Tired of recruiters asking me if I had a BSCS, I went back to college after years working in IT.

Had a conversation with the other seniors in a CS 300 class one day, I would say a few of them were in the top half of the class. Was talking about software version control. "What's that?" they all said. "You know, like git", I said. "Git?" they said. None of them knew what software version control or git was.

I would suggest that if you have a class where you learn say C++, toward the end of the class, or right after the class, write your own C++ program - doing whatever you want it to do. If you take a graphics class where you learn OpenGL, write your own program using OpenGL - doing whatever you want it to do. You tend to learn these things more doing it.

A lot of people are flooding open source projects with AI right now, but that aside, also if you just learned C++ or Java or whatever, look at actively maintained open source projects on Github or Ubuntu or Debian or freedesktop.org or whatever. Look through bug reports. Try to reproduce them. If you reproduce, you can reply to the report with what versions you are using (latest is best usually) and that you reproduced it. You can try to fix the bugs too. One thing with this is - it's similar to what an intern or associate/junior SWE would be doing at a company. If you submit a pull request and it gets accepted - it is like what you are doing at a big company.

Years ago I went to a Debian bug squashing party. I didn't know if I'd know anyone there, but getting there I did know one guy who did IT work in my city. Anyhow, a lot of the people there were pretty good. I remember a fellow named Daniel talking and he seemed to know a lot. Plus others. Then someone else walked in and everyone started saying "Pablo is here". It was a fellow named Pablo who was doing a doctorate in computer science at Columbia, They were all looking toward him and curious what he was working on. It seemed like they thought he was one of the most knowledgeable person there, among a group of knowledgeable people.

The point of this is - it was a group of people who were pursuing technical knowledge, and who respected technical knowledge. This guy Pablo from what they said was very devoted to this, and they respected him for it. This kind of social reinforcement is important too - it's talked about all the time, how being in San Francisco or YC or whatever with like-minded people pushes people ahead. I have seen it in many circumstances. Being part of one or more social groups like this focused on getting technically good and eventually trying to get to be a SSWE in a FAANG or whatever is something that helps. It can be easier to find in some places than others, but there are hackers everywhere.