> My problem is that I believed employment would be within reach after teaching myself for a year. I was doing paid work within a year of learning PHP. It wasn

> My problem is that I believed employment would be within reach after teaching myself for a year. I was doing paid work within a year of learning PHP. It wasn't good work, but it was work. The problem is that people want to go from 'learning programming' to 'building Facebook from scratch' - that's why the OP is having problems, when you compare your work to Wordpress, of course your work is going to come up short when you're new. An analogy to carpentry: nobody expects a novice carpenter to make an entire set of kitchen cabinets from scratch and have them all fit and function correctly, or build a timber-framed barn. But you certainly would expect a novice to be able to build you a crate or knock together a stool, shim a squeaky table leg, or make you a cutting board. The equivalent paid work I was doing was along those lines - tweak this so that the tax calculation is updated, change the pricing structure to add a 10% surcharge if the order is over X pounds, those kinds of things.