Title: I am a software engineer who is self-taught, and after graduation I took local jobs for small web shops for dev work.<p>Here&#x27;s a brief description of my timeline from beginning to present:<p>- 1.5 years contract-to-hire SWE (W2 never actually happened)<p>- 3 months full-time W2 work, followed by 6 months unemployed<p>- 10 years independent contract work (freelancing)<p>- 2.5 years of no work, and a lot of job searching<p>The last 5 years of independent contract work have been very sporadic. During this time I typically made under $10k every year. I don&#x27;t really know how to &quot;put myself out there&quot; as a freelancer, and after 10 years of doing it, I just want to go back to W2 as a FT employee.<p>My tech job skills include, PHP, MySQL, vanilla JS and jQuery. I don&#x27;t know testing, cloud, or CI&#x2F;CD practices. Jobs involve building small scale websites- at first only WordPress and eCommerce sites but around year 5 become more much web app SaaS-focused.<p>I have spent a very long time without work because I don&#x27;t really know how to fit myself into other places with such a skill set. I get interviews and then get rejected for not being good enough. But these are the skills I have the most experience in by far. I don&#x27;t have any other job skills that come close. I don&#x27;t have close friends and relatives who have a good pulse on the tech industry. I do have a Github portfolio- it&#x27;s not very &quot;hot&quot; or &quot;trendy&quot; tech but just things I do them because I enjoy doing them.<p>What other good options do I have? It doesn&#x27;t have to be highly relevant to work I&#x27;ve done in the past. Anyone have any ideas of what I can or should do?<p>A side note: I&#x27;ve been working remote since 2013 (may explain a lot about my how my career has went) and am pretty good with maintaining a schedule and discipline around WFH.
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