Speaking from my perspective as a prolific FAANG interviewer: Listing whatever experience you can (high-school jobs, sites created for friends, college jobs) alongside interesting personal projects is a huge leg up for getting through recruiting. If you're early in your career, find a few small-time jobs somewhere in tech that'll hire you, and learn as much as you can as fast as you can. MSPs are desperate for people with a little coding background. They'll chew you up and spit you out with long hours and terrible pay, but they're a great place to cut your teeth on getting things done.
Once a candidate gets to me as an interviewer, I'm mostly looking at a resume for what topics I should ask about, both things that you're comfortable in, and things that you're not. If you have personal projects, I'll ask pertinent questions about them, and often I've learned some very interesting insights from the personal projects of candidates.
In my time interviewing, I've hired people without degrees as senior engineers and I've rejected people with doctorates in computer science as junior support engineers. Turns out, degrees are a mediocre predictor at best of ability to do a job, and practical experience is 99% of the time more impactful than a piece of paper.
Once a candidate gets to me as an interviewer, I'm mostly looking at a resume for what topics I should ask about, both things that you're comfortable in, and things that you're not. If you have personal projects, I'll ask pertinent questions about them, and often I've learned some very interesting insights from the personal projects of candidates.
In my time interviewing, I've hired people without degrees as senior engineers and I've rejected people with doctorates in computer science as junior support engineers. Turns out, degrees are a mediocre predictor at best of ability to do a job, and practical experience is 99% of the time more impactful than a piece of paper.