I worked at IT department of Intel for 6 years.
Then for about a year as a DevOps.
Then for 3 years as JS developer at a startup.
Plus few open source contributions and side projects.
I wasn't strong in Java or other fundamental languages.
==
That is my skillset
Then it's equally fair on part of your employer, which is interviewing for a software dev position, to consider as relevant experience only those where you actually did software development...
It is a little misleading in this context, even 25 years of experience doing IT often won't clearly mean you have the right skill set to be SDE2 (and vice versa).
So it sounds like the role worked primarily with Java? I guess I can see why IT for 6 years plus 3 years as a JS dev wouldn't really prepare you for that and why, as a result, you would get slotted into an SDE1 role (hopefully with the expectation of ramping up quickly and making it to SDE2 in relatively short order). I'm not sure I understand why such a role would be interesting to you, though.
