Not to criticize you specifically, but I was hoping to get much more general advice from this discussion. There are several million developers in the U.S., how are the bottom 500k of them finding jobs? They're not all using Toptal, Upwork or Wellfound/AngelList. These are very HN answers, which I guess we should expect here.
I don't see how general advice is going to help you, though. My general advice is: update your resume to highlight themes in areas you want to work, discipline yourself to apply to one or two jobs every M, W, and F, and practice algorithms for interviews. I expect that's not going to be very helpful for you, though, since I assume you're already doing that.
The general advice I was hoping for was about hiring for jobs at the lower end of the market, since the jobs I've been applying to have been inaccessible to me. For example I asked a month ago at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33696004 regarding "regional trucking companies and retail chains", "How are these companies trying to find employees?" I would really like to have a discussion on how hiring works for these companies because I'm definitely open to that work, updating legacy line-of-business or payroll software or whatever it happens to be.
I agree with your other advice, though I recommend that anyone seriously searching apply to many more than five jobs a week.
