Until very recently I was frontend lead for a fairly large UK site, and one of the best hires I ever made was a 32 year old former-recruiter with no commercial programming experience, and no CS background.
However it was far from plain sailing. We had mutual friends and whilst chatting in a pub, and they won me over with their passion and enthusiasm for what I discovered was their dream job.
I brought them on as a jr, into a small talented team with measures in place to ensure there was the opportunity to learn on the job and appropriate tasks to work on, but it quickly became apparent they were out of their depth. I worked on mentoring in work and and pointed them in the direction of stuff they might look at outside of work to dodge the bullet.
My work started to suffer because I was spending so much time mentoring, fixing code that had become irrevocably tangled and trying to manage a very stressed & frustrated jr dev.
Eventually I had no choice but to move them into a different team where the work was less technically demanding and more html/css focused, with a small salary cut. Everybody was disappointed with the situation but the alternative was letting them go.
Three years later, that dev rejoined the core engineering team a more experienced developer, passion intact, and having learned their trade in a lower pressure environment, comfortable they could handle the role. I'm incredibly proud of them for the way they handled the situation and am absolutely confident this time will be a success.
That said, it'll probably be the last time I hire a dev with zero development experience. As an investment in an individual it's incredibly worthwhile, but despite the happy ending, the whole experience was fairly disastrous.