"Recruiters tell me that I'm a "job hopper" and that "it'll be difficult to place you."

Just explain that you have been contracting for the past couple of years and are now interested in something more permanent..or just look for contracting gigs.

You will most likely need to be more creative when looking for these types of jobs (contracting). Major job boards are filled with recruiters..which makes it difficult. Your best bet is to find companies that aren't using a recruiter.

"far out crazy idea for a hardware device involving Lidar that nobody else is doing"

This is probably not realistic. First find a way to actually make some money now.

"One day when I was having lunch with Richard Feynman, I mentioned to him that I was planning to start a company to build a parallel computer with a million processors. His reaction was unequivocal, "That is positively the dopiest idea I ever heard." For Richard a crazy idea was an opportunity to either prove it wrong or prove it right. Either way, he was interested. By the end of lunch he had agreed to spend the summer working at the company."

http://longnow.org/essays/richard-feynman-connection-machine...

i never said i prioritize the only great idea for a startup that i have ever had above my job search. obviously, since i have been sitting on the idea for 8 years and only half-heartedly tinkering with building it, "making some money now" is what i have been doing instead. all i said was that it was an idea for a dream of mine that i've had for a very long time. isn't this a forum dedicated to startup dreamers--"the crazy ones... the round pegs in the square holes"? i only mentioned that i had a startup idea to show that "hey gang, i'm one of you too."

I know a place in Burbank that's hiring. The job market in LA is rough really h1b people go to the front of the line I've been through tough times here myself and was born here it's a really mean town. But don't give up if you can get to Midnight Mission they will help you it's in downtown.

A general job match-making service (not a jobs board, but a service that directly pairs people with a guaranteed job) sounds like it would be a big logistics nightmare in any big city, even on a municipal level. It's the only way I can reason about how most safety net services can provide you some monetary or TANF benefits, but there's no job application where you get fast-tracked without a proper interview. Logistically it's been easier to send someone a benefits check or food stamps than it is to accommodate a guaranteed position for them to work. So many companies are sleeping on good people.

hah about the h1b problem. Would you believe my last "real" dev job prior to becoming homeless was at a nationally known name-brand company and my job was to come in as the new guy and recommend to the management which American developers on my team to fire, in order to replace them with an "offshore resource" in India? the carrot on that stick was that each American I got fired, I would receive a small bonus and be made the manager of the new Indian replacement. They told me the goal was to eliminate all American engineering from the company. I immediately recognized this new job really meant I would be the one rewriting craptastic code commits from Bangalore at 11:00pm on a Friday night. It was a pure bait and switch job. I was really upset about it. I thought I had been hired to write code, not to be a willing cog in the cruel Wall St machine and earn my 30 pieces of silver and contribute to the "great sucking sound" that is chiseling away and hollowing out the American labor market. So I quit that job on principle and foolishly believed I could find a new job right away. Two months later I got evicted at gunpoint by the LA Sheriffs and have been homeless ever since.

and the cherry on top of it all is that the CEO of that multinational conglomerate offshoring all of the high paying tech jobs to India is Steve Feinberg, CEO of Cerberus Capital and one of Trump's best buddies who Trump appointed to audit the entire US intelligence portfolio.

If I had to do it all over again and quit my job to protect American software developers and become homeless for it, I would do it again without hesitation because I did the right thing. Somebody needs to stick up for the American worker. We can't count on help from phony politicians on both the Left and the Right, nor from greedy billionaires.

You can't stick up for the American worker while starving on the streets. So in relation to your last paragraph about theoretical do-overs, I would argue that keeping the job until you actually have a replacement lined up would be the wiser choice both for your wellbeing and the potential to have a greater positive impact for others.

Of course in hindsight I realize that resigning was the dumbest decision ever, although there were others factors involved beyond the offshoring experience that I described. It was a company with a toxic culture that created too much stress over little things that shouldn't matter. I resigned as a pre-emptive measure because I had a good sense that they were about to fire me, because I had went straight to the CTO and told him that I was uncomfortable with picking which of my coworkers to fire. Then I found out from him that the offshoring plan was his idea all along, and that the consulting company I was contracting for had been brought in by him to take the blame for the plan. They moved me to 3 different teams in less than a month. That's a clear signal in corporate bureaucratic culture that they are building a case to fire you, by putting you on already late projects and under performing teams.

But I don't look back and say "well, I dug my own grave by resigning, therefore I deserve to suffer the consequences." Nobody deserves to be long-term homeless in the wealthiest country in history.

Where your self-pity needs to be stopped. "No body needs to be homeless in the wealthiest country?" Dude. People are poor all over the country in most places. If you just drive you will see shantys in 50% of all cities. Don't go to that part of town! Your dev skills should put you on the fast track to being on the top again. Hang out there until you feel like you will always have a home, then build your company.

poverty is Universal, therefore the problem of poverty can't be solved, so we shouldn't try. ok, got it.