I‘ve spent a fair amount of time conducting interview loops at a major tech company. Here are the things I’d be looking for from a candidate like you:
1) Have you delivered something with business or monetary value? Can you explain it?
Hobby programming is great, but I’d hope someone coming from another industry had been able to identify a problem and used their programming skills to solve it.
2) Are you familiar with the larger software engineering toolset and mentality, or just programming.
Planning, estimating, architecture, design, testing, continuous integration, continuous deployment, logging, monitoring, infrastructure, etc… A lot of this falls under DevOps or application lifecycle management these days.
I wouldn’t expect a entry level engineer to have expertise in everything, but I would expect them to be know the basics of most or all of them and why they are valuable. Being able to talk to why CI and automated deployments made your life easier or how a good logging framework and implementation let you figure out an error are good signs you are really into the whole of the profession and not just the fun problem solving parts.
3) Convince me you are interested in the boring parts. In my experience most of being professional software engineer isn’t nearly as fun as hobby projects. Do you really want to do this when you are implementing a mildly customized data grid for the 100th time to enable someone to approve or deny travel requests? Or mapping 150 fields from one data source to another, each of which‘s column names are just different enough to need it’s org definition. Because ultimately, we are solving problems with business value for customers/partners and often the best way to answer those problems is… boring.
4) Most importantly, show me you aren’t a “hobbyist developer trying to become a professional developer”. I want to know you are a professional developer that hasn’t had that title yet. If you can solve problems with software/programming at your current job, do that and tell me about it. Build a product someone, anyone else uses.
If you can, move into a programming adjacent role (product owner/PM/analyst/etc) in your current industry.
Others have knocked bootcamps as a bad option. I’d say it depends. My company runs a training program for military veterans and it is wildly successful, but it also focuses HEAVILY on job placement. I also know a local boot camp in my (small) city that seems to have a darn near 100% placement rate due to an excellent network with local companies. If you find a boot camp with a strong reputation and evidence for high placement rates, it might be worth it. It’s worth noting the the veteran program is free and the local boot camp was cheap as they are programs looking to produce qualified employees for their sponsors rather than money making enterprises themselves.
Network (the interpersonal kind) heavily with other professional developers. Go to meetups. This isn’t so much to find a job directly from one you developing network (although that happens!) but to become familiar with the culture, learn what is being talked about, and learn about opportunities.
Finally, I’ll echo others and say you can go the route of getting a CS degree or similar. If you are going to work in the industry long term I think it’s useful- not only does it fill in a lot of gaps that often only become apparent years later, it also helps with “checkbox” resume screening, gets you access to a career services center and is a nice shortcut to large professional network. Let me put it this way- I’ve never not responded to a student or alumni from my university that has reached out to me. It’s a big commitment though- ideally find a program that caters to working professionals but is affiliated with a large / strong alumni network.
Good luck!