The argument could be made that you had a lot of valuable experience though. If I were looking to hire a new programmer, and had someone with experience as a reporter, I’d be thinking about all the places that experience would be useful. It would suggest to me that you’re a good writer, communicator, you can deal with the general public, and function reasonably well in a high-paced, short-deadline, office environment. A decent programmer who is an excellent communicator is hard to find and can be incredibly valuable, and if I couldn’t get you up to speed as a programmer, you could still make an great technical documentation specialist, marketer, etc.

If I was looking at someone with the same amount of programming training who had previously flipped burgers or been the proverbial “ditch digger” I’m not going to see many parallels for those skills.