[brundolf]

Can I ask what country you're in? I'm in the US and my experience suggests the exact opposite of nearly every point in your first paragraph

Programming jobs here are plentiful, you should never work for free, your very first job might be a little harder to get than later ones but it won't be hard. And listing things like "tabs" and "pagination" on your resume feels really desperate, like you're scraping the bottom of the barrel to pad out the list as much as possible. The closest thing I would suggest is to maybe list some specific frameworks like React or Redux (or the equivalent for your area); though even then it's not really for the technical recruiters, it's for the imprecise algorithms that sift through the pile

[thorwasdfasdf]

Well, I started my career in the US durring the dot com bubble bust when absolutely no software engineer could get a job no matter what they did. this no doubt informed my views on the subject.

But, even now, I thought it would be harder to get a job as a junior role than senior. As a hiring lead, 5 years back, i remember, we could have our pick of just about any overqualified intern we wanted. we got one guy who already had 1 to 2 years of work experience, just so he could be hired as an intern and he was awesome.

As for being detailed. mentioning implemtations isn't just about padding out. It's about providing an accurate picture of what your experience is. It's not enough to simply say "i am intermediate JS experience". that doesn't tell the interviewer much. furthermore, most people aren't very accurate at rating themselves. overconfident people think they're experts and experts with no confidence under-rate themselves. by mentioning implementations and specific experiences, it allows the interviewer to more accurately guage your level of expertise.

[brundolf]

Fwiw, I graduated in 2014 with a CS degree from a mid-tier college with a mid-tier GPA, and I had multiple competing offers lined up months before I graduated. And the market has only gotten hotter since then. It's probably harder for someone transitioning from some other field/coming out of a bootcamp, though I've known people from bootcamps who had similar experiences to mine. Not all of them, but several of them.