[google_tvc]

You absolutely nailed it on the head. I am one of these "staff augmentation" devs and it has been bothering me for awhile now. I would love to try my hand at one of these "trendy" startups as a full-time employee but I am pretty much the opposite of what they seem to be looking for:

  - non-technical degree from a local state school
  - 35+ years old
  - only have a couple of years of professional software development experience and most of it as a contractor/consultant
  - not white
  - most of my work is back end bug-fixing, maintenance, being in an on-call rotation, and occasionally integrating some system to some enterprise database
  - buzzwords in my resume (Java, Borg, RPC, Hibernate, SQL, XML, Eclipse IDE, DAO, DTO, etc) probably scares off the young devs because apparently anything remotely related to J2EE or enterprise is evil
  - my real employer is one of those Indian staffing firms

I tried one of those "dev auction" sites (Hired.com) one time. The "talent advocate" assigned to me got really excited upon hearing I am currently a contractor at the BigCo. in Mountain View, CA. She immediately put me up on auction and I guess her enthusiasm got to me since I got excited as well when I started seeing all these cool San Francisco startups viewing my profile.

Then both of us were disappointed when none of the startups were interested. The auction period came and went. I had zero offers to chat on the phone despite dozens of views. She was nice enough to give me another auction round and I went for it. Only a half dozen new views on my profile that time but at least I got one phone interview out of it. The talent advocate was a bit confused by the whole thing and couldn't understand why most of the startups didn't even want to speak to me. She did offer to personally reach out to some of the startups on my behalf but I knew what happened so I politely bowed out of the auction.

So I guess I have this stigma now and I know it's only going to get tougher the older I get. I want to fix this and hopefully move to a full-time product development role before it is too late. Should I quit my job and go back to school? Join a coding bootcamp or "hacker community"? Continue working as a contractor and keep applying to startups on the side?