It definitively feels like AI is in my way in many ways. There's clearly a lot of recruiters using it to sort through applications (I've gotten more than a few rejections that start with "Sure! Here's a polite but firm letter rejecting a job candidate."), but also the expectation that AI can do what I'd be doing as a junior, so why bother hiring juniors?

I get the point about publishing everything and I've been doing that. Even my janky early Python is on my Github. It's just frustrating that I'm not even getting the chance to discuss it with an interviewer.

I'll look into some of those channels and such as well, thank you.

I've posted in other communities (like on Reddit) and largely gotten vague, very poor, or aggressive responses. My hope with a dedicated mentor is that I'd get someone I can work with over a few months to figure out what the issues are in my search. Although it's not bonkers expensive, it does cost a decent chunk of change.

I'm mostly interested in webdev right now - my main skill set is in React and Node but I'm much more comfortable in frontend work. I've been working on learning C#/.NET since many jobs in my city want it and I find it a bit more intuitive, but it's been slow going learning a whole new language and framework while working full time at a non-dev job. A longer term goal for me is to move into game dev but I've put that on hold because of the hard times that industry is going through, of course.