At the very least if you don't have a CS degree, you should be able to demonstrate CS-knowledge by prepping for basic whiteboard interviews. Imagine what this

At the very least if you don't have a CS degree, you should be able to demonstrate CS-knowledge by prepping for basic whiteboard interviews. Imagine what this guy looks like from the hiring managers side. Would you take the risk of hiring him for a software engineering position? Do you have any confirmation whatsoever that he can even write a single line of code? Yeah sure, he founded a startup, but you literally have no idea who wrote the actual code there or even if anything functional was even produced. Maybe the reason the startup failed is because the software was incompetent. I get it. We all hate reversing a binary tree, and most likely we'll never have to do it in day to day work. But here's the thing, almost anyone who can reverse a binary tree on a whiteboard has basic competence at writing code. The reverse isn't necessarily true. There are lots of great coders who aren't good at whiteboard interviews. But hiring managers don't care about false negatives. Bad hires cost a truly staggering amount of money, overlooked candidates cost virtually nothing. When I hear or read about people who are failing to get SWE jobs, it's usually because they do not have any demonstrable credibility of basic competence at writing code. To get a seat at the table you must bring at least one of the following: a pedigree, a network of credible people who can vouch for you, your name publicly attached to a successful project or the ability to crush whiteboard interviews. A manager that hires somebody who meets none of those criteria is taking an enormous risk.