on data structures and algorithms and pass their interview. It just takes a bit of extra effort. Plus its knowledge that helps on your everyday work.

Source: Self taught who constantly studies CS stuff.

Learning LALR parsing is fun; for production work the intuitive approach of recursive descent in fine.

> Build something.

After this, which is IMO the only valid answer, we could talk about web devs with degree looking for jobs at startups founded by self-taught web devs without degree...

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