Speaking as a mostly recovered ex-PhD, the factors which affect hireablility are largely orthogonal to your educational credentials, particularly if you are att

Speaking as a mostly recovered ex-PhD, the factors which affect hireablility are largely orthogonal to your educational credentials, particularly if you are attempting to get hired for a job which is not gated against said credentials (i.e. most jobs in industry, regardless of what the HR documentation claims). Also, most things that people will tell you re: build portfolio, contribute to open source, etc. — it's largely a waste of your time, at least with regard to getting a paycheck with large numbers in your hands as expeditiously as possible. Please, contribute to open source, I need that stuff. But don't do it because you think you have to in order to land job interviews. If your skill and discipline as a "get stuff done every day" developer is roughly no better than your average junior web developer, that's approximately a $90k/yr position for which the market has deep unmet demand. The set of people who are hiring decently competent developers is approximately "everyone with an existing software development team." A much better approach is: * Make a list of companies you would be interested in working for * Figure out who at these companies is currently managing a dev team * Contact those people, convince them you can write compiling code * Discuss doing work for them in exchange for large amounts of currency Beyond that, understand that you're going to have a learning curve to get your "getting stuff done every day" and domain-specific development skills up to spec. Right now, you're probably about as productive as a junior developer with six months of industry experience. This sucks, but you're already aware of it. The typical grad student is shit about e.g. coding as part of a team, using commit-driven development, issue tracking, that sort of routine process things that keep work happening regularly - even if they have a great grasp of their chosen languages(s) and tool(s), which many do not. If you play your cards right, the learning curve from there to "competent if inexperienced senior developer" is about 6 to 18 months for a typical engineering grad student who has some experience mentoring undergrads and helping them through issues like "this wouldn't have happened if you'd just use version control" and "would you please write comments that tell me what the heck you're trying to do with this block of code." At worst, the outlook is about the same as a run-of-the-mill junior developer, who is still likely taking home an embarrassingly large paycheck while they improve their skills. Your safety net is "CRUD monkey." That already pays well enough to make the median dual-income American family rather jealous. From there, what do you want your career to be? Application development? Graphics? Data science? Database engineering? Pick something, find teams that are working on that, talk to them about the work they're doing. Bonus points if you already have some understanding about their subject area based on reading you did as a grad student, or projects you worked on, but they likely already hire people with less domain experience than that.