I am in this exact age group, and my circumstances are almost similar. I got lucky, my family is very close knit so I'm able to live with my mother, and up to 3 relatives have given me opportunities to move in if my mother couldn't handle me playing parasite.

I made the dumb mistake of going to a small private college for CS. There were only 2 professors in the department and at most around 8 seniors, so we had an insanely good professor to student ratio. Problem is, the career center had no connections in the tech industry and as a result I have been trying to solo my way into a software job having graduated in 3 years with my bachelors with a 3.3 gpa and no internships since the year I was planning to have one in the summer, I found out I could graduate early so I took the chance.

Then I found out almost every intern opportunity requires an active .edu email or some other validation to show you are an active student. So I'm in the awkward position where I'm working on FOSS projects whenever I can, while playing homemaker for my mother to "earn my keep", and trying to get a leg in.

But the real getter is that I am not some rock star coder. I'm not really good at it, at all. I don't have great recall of the myriad of algorithms (I know what A* is, but would have to Google a proper implementation). Same with with a spline or a rope. If I write software, I usually end up spending a few hours on ~300 lines just debugging it into a working state with a standard library reference open the whole time. I understand the languages I use - I can write regexes, I know locks, etc, but I usually just hit some gap in my knowledge snag that gets me caught up for a while. For example, I was trying to use Python subprocess to do some calls into nvidia-settings and various other fan controllers(I was writing a script to intelligently control my machines fans since the default Linux fan controls kind of suck). Took me 3 hours to figure out that the best way to get standard out was to use subprocess.check_output because temp files as pipes didn't work (at least for me).

So all my interviews so far have basically gone the same way - I don't produce perfect code from memory, and as a result I don't get consideration (there are more reasons than that, but I get the impression), especially without any past employment experience and only 2 personal projects (which are really just scripts) across github and gitorious. I also have an awful personality most people can't relate to - I'm an introverted cynic. Even if I can try to fake behavior around others I always crack and act like myself again at some point. I have a really hard time making small talk and being chummy, for example.

So I can relate to the large portion of the population that isn't an Elon Musk super-genius entrepreneur or some John Carmack coding god whose every line of code reads like prose that five hundred years from now professors will read off to CS students like Shakespeare. I'm not even particularly average, because I have very little concrete experience - I just have a gigabyte of source files for homework and projects from school, a few commits to various FOSS projects that changed a line or two. I'm trying to make something I can show off but I lack the imagination to come up with something novel that I can realistically build by myself in a month or two (since I'm always worried I might end up just like the kids in this article, out on the street).

Sorry for the rant, I just feel like the guy two posts up is kind of lucky to be talented.