I have been trying for years. I fail at everything. The thing is this, just knowing how to program and do DOM manipulation isn't good enough. You need to have a stack/framework or 5 that you know like clockwork and as intuitively as a language. I thought by now I would know enough but its really going to be another year of learning node/express/mongoose/mongo/jade/programming patterns/web apis/authentication and god knows what else before the 'big' $20hr checks come rolling in. Seriously , if you don't have enough 'intuitive' understanding of a stack coming into it then you're dead before you've entered the door. Learning a stack is like learning a new language. I have written in PHP but trying to learn CakePHP or any of the other PHP frameworks is a large time investment. I tried Rails and plopped. I've now finally settled on node with express but learning mongoose, ajax w/mongoose and jade in conjunction with api's and storing dom id's and whatever else takes time as building muscle memory is the only route to employment. When I was younger I use to play with drum machines and electronic music equipment a lot and knew certain pieces of it like the back of my hand. The only way I see myself making any real money is to learn a stack literally as well as I knew that music equipment when I was a kid. That means striving to know every granular piece of it....and that takes time.
You don't. You need to set reasonable expectations and approach a coding job as a "new" task instead of one you perceive you've failed at - you probably know more than many intermediate developers but it sounds like your ability to ship code is the biggest problem. Being a programmer doesn't mean knowing the entire stack and each and every piece of it, its about being able to pick out whats important to the task at hand.
I've run into a frequent roadblock in that I always want to know all the elements of what I'm getting into. I'm finding that in MOST cases its not important at all, until you're architecting a new system. Leave that to senior level folks for now, just find a place you can fix or work on UI elements or clear bugs - theres no need to be so stressed about a programming job, just reach for a branch that you can grasp firmly.
