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I see a few possibilities that explain your situation --a couple of which you've already mentioned. 1) You've gotten unlucky i.e. each job you've applied to ha

I see a few possibilities that explain your situation --a couple of which you've already mentioned. 1) You've gotten unlucky i.e. each job you've applied to had a 5% acceptance rate, and you've just happened to roll 1-19 out of 20, n times in a row. If this is the case, keep your head down and apply to more places. .95^30 > 20% but .95^90 < 1% 2) You're not applying to the right places. There are literally thousands of startups that would kill to hire a good, remote software engineer for $45K. Take a look at workatastartup.com 3) You're not actually a good programmer. This may sound harsh, but some of us don't have the points of reference to accurately determine how our skillset stacks up against others. 4) You're not easy to get along with or manage. When hiring for junior positions, companies are less likely to put up with jerks than for senior positions. I realize some of this may sound harsh. My intention is to help you. My advice is to apply to startups and offer to work for free for a month. Do this 3 times, and there's almost no chance you will not get an offer if you're good programmer who's easy to get along with.

sgerenser 6y ago
I don’t think it would be legal for a company to allow someone to work for free (or anything less than minimum wage in the state in question). However offering to work at a very low hourly wage on a temporary/probationary basis could work.
bartread 6y ago
There's another one: 5) You might be a good programmer but your skillset in terms of technology stack(s) might not match up with what employers/recruiters are looking for. We interviewed a junior dev a couple of years back who had exclusively RPM and mainframe experience. We're a .NET/C#/SQL Server/TypeScript/React shop, with a bit of R and Python thrown in outside of the core technology team. I couldn't work out whether he couldn't get his head round our pair programming task (which isn't any kind of ridiculous invert a red/black tree type whiteboard problem) because he wasn't a good programmer or because the mental model was so different to what he was used to, and he really seemed to struggle with C#. I didn't give him a job because I thought the risk of having to let him go during probation was too high, which would have sucked given that he'd have been leaving a steady job to join us. Contrast this with another interviewee who was a nurse, and a self-taught programmer, who really did seem to get it. He nailed our assessments, and we made him an offer. He joined us and has worked out really well. It's not that I'm against hiring people with mismatched skills, or from an unusual professional background - far from it - but I need to see some glimmer of a good match during the selection process, particularly if somebody would be leaving stable employment to join us (not that we're unstable, but there's the probation period to successfully navigate) and/or - not really an issue now we're all WFH - they're planning to relocate to work with us.

sgerenser 6y ago

I don’t think it would be legal for a company to allow someone to work for free (or anything less than minimum wage in the state in question). However offering to work at a very low hourly wage on a temporary/probationary basis could work.

bartread 6y ago

There's another one: 5) You might be a good programmer but your skillset in terms of technology stack(s) might not match up with what employers/recruiters are looking for. We interviewed a junior dev a couple of years back who had exclusively RPM and mainframe experience. We're a .NET/C#/SQL Server/TypeScript/React shop, with a bit of R and Python thrown in outside of the core technology team. I couldn't work out whether he couldn't get his head round our pair programming task (which isn't any kind of ridiculous invert a red/black tree type whiteboard problem) because he wasn't a good programmer or because the mental model was so different to what he was used to, and he really seemed to struggle with C#. I didn't give him a job because I thought the risk of having to let him go during probation was too high, which would have sucked given that he'd have been leaving a steady job to join us. Contrast this with another interviewee who was a nurse, and a self-taught programmer, who really did seem to get it. He nailed our assessments, and we made him an offer. He joined us and has worked out really well. It's not that I'm against hiring people with mismatched skills, or from an unusual professional background - far from it - but I need to see some glimmer of a good match during the selection process, particularly if somebody would be leaving stable employment to join us (not that we're unstable, but there's the probation period to successfully navigate) and/or - not really an issue now we're all WFH - they're planning to relocate to work with us.