MIT class of '75 in course 18 (math - 3 years) and class of '76 course 6.3 (CS - fourth year). I stayed for that 4th year because the job market and grad school pool were awful. Was unemployed when graduated in June '76. Took advantage of that to take a cross-county motorcycle tour. Finally got a job in mid-September. That company went belly-up 6 weeks later. Remained unemployed until January '77. With the dream job that really launched my career. I wish I had more encouraging words for you, but what worked for me was - stick to what you love - eventually it'll work out. But don't be afraid to do what it takes to survive. I made ends meet by working as a bartender - moonlighting during that first job, and then as main income for a few more weeks until I got that wholly unexpected call from a headhunter that changed everything.

You keep trying. You may have to take a lesser job to pay the bills, but you keep trying until you succeed. You also need to understand that the CS market has something of a glut right now and with companies downsizing for various reasons, jobs in CS are tight. When I went through the same thing, I took jobs at small companies, startups, etc., to pay the bills and I kept applying to other companies until I landed a job with one of them. You might also consider talking to consulting firms for contract work, something I've done before.

If you give up, you will certainly fail, so don't give up and realize that the hardships you may experience will make you stronger, more resilient, and better prepared to deal with hardships in the future.

Talk to peers, friends, even people you do not know that well and ask about their plans. Don't be afraid to ask for help. Crash on a couch for a few months. Keep refining and sending out resumes. Take a job that you might be overqualified for. Early in your career you should accept and work for entry level positions and anticipate that you will be doing this same thing every 2-4 years in order to get to a salary range you are hoping for anyway.

Don't expect or even look for a dream job straight away. Lower your standards. That's what I did, and I ended up where I'm supposed to be in my career after a few years. I took an early risk on a personally important project early in my career and found myself broke and headed home afterward. I just committed myself to taking entry level work and moving jobs several times in order to catch up with my peers who went straight into industry.

Broaden your search. Apply to startups, for less money / more equity - there are plenty of them in the Boston area. Basically just do a sober assessment of how much you need to live on (perhaps with a roommate), add 30% to that and that's your minimal acceptable cash-side compensation. Do that for some time (a year or more), learn, move on. While you work, set aside some money for the rainy day. This is not optional, you have to do it even if you don't set aside a ton. Fundamentally, you have to stand out and you have to start building a track record. How much money you make in your first job is not very important. I'd say what you _do_ in your first job is more important. That's what people see in the resume. Good luck, and remember - you've got the very best education available. Do not sell yourself short in job 2 and so on.

Sucks how things are rough out there right now. You strike me as someone with a lot of heart, and I really hope something good comes your way soon. I’m working on a startup at UC Berkeley with my co-founder, we’re bootstrapping at the moment, but we’ve got a lot lined up.

Would love to connect if you’re open to chatting. No pressure at all — just figured I’d reach out. Feel free to shoot me an email (info’s in my bio).

Sorry to hear you are demoralised. Hang in there. Tough times dont last, tough people do.

I'm planning to startup and looking for early engineers. Hit me up on Linkedin if you are interested https://www.linkedin.com/in/nikhilkattani/

If you can self-host or publish a demo of your work that is open-sourced, I find that that really opens the door for a lot of web dev positions, regardless of what particular languages you know and/or what’s in vogue.

(Mine would be https://jonline.io/jon, part of a larger project that does federated social media, but just a “hello world” portfolio server app that you open source would be quite effective, I think. This is all based on recruiters’, hiring managers’, and other devs’ responses when I link them to it.)

The advice I give to students is to leverage connections, especially family connections, as much as possible. Take any job you that have a family connection to, even if it isn't in tech.

Learn the business as well as you can and then apply your technical knowledge to it.

I came from a background that sounds a lot like yours. I didn’t get to go to MIT; I just taught myself, also during hard economic times. My way of getting jobs was learning skills that were difficult for most programmers so that having a degree wouldn’t be as important. I also applied only to places that interested me and where I thought I could contribute. Therefore, I applied to very few places. I have always thought that it is my job to be irresistible to a hiring manager. No one owes us a job.