Ask HN: What is the best way for juniors to find work in 2021

Back when I started out fifteen years ago, programming was a fairly uncommon activity. There was little in the way of bootcamps, so your competition was mostly other self-taught teenagers. Now, these days, you're competing withe a huge amount of people who've skilled up in good practises from the get-go, and there's also much more competition from outsourced tech-shops in places like Eastern Europe who have a far better reputation than more old school progammer mills.

I have a smart friend here in the UK who's been working in technical support, re-skilled at a bootcamp, seems to know what he's doing, but finding a job now things are hyper-competitive is proving really difficult. He managed to bag one job but the COO basically unfortunately pushed him towards running their support department so he didn't get as much experience coding as he'd have liked. What best avenues would he have for finding an actual programmer job?