I have a Cambridge Technicals Level 3 Diploma in IT. I have been writing software since 2020. I have spent years building things, maintaining things, contributing to other people's projects, publishing packages and putting actual software on actual hardware. I have a public GitHub, a personal website and a fairly ridiculous collection of projects considering I have never actually been employed as a software developer.

And I still cannot get a fucking job.

Not a senior job. Not some ridiculous six-figure systems architect position where I turn up on Monday and declare that everyone else has been doing software wrong. I am trying to get my first professional software role.

I have applied for at least 22 suitable software and IT jobs over the last few months. I have had zero responses.

That is the part that gets me. It is not even a case of getting through interviews and being rejected at the final hurdle. In a lot of cases, I am not getting far enough for a human being to decide that I am unsuitable. The application just disappears into the machine.

And yes, I know the obvious response: "You need experience."

That is precisely the fucking problem.

Entry-level, sure it is

There is a very obvious circular argument in early-career hiring.

You need experience to get the job. You need the job to get experience.

Entry-level jobs frequently want previous experience. Junior jobs want evidence that you have already done the work. Graduate jobs want degrees, placements or internships. Employers say they want people who can hit the ground running, which makes some sense when you have an application pile hundreds of people deep, but it creates a rather absurd situation for anyone trying to enter the industry from outside the standard pipeline.

At some point, "entry-level" stops meaning "a job for someone starting their career" and starts meaning "a job for someone who has already managed to start their career somewhere else."

I am not uniquely struggling with this. It is a wider problem for people trying to enter industries where employers treat previous employment as a prerequisite for being employable. There are people who have done years of self-directed work, projects, freelancing, open source, college work, community work or other practical work who still get reduced to one line on a form saying that they have no "professional experience".

That phrase matters because I do not actually have no experience.

I have no professional employment experience.

Those are not the same thing.

I have experience. I just don't have professional employment.

Take Wolfram.

I wanted to work with the AT Protocol from C, and there wasn't an option. So I built one.

It is a C/C++ SDK and foundation for working with AT Protocol. It deals with protocol structures, generated clients, repositories, streaming, identity resolution, OAuth, DPoP, validation, moderation, persistence, XRPC and the awkward bits that appear when you are trying to make all of that work across multiple environments. It has releases. It has tests. It has CI. It has documentation. It is software that other software can actually use.

Then there is Cobalt, a native Bluesky client for the Wii U. It is not a mock-up. It is not a screenshot of a hypothetical application. It runs on an actual Wii U, with a native TV and GamePad interface, authentication, persistent encrypted sessions, timelines, threads, images, alt text, searches, feeds, lists, muting and blocking. I built an OAuth flow around Wolfram because the client needed one.

Indigo is a separate native client for the 3DS. It is not simply "Cobalt but smaller"; it has its own architecture and constraints, host tests, sanitizers, warnings-as-errors and testing against a real PDS and real hardware limitations.

Platinum is a Classic Mac OS 9 Bluesky client, with a C89 client and a Node bridge. It is not released because I have not done the hardware verification I would want before calling it finished. That distinction matters to me.

I have also contributed to other people's projects. I have worked in codebases I did not write. I have had to understand somebody else's structure, work within somebody else's assumptions and make changes without having the luxury of simply rewriting everything to suit myself.

I built Malachite, an importer for bringing Last.fm and Spotify history into AT Protocol, and it has handled over 100,000 records. I built reusable packages around the work too, including @ewanc26/tid, a small package for AT Protocol TIDs which is used by my own projects and by MultiScrobbler.

This is not me saying I am secretly a senior software engineer and the industry is too stupid to recognise me.

There are absolutely things I have not experienced professionally. I have not spent years in a commercial engineering team. I have not had a manager assigning me tickets every morning. I have not spent months in somebody else's code review culture. I have not had to maintain a production service while eight other departments are simultaneously changing requirements underneath me.

I am aware of the gap.

I am not pretending the gap does not exist.

The problem is that the missing piece is exactly the piece I am trying to obtain.

Somebody needs to give me the first professional opportunity.

I build this stuff because I want to help people

There is another thing that makes this particularly strange.

I do not generally build software because I am trying to turn every line of code into money.

I build things because I want them to exist.

Sometimes that means making something useful that somebody else has not bothered to make. Sometimes it means taking a ridiculous piece of hardware and getting it onto the internet because I thought it would be funny and technically interesting. Sometimes it means writing an abstraction because three different projects need the same thing. Sometimes it means fixing something because it annoyed me.

I have support links. I have places where people can support the work. But that is what they are: support links. They are not a subscription wall and they are not "pay us £9.99 a month to keep using the software".

I have seen enough of the modern software industry to be deeply suspicious of the idea that every useful thing should immediately become a revenue opportunity.

That is how you end up with software that gets progressively worse because someone has discovered that removing a useful feature can be monetised.

I don't want to build things that way.

Inkwell is a good example. It costs roughly £3 as a one-off purchase through the official app stores. There is no recurring subscription. I made something, people can buy it if they want it, and then I leave them alone.

The point of all of this is not that I am nobly refusing to make money.

It is that my motivations for building software are not particularly well aligned with the assumptions embedded in a lot of commercial hiring systems. I have spent years doing real development without having a company sitting over me saying "this counts as work because we gave you a payslip".

Apparently that distinction is enormous.

I didn't stop just because nobody was paying me

This is probably the part that makes the whole thing feel most absurd from my side.

On 17 April 2026, I had emergency brain surgery to completely replace a ventriculoperitoneal shunt that had been in my head for seventeen years.

That meant a new shunt valve, which felt fucking weird after having the old one for most of my life, stitches in my head and another surgical wound on my stomach from the distal catheter. My sleep schedule was completely fucked afterwards and recovery was not exactly a relaxing little break.

I was still working on my software projects.

Not because I had a manager expecting a deliverable. Not because I was being paid. Not because my mortgage depended on getting a release out on Tuesday.

Because I wanted to.

The Git history shows it.

On 21 April I was working on Jasper's import system, including daily chunking, resumable imports, persistent state, progress tracking and file-hash verification. On 22 and 23 April I was working on AT Protocol document and Markdown conversion, facet handling and package dependencies. On 27 April I was dealing with Spark story and video importing, including blob uploads, record creation, deduplication and OAuth scopes. On 28 April there was more work across Malachite, Jasper and the web frontends, including extracting shared UI into @ewanc26/landing-ui and fixing browser and deployment issues.

Then 1 May came around.

Beltane.

I started Opal, a migration and conversion tool for moving microblogging data from services including Twitter, Mastodon, Threads and Nostr into Bluesky. It grew into a real system with publishing, rate limiting, browser OAuth, an import wizard, parser rewrites and threading for long posts. I was also dealing with the wonderfully glamorous reality of getting the thing built and deployed properly: build ordering, browser-safe libraries, Vercel serverless timeouts and the usual collection of things that only appear once software has to actually run.

Some of that work is deployed through Vercel, including projects under domains such as jasper.croft.click, malachite.croft.click and opal.croft.click.

Again, none of that makes me professionally experienced.

But it does make the phrase "has no experience" rather misleading.

The missing part is much narrower than that.

Nobody has employed me to do it yet.

The qualification isn't the problem. The gate is.

This is what makes the piece of paper so frustrating.

I spent years in college. I now have an IT qualification. I have a public body of software work behind it. I have written low-level C. I have written TypeScript, Rust and Python. I have built services. I have worked with APIs and identity systems. I have dealt with OAuth, deployment, persistence, networking, packaging, testing and cross-platform constraints.

And yet the piece of paper often seems to function less as evidence of what I can do and more as another field to tick before somebody decides whether to look at anything else.

That is backwards.

The same thing happens with "professional experience", where the definition quietly becomes "having already been hired by somebody else".

That is not measuring technical ability. It is measuring whether another employer has already taken the risk.

There is a difference.

A hiring manager can quite reasonably want evidence that I can work in a team. They can want code review experience. They can ask whether I can take direction, communicate clearly, work to somebody else's requirements or maintain software I did not design myself.

Those are legitimate questions.

But there needs to be some route by which a person gets to demonstrate those things for the first time.

Otherwise the gate just stays closed.

The commercial software world feels fucking geriatric

I do not mean that the people in it are literally old.

I mean the assumptions can feel ancient.

There is this persistent model of employability where the important things are the institution you came through, the company that previously employed you, the job title you held, the number of years you have spent doing that title and whether your previous employer happens to use the technologies currently listed on the advert.

Meanwhile, the modern internet makes it entirely possible for one person to build and publish software used by people they have never met.

I can put source code online. I can publish a package. I can deploy a service. I can contribute to another project. I can build something for a platform that effectively stopped receiving first-party support years ago. I can publish the whole history publicly so somebody can inspect what I actually did.

And yet the hiring system can still look at all of that and ask whether I have "commercial experience".

There are obviously reasons employers use that filter. They have limited time. They receive too many applications. Nobody wants to manually investigate every Git repository ever created.

But at some point, the convenience of the filter becomes the problem.

It is easier to ask whether I worked for a recognised company than to inspect whether I can actually build software.

It is easier to count years than to look at what those years contained.

It is easier to reject someone for lacking a particular credential than to decide whether their actual work demonstrates equivalent ability.

So I end up with the same answer again and again: I need experience, except the experience that counts is specifically the experience that comes from having already been employed. That leaves me stuck in exactly the same place where I started.

Most of the evidence is sitting in public

That is why I find this particularly difficult to square with the idea that I am somehow an unknown quantity.

My work is not hidden.

My GitHub profile exists. My website exists. The repositories exist. The commits exist. The release history exists. The package publications exist. The deployment history exists. The documentation exists.

People involved with the ecosystem I work in have seen the work. I have multiple current and former Bluesky employees following me on the platform, including Bryan Newbold, one of the people behind the original AT Protocol specification.

That does not mean they have endorsed me, and it certainly does not turn my GitHub account into a job reference.

It does, however, make the idea that I am completely detached from the technical community I work in rather harder to take seriously.

And this is not really just about me.

There are plenty of people whose actual abilities are obscured by the way hiring systems reduce a person to a chronology: school, college, university, employer, employer, employer.

That works reasonably well if your life happened to follow the expected route.

It works a lot less well if you learned independently, built things outside employment, had health problems, changed direction, could not afford unpaid internships, did not go to university, came through further education instead of the conventional academic pipeline, or simply failed to get that first opportunity at the right time.

The system then tells you to get experience, while making the lack of experience the reason you cannot get it.

"Just get any job" is not actually an answer

There is also the rather exhausting assumption that if the career you actually want is difficult to enter, you can simply go and do some other job temporarily.

I can't fucking do manual labour. I can't stack shelves.

I am semi-paralysed and have virtually no dexterity in my right hand. That is not a minor inconvenience when somebody's solution to unemployment is "just get any job". A huge amount of the supposedly obvious fallback work available to someone without professional experience is physical work: retail, warehouse work, hospitality, stock handling, cleaning, delivery, whatever happens to be hiring locally. Those jobs are not interchangeable with sitting at a computer and writing software.

And that matters to hiring because it removes one of the safety nets people casually assume exists.

If I cannot get a software job, I cannot simply go and spend six months doing physically demanding work and then come back to software with some money and a shiny new line on my CV. I have to find work that I can actually physically do. My disability constrains the pool of jobs available to me before an employer has even started assessing whether I am qualified.

That means the usual employment advice creates a particularly stupid loop. I am being told that I need professional experience to get into software, while one of the standard ways of "getting any experience" is through work that I may not physically be able to do. At the same time, the field I am actually capable of working in is the field where I am being told I need experience before I can enter it.

Then there is the chronic illness side of it. Employment is not just a question of whether you technically can perform a task. It is whether you can sustain the hours, the commute, the physical demands and the predictability that a particular job expects. Those things vary enormously between people.

Software engineering happens to be work where my limitations are much less of a barrier. I can spend hours debugging a C program. I can design an API, write a parser, investigate a deployment failure or maintain a package. I can do serious technical work from a computer.

That should make software a fairly obvious direction for me.

Instead, I am still being filtered by the fact that I have not previously been employed to do the thing I am capable of doing.

And this is where disability becomes directly relevant to the hiring problem rather than merely being another fact about my life. A non-disabled person who cannot get their first software job may at least have more freedom to take an unrelated job temporarily, build up savings, gain workplace experience and keep applying. That route is not equally available to me. My options are constrained by what my body can actually do.

I am not asking an employer to ignore that. I am looking for work where it is not a fundamental barrier to doing the job.

There is a rather important difference between "I need reasonable accommodations to do this job" and "I cannot do this job". The fact that I cannot stack shelves does not mean I cannot write software. The fact that I have limited dexterity in one hand does not stop me designing systems. The fact that my health affects my energy and predictability does not erase years of technical ability.

If anything, that makes the insistence on professional experience even more frustrating. The work I am actually equipped to do is the work I am trying to enter, while some of the supposedly obvious alternatives are not realistic options in the first place.

And even leaving disability aside, taking an unrelated job does not solve the original problem. If I spend a year doing something completely unrelated to software, I still have no software employment experience at the end of it. I have simply spent a year being employed at something else.

That might be perfectly reasonable advice for someone who needs immediate income and can physically do the job. It is not a magic solution to the experience paradox.

I am not trying to skip the beginning

I am not asking to be treated as if I have already spent ten years working in industry.

I want the beginning.

I want the first professional code review where somebody tells me that the way I approached something is wrong and I have to fix it. I want to work in a team. I want somebody else's requirements to constrain the architecture. I want to maintain a codebase where I did not write the original design. I want to learn how other engineers work and, ideally, become useful to them.

Those things are exactly why I am applying for junior and entry-level work rather than pretending that a pile of GitHub repositories makes me senior.

But there is a point where "you need more experience" stops being useful advice and starts being a closed loop. I have spent years building software on my own, I already have an IT qualification, I have contributed to other people's projects, I deploy things, I publish packages and I work on real systems. I can keep producing more evidence, but there comes a point where the only additional experience that would satisfy the filter is employment itself.

That is the part I cannot manufacture in isolation.

And no, I am not going to university just so I can spend the next several years slogging through another qualification and maybe, eventually, get a software job by the time I am twenty-six or something.

A degree can be the right choice for plenty of people. Formal education has value. I am not claiming otherwise.

But "go to university" cannot be the automatic answer to "why can't this person get their first software job?" when the person in question is already writing substantial software.

I have already spent years learning this stuff. I already have an IT qualification. I already have a substantial body of practical work. I do not want another five-year holding pattern where I acquire more credentials purely so somebody might finally decide that I am allowed to start my career.

At some point, the answer has to be that I should be allowed to start working.

What the fuck am I supposed to do with the piece of paper?

That is what keeps coming back to me.

What the fuck am I supposed to do with the piece of paper if the piece of paper cannot even get me through the first gate?

I know a qualification is not a magic key. I know employers have legitimate reasons for filtering applications. I know that open-source work is not automatically equivalent to commercial experience. I know there are things I still need to learn.

None of that changes the basic problem.

I have spent years building software because I wanted to. I have done it through college, through difficult periods of my life, through serious health problems, and through the complete absence of anybody paying me to do it. I have built libraries and clients and importers and services. I have contributed to projects I did not start. I have shipped things. I have broken things and fixed them. I have dealt with tests and build systems and deployment failures and strange hardware and stupid bugs and all the other tedious shit that comes with actually making software.

The only "job" I have ever had is occasional help for my mum in her dog breeding business. There is no software company secretly buried somewhere in my CV that I have forgotten to mention.

The reason I do not have professional software experience is not that I spent years refusing to work.

It is that I have been trying to get the opportunity to work professionally and nobody has given it to me yet.

That is the Sisyphean part.

Every application becomes another attempt to push the same fucking boulder uphill. Every rejection, when there is one, tells you that you were not quite right. Every non-response tells you even less. You alter the CV, adjust the wording, apply to something else, submit another application, and the same wall is still there.

I am not asking the hiring system to pretend I have already done the job.

I am asking it to recognise that someone can be capable of doing a job before another employer has decided to pay them for it.

Those are supposed to be different questions.

Right now, they often seem to be the same one.

And that leaves me sitting here with a qualification, years of software development behind me, a public record of the work, and a pile of applications that have gone nowhere, wondering the same thing I started with:

What the fuck am I supposed to do with the piece of paper?