[djellybeans]

Am confused by your second paragraph. You refer to "easy times" of 5 years ago, but also say "one of the hottest tech job markets" in the past 18 months. Not sure if this is meant to say that today is as good as it was 5 years ago for jobs.

I just can't see myself improving by learning on my own anymore. As another professional told me, "you're practicing, but with no guidance and nobody to step in and let you know when what you're practicing is the wrong approach." And when a person can spend many hours a week with practice and learning and receive the same result - no job offers - as someone who did little-none, it's entirely reasonable to conclude that learning new things is just a waste of time.

I still code once in a while, just to keep busy. Still haven't gotten a good idea of "exchange rate" for employability with the knowledge I obtained from my personal C and JavaScript projects.

I know that many companies won't train you from the ground up, but there are a couple. So I started looking into WITCH and similar consulting firms with a contract training program.

InfoSys and Deloitte have rejected me for some general SWE positions (not language-specific) but there are other similar places. Don't mind if I have to go to one of these body shops, they seem like my best fit for a software job right now.

[stopComplaining]

I'll say I appreciate you taking the time to get me to understand your situation a bit. To clarify, 5 years ago, it was much easier to get a developer job with less experience and less knowledge. Now there is a much higher bar, even though a year ago, there was a high demand for developers, BUT the bar is now raised. A lot of this is because of the emergence of coding bootcamps and the popularity of software development careers in general.

So again, there is unfortunately much more competition and much more to learn and apply to have a stable career in tech. As for what to practice and learn, I would start off with what you learned from your actual interviews you've had over the past few years. Remember what questions they asked you, and the ones you couldn't answer well. Find out those answers and truly understand why the interviewer even asked you those questions in the first place.

Remember that the job of an interview is to tell that a company is hiring a COMPETENT person who they perceive can do the job. When you can't answer people's questions, they don't perceive you as competent or a good candidate and will find someone else. Your job is to learn how to be competent, to answer common interview questions (basic programming, fizzbuzz, system design, data strcutures and algorithms, etc). You need to be coding more, like literally everyday. There are many coding practice coding sites where they will give you some typical coding problem and you can practice to implement them. Then you can go online to reddit or what not and ask people to review your code. This feedback loop will help you improve and further your chances of not only being a good developer, but ultimately getting a job.