For junior IT roles, you’re screening for passion more than anything else. The best candidates are usually people that play with computers and are looking for growth. There’s a mix of “I have been taking computers apart since I was a kid” and “I’m getting an associates in IT.” Totally hit or miss. Sometimes the person with nothing pans out and the degree seeker won’t. Sometimes it’s the other way around. The deciding factor here is how the candidate meshes with the team.

For junior dev roles, someone with a college degree is usually looking for more than a junior salary but has nothing I would hire at higher levels. Someone without a degree might have been coding in their spare time or done a boot camp. A good portfolio might give you a leg up. I consider a portfolio to be evidence of growth, not a bunch of perfect code. I love seeing GitHub profiles that show really shitty code that matures into really solid code (or at least the signs someone is trying). That being said, what matters is the tech screen and a quick code test. If you can do what I validate in an interview and the team likes you, rad.

For someone with no experience, I tell them to figure out something they want to learn and put it on GitHub. Then repeat a fuck ton. Always expand the things you challenge yourself with and move on when your learning or passion has ceased. Sometimes that means you build yet another todo list. Other times that means you try to figure out how to build that cool Discord bot and fail utterly but learn a bunch of shit along the way.

Honestly at the end of the day it’s all fucking luck. If you get a hiring manager like me that’s slightly biased toward self-trained over degree, you have an easier chance on skills stuff. But that’s a crapshoot. I was lucky when I started and people took chances on me. In return I take chances on people I think could have great potential. That’s just dumb luck both from me and for the people I’m able to help grow.