I'm sorry but I can't really say I'd define SA-MP scripters as 'pro scripters', the SA-MP development team, plus other developers who provide includes / plugins, have done an amazing job of providing a simple yet effective API for us to work with, however, you can't really go to far in depth with Pawn, it's more logical then anything else. I have to admit there are some very talented scripters within this community, but I'd say a lot of there skills translate elsewhere, say C++/C# developers, web developers, etc.. For myself, and many Pawn was just the beginning, and other languages soon followed.
Note: Before I get hate I'll add that by in depth I mean comparing to lower level languages where you can access the memory stack and hardware components, or even languages that you're using in order to create complex applications from the ground up. Although there is a lot of talent required to learn Pawn (and I'm not saying otherwise) it doesn't really compare to other programming languages because after all SA-MP utilises Pawn for the Server code, nothing else. You can script a roleplay server within a month to like 3 or 4 months, but you'd be looking at a minimum time span for high end applications written in programming languages.
Talking more about how I landed my first job with development, I started developing SA-MP servers back in late 2008-early 2009, after launching my first gamemode I decided to develop a UCP for it written with HTML, CSS, and PHP. That was my first ever PHP experience, I started freelancing a couple years later after expanding my knowledge as well as playing around with C++, my gaining experience with loads of side projects / freelance projects I could take it all to what would become my employer in 2014, before this I never really looked at it as a possible career.
Because I taught myself, and have always taught myself, I never knew just how good, or bad, I really was, so I was rather anxious about showing my work to people, especially would be employers, although has the years progressed and I received feedback from my friends, family and partner at the time, my confidence grew to the point that I landed the job, and worked as a Junior PHP Developer for a company in Calne, Wiltshire, UK.
Nowadays however, I focus more on enterprise development for commercial websites, including the development of RESTful APIs, e-commerce websites, etc.. I also work on my own project named Bigger World which I'll be launching before the summer.
TL
R: If you don't know just what you can do, I suggest asking the people around you what they think about the work your creating, then you can build somewhat of a portfolio (not so much with Pawn), and hopefully land your first job. Although I'd been developing in PHP and web based languages for almost 8 years I was stilled classed as a Junior developer due to lack of experience within a working environment, but also due to my age, the first line of code I wrote was at age 11, I'm 20 in 4 days.
how much years and what you take for that !
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