"Find a friend who runs small software company, bribe him a bit, so you can then easily write that you worked in his company a year."

Why would you want to do this? If you have a friend with software company work for him for a year! Any sw company worth its existence always needs more programmers. You can work at low pay (or even for no pay if you are okw ith it) for a couple of months while you are learning and then get into a fulltime position. With friends you can make such unorthodox arrangements. If you have a friend who owns a software company, use that to learn!

Sorry, but in one hour or less I'll know someone who'd done that was a poser vs. someone who has the real experience. E.g. what happens when I give him my "trivial" coding tests (for one class of jobs in the '90s that was write functions to reverse a linked list (pointers) and recursively compute the factorial of a number, plus find errors in a small block of code). Then depending on the position I'd ask him to do some design and at some point I'd ask for a window into his thinking about it (depending on how he does this sort of think, anywhere from thinking aloud during the process to discussing it after working alone is fine).

Getting your foot in the door only works if you can then perform, and while mr_b has learned a number of fantastically valuable things, he hasn't learned a number of critical software things. Some people can pull it off if their manager(s) aren't too attentive and/or bright and they're working alone, but he'd be far better off with people who are good and who would mentor him in his first few jobs.

Plus he'd get much better recommendations for his next job if they're from people with clues.