Man you have a very negative can't do attitude.
I said that's how I started. Because that's what you asked. It was automating things that drove me to code. Its was the drive to solve problems. Those solutions just got more complex over years with experience. I've worked on plenty of enterprise and national scale systems, as permie and as a contractor.
The problem these days is everyone only wants the top 10% of developers with 10yrs experience in technology thats only out 2yrs. Also to have a vast array of different technologies under their belt. But no wants to give the on the job training, and internship that produces such experience. Instead we get academically minded people with no aptitude for crating solutions. Its like over fishing.
I'm not overly negative, just realistic.
Every job going, as you said, lists 2-10 years experience working on some commercial system as a requirement.
In order to get that experience I'd pretty much have to quit my day job, because I have zero free time at work to do anything, including automation or anything else. They let about 1/3 of the staff go in recent years, and the workload for those of us who are still here is silly. None of it is development work, and we're absolutely (expressly) not allowed to do that kind of thing as we have a development team. It's come up in the past and we've been forbiddden from developing any kind of app - all such work must be done by the dev team. I'm on 2nd line btw, which is boring me to tears, and the main reason I'd like to get into development, which is interesting.
I notice that graduates aren't required to have any experience, just a degree. One thing I absolutely cannot do is go back to uni. I don't have the funds to self-fund and I have no entitlement for a loan or grant, due to already spending it as a youth (and dropping out like an idiot, because my younger self *was* a complete idiot!).
I can, at best, squeeze in a couple hours a week of doing <something> at home, but my question was what the hell to work on? I'm really crap at having ideas of my own, so basically would be looking to join in with someone else's project.
As for how I've learned to code without coding anything... I haven't. I haven't learned to code. I've just read a few books and played around with random crap here and there, picking up a few bits of mostly useless information along the way
I can tell you what the difference between CDECL and STDCALL is; I know what the CPU registers are for, have poked around with the DOSBOX debugger and IDA to mess with old DOS games (successfully!). But as for writing a program I've never written anything longer than 1000 lines of code. And that's it. And mostly that's because I've never had an idea for something that's worth investing in.
I'd be quite happy to quit the job I have if I could kick-start a career in development, it's just knowing where to begin that's stopping me.
