Ask HN: How does a hobby programmer get hired?

They did try to route me into QA first, but I ignored that and none of them were technical enough to know the difference.

I think you have a few possible paths (many mentioned in sibling comments):

Ship something at least slightly novel of your own. Could be a web site, a web game, a mobile app/game, or something open-source that you've kept at for 6+ months. This will both sharpen your own skills and give an interviewer something concrete to talk about.

Complete Advent of Code. This isn't quite as impressive as the previous, but if someone has completed all of an AoC, that's a pretty positive sign for me. (Note that it's quite possible to cheat at AoC, making this not as strong a signal.)

People hate to hear it, but grind leetcode. Get to the point where 95% of leetcode easy problems are truly easy for you and where medium ones are 50/50 within your grasp. Not only will this sharpen your skills, but it (like AoC) will force you to work through some problems that are initially difficult for you. Just like lifting heavier weights, this exercise will make you stronger as a programmer.

Find an open-source project that has some beginner-friendly tasks. See if you can complete any of those. This will both give you confidence, but also give you a sense of "do I really want to do this as a job?" (A lot of programming is, IMO, the best job in the world. A lot of is...not...)

Keep at the applications. Ask for feedback from failed interviews. Sometimes the true answer is just "we had only one spot and the person we hired interviewed more strongly"; OK, only sensible thing you can do is keep interviewing. Other times, you might get a piece of feedback that really helps.

You could consider pursuing some (charged) AWS certifications. These aren't a major positive signal for a lot of employers, but they're a modestly positive signal for some and for a career-changer, they're probably a better signal of seriousness than a more traditional candidate.

If you find none of that lands you a role, depending on your location, age, and life circumstances, see if any companies near you have internship programs and if one would consider hiring you into their internship program.

I would only do the QA-first route if that was the very last option for you. (It's probably better than a bootcamp, but it's close.) Companies that hire you into QA won't want to quickly lose you from QA into coding. I have a few devs on my team who have gone through that route in our company, so it's definitely possible (and they're good), but I think it's on average a longer road than waiting and coming in the front door to software.

Here's my GH ID: https://github.com/ChrisMarshallNY

You can easily see that I faked over a decade of checkin history, dozens of repos, in multiple organizations, over 20 shipped apps, lots of blog posts, tutorials, class modules, etc.

In my previous job I was highly respected, both technically and as a technology PM, but I still failed to sell many candidates without a good paper background.

"Her degree is in music? That's not great.", even though it was science focused, she had several acoustics and waveform analysis projects, strong math background and would fit well in our signal processing group.