Gonna chime in here with a similar story. I was working at a call center a few years ago. Mostly sales stuff, but it was for a web company. I was taking moocs o

Gonna chime in here with a similar story. I was working at a call center a few years ago. Mostly sales stuff, but it was for a web company. I was taking moocs on the side, Udacity first, then coursera. I was always studying and that was noted by my superiors (in my spare time between calls for example) and eventually an internal opening was offered to me. I got luck there, chance to get off the phones and become an excel monkey. But not as lucky as what happened next, at the same time I’d finished the Stanford Databases class, a number of internal reports tied to a database broke. I had exactly the right about of experience to fix the issues and gain a little credit internally. I moved from a temporary role into a perminate one and started coding vba/sql stuff for the office. From there I continued to learn and was eventually poached to another company. It could have gone faster if I’d been more visible, and I got lucky, but my degree is in Sociology, I learned to code in books and moocs. It can happen if you’re diligent and hard working.