How did you break through? I've been trying to land a dev job for years but I keep getting passed on due to my heavy IT infra experience and they seem to think I'm overqualified, but in the wrong area. "Hm, why would you want an entry level dev job? It says here you have years of director level experience." I don't want to be in management but they seem to think I'm a flight risk or something.
Similar background, what worked for me was taking a somewhat unglamorous job that was as close to dev as I could find, in an industry that has a hard time attracting talent. In my case, I got a job as an admin/developer for a hospital's ServiceNow instance. I spent as much time as possible on the dev side of the job, then moved to dev full time for a year, then transfered internally to a developer role in the engineering department.
The hospital bit was key for me both in getting started, and maybe more importantly for the transfer from admin that scripted to developer in engineering. They have a huge demand for people who can program, but the pay is "goodish" at best, and the culture is...slow and crufty. Lots of room for growth, and they are more willing to accept non traditional backgrounds. Best of luck.
I pivoted from tech consulting (logging user issues, basically) to dev by taking a contract programmer role. It was in a non-profit org that didn't really understand software, and I built them a prototype in my own time which got me in the door. Then I worked up to engineering manager, a move I would not recommend (back to logging user issues).
Look for backend style work. Your infra experience is an asset, look towards cloud infra and all the programming stuff around that. Dev work ain't no panacea, there's a lot of CRUD work, and even when you get to do cool stuff like build data warehouses it's still just fancy CRUD work.
Dumb down your resume. Mine's currently missing an entire decade, leaving out entire details for the things that are there, etc.
If you keep running into an "employment experience" issue but you actually do know what you are doing, a dev I know used to be a maths teacher, created an LLC with a dumb name and created a consulting website. Then after a couple of years of no leads, simply listed themselves as an employee at said LLC on their resume. They are also one of the best devs I've ever had the pleasure of working with.
I had a somewhat similar experience moving from science to data science/engineering. A PhD meant I fit your description of "overqualified, but in the wrong area". Those days were hard and hugely demoralising. Until my résumé landed on the desk of someone who'd made the same career change, I was SOL.
I had to start again from the bottom. I found a 2 person startup consultancy that needed someone who knew computers but also could program a bit. I had been coding since I was a kid but knew nothing about it besides how to make little stuff. You need to imagine you are just starting your career again out of school (with no degree). I worked at that startup for over 3 years, then moved to a slightly bigger company that was even more focused on software and on good practices. Then jumped again a few years later, and finally made it to working at Microsoft where I have been for 2+ years. So it was a nearly 7 year journey before I was doing software at the place I wanted to end up.
Learn Ops. All operations in decent orgs these days _is_ software engineering, and a large swath of those who do it lack deep infra experience and rely a lot on trial and error in more complicated configurations.
