It all depends... The question boils down to "how much of a shit job are you willing to go after"?
There's always a few programming jobs that no one wants because the pay is awful and the company/job description is crap (PHP web apps for 28k/year? ROFLOL). But then they act as proof of employability for slightly better companies and soon you have 12-24 months of "professional" experience and landing interviews at OK companies is not unreasonable.
That's how a lot of us, no degree type, got our first foot in the door.
IT systems type roles are also a good segue into programming roles. And IT admin roles are so much easier to land.
I was lucky enough to start on the sys admin side and in smaller companies and just after the major switch away from Novell to NT4. I skipped a lot of the early/mid 90s stalwarths.
"client-server" VB6 apps with an MDB file on a NT4 fileshare passing as server is the lowest I've been lucky to have to deal with. Boy that was crap. That and actual cgi-bin script actually written in perl.
There's always a few programming jobs that no one wants because the pay is awful and the company/job description is crap (PHP web apps for 28k/year? ROFLOL). But then they act as proof of employability for slightly better companies and soon you have 12-24 months of "professional" experience and landing interviews at OK companies is not unreasonable.
That's how a lot of us, no degree type, got our first foot in the door.
IT systems type roles are also a good segue into programming roles. And IT admin roles are so much easier to land.