When I was in similar shoes ~8 years ago, my first jobs without "prior formal work experience" looked like this: First, rewriting ugly perl script to ugly pyth

When I was in similar shoes ~8 years ago, my first jobs without "prior formal work experience" looked like this: First, rewriting ugly perl script to ugly python script for businness of father of one of my friends from high-school. I knew my friend was writing enterprise java in their family bussiness since he was ~14, and he knew I am a decent programmer because we worked on a class project. Second job was creating a webpage for my aunts language-course. (Based on this, I realized, that working for family is more trouble than worth) For my third job, I was a intern/junior windows sysadmin for ~two weeks. My father overheard their IT guy that they would have large workload due to some QE testing and that they wouldn't be able to do the usual windows/workstation maintenance work. So they hired me to help out on his recommendation. Another job was rewriting some legacy app from outdated Borland Delphi to QT/C++. This was through a differend friend of mine heard of his fathers friend problem, and managed link us through. The resulting app was not very good, and I don't think they actually used it. But they did pay me for the effort :-) Last, a friend I knew in my local church had a spare server-grade tower lying around under his desk for some reason. So we decided to connect it to the net through a guy working at local ISP. We started hosting the church pages and some local missionary organization an I was sysadmin there. In the end, everything I did was through friend of a friend, and usually the work I did wasn't really good. But if you look at the bullet list of the stuff and squint a little, you can make a decent looking CV out of that. Windows sysadmin here, Linux admin there, desktop C++ app somewhere else ... I remember when I applied for my first internship at a corporation, the hiring manager was actually impressed by my "prior formal work experience" ... I just smiled and waved [1] [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DvYBZRwwGB4 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DvYBZRwwGB4