Well, I have an opposite problem. I work in a different industry, but completely adore programming and solving variety of problems that involve data processing or connecting various systems together.
You work in a particular field, is it possible to take your knowledge of the "daily grind" to one of the development houses making tools you use? Is there some software that would be particularly useful that doesn't yet exist? Can you write plug-ins for existing tools (and sell them, a friend did that for audio processing software)?
You have domain experience, you don't have to forfeit it if you make the switch to programming.
Appreciate the support though.
I'm also particularly curious about the "no formal education in CS" bit - for various complicated reasons I haven't (yet?) completed basic HSC, and am wondering how to break into the industry in general. I'm not 100% sure where I want to start, but "simple Python scripts" sounds rather interesting. I assume there was a bit of being in the right place at the right time, but besides that, how did you get yourself noticed?
I got my job by getting noticed through my GitHub blog, to which I dedicated only about a half hour every other night for a month or so.
One night I got an article at the top spot of HN's front page. I had a great job offer within hours from a dev at a company which I've always respected.
Content on my blog was self taught, 99% of what I do at work is self taught. Formal CS education is still useful, but the ratio of cost/reward is terrible.
Very interesting, working for free is (for hilarious reasons) something I could probably pull off right now. I'm curious what kind of work this was - was it more generic coding or industry-specific? I've wanted to play around with graphics for some time, but "get a GPU and mess around with it" has repeatedly not worked out for me, so I've no industry experience.