Don't be afraid to ask for money. Money often means respect and with respect comes self-confidence. If you are free, it means that you consider yourself so bad at programming that people will not even consider you. You'll learn nothing. You'll always be the "free guys" that everyone will laugh at. The one that gets to debug stupid things or have to work on impossible projects. If you don't need that money, give it to a charity but please, ask for money.

To add to this, remember people want your services. They want to feel warm and fuzzy when they finally pay you and their product is working exactly how they imagined (or how they require). If they never pay you, they will take a long time to be satisfied.

Yeah, people usually want to pay for services they think are valuable. Right now, I'm getting tutoring in one of my classes. My tutor was nice enough to offer to do it for free, but I definitely wanted to pay him. He was doing something for me that I considered valuable, and even though I'm a college student who does not have a whole lot of money, I wanted to compensate him for the tutoring.

You should look for small web development firms that might offer internships. Right now I'm doing an unpaid internship. I don't have a car and the place is 10 miles away, so everyday I take the bus for 5 miles, bike the other 5 miles, then do the same thing coming home. It's a ton of work for an unpaid job. The work is stressful. But I'm learning the best practices of coding, how to scale applications accordingly, and my work actually benefits the company. This has been such an ideal opportunity, because before coding was just a hobby and so I hadn't been challenged. But now that I've found a good community of programmers and designers, I learn new lessons everyday and build up confidence in my skills.

A spoonful of medicine to help overcome self-doubt here => http://ub0.cc/0l/12 and here => http://ub0.cc/4J/1j

Amazing. Instantly reminded me of Dean Kamen's robotic arm.

http://blog.wired.com/gadgets/2008/05/dean-kamens-rob.html

Don't work for free.

Try finding a smaller software company (like under 10 people, perhaps a startup) and working for them in any capacity they need people. Running ad campaigns, managing forums, tech support, whatever. Once you have a job with the company, you can then start helping out with programming to whatever degree you are able.

I have been an ER/Critical Care nurse for the past 15 years. I went to nursing school right out of high school, because it was "a good steady job and you can help people." I administered narcotics to a patient before I could drink legally.

I had always wanted to be an engineer, but I believed people that told me I wasn't smart enough.

I remember writing QBasic when I was 9 years old. I begged my father for a modem for our computer for two full years. And, finally, when I was 14, he got me a 2400 baud Hayes smartmodem. After weeks of mucking about with the configuration and connection settings, I was at long last able to connect to my first BBS. I thought I was in heaven.

I mucked around a bit on that BBS for an hour or so, only to have my father try and make a phone call while the modem was connected. That's when it all came crashing down. He was furious and forbade me from ever using the modem again. I still don't know why it upset him so much. I think it had something to do with the movie War Games that had come out a few years earlier. I think Dad was scared I was going to hack into NORAD or something.

So, for years, I gave up on computers. I'd day-dream about being an engineer, only to have people around me tell me I'd regret it, that I would hate it, that I was too much of a "people person" and that my life would be a complete waste if I spent it in front of a computer screen.

But, when I was 30, I finally decided to get back in touch with my inner geek. I went back to school two classes a semester for 5 years. My work schedule as a nurse constantly changed from nights, to days, to evenings, to weekends, which forced me to go to school online. I kept plugging away at it and after 5 long years, I finished the engineering program at the University of Maryland this past May. I still have some General Ed. credits to take, but I finally finished the classes I'd need for their CMIS/software engineering degree.

This June I started to pick up web development and Django. For several months, I thought I really sucked at, and I thought it all might have been a huge mistake, because I could never get things to work right with Django. It wasn't until 3 months later, when I went to DjangoCon, that I learned that the release of Django that I had been working with for 3 months had been broken in the lead-up to the 1.0 release.

Eight weeks ago, I cut down to part-time at work, so I could focus on boot-strapping startups. If all goes well, I plan to release my first web app in a couple of weeks. My plan is to keep bootstrapping startup after startup until something takes off.

It's been a long, hard road, and I still have a long, long way to go and a lot to learn. I've thought many times that I wasn't smart enough, or too old. Things never really go according to plan. I get discouraged and frustrated a bunch. But, the only thing that can really stop me from chasing my dreams is my deciding to give them up for dead.

Amazing story. And I thought I started late.

I hope you succeed.

This is a study in persistence! Good luck to you, Jonathan.

Definite kudos to you. Thank you for posting. suerte.

Gracias. Y a ti tambien.

WOW, you are selling yourself WAY short.

You are more than qualified for an entry level developer job FOR PAY.

Its a programmers market out there, if you can communicate half decently and have a java cert from sun, you will be able to find a job no problem. Just delete that webpage and keep sending resumes out.

I like your idea, I cant help you per se but if it helps your selfdoubt then I think you will do fine, based on your courage to try such an unconventional path. And whatever you do, keep learning on your own time ... that never gets old!

Thanks for your support. I think the continual learning point is particularly pertinent.

Yeah, working in close physical proximity to quality people is hard to beat, but you can learn a lot even working remotely on a pre-existing project. So go scratch an open source itch.

Also there ain't no such thing as a free lunch^Wprogrammer.

Hmm, I'll be 27 in a few months.. And I thought I was stil young!

Geez, now I think I'm old too..

oops. sorry if my anxiety has proven infectious... The panic started to set in when I realised I was rounding up to 30 and not rounding down to 20... Thanks to everyone for their comments.

Whenever I start to feel old, I get a good laugh by expressing my age in an alternate radix :)

I will hire you for free.

Ill give you experience to work in the real world and work with you.

A few months down the road after the projects we have worked on together start making money, you will then become a paid programmer.

If this is a serious inquiry, get in contact with me. We can work something out. I only work in asp.net and C# and will accept vb.net so you have to want to learn...

I am a one man team with the help of one other guy working on a few websites ideas I have.

Self doubt is healthy.

Getting depressed and/or discouraged because of self doubt is not.

And your situation is by no means unique. It is VERY hard to catch your first break as a professional programmer.

That is just how the industry is, the best way to get around that, is to do what you're doing.

You don't HAVE to work for free but if there's no other way it's OK.

Work, produce code, make it open source, bring a sample of of your code to your next interview.

Maybe you should try working on some open source projects and or your own projects while working in a shared space with other programmers, allowing you to bounce ideas off them.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coworking

if you want to work for free...why not find something simple and do a startup around that? Then release more and more apps as you learn more skills

I am willing to hire any and all free coders.

It'll be worth every penny.

I got my first paid programming job at 25. I've never found age to be a problem.