To be honest, I think the story of how I broke out of the "programming industry" is far more interesting. Then, the story of how I broke out of the consulting industry.

How I "broke in": started programming age 9. After university (physics degree), in a dead market (2002), the best option that I found was to start working as a Java programmer for a large consultancy's software engineering arm.

How I broke out of that, into consulting: quickly realised that being just a programmer wasn't enough to satisfy me, so tried to transfer to the consulting arm of that corporation. Was told it was impossible. Did it anyway, through a combination of doing awesome work and convincing the right senior people to be on my side.

How I broke out of consulting: worked my bollocks off to start my first business - 9 months of waking up at 4 o'clock in the morning, working till 7, napping for an hour, then off to work for a long (and challenging) day of consulting work.

What happened next: First business slowly tanked for a number of reasons (main one detailed at http://danieltenner.com/posts/0005-starting-up-with-a-friend...), but I managed to hop onto the second one (http://www.woobius.com), which is going great for the moment.

Don't try to break into the programming industry. You might find it's not so easy to break back out of it...