[sgdread]

It took me 5 month to get my first Java job (every day 4hrs after work; 8 hours on weekends). And now I see how lucky I was to get that junior position. It took almost year to hone basic Java skills and learn necessary basic stack of technologies to do plain Java projects. It took another year till I got my enterprise stack skills to acceptable level. Every technology/framework is 1-1.5k pages book reading and hours of practice just to start doing something useful. And then you have to repeat that every year, because frameworks updating faster than you can learn, priorities shifting, you forget things.

Edit: However, I must say, ^ was done almost in vacuum: I had noone to ask and had limited access to the Internet (sorry, no Stackoverflow for you :). With good instructors, well-prepared programs and strict discipline in classromms, I would say it is possible to get into entry-level positions.