"Businesses, including startups and businesses outside of the software-dev industry, are largely reluctant to hire trainees."

I don't know what this is based on. I'm at a fortune 100 company and my last employer was also a fortune 100 company. I hired a lot of people fresh out of college with no experience for both companies.

In fact, I've found that it's much easier to find good people coming straight out of school than it is to attract good people that likely already have good jobs. And, I've hired a number of people that have no college or majored in something like music rather than comp sci.

Bottom line, if you can show that you know how to code, you'll get a job. Something as simple as writing your own blog software which you can then talk about intelligently.

I disagree with localhost3000 too, all people can't be programmers/tech people. That's not a solution.