After reading your list of professional habits--writing tests, contributing to open source, reading lots of technical literature--I think you're head and should

After reading your list of professional habits--writing tests, contributing to open source, reading lots of technical literature--I think you're head and shoulders above a lot of employed programmers. I've been the technical interviewer before, and if you told me all that, I'd recommend hiring you, assuming you have a reasonable background. It sounds like you have a real appreciation for craftsmanship, which far too many programmers lack. I don't know what your code's like, but I'm going to take a guess that it's above average. In my experience, people who think about the stuff you mentioned tend to write above-average code. Let me tell you what I always looked for in technical interviews. I wasn't trying to determine whether a candidate was an utter genius who would offer novel and clever solutions to hard problems. That's too high a bar; most companies can't expect to consistently attract those types of candidates. Instead, I wanted to see if candidates would write maintainable code. In other words, my #1 concern was whether the candidate was going to create a big mess for the rest of us to clean up. Will they pollute my functions with a bunch of special-case if statements because they had to add a new feature that doesn't fit into the current architecture? Or will they recognize the situation for what it is and start a conversation about changing the architecture? Will they take a class named Car and use it to represent a House, just because it exposes the method .door? Or will they recognize the importance of logical naming, create a new House class, and break out the .door method into a mixin? Stuff like that. Not every interviewer makes that the #1 concern. We all have our pet peeves. But my point is, there's usually some very mundane, practical thing they're looking for. Not super-ninja-rockstar coder status. If you can determine what that practical concern is, you can then try to convince the interviewer why you're exactly what they need.