Hiring someone without experience is a "losing" investment for a company.

First, you assign them tasks that as an experience engineer, you can do in minutes. But instead you take time to explain/debug/review the task. This takes a whole lot more time than just doing it yourself.

Second, once the person is experienced enough to be useful, they leave for a better paying job. No one ever goes, "since you guys help me gain experience, I'll take crap salary for a year or two."

So hiring an inexperience programmer is a form of good will to society. Not every company can do this so this limits the number of jobs that is really available. And you are competing with a lot of people drawn to the good pay of a software engineering.

There used to be backdoors. Get a job as QA or IT and then switch to programming. But now it's (SDET) Software Engineer in Test and DevOps which now requires experience as well.

If I had to do it over again (assuming my finances can handle it and I'm already a "coder"), I'll try to be "tech founder".

I'll dive into ycombinator. I'll learn the ins and out of startup company. (Get a co-founder!).

Read books not just about programming. Read`Inspired`by Marty Cagan. A book on how to become a better Product Manager.

I know is not easy BUT there is nothing that stops a tech person from making software and gaining experience. There are so many tools and tutorials. AWS is dirt cheap with its free tier or use Heroku with Ruby on Rails. Heroku/Rails is so "easy" that this is what a typical startup would use.

After a while, you'll have in your resume.

Software Engineer (I wouldn't put CTO because that's lame.)

• I built frontend and backend of an application that helps people do X. I used the latest and greatest technology.

Truthfully, this route will give a person a better experience than getting an entry level job. You'll have a wholistic view on building an application and what company needs.

Good luck.