Now that that's out of the way: You need to focus. You've described your abilities and that's fine, but you lack focus. Your qualifications are great, but your presentation is all over the place. You need a single one page resume that focuses on one aspect of your knowledge and experience, and lightly mentions the others. Make multiple resumes, each with a focus on one thing. Use the resume that's best for the job. I recently saw somebody who must have had 20 different resumes to match the jobs they were applying for. It worked.

Also, you might consider looking into the Web Hosting business. If your temperament is as you describe, and you like talking on the phone or live chat, most web hosts will overlook any technical gaps. Those can be taught. In fact that can lend to your focus! Focus on the fact that you know things that can't be taught: Customer Service, talking down angry customers, talented writing, friendly and always willing to find a solution under dire circumstances. Those are GOLD. Once those are on the table, the rest is negotiable. I'll email you a link to at least one that is hiring full remote entry level.

Additionally, you need to step up your confidence level. Let an employer know that your family is important to you and that you're dedicated to working hard so that you can support them- and leave it at that. They don't deserve the other details, and they aren't relevant.

I hope this helps.

For most people, different resumes for different roles (web dev, mobile dev, etc.) make sense, but if you have 20 resumes for different roles you're probably applying for jobs that you are highly unqualified for - nobody has expertise in so many areas where they need 20 resumes. 2-3 for most is probably plenty.

The key difference in most resume customizations is how you define yourself to the reader. I use summaries to tell the reader who I WANT them to think you are. If the job is "web developer", I want to tell the reader right away that you are a web developer right in the summary. You've defined yourself as what they are looking for, checked their first (and most important box), and they will now keep reading.

If that summary said "embedded developer", they may stop reading. If there was no summary and your first job title is "data analyst", they may stop reading.

I'd like to second this methodology. It is a very effective approach. I've worked across multiple specialties within technology and I always tailor my CV to the job I am applying for. I highlight the most relevant experience and skills required and remove (or summarize) experience that is not relevant to the position.

Matching your CV to the job can be as simple as updating it to use the same keywords that you see on the job advert. It sounds trivial but many recruiters will filter job applications with a keyword search. If they dont see the exact keywords they are expecting, your CV will be thrown away.

Good luck!

Let's suppose you were a machine learning engineer for 2 years, a web developer for another 2 and a product owner for 3 years.

I presume that some experiences would almost make it seem that you're not dedicated to the role you're applying for if you leave them in. So you have to leave them out.

How do you deal with that?

If the gap is fairly large (say over six months), be prepared to discuss what you were up to during that time. Hopefully it's something interesting, but it doesn't have to be something related to your career path.

To your actual question: I see no issue with bouncing between roles. If anything it shows flexibility and a diverse interest. You'll fit right in at small to medium places where folks frequently wear many hats. Plat it as a strength.

Personally, over the past few years I've been a developer, a product owner and now a product manager.

But if I were to apply for a new developer role, would I leave out my current product manager role from my CV? Absolutely not!

It's generally considered a bad idea to have gaps in your CV. And actually having worked various roles can actually be to your advantage. There are transferable skills you would have gained as a product owner that you can apply to a developer role. In fact, very few developers will have the skills required to be a product owner, so employers should look favourably upon your skillset.

Case in point: my experience as a developer has put me at quite an advantage in the product management field. Due to my technical knowledge/experience, I can understand how systems work better than most other product managers, and I'm better placed to know what the development team needs of me.

So I would say, don't leave gaps in your CV, include all the really good experience you have, even if it is varied, and use that to your advantage to show how these experiences will help you in the role you're applying for.

- you were actively looking, but were unable to find a job during that whole time - for them it's social proof that you suck

- you're actually picky and "high maintenance"

Gee... I would hope I don't suck. Most places I apply to ghost me when they find out I'm deaf! They don't want to "deal with accommodations".

It is something you should be prepared to explain at an interview, but I don't think it would cause any problem.

You're right that it doesn't really count as experience. Employers won't necessarily mind a one year gap on your CV, but if you do find it difficult to get to the interview stage, it could help to add a short note to your CV explaining the gap. But I'd hope that wouldn't be necessary.

I write resumes all the time for people who have bounced between different types of roles. In those cases, having a couple resumes makes sense. For the description you have in your comment, if this person is applying for ML roles, we provide more detail and emphasize that role. If they were applying for a product owner job, you emphasize that aspect and those skills.

As I mentioned in another comment, you can also use a summary to define yourself. If you're applying for product owner jobs, you define yourself as a product owner with skills in web dev and ML. If you're applying for a web dev job, you define yourself as a web dev with skills in ML and product.

The only places that don't have these judgmental frames are a subset of startups.

Just my experience, YMMV.

>As I mentioned in another comment, you can also use a summary to define yourself. If you're applying for product owner jobs, you define yourself as a product owner with skills in web dev and ML. If you're applying for a web dev job, you define yourself as a web dev with skills in ML and product.

This is great advice. Make sure you still include all the roles in your CV to illustrate a consistent period of employment. Just highlight the aspects of each role that are most relevant to the position you are applying for. If a previous role is barely relevant, just summarize the experience in a couple of sentences.

The point is to make most of your CV relevant to the role. Dont make the employer hunt through your CV for relevant experience. Most people will make a snap judgement within a minute or two of scanning your CV. Make it easy for them.

I also think a summary is very important. Sum up your best points with some dot points at the top of your CV.

If you know Linux well enough to configure Wordpress, how about tech support for a hosting company? Try making some short email approaches to old-school hosting companies (I used to run one). They might be flexible enough to take a chance depending on how confident your approach is.

They have lots of customers bashing away at Linux, making mistakes, often without the patience to see their own problems through. Their business problem is that these customers need hand-holding but only pay a fixed, monthly fee. (the hope is eventually they stop asking and keep paying for years).

The combination you can offer those companies could be basic Linux knowledge (no need for advanced cloud stuff) and whatever flexibility you can offer them - especially if they're not in your time zone.

The larger ones might be a tall order, all listing locations by default (Gandi, Leaseweb, GoDaddy, Hetzner etc.), but maybe someone here will have an inside track.

I agree with other posters - never mention difficult circumstances in a job application, particularly a cold application. Just talk about how keen you are to solve their difficult customers' problems, how well you work in a team, and keep the initial approach brief.

Good luck! And please update us if you can.

Once you get that first job, just soak up as much as you can. And keep studying on your offtime. Learning AWS is very valuable.

Back in the day instruction/certification for things like this would run in the thousands/be in person would be a non-starter in a situation like this. We're in a different world now where instruction like this has an infinitesimally small cost compared to the value it can bring.

The question is whether or not doing this now is the best use of his time, and I would argue yes, absolutely, the earlier the better. Just the education alone is powerful, but having an actual AWS Certified Developer cert will open doors.

Note how this path wouldn't be possible if all these hosting companies went out of business thanks to competition from big cloud providers. Then think about what this means for the future we (in IT) create for ourselves and for newly minted IT professionals.

I commonly see people on HN deny that there are any major shifts in overall system complexity happening right now. "Everything always seems complex if it wasn't created when you started in IT". Ok. If the complexity of newer tech stacks is an illusion, why don't you hire the OP to manage your containerized micro-services via Kubernetes? He's starting his career in IT right now, so he should have no preconceptions you allude to.

I just wanted to say to keep your head up, remain persistent, keep learning and stay curious. It can be done and hard work (usually) pays off.

Stay flexible - even if a job doesn’t seem super relevant to your core interests you never know when it’ll come in handy later. For example, my experience in fast food gave me great insights into POS systems (which I ended up building) and my time working at a luxury boutique hotel taught me how to provide excellent customer service even in difficult situations (one time I didn’t call a customer’s room at the request wake up call time and he missed his flight- eek).

Best of luck to you!

Ps- just sent you an email

To this day, my partner is my closest and most trusted friend, even though we haven’t worked together in 2 years.

Dunno what else to share, feel free to ask!

Instructions on how to bootstrap a software portfolio:

Pick a language (sounds like you chose JS which would be my pick as well), buy a copy of cracking the coding interview, make a leetcode.com account, make a codepen.io account, and get to work.

If you’re smart and dedicated you can teach yourself this stuff and these are the best tools to help you in my opinion.

Spend your time solving problems on leetcode and then utilizing these techniques in codepen portfolio pieces.

In my opinion with serious dedication you can have a junior swe worthy resume and portfolio put together within a year.

[edit] since the question inevitably comes up with JS in my opinion you should not spend any time focusing on front end frameworks. Learn Vanilla JS, HTML and CSS, you will blow your interviewers away if you can solve their problems without a framework and it is overhead you don’t need as a beginner.

In my opinion this is a pretty bad advice and I see a lot of entry level programmers struggling for a long time because of this. A basic algorithms and data struture book (something like Introduction to Algorithms by Cormen, and Data Structures by Mark A Weiss) is a must before jumping into leetcode/cracking the coding interview. One needs to have a foundation before diving straight to interview problems.

If you're applying to somewhere small it's less important to demonstrate you're already a good developer, and more important to demonstrate that you're interested in learning what the company can teach you, you're a decent human being who the company will want to be part of the team, and that you're not going to give up after a few weeks. Tools like leetcode won't teach you those things.

To be honest I don't know how without any prior experience or graduating from a top uni you would get an interview at a FAANG in the first place.

Sure, algorithmic thinking is valuable, but linear programming and complexity theory has no bearing on 99% of all web development jobs that require JavaScript and in this context I think this fetishisation of Informatics Olympiad style puzzles is the wrong advice for someone trying to enter the field. You do not need an in-depth understanding of computer science to get started with programming or survive in the field, especially not in an enterprise environment. I met Java developers who I suspected didn't even know what class is to be honest. But people like this can thrive at big corps.

In the first year of university I had Prolog, EBNF and partial derivatives, theoretical foundations of computing, linear algebra and stochastics but how much of that stuff do you really need when programming a UI? The complexity lies elsewhere, understanding business requirements, talking to people, avoiding technical debt by talking PMs out of weird requirements, structuring your application in a modular fashion, staying up to date with the eco-system etc.

I agree that focusing on HTML, CSS and vanilla Javascript before jumping into React, Vue or whatever is a good idea tho. For frontend development job, the best thing in my view would be a solid understanding of the web fundamentals + experience in one of the big three frameworks. Outside of that, I think there are probably a lot of jobs where being able to just work with Wordpress templates is good enough tbh.

Anyways, when I'm hiring "juniors" or I'm looking for something that tells me the person a) actually likes programming b) has some demonstrated talent (problem solving, compositional thinking, whatever you want to call it) and is able and willing to learn and c) is able to work together with people (which is the biggest problem with self-taught solo-devs, not having worked in teams before) d) is not an asshole

This is how I got my first job in the industry. I built software and websites to solve problems that I personally found useful. Though the solutions were (in retrospect) rather unpolished, they were good enough that a team saw some potential and were generous enough to take a chance on me.

It’s irritating as fck that these FANG companies are so brain dead, that this is all that they can focus on.

Learning JS would be my pick too. In fact, there are coding schools/bootcamps that also make this their #1 pick.

Learn JS, HTML, CSS. Play on codepen, make things. Once you've got that down then you're ready to tackle cracking the coding interview and get that job.

It's hard for us vets too you know. With ever increasing requirements, frameworks, tools to learn. We also practice this make stuff in order to stay relevant. Coding is a life-time of learning (new frameworks, new languages, new ways of doing things) and is very rewarding. Graphic Design is as well in the right brain category of work. Web needs both. Right brained people, left brained people, new coders to grow teams, old coders to mentor and lead those teams.

Either way, either path you choose - Backend or Frontend, there's never been a better time to learn this from online resources in the comfort of your PJs.

- figure out for whom you are a good fit based on your experience - for whom and what are you a good solution?

- create a professional, to the point resume, highlighting your unique value prop for these people, and your experience that they will care about

- write a really good cover letter about it, and say in it "I realize you may not have considered remote, but I think I am a very good fit and would be a benefit to your company, would you consider discussing this possibility"

- go through stack overflow careers making a big list of everyone you'd be a fit for, regardless of whether they think they will hire remote. The whole world is your oyster.

- send out applications TWENTY TIMES A DAY. <--- THIS IS WHAT MATTERS

- follow up: after a few days, after a week, after two weeks, then drop them if you haven't heard.

That's really all there is to it, it's a sales grind. You get up and you do your TWENTY calls every damned day and you will find work.

Some folks might think these are high numbers, but here's the rub: when the answer come in, you want options. There's a sales saying: the best negotiating tool is a fat pipeline. If you get a hundred applications out in a week, and they take a few days to a week to get around to them, the following week you have a bunch to look into. But don't snooze, keep firing out another hundred that week until you close! That way, you get not just a job, but one that is actually good for you. You can do it, it's a sellers market in tech! So grind the numbers. Good luck! :-)

Focus on achieving some initial level of “proof” that you can perform in an entry-level software (or help desk) role. If you can’t ever visit the office, you’re competing against a worldwide set of candidates, but you can still bring something that distinguishes you. That you work in US time zone and make it easy for someone to employ you are surprisingly strong benefits to an employer who has so far only employed US people.

If you want to break into programming, go after that rather than help desk or sanding body panels. If your next best alternative is moving far away, renting a place there, and doing auto body work for minimum wage, you can probably come out after-everything even by staying put and doing a mix of online learning and even terribly paying gigs on fiverr/ upwork/ etc.

Once you get to the point where you have the basics down and are the equivalent of a boot camp grad, you have more options for full-time employment. Even at bootcamp grad level, most companies are losing money on you for a year, so before that point, it’s a really tough sell.

Maybe consider Lambda School as well. They’ve got a repayment program that scales with income, so if you don’t manage to make the turn and break into coding somehow, you’re pretty much off the hook after some time. (Obviously read their terms, don’t rely on my summary.)

I applaud your focus on your family; I’d keep that out of the interview process. If I’m hiring an entry-level remote employee, I don’t want to worry that they’re taking care of a family member most of the time and trying to fit my work into the gaps. If that’s what is happening invisibly behind the scenes, great, but it’s irrelevant or negative to the interview.

“I have strong ties here and am only open to remote work” is all I need to know as an interviewer.

Best of luck; once you hit the “I am at a boot camp grad level or better”, we have remote-only positions available (as do many companies). Provided you’re in a state where we have the ability to hire, I’d be very happy to have you apply.

Best of luck on your journey!

This is really important. Don't think about employers "taking a chance" on you or having their hearts warmed by your story. (I mean, it might actually work when the OP is hitting the top of HN but in general...) They want non-risky choices.

Since a sibling comment already covered the other thing I was going to say, I'm going to focus on this part, as it's 100% correct.

Moving away to take a minimum wage job is most likely a trap. You will not be making enough money to both support yourself and do anything meaningful for your family, and you're going to be physically tired after working 8+ hours a day. It's definitely not a good long term solution, and it seems pretty terrible in the short term, too. Even taking a minimum wage job locally seems like a better solution to me, if at all possible (I did see you mentioned you live in the "poorest region of the United States.")

I think I would start by focusing on what the minimum amount of money you need to make to support your family, then seeing how you can make that much remotely. That can be whatever, because it's just a stepping stone allowing you to move on to finding a remote job that not only lets you take care of your family, but also lets you get ahead.

You've got a hard road ahead of you, OP, but it's one I've been down myself. For the longest time, I never had more than a few hundred bucks to my name. My net worth was deeply negative due to student loans until very recently. Even though I'm in a much better place than that now, it's still been 3 steps forward, 2 steps back for me. At the minimum, you will need a lot of perseverance, a little luck, a dash of chutzpah, and a willingness to keep improving yourself.

I learned javascript + basic web development stuff like everyone else, because that's where the most beginner resources are. But the job offers I actually got were due to my learning Java (with some Java enterprise edition mixed in) and having some book knowledge about it. There are vast swaths of industries that will help you enter the middle class, and then some, by working on their old Java or C# applications. A ton of career advice out there is targeted towards the 1% who are shooting for Silicon Valley. We don't need that.

Also try to get proficient at Leetcode and come off as intelligent. A lot of your competition is computer science majors.

Lastly, and this might involve some conscious or unconscious deception: Make it sound like you intend to move to wherever the job location is, post-COVID. This works better if you are already in that state. Once you land the first job, maybe they'll offer the remote option eventually; otherwise keep applying to a couple jobs per day; this job search will be slightly easier and you will actually have the leverage to ask for a remote option when it comes up.

The second job I landed in tech was a FAANG. I completely agree that you shouldn't target FAANG type jobs for your first job. Not because of the other applicants. I could care less about the other applicants.

Where I work and do tech interviews (AWS), it's not about the other applicants. We don't look for the best person out of a pool of applicants. There's one question and one question only: Is this person better than half of the people currently doing this job.

If you're better than half of the people currently doing the job, you're hired. If not, you're not. And the issue is that it's really hard to have the breadth of knowledge necessary to meet that bar without previous experience.

I work in premium support for security. To be better than half the people already here you have to know the following really well: Linux or Windows; Networking; DNS; Encryption; SSL/TLS; Network/OS Troubleshooting; Web App Vulnerabilities; DDoS attacks and mitigation; and more. It'd be very hard for anyone who hasn't done this professionally to be exposed to enough tech to have that sort of depth.

1) not be an asshole; look at their leadership principles and figure out how you resonate with them; answer honestly if you never did that

2) beat the technical questions. they are a proxy for skills and experiences

I used and recommend Leetcode for #2... for entry level I don't think you should need the paid tier.

If there were a Leetcode for not being an asshole, I would recommend the paid tier.

100% agree with everything you said, although depending on the Org 'entry level' can mean 'just graduated from college'. In Premium Support, at least, they're always tinkering with their recruiting models.

I was hired as entry level with 1 year experience at a startup. These days, that entry level job is reserved for recent college graduates or people getting out of the military. They wouldn't slot me as entry level today for recruiting/interviewing purposes.

Not sure how AWS handles entry level software engineering positions.

Another alternative is to join up as a sales person at an enterprise company. Look for companies that are growing at a rapid clip; they will often hire people whose sole qualification is that they have a body temperature of 98.6 F. Sales includes helping people do POCs and such, which is part of the sales process for complex enterprise products. Once you start there, you can work your way into Software Development if you wish and can find helpful colleagues. The advantage of Sales is that they require a regional presence, and there is a chance your location will work out to your advantage (typically enterprise companies have sales forces organised by vertical and/or region, including regions of the United States).

The last option is to join an enterprise company as a Customer Support person. Once again, you can develop basic skills and become a helpful person by trying your hand at scripting to help perform minor tasks support people do when troubleshooting customer issues. I see plenty of bright Customer Service people move into Software Engineering proper after they have demonstrated intelligence and a willingness to help the customer by going a little above and beyond the immediate problem.

Most of my advice is centered on Enterprise companies because that's where a large workforce comprising people with a variety of technical skills can be found. Consumer web or mobile type companies are a bit too narrow in the types of people they hire, and frankly, the variety of interesting coding and problem solving opportunities at such companies pales in comparison with Enterprise shops.

Obviously you didn't lay out all the reasons why you couldn't move, and I don't expect you to, but I'd also REALLY strongly consider the implications of what a steady, well paying job can do for a family. Relocation opens up a world of opportunities for you, which opens up support and services for your family (paid and otherwise) that just aren't available in the poorest places. You don't have to be away from the people you care for if you can bring them along. I understand that leaving a support structure, even a flawed one, may not be possible, but think about that REALLY hard before you rule it out, especially if you're young. Some initial pain may transform lives. There's a reason so may people move away from the places they grow up. Plus, if you move for your first job, you always have the option of moving back after a year or two if it doesn't work out once you've established yourself in the career, which would make finding remote work much easier.

I've done development and testing, and I would characterize QA as "same job, less pay". In both roles you struggle with vague requirements, lots of edge cases, and unrealistic deadlines. It is surprisingly difficult to get out of the QA pigeonhole. People assume the job is easier, and that you're not as capable as a developer.

I have the misfortune of working at a place where some "bright" person got the bright idea of "eliminating" the QA budget because "developers should be able to do everything a QA can". QA was dissolved and existing QA specialists were told that they had to learn how to program, or get lost. The product quality went down the tube and the place got grief from (Fortune-500) customers who write fat checks that run into the millions for support alone. That has been a train wreck in slow motion.

The simple fact is that you can maybe get away without separate QA staff for a something like an internal website, but for anything else, assuming that developers will test their work and put enough thought into even the most common use-cases and certify that the system as a whole works is delusional.

But I question this bit: "QA Requires a pretty different mindset, one which developers lack entirely."

I don't think that's true. I've done both roles, successfully, at various times. The key, I've found, is that a developer can't test their own work. Developers of a project should also not be put in charge of testing each-others' work if they are working in close capacities. A QA strategy that begins and ends with "test your own stuff", "code/peer reviews" and "write unit tests" is going to reach a quality cliff as the complexity of the software increases. You can get away with it, sometimes, but it doesn't scale.

I'm not sure what the cause of this is, or if it can be improved (it can, but can it be completed eliminated?). It's a similar phenomenon to proof-reading your own work. You mentally add words that aren't there. You follow happy-paths in your software because you know what they are; you don't "misuse" your UI enough[0].

[0] One I think of often was when I wrote a UI for a desk conferencing device. I tested every aspect of it and it was returned to me shortly thereafter when the QA guy joined/exited about 15 "on demand" meetings as rapidly as possible throwing the UI into a state that couldn't be recovered from without rebooting the device.

Developers can be reasonably objective when it comes to writing small, self-contained unit tests and some amount of test automation, but beyond that, where serious QA begins, developers are generally too much in love with their creations to distance themselves from them and view them objectively.

You can see this pattern with authors who become (commercially) successful. The publisher, whose most valuable service is editing the author's work, starts becoming too deferential, causing the author's work to become muddled and flabby. A good editor is often the only one standing between mediocrity and greatness...

Yep, QA is a must for complex systems.

I write for an OS that runs on a service provider router and can assure you that no dev team can come close to understanding how to approach testing the entire product. So QA becomes invaluable when it’s time to run system-level (integration) tests that tie multiple features together.

Of course, there is always a lot of stuff you can automate at the system level. I think the QA and test teams do a good job of identifying these areas, though.

This place cracks me up sometimes :)

QA is “the system should do this; does it do it?”

Dev is “the system should do this; make it do it.”

I’m not putting one above the other as both functions are needed for most successful companies. I am saying they’re not the same job.

It’s already assumed that the product has certain features. And that those features work a certain way. But what if you did something else, that was unexpected. Then does it break the system?

As a QA Engineer, your job is to find that fault, and break it. Because you are possibly the last line of defense, before that software goes out into the real world.

However it's been a sad reality from my experience in the industry that the average QA engineer is a less capable coder than the average developer. There could be many self-reinforcing reasons for that which includes lower pay. There are few things good developers wish for more than equal or superior QA engineers who make developers' job writing quality code much easier.

That being said, the reality of job market these days might be that entry level positions are too competitive and this just isn't practical in which case getting your foot in the door with a QA role is still a much better option than nothing. But I would say it is a fairly indirect route to where you want to go.

Sharing from my anecdotal experience, if you’d prefer an environment where you can grow beyond manual testing (QA Engineer) and automated testing (SDET), look for positive cues: “QA as a role” or cross-functional teams or embedded QA within development teams. Ask for stories (examples) about a team member who made a lateral move, how leadership looks for this potential and supports the transition.

I know a guy who's a senior QA and has been writing automated tests in Python for over 10 years. He can't get hired as a developer because of this "pigeonhole effect." It's nothing to do with his personality, either. He gets hired in QA with no issues.

With that in mind, I think OP immediately has a shot on job boards for such a position if priced correctly — especially with the added perk of great written English / better communication.

EDIT: that’s not to say they should not learn to code; agree with your general sentiment, but I think growing in that sense shouldn’t be a barrier to entry.

Regarding finding work, I’d go on remote-focused job boards and look for any junior support or QA roles. Email the hiring team directly saying hi along with your CV to try beat any filtering systems. If you can’t find many of these, or work through all the ones you can find, try messaging small companies hiring onsite and see if they’re up for remote work anyway.

Persistence goes a long way, expect to be told no a load of times but I hope you’ll be able to land something. Good luck!

It's also important to do a bit of research and understand the huge variety of jobs which will come with titles like 'Remote Support' or 'Remote Support Analyst'. An IT Helpdesk job, a Software Application Support job, and a Zappos customer service job might all share the exact same generic title. So do some googling to figure out what is what, make yourself a list of titles that match the jobs you're looking for, then troll the job boards for roles with that title. Based on the post, I would target jobs with titles like "Application Support Analyst". If you search for remote only with no geographic constraints, you will find an absolute ton of jobs.

As a former recruiter, I think it's worth noting that job hunting in this way is absolutely a numbers game. When I was looking for IT work with little/no experience, I would generally get my first interview after ~50 applications. My point is that you shouldn't get your hopes up with each application, and you shouldn't feel let down if you don't hear back on a given job. If you go in knowing it will be a bit of grind, it will be much easier on you. Set yourself a goal of 2-3 applications a day, and get that many done, every single day. Given the huge number of fully remote roles out there, I'm confident that you would be hard pressed to apply for 100 of them without getting an offer.

With that in mind, get your resume all set, write out a couple of cover letter (your writing is solid, so this will help. But don't write an original letter for each application.) and then apply for everything that looks like a fit. Ignore experience requirements for roles that aren't "senior" or "manager" roles.

Best of luck!

I would recommend that you develop some project on your own which you can speak to and talk about struggles with. Depending on the position and the company, demonstrating and talking about personal experiences on a project can go a long way towards showing your passion and determination. This isn't the way in to every company, but it is a way to ensure you have something to talk about that will help you stand out during an interview.

OP, you're trying to do 2 things here: (1) get a job, and (2) learn a trade. Those are different, though related pursuits.

The ideal is you can find a job that will teach you the trade; in other words, you're looking for an apprenticeship. There are often gov programs for tech apprenticeships (typically state level, so I can't link a definitely-relevant one), but [1] may be a place to start. Also just google "[state] IT Apprenticeship." There are also corporate programs at IBM and Accenture you should look at.

Second, even if you can't get the tech job immediately/this round, don't give up. Google needs IT support folks enough that they started a new education program to teach people enough to work for them [2]. If you have to get a different job, look at that. It is a bit pricey at $49/month, but Google says they'd consider completion to be equivalent to a bachelors.

Finally, every CV you submit should have a cover letter, consisting of the paragraphs you wrote in this post from "I am a techie at heart" to "solution seems impossible."

Good luck!

[1] https://www.apprenticeship.gov/apprenticeship-industries/inf...

[2] https://www.coursera.org/professional-certificates/google-it...

Since you have limited time to find a remote job and nobody has mentioned it yet: HTML/CSS still pays pretty well, is fast to learn, and may be even easier to get paid for than Javascript or other coding work since a lot of "better developers" do not want to do it. I would start by building yourself a personal website and using that as your portfolio, and then expand that portfolio as quickly as you can while hustling for work.

On the hustle side, if you're looking for an entry level job in tech that you can do remotely and doesn't require much experience, you can also use Google Maps and Google to get lists of consulting shops in every major city in America (dev, design, marketing, etc.) and just work your way down the list until you have sent a brief email to every single one of them letting them know that you're looking for work.

Plenty of other techniques in this thread as well.

Getting your foot in the door is the hardest part. Good luck!

However, what you have going for you is that you can speak and write English well. You do not have to (and should not mention) where you live, or your own circumstance. Most people are looking for someone cheap to do short projects.

The goal here is to bootstrap your experience with paid projects, even if the pay is low. You use that to then get in front of larger projects or part time work.

Pick a tech platform or a platform family and stick with it, at least initially. You’re looking for projects that, after completing them, will get you in the door with stuff that pays well.

Anything that you develop that you can put into github, you should. Usuallly, contracts are done as work-for-hire. You might be able to negotiate keeping copyright. You might not. However, tools and scripts you write to assist with it should get posted. Your hobby projects should go there too.

Now, to talk specifically about your strengths. If you love teaching and you are good at writing, one thing you can do is to start blogging about your projects, or writing tutorials. It is a kind of psychological or marketing jujutsu. Teaching something implies expertise and authority, so long as the content is competent. You can even frame this as documenting your experience learning something. Just make sure that you brand this as you authoring the thing.

Last, give some thought to speciality. If you are known to be able to solve problems in specific areas, people come to you. Some people write web apps. Some people do devops/sre/infrastructure. Some people write low latency multiplayer game servers.

Take on a freelance contract and kick butt on it while simultaneously looking for the next contract. Eventually you will will either get offered a position by one of your clients, or you'll have enough of a resume to start applying in other places (or you'll like freelancing enough to stick with it).

A couple of years ago, I farmed out some small web design, programming, and proofreading jobs through Fiverr. The price competition among the people who bid for the jobs was brutal—people were bidding from some of the lowest-income countries in the world and seemed desperate for work—but it soon became clear that I would just be wasting my time if I went with the lowest bidders. Your writing skills will do a lot to attract jobs at decent pay. Good luck!

https://weworkremotely.com/

https://www.tecla.io/

https://remote.co/

https://www.flexjobs.com/

And if you're up for it, I highly encourage trying to try Zapier which is an amazing company and has terrific remote recruitment. Even if you don't get the job, great experience.

https://zapier.com/jobs/

I've just check their job openings. In their application form they are asking questions about race, ethnicity, gender,... Is it legal to ask such questions and what is the relevance of such questions?

So the way we are trying to solve this problem is by requiring all companies to collect demographic information on their candidates, and store it somewhere. No one involved with the hiring (theoretically) will see your answers, they just go into a drawer somewhere.

Down the road, the government will ask the company to pull out all the records they collected and look at them in aggregate. If the company is not hiring a diverse enough workforce, there are supposed to be some kind of consequences.

So essentially, companies are required to ask, but you are not required to answer. There will always be an option to say "I prefer not to answer" or something.

This may be overly personal, but I would consider contract/temp work, too, to build up your professional experience. That would also reduce the risk of losing your existing full-time job and ending up in a financial hardship.

Also, apply to non-developer roles. There is a bit of complexity to working in a software company, more than just writing code. Consider a support or other development adjacent field that is still technical.

Feel free to shoot me an email with your resume or Github/LinkedIn, and I'll send back a few openings I know of right now if it seems a good fit. My email is in my profile.

Wishing you well on your job hunt!

(I already gave a career-focused response in this thread.)

Can you send one of your siblings to live with your brother? Can you move with the other sibling?

What if you took a job near your brother, and all four of you lived together?

If you move with one of your siblings, will the situation be better for the sibling? (Better schools, better special needs programs?)

Can you and your brother send money back to your parents or another caregiver?

Whenever I hear an "I live in a poor area" story, I always suspect that the situation is more unreasonable than recognized.

Is this whole situation to keep your family farm afloat? Remember, a farm is a business. It's not fair to you to have this kind of impact to your life if your parents (or whoever is running the farm) are working dawn 'til dusk on a failing business.

When I’m hiring for positions I cross out the school or bootcamp “education”. My top priority is to see what you’ve done in the past and what you’re passionate about. If I like a resume I want a code sample, most have their GitHub in it. I review the code and see how well it’s formatted and how it’s organized. It takes awhile, but I think it’s worth it.

So, keep at it, do some small projects on GitHub you’re proud of. Bonus if you can find a project and contribute to it, even documentation counts in my book. Mentors are also helpful.

You got this!

They provide software development service. I’m using their service right now. They seem to provide good mentorship to junior devs, they also have project/product manager positions, and customer success positions. I’ve talked to their founder and CEO, Hamza Zia. He’s a nice guy. In general, they are pleasant people to work with, which means you’ll also find pleasant (remote) colleagues there.

Throughout my career, from the first paid job I was offered to the best and most lucrative unsolicited offers I've received in senior management, it's all come down to personal connections. People that knew me personally and knew a little about my life, or secondary connections -- friends of friends.

Your location shouldn't make much difference these days -- everything is happening online. Ask around about meetups, panels, pair programming, clubhouse rooms, or anything else interactive where you can share a bit of your story.

I'm connected to some highly successful people, and their main secret sauce is connections. It's nothing mysterious, but really just basic human kindness, generosity, and a collaborative spirit goes a long way. I find most people genuinely want to be helpful and especially so for people who have achieved some level of success already. So the other part of the advice is to scan your world for accomplished people, and just tell them your story. (Better yet, ask what their problems are and offer to solve something for them.)

This was a great Ask HN, thanks for taking the chance.

First: Employers hire people who can do the job, not sob stories. Focus on what you can do for a company, and only reveal your personal life situation when required. I have a wife that works odd hours and kids, but I will only bring it up in an interview when discussing how often I will need to travel to an office. (Often I'll just say that I can't move.)

Second: I have almost 20 years experience and I had to apply to about 60 well-chosen jobs before I found a good match. Is "your job is finding a job?" Are you spending 20-40 hours a week looking? Are you choosing where you apply carefully? Anticipate applying for 100 positions.

I suspect you're 35-45 years old. Why are you looking for an entry-level job? Entry-level is also about life experience. You're making a career change, and your existing experience puts you beyond entry level.

But more importantly, "entry-level" implies that your boss will baby-sit you. This is harder to do remotely.

IMO: Focus on "soft skills" jobs like support, direct customer interaction, content. Focus on jobs where you won't need handholding (babysitting) once you know the ropes, and apply for at least 3 jobs a week.

We (my wife and I) chose our situation. We chose to live where I'd have to work remotely. We chose that I would be responsible for balancing a career and childcare. We chose a lifestyle that requires two professional careers.

Why do I bring this up? Think back to when you decided to accept your situation as caregiver to your loved ones. What about your decision not to move. They were choices, even though they didn't feel like it at the time. (Did I have to marry and have kids?) That's why it's not relevant to your job search, beyond a simple "I can't move" phrase.

Everybody who makes good life choices has a situation that locks them down.

Part I: Job postings

1) Collect job postings for jobs you are interested in.

2) Look at the "skills" portion of the job postings.

3) Assess your level of proficiency in those skills.

4) Practice each skill until you feel confident you have a working level of proficiency in those skills.

Part II: Study tips

1) Take note of every acronym or concept you don't understand. Then, look it up and try to come up with your own definition for it. Write down that definition in your own words. At first, that definition may not be correct, but you have to try to keep it as accurate as you can.

2) When you study a concept from a book or website, also take notes. Then, write what you have learned about each topic. Force yourself to explain what you are doing and why.

3) Vocalize what you are doing and what you are thinking. Record yourself and then listen to yourself. Expressing your thoughts in a coherent way will help you later during interviews.

4) Enroll into a MOOC for Algorithms and Data structures.

Part II: Resume

1) Create a 1 page resume that emphasizes your skills and abilities.

2) In the absence of formal education, create a portfolio that showcases your abilities.

3) If you have completed a MOOC, you can list it there.

Part III: Apply

1) Look for referrals among people you know.

2) Announce you are looking for a job.

3) Apply and interview.

Part IV: Interview

1) Don't get too nervous. Stress management is part of the job.

2) Budget your time. Questions may have follow up questions. Ask if there are follow up questions in advance.

3) Explain your thoughts clearly.

4) Ask questions, the interviewer can offer help if needed.

5) Learn about the company, what they do, thier mision, vision, core values, etc. Crunchbase can help you find basic information about a company.

4) Prepare to ask questions. e.g.: what is their engineering organizational structure, what is their culture like, etc. Prepare to answer questions such as why do you want that job, why do you want to work there, etc.

update: looks like same ideas as RMK. I should have read the thread farther!

WWR is interesting because it has programming and devops jobs, but also customer support and miscellaneous jobs, all remote.

I’d suggest going through the list, short listing the ones that look appealing to you, and then applying the reverse order of desirability, so you get to practice on the interviews you aren’t that keen on and use them as backups or leverage if you do get through.

I’d suggest starting with something that you can do easily and that will settle you for a while, then you can prep and study for the next-level jobs if you want something more ambitious.

I know it takes a lot of effort as well as luck in landing that first entry-level job so all I can say is to keep knocking, but also be prepared to show something tangible. Anyone can talk all day about their awesome work ethics but it's another thing to be able to prove it by presenting a polished (for a junior) software.

I've known several people – usually in their early 20s – who claim to be smart and motivated. Most of them are smart. But when it comes time to actually build something, they'd rather play video games. So how do you distinguish yourself from the video gamers? Build something. Anything.

If you want a full stack job, build a Twitter clone (with limited features) in React (or ReactNative) and Django. Even if you don't use those tools when getting hired, it'll show people that you have what it takes to do the work. Both React(Native) and Django have the added benefits of being in high demand, and extremely well documented.

I took the first job I could get as a programmer in 2010 at the first place that would accept me... making 21k right after getting my 2 year degree. I now work for a major bank as a Senior Programmer with 10+ years of experience.

If you can afford getting paid under market (minimum wage job you're taking? sounds like thats a yes)? Getting that first job can be worth it in the long run.

Put out a hundred applications and expect 2 interviews. Success is consistency and expectations that you'll have to work that much harder to get that first job.

I started writing paid articles on medium on developing mobile apps: 1. My first 2 weeks doing articles daily has given me: - 90% of my articles curated by medium staff for inclusion in people's feeds that do not follow me. - inclusion the weekly FlutterForce Newsletter every week. Yes at this point pay is low at about $5 total but it gets interesting in that it's the same ratio of free value and small paid value as you would do with free features in a mobile and paid features in the same app.

If you already have a small audience to grab somewhere which for you seems to be the case AND if you can make the stimulus checks yet coming stretch IT MIGHT BE THE PERFECT REMOTE FIT.

In my case I know it will even though I have reddit karma of several K in the flutterdev subeddit that it will take me 6 months to get the 500k monthly views on medium that generate on average $25k and so that plus me self publishing my book in 6 months is what is allow me to leverage to other things.

I cannot promise that you will also have the 500k monthly views on medium in 6 months and $25k monthly but I think you could get close.

As I get to the 500k monthly I also plan to start developing video course which will put me at the million in views and revenues.

Oh yeah, the best writing tool for dev notes and articles and books is a tool that has been highlighted on HackerNews before namely Zettlr.

If you feel the need to reach out my email is in my HN profile.

There's actually quite a lot of piecemeal consulting relating to JS snippets on company websites that might be a better fit than support or more traditional development.

I mean things like e-commerce, SEO, form integrations, cookie consent forms, etc. If you talk to small businesses they will have a strong tendency to use wordpress with plugins to try to manage these things with as little coding as possible.

But often they end up needing a little JS/HTML debugging help and if you look at dev support of companies like Google, Stripe, MailChimp, etc, as you develop skills debugging JS, and try to debug websites then you'll actually be building skills that are normally farmed out by the larger orgs to consultants at pretty good rates.

Similarly, you can also do a lot in spreadsheets, i.e. in JavaScript in Google spreadsheets to do more business related tasks and it can be easier to find small businesses in your area that want to pay for projects to organize their inventory, integrate numbers scraped from different tools, etc.

At any rate, I just thought those might be some ideas that would be a bit different and might have some more local stepping stones even in a pretty small economy as well as remote consulting possibilities.

For more tech focused options, you may be able to find remote internships or co-ops that don't require you to be a current university student. You'd be sacrificing some stability compared to a permanent position but they'll be expecting applicants to have little to no practical experience. A data analyst type role could also be an option, but I'm less familiar with the typical job requirements for that.

A lot of the suggestions here are a bit more long term. There are entry level support jobs in tech that will give you valuable experience, _now_, for a pathway to engineering roles. Many companies will also give you a budget to buy courses, books, conference tickets, etc. Staying in support isn't a dead end, anymore, either. Remote companies will try to pay you based on location, but salaries can get very high once you stack up experience (120k+/year).

Regardless of future plans, you'll have an advantage over trying to learn while doing unrelated work.

Here are a few listings as an example:

https://automattic.com/work-with-us/happiness-engineer/

https://kinsta.com/careers/

https://www.dropbox.com/jobs/listing/2603610

https://system76.com/careers

If you want to talk more about it, lmk, and I'll email you.

Producing good work in your current position and having great communication skills can get you very far relatively fast in my personal experience.

Finding jobs through HN has worked for me in the past, in the search just type {month} {year} and look through the whos hiring threads ctrl-f for remote, look through the companies listings and see if they got anything new even if the post is a couple months old! HN can be a cheatcode to getting an interview rather than cold applying through monster.com or some shit like that.

Good luck!

Also, there's nothing stopping you from making things now, getting them online, and building on that experience. With not a lot of experience, I called up places and asked, "Do you need a website?" And got started that way.

Good luck!

Automattic Happiness Engineer: https://automattic.com/work-with-us/#open-positions

Zapier Support team: https://zapier.com/jobs/#job-openings

To help you get a remote software development job, consider doing a remote, part-time bootcamp with an ISA (Income Share Agreement). That means you pay nothing until you're hired. Some options include:

Lambda School: https://lambdaschool.com/courses/full-stack-web-development

Thinkful: https://www.thinkful.com/bootcamp/web-development/topic?form...

FreeCodeCamp on youtube has plenty of free, high-quality content.

I'd suggest to rummage through your existing network for opportunities. Also QA and IT Support roles with a bit of operations work might suit you since they involve a bit of software development but should be lighter on development skill-set requirements.

While doing 6, apply to other jobs too like IT admin, customer service agent, bookkeeping, virtual assistant, secretary, exec assistant, and anything and everything else.

This is a game if numbers, apply to as many as possible as fast as possible. Kee doing this everyday, every week till you get it. Be creative, exhaustive, and bold at each step.

Hear me out, I was trying to figure out how to best go about sending out emails to people who sign up on my website. I try to listen to podcast episodes to learn some of these things. A well known copyrighter from Australia was interviewed on the podcast episode I happened to listen to 2 days ago. His story of how he got started was brilliant. He went above and beyond with the projects he did on upwork. People that hired him were blown away by how much value he provided. He started raising his prices as word spread about the quality of his work. I think what he did is a very viable strategy for those getting started.

https://www.indeed.com/q-Technical-Writer-Editor-jobs.html

https://www.flexjobs.com/jobs/technical-writing

https://www.upwork.com/freelance-jobs/technical-editing/

https://www.fiverr.com/search/gigs?query=writing%2Bproof%2Br...

You can also contact agencies like Toptal and Robert Half.

If you want a different type of job then you need to have evidence or a convincing story that you have literally done that job before, either as an intern or through training/education or as projects on your own. But the fact that you have literally done proofreading and documentation editing in a technical context and there is a record on Github seems to be concrete proof that should be possible to leverage into getting paid work doing the same thing.

https://github.com/malgamves/CommunityWriterPrograms

In the process of doing this type of work, you surely will learn new things and probably will help you figure out exactly what you might want to focus on / become an expert at / etc. You'll come to understand systems from a user's perspective which always good for developers.

Just my $0.02.

This is the kind of thing full time engineers typically don't enjoy doing, so docs stagnate and can quickly become out of date or inaccurate.

It's super useful if someone is used to a routine where they know how to dig into a project, find errors/inaccuracies, and work to improve them.

But if they're accepted by the repo owner, they're probably not nonsense. And projects need better documentation. If the OP was applying for a junior 'tech' role of some sort, and demonstrated that experience of revising documentation to be up to date and improved... it's a step up from some people I've seen over the years (who leave behind bad/broken docs, for example).

Also, when you’re broke, you often don’t have time to look for a good position, because you need money right now, so you take up whatever job is on offer, which leaves you with no time/energy to look for something better, and you can’t take the risk to just quit and follow your dreams because you don’t have any safety net. You can easily spend years this way.

Of course, all this would not sound great in a job interview. That’s why, when I interview people, I tend to focus more on the attitude, personality, and actual skills of a person, and avoid asking questions about past odd jobs, prolonged unemployment periods, and the like.

We all need to start somewhere. OP just happens to be starting now.

Good luck, OP.

Documentation writing is something that can get you in the door at interesting places. It can also give you time with technology in a less pressured environment to learn it and switch to more technical jobs.

Bigger companies have roles like this, but they are obscured because documentation writer is not a sexy title, and the role is more than writing. It can be part testing features or providing product feedback ("I tried writing about this feature but it's so complicated. Will people even use it?")

To work out some places to try applying I started with Microsoft. I'd ignore locations, even when listed because companies haven't updated their tools to reflect remote or are stupidly optimistic. Even if you got fired because you wouldn't work onsite at the end of 2021, the experience would give you a serious boost. How I found the roles:

1. Searched for "Microsoft documentation". Found docs.microsoft.com. 2. Searched for docs.microsoft.com on jobs.microsoft.com. 3. Found "content developer" roles listed. This is the job title stuff I was talking about. At the core it's tech writing. 4. Pivoted to searching "content developer" - https://careers.microsoft.com/us/en/search-results?keywords=...

Repeat that for other companies and you'll find different opportunities. There may also be contracting roles but it's harder to get into those initially. Writing docs for open source projects associated with these companies can help to make contacts. Red Hat is another place to consider for this reason.

It's important to have a portfolio of work. If you apply for a doc writer role you'd need to find examples that map onto what they produce. Also, look for opportunities to critique their work to some degree and be ready to suggest how you might improve their current work. Docs are becoming more interactive and interesting too, so any suggestions on how to make them more interesting will find more ears.

I’ve found what’s missing in our industry is a centralised place for new devs to get their foot in the door. It’s a lot of hard work mixed with lot of luck, but we could do better... if you’re looking to do YC S21 but don’t have an idea, here’s one with users waiting to bust through your door!

It may be the perfect match for you -- but all I want to say is, if you get frustrated with it, you're not alone! Don't be afraid to try a different resource to get started.

However, I've revisited the book and I enjoy it a lot more after becoming more familiar with the language

I am in the process of applying to entry-level jobs and I can assure you that I have not encountered a single technical interview that did not require knowledge beyond what FCC covers.

Other than that, I would keep improving documentation on open source where you can and should. Then highlight that work as much as you can on your resume.

I wish you the best of luck and hope that you find your start!

https://github.com/fossjobs/fossjobs/wiki/Resources#internsh...

Are you near any colleges or hospitals nearby? Those are probably your best bet for finding a local helpdesk. Don't forget YC's Work At A Startup and AngelList -- I see remote customer support posting there as well!

For the extremely short term, consider looking for a listing of ecommerce shops (maybe a high traffic Shopify listing on a blog or ecom-adjacent site) and hitting them up about customer service roles.

There's a big gap between demand and supply and it's only growing.

If you want a 1:1 advisor, I recommend Jordan Carroll: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jordanscarroll/

Upwork has been a place I use to get some gigs, some of my best clients actually.

Good luck!

Send me a resume, adam@numsp.com

Don't constrain your search to looking for just tech industry helpdesks. Helpdesks and call centers can be found supporting all manner of industries and segments, be it remote education software, point-of-sale credit card readers, one of those medical machines that goes beep in hospital rooms, or those tablet-like computers a mechanic uses troubleshoot a car's engine controller. Tech has permeated into society to a greater degree than even us techies sometimes appreciate, and wherever there's a broad enough deployment of something, there's going to be people who need or want technical help with that something.

Start looking up every company you can think of, big and small, new and old, and hunt down their job listings, looking for anything that sounds like it could be mainly tech support work, whether or not the listing actually calls it that. Also worth looking at are contracting and temp agencies, as often tech support is an out-sourced role.

Since you don't have a technical work history yet, look to the time you've spent tinkering, say, during your win98/Ubuntu dual-boot adventures, for example. Find times you had a hard problem to deal with. How did you solve the problem? What was your process? How did you deal with impediments to solving those problems? That's something you'll probably get asked in an interview for a tech support position, and it will be good to have some answers.

Do the same with your customer service experience. Come up with examples when you dealt with a particularly difficult or unhappy customer, and were able to help them solve their problem to their satisfaction.

Once you manage to land a tech position, become a sponge. Start soaking up technical knowledge. Seek to understand the Why behind the How. If you have specific tools, dig into those tools' nooks and crannies. See if there's ways to use the tools better. Become valuable as the guy who's really good at figuring out how to solve a particular class of common problem, or taming some arcane tool your team has to use. And if documentation is lacking, leverage and polish your communication skills to create or improve documentation.

Doing this will set you up for being able to move up from the basic entry level role, into something more advanced that hopefully pays better, whether that's moving up in your original company or finding a better position with another company.

Have you considered they might benefit from moving to a new location as well? Better schools and services for instance.

I found out the hard way that "being able to learn fast" is a potentially very dangerous mindset to have when you are looking for an entry-level job for the following reasons:

* You could easily open yourself up for exploitation by "sweatshops" (lack of mentorship, time to learn, and terrible pay) which hinders your career progression (assuming that you don't want to end up in one of those).

* You are very likely overestimating your abilities for "better" jobs that have stricter requirements on non-code-writing skills, including computer science.

* You can easily become a jack of all trades, master of none -- not in the sense that you are a generalist and a capable fullstack engineer, but in the sense that you just knows a little bit of everything and nothing well enough for an actual job. It's not that it can't be fixed and developed upon, but for your first job I personally think that's really not what you want, I hope you don't end up wasting time to get to that point.

freeCodeCamp is great to get started with (I have been through different version of the curriculum a few times for various reasons), but even finishing all of it won't get you even close to job-ready for jobs that have heavier requirements on non-code-writing skills.

That's not to say you won't be able to get a job after finishing freeCodeCamp -- with a bit of luck you may even be able to find a job with very good terms. However, if you want to compete for high-level jobs and/or want to continue to develop your skills properly even after getting a job, I highly recommend doing things that are more difficult than what you are doing immediately, and make that a habit.

Since you are reading Eloquent JavaScript (which probably means you care about more than just getting code written and things put on the screen), here are a few things that you might want to consider/get into immediately:

* As many have already mentioned, solve challenges on LeetCode regularly and perhaps spend time read some of the forum posts. The reason is that there is little hint/guidance in the freeCodeCamp curriculum about what/how you could do for more efficient algorithms -- in fact, in many cases brute-force, naive, solutions would be accepted. You don't want to get into the habit of thinking that solving challenges in O(n^2) time is okay when interviewers expect you to solve them in linear or better time complexity.

* Eloquent JavaScript is a great book (I recommend adding You Don't Know JS to your reading list), but try to read it a few times at different stage of your learning/career -- you will likely learn something new/develop a much deeper understanding of abstract concepts every time.

* Supplement your study with other courses such as those freely available on edX or MITOCW. If you are looking for a structured way to learn outside of freeCodeCamp, perhaps consider something like this: https://github.com/P1xt/p1xt-guides (not affiliated with p1xt in any way, I just came across her things when I first started learning a few years ago and find them super useful).

* Get a personal portfolio up as soon as possible, *and make an effort to refine it to show that you are different* as you go -- otherwise you will regret not having it ready when you need it. This is particularly important for people who are self-taught. Writing blog posts are okay (some companies seem to use it as a hiring metric?), but don't things that are just simply copying/paraphrasing/"distilling" without adding value -- it would just make you look very bad to those who know what they are talking about; talk about the problems you encountered, how you solved them, what you did to get personal projects done, etc. Even if it's not writing intended for interviewers/HR, you will still benefit a lot from writing things down (communicating technical details clearly is an important skill and definitely one of the metrics used by interviewers!).

I don't have much advice on entry-level remote jobs, at times it feels like they don't exist and, if they do, only in large organisations whose openings are usually extremely competitive. A few of my peers who were self-taught landed their first and remote jobs simply by reaching out and asking; I'm not sure about the details, but they're all hard-working people who evidently care about learning more than just writing code, perhaps it's not a bad idea to cold e-mail once you get to the point that you are comfortable with your skills.

I hope it helps! Good luck! :)