You&#x27;d have to find a community adjacent to your interests.<p>I like programming languages and functional programming and haven&#x27;t had trouble finding things to learn and people to help me, mostly through the Haskell community. You have everything from completely disorganized but perfectly accessible help like IRC channels and mailing lists to things like type theory meetups and study groups (if you live near enough people with those interests). It&#x27;ll be easier in the Bay Area or New York, but moving here has lots of other benefits and isn&#x27;t nearly as constrained as going to grad school.<p>Once you know enough on your own you can parlay that into a &quot;sexy&quot; job if you&#x27;re so motivated. I interned at a company that had their own internal language, for example, and one of the main people working on their compiler had a philosophy degree and (unless I&#x27;m misremembering) no grad school whatsoever. It&#x27;s more difficult because interesting jobs are relatively rare and a lot of places (especially ones close to academia) are still disproportionately concerned with credentials but it&#x27;s <i>possible</i>.<p>As long as you can concretely demonstrate your capabilities, you have <i>a chance</i> at progressive companies without credentials. This still isn&#x27;t true within academia itself, at many government roles or at big rules-bound corporations, but it <i>is</i> possible within the &quot;core&quot; tech industry.