I would hire a hobby programmer (if they can pass the interview). In fact my policy when interviewing is to never look at CVs at all. But ... be prepared at l

I would hire a hobby programmer (if they can pass the interview). In fact my policy when interviewing is to never look at CVs at all. But ... be prepared at least initially to take a junior position. This is because we may need to train you for working in a larger group and you may have a bunch of bad habits. Like not writing understandable code, not writing good (or any) commit messages for other members of the team (or even not using version control at all). The flip side to this is that junior developers where I work can be promoted very quickly. One recent hire went from a junior software engineer to principal (2 steps and a substantial pay increase) within a year. Also while you're waiting to interview, please consider contributing to open source projects!