Now if you want to move up fast, stay focused. Go to udemy and go buy the highest rated courses on your subject of study. Load up some podcasts on your phone. While you're on your commute, listen to those programming related podcasts. When you go home, study those courses. When you step into a job, you want to be a 'go-to' guy. This is how you make your salary move up really quickly. Once you hit the salary ceiling in most places, which is 120 to 150k unless you're somewhere like california or new york, go very hard on your programming. When you hit that salary ceiling, then you can start focusing on other things like opening up your own business or even relaxing.
Also, put your resume on indeed and on linked in and even monster.com. Once you get in with a reputable company, recruiters will be blowing you up, doing everything they can to get you a job. Before I got the job where I currently work at, I had to apply to countless jobs... like to the tune of dozens. Now as soon as I got this job and got a few months in and got to put 'senior javascript dev' on my resume, I literally haven't had to apply to any jobs. Recruiters are coming to me and trying to put me on with different companies. What I will say is having something like a blog, youtube channel and active linked in profile is going to be very helpful. You need to create a sort of 'presence'. Nobody will know how skilled you are if you don't market yourself.
. It ain't gonna be cheap when I spec the bih out though. Shooting for that 4k display, 64GB of RAM, and at least 1TB of storage.
