I'm 5 years out of a unrecognised university where I did Software Engineering. First job was VB.NET, one job was Python, Linux and Web development. I feel cast as a web developer.

I'd love a role doing C but no one is interested in juniors if the applicant hasn't got 3 years of C development experience already. I've done some C and a drop of open source coding but I'll never have the confidence to convince someone I know absolutely what I'm doing. Do I just spend more and more time letting life pass me by as I sit in my room on a friday night writing a C problem "for the sake of learning more C"

Basically I'm just not sure I want to continue my career if it's going to involve nothing but high level, machine abstracted, business logic and as interested as I am in low level development and enjoy reading books by Taunembaum I struggle to see how I can make the jump and I just feel life would be easier if I got a job in a cafe in Amsterdam rolling spliffs for customers.

My ideal job, being a paid member of the Fedora development team seems so far away, without anyone to pay me to learn the skills to get there, and the only way would be to literally spend weeks and weeks of my life contributing code without recognition for free and without any guarentees at the end. Not that I've contributed anything at all so far.

Are there any career paths that are logically set out so that jumping between roles is "correctly" incremental and where hard work and learning does eventually lead to the kind of places I might want to go? [ and also getting paid at the same time? ]