I'm self-taught, and got hired in the UK. The stepping stone was an internship at a small company, who then took me on full-time. I stayed at the first company

I'm self-taught, and got hired in the UK. The stepping stone was an internship at a small company, who then took me on full-time. I stayed at the first company for 3.5 years. During that time i also spent enough time on the then-young Stack Overflow to get 30-40k reputation. I have a solid degree in a technical but unrelated field. And i'd like to think i'm actually a decent programmer, and that this comes across in interviews. All that added up to make it pretty easy to get the next job in the normal way.