> I've interviewed at Google, Facebook, Dell, NSA, CIA, DoE (E=Energy), Airbnb, Palantir
Those are some pretty impressive names for places you've interviewed at, but they also have the highest bars to get in. Why not try just some average, run-of-the-mill companies off job sites? There's nothing embarrassing about starting at those. I worked for a no name exercise tracking app company my first job out of college, who later threw out all the work and became a diet tracking app.
Sometimes when I've been between jobs I've even grabbed some bottom of the barrel project work off remote contracting sites. If you can write clear English and are willing to work at 3rd world country rates, you can get infinite work there. It still pays enough to get health insurance through someone like Freelancer's Union.
> I tried improving my interview skills. Reading Meyers, Knuth etc. books
I don't think reading books helps with that. I'd recommend practicing interview problems on sites like LeetCode. I have a CS Master's degree and can easily write an A* pathfinding algorithm on a white board and give you the time complexity of any algorithm, but it's not super useful for the sort of interview stuff I get asked. Typically you are just asked to hammer out a design or implementation for some specific set of requirements that complies with some set of performance criteria, so it's not really book learning being tested. More just that you can you sit down and write the right code/design - which is what you'll be doing every day on a programming job outside meetings collecting those requirements and scheduling the work.
> dropped out my freshmen year at a top 40 college. Was on the cyber security team etc. too expensive so I had to dropout.
Lack of a degree would disqualify you from 95% of programming jobs I've worked at. I don't think it's important myself, but I'm not a hiring manager. The only person I saw hired without one had an amazing project portfolio with hit apps in the app store I would have trouble writing. So it can happen, but it's like being a star baseball player. Outside the reach of most people.
If you really want to be a full time, salaried programmer and don't have a star portfolio, or large bodies of open source code to show off, I think you'd have to take out a loan and get that piece of paper from college first. Project work, or work from contacts or friends at tech meetups, generally is less strict re that. But companies that don't know you are going to just filter you out for no degree.
Those are some pretty impressive names for places you've interviewed at, but they also have the highest bars to get in. Why not try just some average, run-of-the-mill companies off job sites? There's nothing embarrassing about starting at those. I worked for a no name exercise tracking app company my first job out of college, who later threw out all the work and became a diet tracking app.
Sometimes when I've been between jobs I've even grabbed some bottom of the barrel project work off remote contracting sites. If you can write clear English and are willing to work at 3rd world country rates, you can get infinite work there. It still pays enough to get health insurance through someone like Freelancer's Union.
> I tried improving my interview skills. Reading Meyers, Knuth etc. books
I don't think reading books helps with that. I'd recommend practicing interview problems on sites like LeetCode. I have a CS Master's degree and can easily write an A* pathfinding algorithm on a white board and give you the time complexity of any algorithm, but it's not super useful for the sort of interview stuff I get asked. Typically you are just asked to hammer out a design or implementation for some specific set of requirements that complies with some set of performance criteria, so it's not really book learning being tested. More just that you can you sit down and write the right code/design - which is what you'll be doing every day on a programming job outside meetings collecting those requirements and scheduling the work.
> dropped out my freshmen year at a top 40 college. Was on the cyber security team etc. too expensive so I had to dropout.
Lack of a degree would disqualify you from 95% of programming jobs I've worked at. I don't think it's important myself, but I'm not a hiring manager. The only person I saw hired without one had an amazing project portfolio with hit apps in the app store I would have trouble writing. So it can happen, but it's like being a star baseball player. Outside the reach of most people.
If you really want to be a full time, salaried programmer and don't have a star portfolio, or large bodies of open source code to show off, I think you'd have to take out a loan and get that piece of paper from college first. Project work, or work from contacts or friends at tech meetups, generally is less strict re that. But companies that don't know you are going to just filter you out for no degree.