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.

PHP is paradise compared to the bed of glass and nails some of us 30-somethings had to drag ourselves through man.

Lotus Domino. Never Forget.

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.

cgi-bin's seemingly incredible power made me accidentally learn pearl.

I suspect it broke me as a programmer for years!

Or learning to program in C on DOS, where a bad pointer could not only hose your program, but easily hose the OS too

I started with Lotus Notes baby!

I think you're correct for tech startups and large companies, but not for dev shops or family businesses.

I think it holds true for dev shops that are not simply body shops as well.

As for family businesses, they rarely if ever hire software developers. They hire someone for a different role who can code, such as the "help wanted" sign I saw last week in Santa Fe looking for a sales clerk who could also maintain a small website front to back.

I disagree slightly in that vast majority of tech startups don't have any money. They need people they don't have to pay. What better way than to give everyone who walks by a flyer? Comparatively, dev shops need to be able to get another customer, so they need to produce something that does at least work regardless of whether or not it scales. They need people who can build something right out of the gate or the clients don't pay the invoice. They don't have the time to spend training someone.