[mcv]

After a career as hockey trainer and dentist assistant, my sister switched to a career as software tester, received some pretty intensive training for that, and is now developing herself towards business analyst, though she's also eager to move towards development.

A friend quit his PhD into medical psychology and entered a training program for developers where he got exposed to PHP, C#, Java, and maybe another language. He got into PHP development at a startup, and after a poor experience with some lead developers, he's now their lead developer. Some of his co-workers are superficially better developers, but they're cowboys who quickly deliver untested, hard to maintain code, whereas my friend works slower but more thoroughly.

Either way, getting into a program where you can learn how to do it right, seems to be an important step.