I'd known for a while that the job I was in was a dead end. I was taking a lot of online programming courses and geting involved with local meetups, etc. When a

I'd known for a while that the job I was in was a dead end. I was taking a lot of online programming courses and geting involved with local meetups, etc. When a friend who'd ended up in a non-programmer role at a tech company offered to put in a good word for me for a poorly-defined 'assistant' position, I went for it. I was honest about my skill level, and it turned out that there was a lot of work that anyone sufficiently interested could do. It was a lot of pretty boring stuff at first, documentation and testing, mostly. But there's always some small project that falls exactly in the 'inexperienced new guy' sweet spot--something that everyone wants, but can do without, and no one has time to write, or else something that some manager has asked for that a project lead doesn't want to waste developer time on. After I did well enough on enough of those, the requests to do the more boring things got fewer and farther between. In general, my job search strategy has always been to look at opportunities orthogonal to my field. I didn't look for software jobs per se--if I had to compete against CS degrees I'd have been a goner. Instead, I looked for positions where I could use the knowledge I had as a multiplier for my productivity doing something else. It also really helps that the market for good devs is pretty competitive. It means that once you're in and you've proved yourself a bit, it's easier (and often less financially risky) for your employer to take a chance on your ability to learn than it is to hire another dev when something needs to be done. But as I said before, this approach sort of kicks at least one can down the road; if you start off at 'assistant' level, it's hard to move up in people's perception.