ddnomad

Hey, sorry for slow replies, not receiving notifications for replies on Lemmy by design.

You can ping me on Matrix / Discord / Telegram, I’m ddnomad there. We can have a chat :)

Also while I'm at it, there are some things you can do to improve your chances of getting a solid entry level position with a good pay and decent perks:

• Make sure you have a presentable LinkedIn profile with a lot of connections. Having a good baseline of connections usually helps to legitimise yourself as a professional.
• Have a solid resume put together, there are plenty of guides online on how they should look like. You will need multiple resumes for every area of expertise you will be applying in (e.g. resume for a back-end web developer, resume for a Java developer, resume for an Android developer). Keep each resume one page, you can embellish things but do not outright lie about your achievements / expertise.
• Do some open-source projects, those can be simple things, but well presented and put together. This will help to show that you can actually code, know how to use VCS etc. Having GitHub and GitLab profiles is a must.
• Maybe go ask / answer some questions on Stack Exchange. Having good reputation there used to be (and probably still is) a decent plus for you as a candidate.
• Also consider having a decent reputation on Hackerrank, LeetCode and similar platforms. Add those in to your resume.

All of those items above probably sound like a usual business, or maybe do not particularly make sense for you, but having those really helps to get that extra boost of credibility to land a solid first job.

My suggestion would be to start applying for jobs that look interesting and specifically mention that they are entry level positions.

Also, unless you need to have an official job for some reason, you can always try to make a living freelancing on a platform like Upwork. It does have its downsides (0 job security, requires you to deal with clients directly, finding fitting contracts sucks etc) it will also help you to learn and evolve for your future job interviews, and it will allow you to try different things without having to be actually hired into a specific position long term.

I’ve started my professional career a long time ago by doing small tasks like writing automatic installers for things like Splunk around the time Ansible was not popular yet. It was fun, helped me to earn a living and forced me to learn both soft and hard skills at a far greater pace than I would ever do (because of the a pressure of delivering for my clients).

The enshittification of the internet shall continue.

We will fight and we will lose, as depressing as it sounds. The vast majority of people just don’t and won’t care.