You were disabled and realize it is not getting better, and no one seems to be able to fix the issue. You’re stuck laying down most of the day, you have enough mobility to function at home, but anything outside of home leaves you in bad shape beyond your control where you are not professionally functional. What do you do to earn a living and survive?
This is not a hypothetical for me.
The problem I run into is not knowing what it takes professionally. I’ve learned a lot but I’m just a hobbyist and have no clue how to get past that phase. I struggle with complexity, but I know hardware fairly well at the registers/stack/ALU level and can make a gagillion IF statements do anything wrong for a radar proximity triggered cat toy in Arduino. I just don’t know where to go with that and without any networking potential it seems a little hopeless.
Make projects for a portfolio, throw them on a public GitHub repo and shop that around to employers.
Make sure to have neat, commented and mostly polished code that covers a decent breadth of topics. Like authentication or low level hardware handling.
Also try your hand at submitting contributions (and getting them accepted) to larger open source projects and point to those as well
NGL, the employment scene for junior devs…isn’t the best rn, expect to have to put in hundreds of applications with few if any call backs for a while. BUT companies are always hiring for good hardware devs junior or not, so you might get lucky
Alongside what cm0002 said, I’ve found that finding recruiters manually and putting yourself out there has significantly increased my callback rate. They really know how to pitch you a lot of the time, and I wish I knew this as a junior.
Basically, look for postings by TekSystems, Jobot and other recruiting companies and put in applications to their systems (make sure to only apply for a few so as to not seem like a “spray and pray” job seeker). Hopefully, you will get a callback and / or emails about positions. Eventually, you will get a call from a recruiter from one of the recruiting firms and they will ask you a bunch of questions about your tech stack, experience, what your preferences are for positions, etc and they will basically file you away for later. When they find a fit, they reach out.
It’s great to have like 5 - 10 of these recruiters (from different companies) since you know you’ll be getting calls even in dry periods like this one.
Also, I really cannot emphasize this enough - LEARN DATA STRUCTURES AND ALGORITHMS. It sucks to get a call from a company, have them set up a technical interview and then fail it and lose out on the opportunity.
This Udemy course is a great place to start if you know JS and it regularly goes on sale for $15 like every two weeks (not sponsored, it’s just genuinely a fantastic course and it’s worth every penny at any price, but for $15 it’s a steal if you know JS): https://www.udemy.com/share/101WNk3@wU2BBFJCNjPisNOAOq7G4IopJulzdWP6mkQD_4_vkOPjMfs8zL8f8CUVsevYRvCjBg==/
You can also do temp work, English language teaching, proofreading, data entry.