You got a job with a lower barrier to entry and then transferred to development. It's much harder to go straight to development with no industry experience. And once you have any amount of experience it's much, much easier to get a job.
edit: It might be less sexy to get the A+ cert when you're a teenager and work up from there than to go to a good university and get a CS degree, but we've ended up at the same place but without crazy student debt.