> When applying without a CS background how tough are the technical interviews?

It's very rare, in my experience, to be asked a pure CS question in the interview. For some positions you may be silently expected to have some degree of familiarity with CS concepts, for other - especially entry-level - positions you don't need CS knowledge at all.

Being able to produce working and good looking code is all most companies want from fresh employees, I think. It's unfortunately still hard to find people with that skill, but if you have it you can learn everything else.

In short: apply everywhere, go to interviews and don't be afraid. You'll be pleasantly surprised (I hope).

Depends where you're going. Top companies like Google, Facebook, Microsoft, etc are looking for people who can pass some tough CS questions, whereas more standard corporate or mid-stage startups are going to be a bit more lax. I've seen everything from "parse this integer from a string without your language's built in parse function" to "build a small database schema using ER diagrams" to "write us a P2P chat server with a central login server".

I interviewed a referral once, this kid had written a couple of trivial android apps in notepad, which was something at least. But when I drilled down he really didn't understand anything he was doing with respect to the build (ie didn't know what the classpath was), didn't know anything about basic collections, didn't know tools like eclipse, version control. He claimed to be eager to learn, but no one has a full time dev to spare teaching anyone intro classes on this stuff.

So, from my perspective, if he would have known the tools, basic concepts, and had taught himself more, he would have been a hire. Otherwise, he just wasn't self starting, and really wasn't eager to learn, or he would have come with more ability.

In that kind of situation you can basically do a contract to perm internship kind of thing, point them at resources, and see if he's fully competent to be junior at the end of the contract. Not everyone can afford this of course, but sometimes people don't even know what they should be learning, but will gobble up knowledge if pointed in the right direction. A weapon waiting to be aimed, if you will.