[Nursie]

The problem is that paper experience is not actually a good indicator of anything, but lack of it will keep you out of a job.

Recently I've been working with a team of 3 other engineers. 2 Were average if a touch lazy. The third had ~30 years experience on paper. He was without a doubt the most incurious, unproductive, useless programmer I've ever encountered. He must have committed less than 1% of the new code over the last 10 months and most of that was wrong. He was a net drain on team productivity.

However the rest of us delivered and now he gets to put another successful project on his resume and look to a recruiter/HR person like he's a useful, productive guy. Where someone like you who likely has some raw talent and just needs some battle-hardening... you may find getting a foot in the door quite hard.

I don't really know how to solve this.

[Nursie]

2 more things. Firstly, I suppose one solution would have been for management to pay attention to the atmosphere.on the team and do some sort of productivity assessments on their staff.

Secondly - to get a start somewhere good I would (if you don't have a tech degree or experience) show some interest in the topic and an ability to be a self-starter. Do a couple of coursera/udacity courses. Stick up a webapp or try to get started with android development or something. Doesn't even have to be exactly aligned with where you want to be, just show some ability, intent and interest.

[Tyrannosaurs]

Accurately measuring productivity of programmers in a way which doesn't negatively distort performance...

Crack that and you'll not need to program, you'll be rich.