I love my job.
About getting a job like it:
Ever read Kylph's signature? Yeah, pretty much that's it. Get an internship working on a military base, and maybe you'll have a manager like me who makes you do everything to gain experience. A security clearance isn't hard to get, the higher level ones are though. If you want to ask more pointed questions, pm me.
I started working for the feds in high school as an intern, and now I'm pretty happy with my career.
That's it dude. I swear I just had this conversation not 5 minutes ago. Tech jobs, especially the fun ones, require 2 things.
Get your foot in the door SOMEWHERE.
Work hard. Gain experience. Pay your dues. Advance.
If you're willing to do bitch work for 2-3 years (maybe more) you'll find that the industries for tech (whether it's mech engineering, software engineering, whatever) are just looking for people that have a lot of potential to train and mold into exactly what they need.
My example is not uncommon:
1) Worked really hard as a Help Desk guy.
2) Our dev got overloaded and they asked if I could help.
3) Learned flash and php on my own time, and was able to jump into the work in 2 weeks of hard work.
4) Topped out my experience and went to work for verizon in help desk.
5) Worked really hard. Built some tools, learned how the 'internet' works.
6) Worked for a hosting company as front line support. Took every shift I could, followed the Engineers outside for smoke breaks. Took everything in, and when a new Engineer spot opened, I applied for it.
7) Worked as an engineer for a few months, then a secretary told me I did my job wrong for DOD wiping a hard drive that had been out of rotation for 30 days (even though that was policy). Told her to STFU in a less than PC way and was fired. Lesson learned. (On a side note, she was fired for incompetence 3 months later, and was, last I checked, a greeter at walmart).
8) Got a job making way less money with some really smart guys. Let them brain dump on me for 2 years. Learned Perl and Python. Moved on.
9) Got to rackspace. Paid my dues as an admin for 2 years. Worked hard, built a lot of cool, high profile tools, got promoted to engineer.
In all of that, my only School was 2 classes at a Community College. Introduction to Linux, and MySQL administration.
I'm sure Mech/Aero Engineering will take a degree, but what I'm getting at is, the fun stuff in the Software/System engineering world really just takes hard work and persistence. Show people you're willing to go the extra mile to further yourself, and that generates a lot of respect from your peers. Respect that translates into more responsibility that will translate into a promotion.
I'm positive that I'm one of the people 'taking a job away from someone with a degree' but only because I do it better than them. Instead of learning from a professor for 4 years, I learned on the job, and got more out of it than they did from their school. Now I'm the one interviewing them and turning them down because they're not well rounded enough. I've taken a few candidates straight out of college, but for the most part, college teaches you to 'do what it takes to pass, nothing more'. I don't want people with that attitude. I want people motivated to learn more than what's required of them. I want people who have been 6ft over their head, and turned into subject matter experts in a short amount of time.
If you take anything out of this post, take the last paragraph. The companies that get all the press (Google, Facebook, Amazon) DONT CARE ABOUT A DEGREE. They care about what you've done that you can bring with you. They care about how quickly you'll learn, and how deep you'll dive down the knowledge rabbit hole. They could get 2 shits about your 4.0 from Stanford.
