Ask HN: How does someone get their start in IT?

I've looked at various job postings for my area of the American midwest, and nearly all of the positions that are above CSR ask for requirements of 2-6 years experience working with server technologies (RHEL and Windows Server), Bachelors/Masters in CS, and salaries sometimes being less than $35k for the position. I've not followed the IT job market for that long so I cannot say whether that is the average pay for the skills in question, but even that seems outrageous. I could be wrong, of course. Some do have much more reasonable requirements, but I don't come across too many of those.

Now I would expect to see people much older applying for these positions. Somewhere in the age range of "Slackware in college". Instead, I see people who are 18-26 being offered - or already have - jobs in these fields[0]. I don't mean customer service, I mean working on actual hardware for companies or developing for front/backend.

How are these people getting these career deals so easily? Am I not looking in the right places? Are these people really just the extraordinary Hacker types?

To ask this a different way, how does one get the god-like experience working with enterprise systems when the bar to entry already requires that you were simply born with these abilities?

I know this may come off as another "how do you get experience for experience without experience", but the point that separates this question for me is that these aren't people already in their 30s. They are sometimes not even old enough to buy alcohol. I'd find it hard to believe that someone who just turned 20 could afford the pricing of Win Server for the experience of using and certification. It could very well be that my perception is warped, but it is safe to say that these people do exist and this does happen.

[0] People living in more tech-oriented areas of the US, such as the coasts.