How did you convince them to hire you when you had no professional experience? Did you have to take a pay cut to do it?
I had 4+ years of working on a reasonably sized and complicated Java application. In addition, a few years before I used Python for personal projects so I could show some experience.
But it turned out the position was largely for front end development, and not some of the more back-end stuff I'm interested in. I think they liked me (don't know how I compared to other candidates) but I thanked them for their time and told them the position wouldn't be a fit for me.