I am a freelance programmer, and though I got a CS degree I do not value a college education in itself when thinking about hiring.
There are two ways of hiring:
- knowing people to hire (directly or indirectly)
- accepting a sales pitch (usually a resume with accoutrements)
The former is a superior way of hiring, since it directly addresses the issue of trust, which is the biggest issue at play when making a hiring decision. Can this person do what he says (abilities)? Will he do good for the company (character)? All these questions boil down to trust, and when a colleague, contact, whatever says, "This guy will be a good hire," it makes all the difference.
The latter method requires the conveyance of trust via the sales pitch. Usually the sales pitch is a combination of resume/first contact, interview, etc. But in the end it's just a sales pitch, and if the hiring manager is going to buy (hire) he has to make a leap of faith. It's very hard to make that leap of faith when the things in the sales pitch aren't capable of being reduced to bullet points.
As such, the self-taught person just starting out is pretty much aiming to get hired via the first method, which is superior anyway. This means networking. Lots of networking. Going to meetups to build street cred with the other developers, going to business/dev type meetups so you can meet business types and build trust, attending startup events like Startup Weekend or other social type events, etc. It's a *lot* of work, but it pays dividends over time. Please also note that when you network, it's all about what other people do.. showing up at a function and presenting yourself all the time isn't what it's about.. remember, you're building trust, and understanding someone's problem and verbalizing it back to him does a lot to build trust.
(anecdote: I recently had to find more business due to a major project scaling back. In two days I had two more projects lined up merely by contacting people I knew and following up with others. Networking really does help.)
Of course, you also have to learn, and there are various ways to do that. A crash course in a consulting firm that provides lateral transfer training will get you both a bullet point and good networking. You can also apprentice at some consulting firms. Barring that, you can do some learning, contribute to open source projects, participate in so-called, "hack nights" where programmers sit around and program next to each other, etc.
In other words, it takes work to build up your credibility, but it's largely stuff you should do anyway.
