Programmer without degree

How do I get work without a degree? Have any of you accomplished this?

Do I have to make a startup?

How I got work without a degree was that I spent two years as a damned game tester at 12 hours a day, then went home and programmed.  Sometimes I would check job postings, usually not.  Sometimes instead of programming I would play games.  Eventually I got hired for shit wages at a small conslutting company because a personal project I had done had some overlap with a project they were working on, stuck with it for a couple of years (shit wages, shit hours).  Spoiler alert, no company is making money off SICP except McGraw-Hill.

So if you want to get work without a degree, be prepared to sacrifice your pride for shit jobs at shit wages and doing some stuff that is not programming in order to make money in the interim.  Hell, be prepared for that either way, half the other game testers in the building had degrees and were making the same $10/hour as everyone else.  And while doing shit work at shit wages, educate yourself in your spare time.  Do something real.  Working through SICP isn't real.  Reading a Rails tutorial isn't real.  Make something that's useful, because it raises the odds that you'll have some relevant skill that a company might want.