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"Work for me for a year w/o salary and I'll help you get a job." /jk

There are better routes for new programmers IMHO.

Start at http://rubyonrails.org/ and build a website you find useful.

Learn SharePoint or BizTalk, those are boring but in very high demand now.

Even more boring, sing up for a cheap 6 month Cobol course in India.

I agree that learning how to get a website up and running is an easier way to go (and hence more likely to succeed and be morale-boosting). Even if web development isn't considered as "hard-core" as working on compiled applications in C++, there are still a decent amount of jobs available.

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