Or that you've learned to be cuthroat enough to know how to game the system. I know a lot of people who copied their way though university. :-(

a week later, I had gotten 3 job leads, even though I wasn't actually looking for work

It's frustratingly easy to find work when you don't want it. It's often much harder to find it when you do. I call it "The World Hates Me" theorem. ;-)

My advice to anyone looking for a career change -- don't oversell yourself. If you promise, and can't deliver, you're screwed.

*shrug* Honest people always tell the truth, and nobody wants liars to prosper. Either way, reminding people to tell the truth so they don't get caught just helps the jerks. Let the lying twits find out the hard way! I hate people who say they can do a job when they can't, especially when they poach jobs at honest people's expense. They deserve to be fired (or fired upon!). (Who me, bitter? Yup, still bitter. Yup, still cleaning up messes in production by overzealous people who couldn't pull off what they promised. :-( )

My advice to the OP is simpler: "programming" doesn't have to be hard. "Programming" can be exactly hard as you want it to be. In some sense, "programming" is just another word for "configuration". I am, in a very fragile (and unconventional) sense of the word, "programming" this message into the PerlMonks system right now; that is, I'm setting it up to be displayed when I come back to it, and to let other people view it. It's so simple that no one will pay me to do it; but in general, if you know how to to configure something that someone else is unable or unwilling to do, you can usually get paid to do it. Heck, people will pay you to program their VCRs for them!

Programming can be as simple as taking a big, long command that you type in and creating a short cut for it; or as hard as building a control system for a space shuttle.

Most of the time, programming just involves automating something that you already know how to do. Ocasionally, it involves thinking out the steps to do something non-obvious (and then, typically, publishing the results so that no one *else* wastes their time thinking as hard as you did); in very rare cases, it involves extremely hard research into the world's great unsolved problems.

Depending on the job you want, you can get paid to re-install someone's Window's drivers on a dozen computers across a network (perhaps by writing a quick Perl script to help), or you can work on control systems that make automated subway trains run. It's a big continuum; you don't have to know it all right away.

Good Luck!

--
Ytrew