>, but it doesn't seem to be answering the question
It seems the relevant "answer" is :
>To become a great programmer with very marketable skills, you have to build things and write code. [...] As you are building, save your work and put together a little portfolio on your website.
The projects portfolio gets people interested. I've seen some websites that showed off a project and on the webpage somewhere would be blurb like: "Btw, I'm also looking for a job in Javascript blah blah blah." And then the recruiters or hiring managers would email them because they were impressed with the work they saw.