[longsangstan]

My experience: just try to land a programmer job first, even if the company/job looks shitty.

I only had an Economics degree with no formal IT education and now I had a software dev job.

Like you, I was self-taught and only had built some personal projects, but it was enough to land me my first IT job in a shitty startup. And then you can have easier time finding other software dev roles.