All of that changed one night when I showed a demo of a browser game I'd made at a meetup some Groupon devs happened to be at. That lead to a phone screen, an onsite, a job and then never another time when I couldn't get a decent tech job. Of course my skills improved over time, but the biggest delta was just getting a single name on my resume that hiring recruiters respected.
I sometimes wonder how many people are out there are like me a decade ago—able to do well in whiteboard interviews, capable enough to contribute, eager... and consistently denied a chance to even try.
Years and companies later, I've brought it up in those diversity hiring meetings, but that's not the sort of changes that are being sought at most places.
I agree though, at 3 years I was still fairly junior in the scheme of things. I was doing full stack work and building money-making applications from scratch, but it wasn’t great work. It wasn’t going to scale well, the front end was based on an ad-hoc framework because I was afraid of learning and implementing new tools like backbone.js, there were very few tests, not great internal tooling to aid workflows, I wasn’t a great mentor, etc. A lot of what I did was because it worked once before, and not because I knew exactly how and why. My fourth year was when I got my first senior title, though.
I like when companies distinguish engineering levels by capability. E1 through E7 for example, where E5+ would be approximately what people imagine when they hear the term senior. Unfortunately everyone uses different leveling, so it’s hard to adhere to that. Our industry would benefit from standards.
It's a weird market where the difference between 0 and 1 year of experience can be so dramatically reflected in salaries and opportunities.