Please find me these jobs because I'm having a hard time deciding what to eat tomorrow.
Will I go with the usual rationed slice of wonderbread or go gourmet with a can of tuna?
Will I go with the usual rationed slice of wonderbread or go gourmet with a can of tuna?
There's a terrifying rule-of-thumb called the $20,000 rule (it gets adjusted for inflation periodically; it used to be $10,000) that says that your job hunts will take 1 month per $20,000 in salary. That seems to be accurate for non-techs. In technology, it's about 1 month per $50,000-- if you're already in the game. It's still inconvenient, but not the nightmare it'd be if that number were 1 month per $20,000.
Getting your first dev job-- without connections or a CS degree-- is hard as hell. What seems to work for a lot of people is to take a job that involves programming and use that as a launchpad. If you know how to write Excel macros, automate all the office shit work. Then learn VBA. Then learn Python because VBA sucks. Now learn some front-end stuff (HTML, CSS, Javascript). This'll take over a year, but good things don't happen overnight. Soon, you'll be a fully-fledged programmer. If you work your ass off, you'll pass the people who started coasting at 24 and be running circles around them in 5 years.
Got an entry level job at a bank in ATM support in Pittsburgh and spent the time in-between calls writing excel macros and command line programs to make the job even simpler while also working on my own rails projects at night. This led to a junior dev job at a php shop after a year and a half, which after another year and a half and launching a startup of my own, I finally made it to New York City as the second engineering hire at a startup.