this post was submitted on 19 Jul 2023
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I certainly experienced this at the start of my career. Everyone wanted me to have at least bachelors degree despite the fact that I was able to run circles around fresh college graduates. It wasn't until someone gave me a chance and I had real world experience that people stopped asking me about my college education. In fact later into my career when they learn about the level of experience I have and that I'm entirely self-taught, it's often seen as something positive. It's a shitty catch-22
So it really is like that eh?
Do you have any tips for what could help me, even a little bit, to have better chances?
Build an open source portfolio. Being able to show employers what I was capable of was a massive benefit both then and now. You can say you know all of these things, but when you're looking at hundreds of applications one of the first things they do to reduce the pile is filter out people who don't have some kind of online presence like Github. This allows them to see that you're actively engaged with the field and if they want to interview you, to look at your code quality and experience.
A personal website that highlights your best work is also a good idea, as it helps to even further distill down the things you're ultimately going to end up talking about in an interview. It doesn't need to be anything fancy, just something that shows your competent. I wouldn't expect the person interviewing you to actually hit view source and criticize your choice in frontend framework.
Without any prior professional experience, is an extensive open-source/[other non-professional software development related experience] portfolio perceived as more valuable than a degree to employers?
That entirely depends on the employer, but in my anecdotal experience that has been the case. Especially in more recent years versus the start of my career (nearly 20 years ago).
The reality is that Computer Science is useful for building strong engineers over the long-term, but it doesn't at all prepare you for the reality of working in a team environment and contributing code to a living project. They don't even teach you git as far as I'm aware.
Contributing to open source demonstrates a lot of the real-world skills that are required in a workplace, beyond just having the comprehension and skill in the language/tool of choice you're interviewing for.