This is primo advice. I'm sort of in OP's position for I can't find work and don't have experience because I wasn't smart enough to find problems to solve. I'v

This is primo advice. I'm sort of in OP's position for I can't find work and don't have experience because I wasn't smart enough to find problems to solve. I've had Python's doc and interpreter for years, but it's not until I had a problem and I wanted to solve (mobile credit transfer for subscribers on different networks) that I started to actually do Python. I haven't solved the problem because I hit a roadblock back then (a technicality I missed that forbade a certain tier of SIM cards to do what I assumed be possible), but I've learned more during that tiny silly project than I've learned in years. You make an excellent point about using a hammer vs. being a stone mason. It's not enough to have discrete skills, one also needs to have the glue that binds those skills to make a coherent whole. i.e: programming, abstracting, managing time, breaking down a problem to manageable bits, tracking an issue, testing for different cases, saving knowledge and things you learn, etc. This glue is very important and I still don't have enough of it. For hardware, it's slightly different but there's a lot of overlap. I started a small project to build an interface to allow some cars with head-units with a certain feature (like the ones the Tesla has) to work with something else. And just putting it down in writing helps, even if it's just because it displays the date I wrote it and reminds me I should get back to it. Everyone who asks me about this kind of stuff, I just tell them to find stuff to do and build their toolbox early on so they don't make the same mistake I've made.