[msluyter]

My bachelors was in music and I was midway through a masters in music when I decided to switch to CS. Needless to say it was a huge paradigm shift, and having had very little experience prior to that, and also as a result of a program that was highly theoretical, I came out with a MS in CS but with some massive gaps. I wasn't that comfortable with basic tools, like the unix command line, vi, or even DOS (it was a while ago), for example.

So, feeling somewhat unconfident, I took a job in software testing -- SDET, doing test automation mostly in Perl. I figured it'd be a gentler learning curve during which I'd beef up my skills, and after which I'd move over to software development. It worked out fairly well for me, though due to a variety of factors, I stayed in the testing/QA side longer than planned.

I think that's not a bad path, and better than starting in tech support imho because you'll be directly involved in the development process. Just make sure that it's a technically focused role with opportunities for writing code, and not just button pushing. And don't stay there too long, or you'll find yourself in the unfortunate niche of the rare and highly sought after testing/QA person who can also code.