Most of the people who are self-taught do it as a hobby. People don’t hire hobbyists.

This is what I mean. Yesterday I spent 2 hours going over one specific transition in a meeting for a freelance job I had. Today I had a call where I have to revamp the entire process for another one I had. When I worked at a medium sized business, I spent 3 weeks planning every aspect of a complicated search filter before even touching code. (10+ hour days doing data normalizing, edge case review, etc)

I program for fun. But nothing about the programming I do for work is fun. It’s focused, labor intensive and a massive headache. But I also have a portfolio and I get scouted on LinkedIn every week or so.

I’m certainly far from great, even after 10+ years, but I’ll never been unemployed.

If you treat learning like a job, you’ll get hired somewhere.

But this requires: Organization (can you plan your code before you start) Understanding (do you know what your code actually does without reading it on SO) Testing (can you demonstrate that your code does what you planned consistently?)

Also, can you be adaptive?

I got hired in a company that only uses C# even though I’d never used it before. I taught myself how to use it well enough in two months of intense focus.

Last year, I shifted my frontend to react. I had to teach myself from scratch in 2 months.

If you make a portfolio site, is it attractive, fast loading and interactive? Have you deeply interacted with it? Have you formatted it properly? Have you refactored?

There are all kinds of horror stories because most people claim they can program after writing a “Hello world!” Program with a bit of glitz.

Write an exquisite frontend on GitHub, know about data structures, big O notation

Also, you don’t need to apply to a big company. I know all kinds of local small companies that are desperate for programmers and even my home city (Toronto) seems like you can get a job if you have just finished a boot camp.

If it’s meaningful to you, you’ll figure a way to make it work. If it’s a hobby, you might need some luck.