They have. There are companies in the UK that hire Oxbridge grads from the humanities with no tech experience whatsoever and train them. In the States, IBM has a similar apprenticeship programme that lasts for 1 year.

In the mainframe era (e.g. up until the late 1990s maybe?) the big US consulting firms did the same thing. Andersen Consulting would hire smart history and english majors and teach them COBOL in 6 weeks and then dispatch them to a client site to work 60 hours/week. Granted their approaches, designs, and code were highly standardized, but the work got done.

I did this. I started in QA with very little experience. I had some linux experience from personal projects I'd worked on and 3 months of a pretty mediocre python developer bootcamp. The company I started at mostly hired less experienced people and had them work QA for a year to get them integrated. It worked really well. You were on an integrated team with QA/Dev/Ops and as QA you sat with other team members and did manual testing while you figured it out. They had a great mentorship program and were serious about training and promoting from within.