[stevenp]

I've been employed as a software engineer since age 19, and I'm almost 33 now. I've worked for companies like MetLife, Tommy Hilfiger, Yahoo!, and IMVU, and my lack of a degree has never been an issue.

It helps that I was always a hobbyist (I started playing with my dad's Commodore 64 when I was 6). For the most part, everything I learned I learned by building stuff. I dropped out of college when I was 19 because my financial aid fell through, and instead of continuing with my bachelor's degree, I decided to enroll in a 9 month program at a technical school. That allowed me to fill in some of the gaps that my own tinkering didn't really cover -- things like object-oriented programming.

After that, I got my first job programming online surveys in Perl, and I've been employed ever since. Getting your foot in the door is the most important thing. You only need to find one person who believes you can do the job, and if you're intellectually curious enough, you can easily learn by doing. My first job was with a small business that didn't have anyone doing any programming, so there was nobody to tell me I wasn't good enough during the hiring process, so I was able to fake my way into having a job that gave me the employment history to work my way into bigger companies and higher salaries.