What courses should i do do have a job in apple,microsoft etc?

Why can't I find a new software engineer job?

• edit: Should I get back to college in order to get a Computer Science Degree? I came from a tough childhood and  grew successful very fast in the early 2000, right with the internet  boom. I got a job at this fancy Internet Company and was involved in  pretty complex and important projects and was earning a good living at  around age 20. But after 7 years in the same company I got bored and  without prospects. I tried to go to night school (usual in Brazil) to  get a Bachelor degree in Computer Science, but either the courses were  too hard or to easy or I was too tired to learn anything. After amassing  some serious money (enough to buy an apartment in one of the fanciest  place in Sao Paulo) I decided to go back to a "real" college, the best  one in town. Having a shaky background in high school  physics, math and the like, the possibility of entering a Comp Sci or  Comp. Engineer degree was out of reach, so I decided to go for  Meteorology. There, they said, I would learn lots of physics, calculus  and computer simulation. There I went, and boy how I suffered.  Everything was above my head. But after one year I got in track and got  my degree in 4 years, learned a lot of math, some computer simulation,  etc. I suffered so much that I was diagnosed with clinical depression  and have been in meds and going to the shrink since them (some 7 years  now), improving only very slowly. I think my situation worsened by  realizing by the middle of the study course that Meteorology held little  job prospects or prospects for my life, since now I believed that my  calling was math/computer science (I tried even to change majors, and  got accept in the #1 place for the the Comp Sci dept, but I chickened  out....) Nevertheless, I was really focused on following a  career on the academia and since you had to move towards a PhD to be  considered, I stayed in the Meteorology dept. and run for a masters. I  hated every moment, but I managed to get the degree after 2,5 years. Zap  it to 2011. April, 2011. I was running out of money. Everything I saved  from my old job at the internet company went down the tube. I got some  easy and fast freelancer jobs in and out, but now s*** got serious. The  next month I wouldn't be able to pay the rent and my scholarship would  be gone. I started to frantically  look for a new job. After so many  years in college, I really didn't want to go back to my older company,  doing the same Front-end stuff I did as a kid - the job was a bore and  promised to never come back there. After looking for some time, there I  was again, at my old company. The only job I could land in town.... 2013,  I did more than 30 job interviews for software engineer jobs, I got 3  offers, but none of them pinned out. I was looking for entry level jobs  in areas I wanted to work with: server-side engineering, big data, game  dev, math simulation (jobs that I hoped my degrees would be of avail).  Every single job interview went like this: talked to a HR person, got  approved, talked to a software engineer, got quizzes about arcane  computer science subjects (like listing the errors of the HTTP protocol,  bits in a byte, to cite libraries of language I just said I haven't  worked with for a while, OOP design, etc), with 5% of these interview  asking me to actually code anything, and I blew every single one of  them. Ok, if I got to the coding stage and the interviewer didn't like  it, so be it... but flunking in a quiz interview, that was heart  breaking. and here I am. I really don't know what else to  do. I hate my actual job and company and it seems that I'm stuck with  it. Friends with a much lesser college 'pedigree' are fairing way better  than me and I'm starting to feel hopeless. I don't want to get back to  college and get a Comp Sci degree, since I don't think the returns will  be much greater right now... I'm attending coursera/udacity classes,  getting good grades, but things are changing slowly. As I'm getting near  my 40's, maybe a management degree would do better, but engineering is  my passion.

• Answer:

  Reading your story, I see times when it says you're confident to the point of possible arrogance in some parts, and at other times crippled with self-doubt.  It sounds to me like it is possible that you're not getting the jobs because you don't interview well.  You need to find a quiet confident air for interviews.  A good interviewer won't throw you out for not knowing whether an HTTP 302 is a permanent redirect or a temporary redirect.  But you have to be able to talk about why it is or isn't important to know which is which, or what the difference is, or how you'd look up the answer, or how your favourite programming language codes those differences, etc.  In other words, not knowing the answer isn't a failure, it's an opportunity to explain more about yourself and who you are and how you think.