All right, behold my idiotic story about the time I got a job for one of the major tech companies.

It's the late 00's. I am in my early 20s. I have an associate's degree from the local community college, and I have been messing around with programming since I was 8 years old. I am unemployed, having not long before been laid off from a minimum-wage job at a failing retail establishment. I am living at my parents' house, spending most of my time messing with code and hanging out on IRC.

I am contacted on IRC, one day, by a recruiter for one of the major tech companies. He tells me that I sound like I know what I'm talking about, and would I like to interview for a job?

Well, yes, of course I do.

This major tech company has an office in a city a few hours' drive from where I live. I go there for the interview process, which is somewhat grueling.

I don't get the job. I had a brain fart and whiffed some basic question about computational complexity; I'd forgotten what O(n log n) means. So it goes.

Perhaps a week later, the recruiter calls me back, saying that, out of the blue, a different subsidiary of the major tech company would like to interview me. This subsidiary is an acquired startup, a major website in its own right, and would I be interested in interviewing there?

Well, yes, of course I am.

This subsidiary's office is located in the Bay Area, which is a somewhat greater journey, but I fly there and do the interview process again.

I got the job, that time. I aced the interview, in fact. Pro tip: It is a good sign if you manage to blow through all of an interviewer's prepared questions, and force him to resort to asking riddles, and then manage to answer the riddle correctly, too.

It was only later, after I started to work there, that I learned the full story. The website's ops team needed to hire someone. Although this subsidiary was owned by the major tech company, it was still in many ways a separate company, not yet assimilated into the greater corporate entity. Thus, they basically just walked over to HR, and asked to poke around in their resume database.

They did a simple keyword search, and my resume popped up. It was a total coincidence. One of the keywords they used was the programming language they used, which I had also happened to use in some open-source stuff. Another keyword was related to the subject of the subsidiary's website, which, entirely unrelatedly, also happened to be a word used in the name of the retail job I had recently been laid off from.

My resume was very nearly a blank sheet of paper, aside from these things. I was told that the site's lead architect, on seeing it, reacted along the lines of, "Oh, we have got to interview this guy."

So they did, and I spent the next several years working there.

This is an incredibly stupid story. There is absolutely no part of this process which I would point to as advice for other people. To the extent that this has led to my success, it was blind, stinking luck, and I doubt it would ever happen again.

I'm not sure what moral you could take from this. "Know your shit" seems patronizing. I would like to think that possessing technical know-how with no relevant degree, certifications, or experience is still a state which can lead to success, but I suspect that such extraordinary luck is still a necessary component as well.