90k a year is totally doable for medium-experience software in principle, but in southeast Michigan I'm much less sure. The salaries are laid out differently.

For those coming into the industry from outside, the real questions may be less about what you're capable of programming, and more about your wisdom in producing code that works well with other code and with the realities of failure. It's hard enough to get a good sense of how much of that wisdom you have even when you are a software engineer...

Do you have X number of years of non-programming related roles on your resume? Do you list the year of your college degree? These things might signal your age/over-experience/lack of programming experience enough to get your resume culled.

There's also the fact that most jobs are looking for exact matches rather than someone smart enough to get up to speed on their tech stack. So they want to see X years with Y technology. If you're coming from a different field it can be hard to check those boxes.

Getting your foot in the door is the first step. It’s helpful to have a good presence on LinkedIn and not ignoring recruiters even if you think they sound clueless. Getting a referral helps a lot too. That got me interviews with Google but Microsoft, Faceboook and Amazon were all either applying online or responding to recruiter spam.

I’m finally about to jump to a big tech company but up until now I worked for a small company on the east coast and don’t have a blog or any public projects on GitHub.