[acveilleux]

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.

[ry_ry]

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.

[acveilleux]

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.

[ry_ry]

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

I suspect it broke me as a programmer for years!

[spacemanmatt]

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

[drumdance]

I started with Lotus Notes baby!