Your best bet for getting companies to be willing to take a risk on you, if you have no relevant education or work experience yet, is to start working on side p

Your best bet for getting companies to be willing to take a risk on you, if you have no relevant education or work experience yet, is to start working on side projects(that you can share on places like GitHub), contributing to open source, maybe work on a phone app or two and release them (depending on where your interests lie exactly in the software world). Perhaps gather these into a slick, well designed, simple web site, basically saying what you said above. Anything tangible that will make people more excited about giving you a shot. They likely won't be willing to just take your word that you were a proficient self-study, but if your work is good, some people will be willing to look beyond just the education. While you are trying to teach yourself, take a bit of time to get a basic familiarity with Computer Science concepts (data structures, algorithms, common design patterns, and OO concepts if applicable, etc). These can often seem unnecessary and overly complicated to a self taught developer (speaking from experience), but they can really help with writing nicer, cleaner, more efficient code in the long run. One thing that helped move me in the right direction for my career was starting a couple of web sites for ideas I had for various niche communities (I had dreams of grandeur and selling my websites for millions, ha). They both failed miserably, and never really generated a sustainable user base. However, I learned a ton in the process about web technologies from front end to the database side of things, and having that on my resume really helped in start-up interviews, as it was a mentality that people in those circles could relate to.