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If I were asked for a GPA or an SAT score at any job interview, I would walk as well. It's completely irrelevant, and highly dependent on the school you went to (is a 4.0 at DeVry better or worse than a 3.0 from CMU?)

It sounds like you're a little older than a person who would be debating going to college, though. I had a coworker that trained me at my current job who only had a few classes at a community college. Being hired a decade after him, it was required that I have a bachelors degree. Things have changes rapidly in the past few decades in terms of HR expectations at larger companies. I'm not trying to detract from your advice, because I think you're absolutely correct. I'm just wondering if you would be able to replicate your success today.

Maybe it's hard to get a job at Google without a degree (at least, if you're not a software security person). Don't work at Google. There's an industry full of small software startups and an open war for talent right now; start your career at one of the shops smart enough not to pay attention to college records. For every successfully-executed role in your resume, it becomes progressively more and more insane to screen you out based on your degree. Since the starting state on screening by degree is already "pretty crazy", it doesn't take long to make college irrelevant.

But again, to make that work, you need to be serious enough about your craft that you can demonstrate ability clearly.

"If I were asked for a GPA or an SAT score at any job interview, I would walk as well. It's completely irrelevant,"

Its highly relevant if they're going for the stealth ageism thing. GPA is an age proxy. Due to grade inflation, the "respectable" GPA I earned in the 80s would in the 10s mean I was at least highly unmotivated if not outright mentally impaired. There was a time, a long time ago, when mid three something was a respectable accomplishment.

Superficially, if you ask an accountant job applicant how much their first car cost, after getting their first real job, that sounds wise. After all, the more expensive, the better they must have been at budgeting and money management, or at least they were ambitious when filling out loan paperwork, and that sounds like a great skills for an accountant. However obviously due to inflation all it will do is prioritize cheap young meat ahead of older more expensive. My great grandfather's first postwar 1946-ish caddy was only about $3K, therefore by numerical metric definition he'd be only 1/10th the accountant compared to a 2013 grad buying a modern commuter car.

One thing I would add to that, before walking away talk to the hiring manager about it. HR is just following some set of guidelines, and in many cases a good manager can work with them to make the problem go away. Think of it as a test for your prospective manager as much as anything else.

Read and implement papers is extremely good advice. It also applies even if you have a degree. I have a BA in math but in the last 6 years have found myself in positions that usually require a phd. And that is not an option with a family and no university nearby. The ability to read academic papers and understand them and turn them into something useful is very valuable.

One thing I would add is to learn how to write, as tptacek obviously has. And like the reading material, not internet comments or blog posts. Learn to write real technical reports and proposals. Many engineers, in particular software people can't write worth a lick.

"start building things from papers."

Really liked what you wrote and found this particularly interesting. Can you elaborate on why you think this is important and how you generally go about it (finding papers, choosing what to code, etc)

There are rapidly diminishing returns for picking up new languages for the sake of having multiple languages.

There are accelerating returns for knowing one or two languages so well that you can build nearly anything in them.

There aren't diminishing returns for learning new concepts, new algorithms, new distributed systems protocols, new problem domains. You can keep implementing things from papers indefinitely and you will keep getting better and, potentially, more valuable.

How should one go about finding interesting white papers to implement?

Go to the websites of well-respected university computer science programs and browse their research groups; for instance, go to MIT's site, and then check out PDOS. University research group sites usually have indexes of projects, each of which has a bunch of papers backing it. Read the web pages to see if the project is interesting, then read the first paper, then decide whether you should get your hands dirty with the concepts.

> Learn a systems programming language and a functional language

Not trying to start a language war or anything but would really appreciate learning what you (would have) started with especially on the functional side of things.

C and Lisp.

I found calculus tricky until after I had read Neal Stevenson's Baroque Cycle. Once I knew why there were two different notations and had a bit more of the history behind it, I found it a lot easier.

I often think history departments should get more involved in the other subjects taught at school so that you get a bit more perspective on why things are they way they are.

Awesome advice, thanks.

> Math didn't matter much in my first 10 years or so, but it matters a lot to me now

Can you please expand on what kind of math matters a lot to you and your work now?

> 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.

Why not just take it at a univ. then?

My schedule isn't compatible with a university math class, which is what I think a lot of people who skip college are going to find out when they try to pick things back up. I can dedicate the requisite number of hours to a course, but not in the structure a course demands.

Regarding the importance of math to my career now: cryptanalysis, signal processing.

> I can dedicate the requisite number of hours to a course, but not in the structure a course demands.

This seems like a common situation, and I am almost surprised it is not adequately addressed yet.

I'm ready to shell out for it; I'd pay more for linear algebra than, say, a MacBook.

What doesn't work about courses that are already online and complete (say, Open Courseware, most of the Coursera stuff)? Any that do work? I run into the complement of your problem reasonably often - trying to point technical people to material to help them fill some mathsy gap they need filled for work.

I have to agree about going for the difficult jobs. I too do not have a degree and I prove myself by killing the hard ones.

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

What do you mean? You just talked about being in IT without a degree.

IT pays well out of the gate but offers virtually no path for advancement --- not in the sense of "are there better titles to be had" (sure, "Senior IT", "Manager, IT", "Director, IT") but rather in the sense of technical challenges and opportunities for learning and specialization. 5 years down the road, developers are doing significantly better on compensation and have essentially boundless opportunities (including, if one burns out, doing IT work); on the other hand, having 5 years of IT on your resume and no degree means it can be very hard to get a job outside of IT.

Sounds to me like the difference between IT and IS. You're either "the IT guy" or you work in IS doing real things. Not just rebooting a managers PC and installing printer drivers.

Are you posting from the 90s?

Helpdesk, desktop support/field service, and Geek Squad still exist. You tend not to see developers or architects doing that work for a living.

Wait, so people think "IT" means desktop support? Network architect is IT. Sysadmins, network admins, "devops" (remember when they were called sysadmins?) are all IT.

IT is about the technology. IS (information systems) is about the system as a whole, which includes the people. IT is focused on making technology work, IS is focused on using technology to improve a process.

IT is a part of IS, but IS is bigger than IT. If your job focuses on fixing technology (such as computer repair), you're working IT. If your job focuses on processes and people (such as software development, information security, business enablement, etc), you're working in IS.

For your website, the IT portion is the server it runs on. The IS portion is the IDE you use, your development environment, the server, your language/framework, the browser, your developers, and your customers. That's the information system as a whole that allows your website to work.

But yeah, when I hear "IT guy", I think desktop support. People in IS outside of support tends to refer to themselves as something more specific than general IT: I'm a programmer/developer/software engineer. I'm a network administrator. I'm a systems architect. I'm a security engineer. That's just my experience, and that's what I interpreted the comment "stay out of IT" to mean. Desktop support doesn't tend to have much room for growth compared to careers in IS.

Ok, but your perception of IT as desktop support doesn't change reality.

Language is a reflection of the idea being presented. If your audience perceives IT to be desktop support, then using IT to mean desktop support is absolutely correct and does reflect reality. This is my interpretation of tptacek's comment, and from his posts afterwards it seems I am right. Other comments here are saying the same thing, that IT is a "computer janitor".

This might be different in other English-speaking markets, but at least in this thread, that is what is being expressed. It doesn't matter what term is being used, that is what the parent was trying to get across. Don't become "the IT guy". The definition of IT guy he was using is "computer janitor".

Nobody said anything about "IT guy", he said "IT". A field, not a person.

"IT" is now being used more often to mean "computer janitor" than all the jobs related to computer/system operations. It's a bit of a shift in the terminology.

I run an IT shop for small construction companies - and I'll cheerfully reboot PCs and install drivers.

Frankly, it's fun:

It's a good way to meet interesting people... and if I listen very carefully I'll find an unmet business need that I can help with a custom database or an app.

It sounds like you're more of a businessman than an IT guy. I used a job in IT to leverage my way into my current role of information security by listening to the needs of my company and offering my services doing way more than security work.

I don't think anyone would disagree that being able to find a need and sell yourself as the solution are two of the biggest assets in finding success.