I studied business at a for-profit (not prestigious) college and was a technical recruiter (not prestigious) right before moving into development as a career.

I studied business at a for-profit (not prestigious) college and was a technical recruiter (not prestigious) right before moving into development as a career. My current dev job is quite challenging, I am working with cool tech, and I learn every day. My route to this gig was: - learn Ruby well enough to sound like I knew a lot about hard things (go deep on one thing, instead of having a shallower portfolio of simpler things) - hustling to get that first coding gig, no matter how crappy it was - grinding through several jobs in a few years, learning each time how to pick a better fit, even if I had to move a few thousand miles/km to get a better gig (did that twice) - building up enough expertise in core web development skills (testing, MVC apps, DOM manipulation, etc.) and "under the web app" skills (writing libraries, learning to MITM myself, etc.) - researching what kind of job I wanted, selling that to interviewers, and eventually getting one (my current employer) to believe me enough to give me a job offer, and then working my butt off to learn what I need to learn how to succeed at this level while carving out enough time to climb to the next level tl;dr - work hard, learn marketable skill, go where jobs are, be hungry, do what you gotta do Happy to chat more if you like. My email is in my profile.