Very few "real" tech companies require degrees now, certainly none of the sensible ones do. Looking at the front page of job listings on this board, you see Dro

Very few "real" tech companies require degrees now, certainly none of the sensible ones do. Looking at the front page of job listings on this board, you see Dropbox, Google, Uber, Oracle, Amazon, Visa, Atlassian, and Bank of America all with serious tech jobs (some of them quite senior) with no education requirement. But what you will need is the knowledge that you would have otherwise gotten with a CS degree. If you don't know a priority queue from a linked list, or you can't name an example of an O(nlog(n)) algorithm, then you're going to struggle in way more than just the interview; this crap comes up in real life more often than might be obvious. Luckily there are more than enough free places to learn this stuff. It's far less structured than a college, and requires an absurd amount of discipline to do on your own time, but nothing is missing. Beyond the ad-hoc content, several top-tier universities put their CS courseware online for free, and you can totally get the same CS education that others pay $200K for. You don't get the paper that says you did it, but you don't really need it. Getting through the resume barrier is a bit more tricky, but here's a tech recruiting open secret: Stack Overflow. It's gold for recruiters, and extremely heavily used. They find people who consistently post strong answers on topics relevant to the company they're recruiting for and directly recruit them to interview. Skip the job listings. If you have a strong S.O. profile and provide enough information for recruiters to track down who you are, you'll get no end of attention. That and GitHub. Write some code that demonstrates good design and put it up. When I was doing talent vetting for small firms, a person's Github page was a far more valuable signal than their "qualifications".