It took me a while to get a real programming job out of school as well. It eventually happened. Whatever you do, keep coding. Get stuff out there. Pick an o

It took me a while to get a real programming job out of school as well. It eventually happened. Whatever you do, keep coding. Get stuff out there. Pick an open source project if you like that kind of thing, otherwise follow a pet project, get it on the web. Hell, you may not even need a job if it takes off. But in the short term, there's a serious risk of fading away from code, which is why you really honestly might be better off working at a coffee shop instead of doing a boring corporate job. At least you'll be hungry to write code. A creative writing teacher advised a few students against taking a PR job for the same reason (I'm not sure that was necessarily the best advice, just one school of thought). In the past, it was much harder to program, because the resources were harder to come by. Now, you really can't say "I never had the opportunity to work with that programming language", because pretty much everything is there for the taking.