Discussion on: if experience < 1: job = False

Not an employer, but I do have some advice as someone who had been in a similar situation and got insanely lucky (twice).

First, get a job. Any job. It doesn't have to be IT work, it doesn't even have to be computer related, it just has to be something you can put on your resumé as work experience. There are two reasons it's important to have a job even if it's not in your desired field:

1. Barring the types of jobs a high-schooler might get and some really rare cases, just about nobody is going to even consider hiring you if you don't have any work experience at all.
2. It's a lot easier to job hunt when you have a stable income.

Second, look for other opportunities to fill out your resumé. Maybe there's some charity you can do IT work for on a volunteer basis near where you live. Perhaps there's some big FOSS project you could contribute to. The idea here is to find things you can do without needing to be paid for them (and thus with a much lower requirement for existing experience) which prospective employers will likely consider as some form of experience, even if it's not regular work experience.

Third, network (socially) as much as possible. It's admittedly hard to do under the current circumstances, but a large part of what gets you hired is who you know, not what you know. Building up an online presence that's related to your desired field helps a lot here. Additionally, if you actively work on the second point, it will often naturally help with this one.

Fourth, look for other ways to improve your value as a prospective employee. Easy examples include learning a new language (Mandarin Chinese is probably the most valuable right now, but Hindi, Spanish, French, and Arabic are also pretty high up there) or getting additional certifications related to your preferred field (most cloud providers provide some type of certification related to their services, these look very good on a resumé when applying for an IT position).

In my particular case, those second and third points are what landed me my current job at Netdata Inc. I worked on the FOSS Netdata project for a couple of years (at one point I was actually one of the top four contributors by number of commits) and developed a rather good working relationship with both the other developers and the community, and that in turn turned into a job offer when Netdata Inc originally started up.