Got my undergrad at a no-name state school in international business and worked for about a year as a jr product mgr at a tech company in SF, but I've been programming since I was 12 or so, and I left that job to freelance. Did that for over a decade, mostly focused on iOS dev. I've done a few apps for larger companies that you'd recognize, but most of my work is for early stage startups that no longer exist. Still, I guess iOS is in enough demand that it was enough to open doors at these companies, and from there it's a matter of passing the interviews. I've been really successful as a freelancer, so the non-technical parts of the interview process were really easy, just like selling yourself to potential clients, basically.