Your difficulty and this gentleman's relative lack of difficulty finding a job probably has a lot to do with location. Second runner up is probably credibility. Let me explain.
My experience is in line with the author's. Finding a job has always been relatively easy (beginning at a certain point, which I will elaborate on) and I do not have a degree of any kind. It's my opinion that three factors are primarily responsible for my state of affairs.
1. I started working at a local ISP when I was 15 years old. This was around the time that 28.8kbps modems were all the rage. While I was very green I had unbounded enthusiasm and desire to learn whatever I could about technology. The ISP got a super cheap tech support person and I got paid to learn. After a year I got a chance to do UNIX sysadmin work, and my level of experience began to snowball.
The (fairly obvious) takeaway here is that I built experience. Businesses don't want to train you if they can help it. Not able to find a learn-on-the-job opportunity? Take the author's advice and contribute to an interesting open source project.
2. Befriending an employee of one of the largest ISPs in the United States ended up landing me a development position on a pretty large contract. I worked damn hard, and ended up contributing in a fairly visible way. Because the job was for a company in the Fortune 50 I've since been able to point to it as social proof that I at least have a vague idea of what I'm doing. Employers love this. This is when job hunting became dramatically easier.
You may think the takeaway here is to be lucky, but I disagree. The takeaway is to get to know people that you can develop mutually beneficial relationships with. To this day I still get contract work and referrals from people I worked with on that one job.
3. Location. Companies will sometimes relocate you, but I've never seen one that will do it without there being a very compelling reason to have you on staff (ie, experience and a proven track record). You have to go where the jobs are. Sometimes you have to suck it up, move away from your family and friends, become a nobody, and start pulling in a paycheck. Once you do you can start planning (and saving) for the luxury of living and working in a desirable place.
The takeaway here? Get away from the crowd. In my experience there are at least two good markets for developers, Denver/Boulder CO (Denver being easier than Boulder), and Kansas City MO/KS. I'm not a big fan of Kansas or Missouri (sorry natives, you're all great people), but Colorado is a beautiful place with lots to do outside your cube/apartment. The job markets in both those places are reasonable and you can be relatively well paid even with limited experience. How do they compare with SF/NYC? Not even close, but it's way easier to stand out from the crowd when there is no crowd. Being in the middle of nowhere can sometimes be a benefit.
All that said, good luck.