I came to the comments say the same thing. I’ve hired and worked with many engineers and the overwhelming majority did not attend MIT or Stanford. Some of the best didn’t attend college at all!
Once a candidate gets to me as an interviewer, I'm mostly looking at a resume for what topics I should ask about, both things that you're comfortable in, and things that you're not. If you have personal projects, I'll ask pertinent questions about them, and often I've learned some very interesting insights from the personal projects of candidates.
In my time interviewing, I've hired people without degrees as senior engineers and I've rejected people with doctorates in computer science as junior support engineers. Turns out, degrees are a mediocre predictor at best of ability to do a job, and practical experience is 99% of the time more impactful than a piece of paper.
That's interesting, and somewhat rankling - as both times I interviewed at the G in FAANG, not a single interviewer gave a nickel about any of my experience, or projects I had worked on.
It's such a joke that the keys to a golden line on your resume and a giant salary are gated by the luck of which 7 people get picked to grill you that day, how busy they currently are, and what their pet question is.
Job hunts are a campaign. If you're pretty good you'll land a job but you might not land every job.
While this varies from company to company generally resumes get you interviews and interviews get you jobs.
Even if you have a 95% pass rate for any one interviewer, you're at like 77% for passing a 5 person panel. Good but hardly a guarantee.
But if you have even three job interviews, the chance that you'll get atleast one is 98.7%. Not so bad!
Sure it's a bit hand-wavy but I hope it takes the edge off this interviewing business for you the way it does for me.
Cheers!
Moreover, I'm not really interested in "years of experience". Previous titles don't really matter, too.
What does matter for junior and middle developers: personal projects, specific products or features developed by them or their team, accounts on Upwork, GitHub or StackOverflow, recommendations from other people, a personal website or a blog.
We are talking about the initial screening filter, so _anything_ proving you are a real developer is fine.