[jmatt]

I'd recommend sending your resume in anyways.

As others have mentioned networking is they best way to work around such bias. A recommendation from a competent employee will usually outweigh a degree. It's likely the tech manager doesn't care if you have a degree, only how well you will do the job.

As someone who has worked for large and medium size tech companies in the past I can tell you that your experience will vastly outweigh a degree when it comes to hiring and interview decisions when you have 10 years experience.

If experience alone won't get you the job you want there is one other approach that I've seen work. Take a small step in the right direction. You need to escape IT entirely and get a job where you are programming full time. From then on moving from one programming job to another is significantly easier. As is networking and attending community events (.net, python, java user groups, etc). I've gotten two programming jobs with zero experience in the programming language they were hiring for. I was honest about not knowing the language or technology and in my interest in learning it. And that was enough.

[walesmd]

A lot of really good points here. I grabbed my job based off of my open source work and community involvement alone.