[nateinaction]

I’m not sure how helpful this is but I worked Tech Support before applying to be a developer. If she wants good hands on training in sysadmin and programming there are support jobs (especially at startups) that are terrific for launching (or relaunching) a dev career.

[Clewza313]

Tech support jobs are good for bootstrapping when you don't have dev or sysadmin experience. For the OP's friend, though, who has programming experience, this would likely be an unnecessary detour.