> there's hiring managers or recruiters that won't look at me, and coworkers whose behavior changes when they find out.
I am very surprised to hear you say this. My background appears to be similar to yours (no CS degree, programming full-time since the mid-90s), and although I did see some resistance in job interviews for about the first 5 years of my career, once I had enough experience under my belt nobody cared what my education was. I've never encountered the type of elitism you describe. Maybe it's a Google thing?
I've had a similar experience to other poster, but relative to tech stack.
I learned .NET and Javascript early in my career. Every single job interview I had at a .NET shop brought up my lack of a college degree as a possible barrier to "handling" or being "good enough" for the position (their words). Not a single one of these companies invited me back for another interview.
Never had the same problem with JS, and now I happily work as senior-level engineer (using Python and Javascript) while encouraging other more junior engineers to take up and pursue the JS ecosystem.
I am very surprised to hear you say this. My background appears to be similar to yours (no CS degree, programming full-time since the mid-90s), and although I did see some resistance in job interviews for about the first 5 years of my career, once I had enough experience under my belt nobody cared what my education was. I've never encountered the type of elitism you describe. Maybe it's a Google thing?