[jordanb]

Even in America it's difficult to get a job with no CS degree and no experience. Actually it can be tricky to get a job with just a degree and no experience.

I got an English degree and then spent the first several years building Drupal websites on contract. Eventually I built up enough business experience to pursue more sophisticated work.

Contributing to Open Source is great too, in that there's no barrier to entry except your ability to work on a team and write sufficient quality code. Employers will still want to see some traded-code-for-money type experience on your resume though, so it's best to bite the bullet and find some lowball consultancy work.

[jokoon]

I'm pretty curious if there actually are open source projects that are in need of beginners.

> except your ability to work on a team

Whell I'm bad at playing politics. I don't see why teamwork should be important for an open source project.

[kuschku]

> Whell I'm bad at playing politics. I don't see why teamwork should be important for an open source project.

Well, mostly because you often get issues where you, as a team, have to make a decision.

Do we decide to support this specific feature, even if it increases our maintenance cost by a lot?

> I'm pretty curious if there actually are open source projects that are in need of beginners.

There are many projects. A good way to start is by trying to fix some tiny things that annoy you personally, use your changes yourself, and try to get them merged. This is useful as (a) probably others had the same issues, and (b) you have already tested the changes somewhat by that point.

[danmaz74]

It would help not to think about teamwork as "playing politics".