[stevewepay]

Internships in Silicon Valley are most certainly not unpaid. The company I work at pays our interns really well.

It sounds like you need to increase the breadth of your knowledge. No one hires for Lua, and although Node is pretty popular right now, you not being able to get a job indicates that you are probably missing some fundamental knowledge, like algorithms, etc. You probably need to increase the quality of your coding, and increase your preparation for interviews.

You are 1 hr away from SF, which suggests to me you live in Livermore or Tracy. You probably need to study up on things that companies are expecting. Go to sites like leetcode.com and glassdoor and work on your skills, maybe that's where you're lacking.

[coroutines]

I don't think BART goes to Silicon Valley - is there something to connect the two?

Yes, Lua is very much a niche. I tried applying at Cloudflare because they use the Lua module for nginx - that is definitely in my field as I use them both already. I'm haven't heard back but they've had that position (Lua Engineer) posted for months now. I think my resume might be sitting in a stack.

I had hoped my community college AS in Computer Science would account for something, but when you compare it to those who went to uni I'm sure it's greatly devalued. I like to learn on my own as needed, but I can't show that on paper (can I?). I do feel that I know algorithms fairly well - I spent last week learning the Paxos algorithm so I could apply it to database (mirroring?). I have fun doing things like that, it's just not something I can say I'm accredited for by a university.

I hadn't been getting interviews for a few months but I managed to get 4 all last week (when it rains, it hails?). I was nervous for the first interview but because it was for a friends' company I think I still gave a good impression with him vetting me. I had an easier time admitting my limited frontend experience in the subsequent interviews with other companies. I actually think the way I said this made me appear stronger, like I expected to have no trouble picking it up quickly.

Anyway, I've been trying to decide if I should throw myself into a project to show my ability through Github. I'm torn thinking I should be devoting all my time to the job hunt, but many of my friends have done this to get noticed..

I appreciate your feedback, thank you sir <3

[stevewepay]

You said SF, not Silicon Valley.

Degree is not relevant, no one in SV cares. There are plenty of people that don't have college degrees that have very good jobs. All that matters is your skill and competence.

You are in an awkward position. You know Javascript, but you don't know front end. There aren't very many purely backend positions that require only Javascript/Node. They probably expect a complete fullstack knowledge, so not knowing front end will hurt you, and not knowing a more back-end language like Python, Java, etc will also hurt you.

Keep interviewing, but learn a new language, like Python or Java, and try to get some experience in it, through open source projects, freelancing, etc.