Degrees are not useless, but they definitely aren't worth the weight some people place on them either. In your case what is hurting is the lack of experience t

Degrees are not useless, but they definitely aren't worth the weight some people place on them either. In your case what is hurting is the lack of experience tied with the lack of a degree. If you had a degree with 2 years you'd have little issues assuming you can get through the interview process. But without a degree and with only a couple years experience it is much harder to get past a lot of the gate keepers. If you really want to work at a place that "requires" a degree or enough experience to offset it you'll need to find some smaller businesses, or even some of the larger enterprises where they will interview you as a person and not worry so much about the piece of paper you don't have. This will let you get your 5-6 years of experience that will mainly offset the lack of a degree. Also, for your resume you'd likely do better with a functional resume with projects/accomplishments on it, rather than a chronological resume. The functional will let you highlight more details about your open source and hobby work. Chronological will show your relative lack of experience just by the dates shown, and generally makes it harder to show all the relevant stuff you have done since you are trying to summarize a job position instead of talking about different projects/problems you have solved. Just a personal note and from my own experience. I have over 20 years in the industry and I do not have a CS degree and I do not list my formal education on my resume as it is irrelevant for what I do (generally). When I have applied for positions in the past I'd use their response about a degree as a good filter about the company. Because if they are calling me to talk but then tell me that without a degree that I am not worth chatting with then I just found a company to avoid. I say this because intelligent people want to associate themselves with other intelligent people, and a degree does not make someone intelligent. A degree may help to increase someones intelligence, but it more so just proves you can endure a level of memorization for a few years to pass some exams, not that you are intelligent or even competent to do the job. Personally, I prefer to work and associate with people who are intelligent because they have a thirst, desire and hunger for information and learning, then I do someone who uses a degree or a specific school as a filter to whether another human is intelligent or worthy. This is the reason I do not let my teams use the lack of a degree or where a degree is attained to influence whether we interview someone, the only things we look at are the resume & cover letter and if we like what we see we interview the person.