The cool thing is, he could back into a programming job. Intern, QA, semi-technical gopher, job got through a friend, whatever. He seems to have some chops. If he's there for M months, and moves himself into a programming job for N months, he gets to say on his resume:

    JobCo
    M to N
    Role: Programmer, etc, etc

It's an option among options.

I may very well have enough experience for a steady coding job, as I have had an entry level coding job before. But, there were never a lot of coding jobs in my area, and even less so since the recession came in.