just curious. how does someone get experience in coding (or anything else) if no one will give them their first job in that field?
IT is a strange field. I actually know of few people that have a "related degree". Mine is in Electrical Engineering. My team is made up of a couple of accountants, a couple of business majors, a handful of people without degrees, but received technical training in the military, and a (of all things) a music major. It's very much a profession that you can discover that you have an aptitude for, and fall into it. That's changing, slowly, but it's still very true.
So how do you break into it? I couldn't find a job as an EE. I liked to play with computers, so I took a (VERY) entry level job in a repair shop. Worked lousy hours for a year, then went into consulting, where I worked even lousier hours for a couple of years. Did every crap job there was, lots of 3am work, lots of last minute oncall, stuff the more senior guys hated.
As a result, I saw everything and learned more in those few years than anyone ever would in a class. 20 years later, here I am. One of the senior guys, foisting crud that I don't want to do off on to the newbies.
So - to break in, get a good computer setup at home. Break it, and fix it, a lot. Volunteer at local places - churches and schools are always looking for help. Join user groups and network. Start at the bottom. The VERY bottom. Work your butt off. Volunteer a lot..."Sure, I can come in at 1:30 to change that around". It's not easy, but that how you can do it.
Very good question. Have you noticed how entry level jobs mean entry level pay, not experience? Wbill probably gave you as good an answer as you're going to get.
A good question, and one of the interesting things about the computer industry. Unlike many jobs which require specialized resources, anybody can write software if they have a computer. Assuming you've got a PC or a Mac and access to the internet (even occasionally) you can download all the tools you need to write software for free. If, for example you want to write code for a Windows environment you can download the free Express versions of Microsoft's development tools and start writing code.
There are vast amounts of free training materials, including courses that range from what a beginner would want to graduate level courses at MIT and Stanford that you can take for free if you have access to the internet.
And one of the side effects of the open software movement is that you can, for free, read, learn from, and use the very software used in major systems. For example, you can easily read and learn from the source code to the Android system used in cell phones and tablets, or the Apache web server source used as the server code for most large websites, or even the code used to build the Linux operating system.
One reason open source software exists is that students and others work on it without getting paid, often to learn and improve their own career potential.
When I used to hire software developers I found some of the best candidates had taught themselves and written significant programs on their own. Including a kid I hired who had dropped out of high school. He came to the interview with a stack of games he had written. We took one look at the quality of the coding and hired him on the spot.
Unlike other skills, a program itself shows how good a programmer you are. So in many cases a prospective employer can tell just from what you have written how good a programmer you are. The open source community provides an even better way to demonstrate how skilled you are as a developer - without having to be an employee, or ever having been hired to do software engineering.
Of course the do it yourself nature of software development is also a reason that programmers here have to compete with other developers from all over the world. Just as a kid here can use his time learning to program without any expense but his time, so can kids in China, India, Russia, and everywhere else where personal computers and the internet are available.