This happened to me. I had a streak of bad luck that left me with an unimpressive resume and made it incredibly difficult for me to get hired, even though objectively I was/am very good at making companies money.
In my case it came down to the realization that the standards people use to judge your skills are very arbitrary. Once I went out and got a few certificates I started getting job offers. Nobody cared about the fact that I was smart enough to learn SAS in two weeks or make my previous employers large sums of money, they only cared about the fact that I had the certificate. C'est la vie.
In every industry there's some sort of bar past which people start treating you like a real person. Getting past this bar often has little to do with merit-think having a degree from a "prestigious" college or having exceedingly specific previous experience. Try to figure out what that bar is in the field you want to work in and how you can show that you've cleared it. Programming is a diverse field but a few bars I've seen people use (not saying I agree with these) are "has experience in Ruby/Python/Functional Programming/my favorite language", "has contributed significantly to open source", "recommended by someone I know who is competent", and so on.
The last one is IMO the most valuable bar to clear. The more you can get out and know people, and show them that you're competent, the easier it is to get better jobs and better projects in the long run.
In my case it came down to the realization that the standards people use to judge your skills are very arbitrary. Once I went out and got a few certificates I started getting job offers. Nobody cared about the fact that I was smart enough to learn SAS in two weeks or make my previous employers large sums of money, they only cared about the fact that I had the certificate. C'est la vie.
In every industry there's some sort of bar past which people start treating you like a real person. Getting past this bar often has little to do with merit-think having a degree from a "prestigious" college or having exceedingly specific previous experience. Try to figure out what that bar is in the field you want to work in and how you can show that you've cleared it. Programming is a diverse field but a few bars I've seen people use (not saying I agree with these) are "has experience in Ruby/Python/Functional Programming/my favorite language", "has contributed significantly to open source", "recommended by someone I know who is competent", and so on.
The last one is IMO the most valuable bar to clear. The more you can get out and know people, and show them that you're competent, the easier it is to get better jobs and better projects in the long run.