Starting over and the Catch-22 of experience
**Sorry this is so long. It was meant to be much shorter, but I started typing and just couldn't stop.**

<hr />

I posted a <a href="http://stackoverflow.com/questions/220896/should-i-find-a-new-career">question</a> on this site back in October about how my job was causing me health problems.  

Fortunately, things got better when I returned and I was able to handle the job pretty well for the last four months. I've started to notice, however, that I've gotten very complacent about my goals of training myself to get out of the job.

I got my start late (I was in Grade 10 - I was 15 or so, much later than most of my close college friends) and had high school classes which used VB6 and (Turbo) Pascal. I discovered I liked it, and seemed to do well in the class without really trying in a year when I was practically failing everything else due to personal issues. I decided to try it out in college (university not being an option due to grades - snowball effect from the bad year. I'm Canadian, so there's a solid distinction between College and University for me).  

College was very vocational. I literally had classes in C++ and COBOL - language syntax classes, really, with the hope that some theory and good foundations would magically form.  

So, now I'm doing maintenance on a system which essentially boils down to multi-million LOC worth scripts in an MPE (HP) offshoot JCL (a proprietary unix shell to emulate deprecated hardware) and COBOL. I essentially consider this job career suicide, and I desperately want to escape.  

The problem I see is that when I get home from work, I'm mentally wiped and just want to zone out. Although I love programming, I just can't bring myself to do it when I get home (plus, I have a serious problem of finding interesting projects to code). I end up reading blogs like Coding Horror and lurking the programming subreddit all night.  

What I need to know is, how can I start over with programming. I've caught myself thinking in a very COBOL mindset, and I need to get rid of it. Is it entirely reckless for me to quit my job and spend a month hammering the books and the compiler, trying to find my way? I hesitate to do this for financial reasons - I'm very close to paying off my student debts, but my finances for the moment are technically credit-based and I don't want to fall back further in debt.

For those of you on this site who are in charge of hiring, what would you think of an unsolicited email from someone with shockingly little real experience who wants to take on a junior programmer role, essentially using you as training (a post-grad co-op sort of thing). I know the best way to get ahead is to find great mentors and learn from them, and that's just what I want to do. I just don't know how I can convince someone to take a chance on me.

I want to dedicate an hour each night to bringing myself up to speed, but I need direction. How do I start over to get into the career I want, rather than the death spiral I'm in now?

Starting over and the Catch-22 of experience
===

**Sorry this is so long. It was meant to be much shorter, but I started typing and just couldn't stop.**

<hr />

I posted a <a href="http://stackoverflow.com/questions/220896/should-i-find-a-new-career">question</a> on this site back in October about how my job was causing me health problems.  

Fortunately, things got better when I returned and I was able to handle the job pretty well for the last four months. I've started to notice, however, that I've gotten very complacent about my goals of training myself to get out of the job.

I got my start late (I was in Grade 10 - I was 15 or so, much later than most of my close college friends) and had high school classes which used VB6 and (Turbo) Pascal. I discovered I liked it, and seemed to do well in the class without really trying in a year when I was practically failing everything else due to personal issues. I decided to try it out in college (university not being an option due to grades - snowball effect from the bad year. I'm Canadian, so there's a solid distinction between College and University for me).  

College was very vocational. I literally had classes in C++ and COBOL - language syntax classes, really, with the hope that some theory and good foundations would magically form.  

So, now I'm doing maintenance on a system which essentially boils down to multi-million LOC worth scripts in an MPE (HP) offshoot JCL (a proprietary unix shell to emulate deprecated hardware) and COBOL. I essentially consider this job career suicide, and I desperately want to escape.  

The problem I see is that when I get home from work, I'm mentally wiped and just want to zone out. Although I love programming, I just can't bring myself to do it when I get home (plus, I have a serious problem of finding interesting projects to code). I end up reading blogs like Coding Horror and lurking the programming subreddit all night.  

What I need to know is, how can I start over with programming. I've caught myself thinking in a very COBOL mindset, and I need to get rid of it. Is it entirely reckless for me to quit my job and spend a month hammering the books and the compiler, trying to find my way? I hesitate to do this for financial reasons - I'm very close to paying off my student debts, but my finances for the moment are technically credit-based and I don't want to fall back further in debt.

For those of you on this site who are in charge of hiring, what would you think of an unsolicited email from someone with shockingly little real experience who wants to take on a junior programmer role, essentially using you as training (a post-grad co-op sort of thing). I know the best way to get ahead is to find great mentors and learn from them, and that's just what I want to do. I just don't know how I can convince someone to take a chance on me.

I want to dedicate an hour each night to bringing myself up to speed, but I need direction. How do I start over to get into the career I want, rather than the death spiral I'm in now?
