* community contributions - I do not find it special any more, but I learned that it is not the default: I have basically millions of people using text and code I created. Again, it's a side effect of the work, but it's also social proof, probably more so than a degree, since the results are tangible. Some people are immediately amazed by this.
* open source: as said above, have some kind of portfolio - it so easy today - in fact, if I weren't that busy right now, this would be the part I would focus on in my position - have well defined clear fun portfolio projects with tangible goals and a somewhat coherent story, maybe around current topics like devops, AR or ML (which are full of unsolved or tedious problems btw)
* be a great generalist: you need the first job or jobs to find some direction you want to go in; but for an entry it's great to be a generalist; me, you can throw frontend-fixes, search engines, ML data pipelines or web API design tasks; documentation or presentations at me - I'll work it out and help you win. Not sure if that helped, but I see people specializing in niches, and not really learning much beyond their focus field is a bit dis-encouraging
* attend meetups and talk to people; many meetups today are hosted by companies and you can have informal chats, which I find much more relaxing than interviews and whiteboard coding questions
* stand out - be in top 10% of kaggle or any other competitive programming site and I would bet jobs would hunt you, not the other way around
The other way to look at it:
Find work at a place, where other programmers won't go. Many orgs are desperate for a software literate IT guy, maybe you find some entry in such way.
Tl;dr
The software development world today is totally different; you can go out and program something useful and get it into the hand of millions of people simpler than ever. It takes some courage to start and put things out there, polish and nourish them. Good luck!