I got a job at Apple as a dropout with, at the time, only some credits from Florida State University and Valencia Community College. I've also had interviews with Facebook and Google and Amazon. I'm not going to say that the school you go to doesn't matter, but I think that having good experience tends to matter more than anything else.

It's not like I'm some hypergenius or anything (far from it), I'm just somewhat of a self-learner and tend to do alright in whiteboard interviews.

Yes, although I was a bit slower. Three years at community college, three years at UC. First job out of college was at Google as a software dev.

I know people with no degree at FAANG. Best time to break in is after a few years in industry when you have some work accomplishments you can point to that indicate you are a high performer.

New grads are pretty undifferentiated except for university prestige so that's a rough time to compete if you're from a less prestigious school or no school.

Yeah no problem. I can't speak to every state school but I went to one that was easy to get into and had a highly rated computer science program with a lot of extra curricular clubs that made it easy to distinguish oneself.

Do they offer a class focused on the interview like Stanford? No. Can you still cram interview problems until your eyes bleed? Yes.

Aren't all the top legal jobs in the US taken by graduates of quite expensive private schools?

Yes! I can think of several examples of people I know at the state university I attended.