Big takeaway from the mocks is that I come off as too junior or entry-level. Applying to junior jobs with my 10 years experience will lead to sticker shock for the employer so this is a tricky spot that I'm in. Even if that wasn't a problem, they would think I'm slow as a turtle to work and learn.
A very overlooked topic is how brutal the software industry can be for a person who has that prolonged junior phase. I fell into a 'perpetual temp worker' career by accident, and a contractor cannot expand their role in a company, esp. if they only work for 6-12 months at a time.
I suggest that to get out of this situation(which will possibly get worse over time), you set aside AT LEAST 1 hour a day to dedicate yourself to study.
Also, try to find a company that does B2B, preferably not startup. They usually involve VBA, Java and sometimes they can even have some "forward looking" tech for you to work with. On B2B, everything is slower and sometimes you mind find that you are actually pretty good in comparison to your peers. So you can take care of you family.
You probably know places where you could improve to not sound Junior. A few of them which most of the people I interview with doesn't grasp or can improve a lot:
- Learn some computer networking basics. Do you know where is HTTP in the network stack? TCP/UDP?
- Learn algorithms. Get a programming language you don't know, but would like to work with, and there is a good B2B market. That solves the problem "BUT I DON'T KNOW WHAT TO BUILD!11" problem, as you can just write algos and learn data structures
- Contribute with small and simple tasks on Github. That generally counts.
- Work on a idea, make a low-running webapp. If you show this to people, that'll make you stand out. Also use it as your playground, make it very well tested on some places, so you can show your possible employers that you can test well when you want/need, but can also be pragmatic for things you don't mind.
Try to divide this hour into like 30min dedication to each Item you consider important. Also, accept that not always you will solve a problem, or maybe it could take you a few weeks to really get things going. Use the alarm clock on your phone.
It's the same as going to the Gym.
My advice is to find something that pitches a career change to organisations. For example, take a short period of study, and then in your applications say something like "After 10 years of X, I decided to follow my real passion Y, and I'm now looking for ways to expand in this role. Of course, I still bring all my past experience that I believe will be invaluable in this junior role..."
I've seen people do this - it works. Tell a story, believe it yourself, and you will convince others to give you a chance in a junior role that you can them move quickly upwards from.
If you put some contact info on your HN profile, I might be able to do another mock interview and give you feedback if you are interested.
I'd say that avoiding interviewing entirely is unrealistic. You will always be required to do an interview, even if you go through referrals.
I'd suggest reframing your CV to match the kind of job you want, and starting from there. You'd be surprised how the same experience can be written in vastly different ways.
From there, what helped me with interviewing is thinking of it as me trying to help the interviewer get to a good answer, rather than me trying to impress them. It suddenly became more natural and wasn't so challenging from then on.