Am I actually close or am I fooling myself ?
I'm 21 and i dont have a degree and based in algeria I started from literally zero Python this year. Been at it full time since. I don't have anyone around me doing this so I genuinely can't tell if where i am standing .
What I've built:
A few CV projects. Scene classification, got it to 93% with ResNet18 after starting at 81% with a basic CNN. Moth species classifier at 98.4% with transfer learning. Two YOLOv8 detection projects, and on the weld defect one I ran three experiments trying to fix the accuracy before figuring out the real problem was the classes overlapping in how I annotated them, not anything about the model. Both classifiers are deployed as FastAPI endpoints. Here is my github : https://github.com/zanexkun
Tabular stuff, a freight rate prediction take home I did for a company (MAE $106.92, R² 0.83), and I just finished a salary prediction project on the LinkedIn postings dataset. That one was 11 separate tables joined by IDs and honestly it wrecked me for a while. Ended up cleaning it down to 28k rows, ~1260 features with TF-IDF on the titles and descriptions, tuned LightGBM to MAE $17.8k and R² 0.743.
Repo here: https://github.com/zanexkun/job-posting-analyzer
What I know I'm missing: SQL (starting this week), Docker, anything MLOps, transformers, and I've never touched DSA.
Here's my actual problem though. I've barely applied anywhere. Every junior posting I open either wants a degree, or 2 to 3 years experience, or lists a stack where I have maybe half of it. So I keep closing the tab. And freelance ML seems to be either people with 60 reviews or clients offering $50 to "build an AI", nothing in between.
So I want to know:
Is what I have actually junior level or am I overrating it?
If you're outside the US or EU with no degree, is remote work actually possible, or is the whole "remote but only in these countries" thing a wall you can't get past? Should I just be going for contract work instead?
Am I supposed to apply when I don't meet half the requirements or is that just wasting everyone's time?
And if you were me, what's the one thing you'd do next?
I'd rather someone tell me I'm not ready and why than get told good job.