The problem is a lot of people who want to learn to code, and are conditioned to desire the college route of education, don’t actually know that there is a difference and that you can be completely self-taught in the field without ever stepping foot in a university.

We’re not closing schools despite having libraries and the internet, having (good) teachers is useful to learn faster and get pushed further. There are some good programming schools that can make it more efficient for you. I think the main problem is rather the insane cost of higher education in the USA which create anxiety about being certain that you can repay it in the future it may open for you. It is sad.

I always wanted to believe this, but, at least in my country, not even a specialized high school degree is enough to get me anywhere for months, it’s crazy.
Maybe you could even make it without formal education, but everyone’s always looking for those sweet 3+ years of experience in the field (ಥ﹏ಥ)

I certainly experienced this at the start of my career. Everyone wanted me to have at least bachelors degree despite the fact that I was able to run circles around fresh college graduates. It wasn’t until someone gave me a chance and I had real world experience that people stopped asking me about my college education. In fact later into my career when they learn about the level of experience I have and that I’m entirely self-taught, it’s often seen as something positive. It’s a shitty catch-22

So it really is like that eh?
Do you have any tips for what could help me, even a little bit, to have better chances?

Build an open source portfolio. Being able to show employers what I was capable of was a massive benefit both then and now. You can say you know all of these things, but when you’re looking at hundreds of applications one of the first things they do to reduce the pile is filter out people who don’t have some kind of online presence like Github. This allows them to see that you’re actively engaged with the field and if they want to interview you, to look at your code quality and experience.

A personal website that highlights your best work is also a good idea, as it helps to even further distill down the things you’re ultimately going to end up talking about in an interview. It doesn’t need to be anything fancy, just something that shows your competent. I wouldn’t expect the person interviewing you to actually hit view source and criticize your choice in frontend framework.

Yeah, I do that actually, though I keep a “serious” profile where there’s little activity and another one where I can just do whatever so I engage a lot more with other projects and make some experiments for myself, so it also ends up being the most active, but I don’t show it, maybe I should?

In my experience interviewers look very pleased when I show them what I made, but they don’t seem to dig into it much most of the time, so I don’t know how important they really find it.
I’ll definitely try to put more emphasis on those anyway, so they can see a good showcase.

A personal website that highlights your best work

That sounds interesting, I’ll definitely try that, thanks!

A personal website that highlights your best work

That sounds interesting, I’ll definitely try that, thanks!

A personal website that highlights your best work

That sounds interesting, I’ll definitely try that, thanks!

A personal website that highlights your best work

That sounds interesting, I’ll definitely try that, thanks!

Just a heads up, you replied multiple times to this. If the client you’re using doesn’t submit immediately, that just means it’s not doing error handling properly and not disabling submit buttons while the request is in flight. You’ve actually submitted once for each time you pressed the button

Without any prior professional experience, is an extensive open-source/[other non-professional software development related experience] portfolio perceived as more valuable than a degree to employers?

That entirely depends on the employer, but in my anecdotal experience that has been the case. Especially in more recent years versus the start of my career (nearly 20 years ago).

The reality is that Computer Science is useful for building strong engineers over the long-term, but it doesn’t at all prepare you for the reality of working in a team environment and contributing code to a living project. They don’t even teach you git as far as I’m aware.

Contributing to open source demonstrates a lot of the real-world skills that are required in a workplace, beyond just having the comprehension and skill in the language/tool of choice you’re interviewing for.

It is really difficult to get a good job being self taught.

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