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.