That's a good question but one that I'm not 100% confident that I'm qualified to answer. If you have the flexibility it sounds like Austin is your best bet for

That's a good question but one that I'm not 100% confident that I'm qualified to answer. If you have the flexibility it sounds like Austin is your best bet for a close-but-high-paying jobs. It's a beautiful city as well, I love Austin. Would move there in a second. Remote work is possible but getting those positions is much more plagued with the whole catch-22 of needing previous experience in order to gain experience. Obviously brush up on algorithms and data structures prior to interviews. Whether you think it's BS or not, that's just the best approximation of ability that most companies can manage to come up with. You mentioned that some of your jobs had been paid hourly. My advice is to try to get a reasonable salaried position ($65k+/year) at a tech company and hold that down for ~2 years and ratchet your way up to companies that pay better. If you start that low it's not unreasonable to request 15% raises each year for several years. If you can hold a position at around that range for 1.5-3 years, changing companies should net you a 25% raise. I've had co-workers with fairly scatter-shot resumes. It's a small red flag in interviews but I've never seen someone dropped from an interview because of sporadic work history. I've seen people dropped for lying about their work history.