Moving to "Breaking In" forum, since it seems to be a better fit for where this discussion has been going.
This industry is so ridiculously cut throat and unforgiving, that it's amazing that people are so willing to tolerate it. That's my opinion of both gaming and non-gaming companies alike.
Welcome to real life.
This is true of ALL professional fields. Look at doctors or lawyers or politicians or actors or accountants or any other professional to see what a high profile screw-up can do to your career.
It can be difficult, and I want to be sympathetic. I know, I've been there. Layoffs are common in tech industries. Often there is no fault involved and very little notice (unless you happen to be watching the right things at the right time, or overhear a whispered conversation). One day the entire team is called into a meeting and the bomb is dropped: you are all now unemployed.
It is very hard, painful, and can take months and sometimes even years to recover from the psychological blow. But life goes on, and as difficult as it may be, you need to find (or create) a new job.
1. Gaining Experience. We're all familiar with the most common catch 22, right? No experience == no job, and no job == no experience.
Yup. This is universally true. The answer commonly is to look for soft skills, for applicable transferable skills, for non-obvious experience, and for non-professional experience you can highlight.
2. What Counts as Experience. Another thing I learned is that virtually nothing that's done outside of the professional world counts as experience.
Yup. You could learn this the easy way by reading on career sites and job-hunting books, or you can learn it the hard way as you did.
You list some specific projects you did. Be sure to mention those since there is a point where hobby projects reach the magnitude of professional projects. To many employers these projects do carry some weight, but obviously an unreleased incomplete hobby game carries much less weight than a completed professional game.
3. Experience == Skill? After my resume began to get bloated with QA positions, as stated earlier, I'm seen as an average manual tester with no real technical skill beyond that.
Employers are trying to answer two questions during the hiring process:
1. Will you do the job well?
2. Will you fit in?
That is all.
Your experience is strong evidence to both of these. If the experience you show them is that you are good at QA tasks, then you show evidence that you can do a QA job well. It seems you are are looking for a PROGRAMMING job, so you need to provide evidence that you can do a PROGRAMMING job well.
4. Keeping Up. ... As far as performance goes, sometimes it was my own inability to stay focused on non-coding tasks, so I can blame myself for this pattern in some places, notably my first two positions in the industry. The 2nd two were a bit more ridiculous. But enough about that. These are things that I probably could have had more control over in one way or another, if I had been a bit more mature. The rest I'm about to mention is out of my hand(s) for the most part.
It may seem odd to some people, but in the professional world it is not only important to be productive, but also important to SEEM productive. Managing other people's perception of you is critical to success.
You can be highly productive and you can be finishing a lot of grunt work. But if your managers and co-workers look at your history and see a messy desk, constant struggles, complaints, or some high profile item that was not managed well, they will not think positively of you. All those tiny successes you keep to yourself will be invisible. It doesn't matter how good you are at grunt work if you complain and moan and only find problems.
Others can be moderately productive, but focus instead on finishing the high profile work. They can ensure that when a big task is complete that those around them know the work is done. They can be mindful of what they say, projecting a positive attitude. That does not mean being a "yes man" who agrees with everything, but it does mean understanding there is a time and place to go with a plan and invest heavily in a positive appearance, and a time and place to point out flaws within plans.
5. Pay and Worth.
As many people have written on many career sites and books, and I've pointed out in many posts, salary is not what you are worth. Salary is what you negotiate.
I have seen people with similar skills and similar work histories with radically different salaries at the same company. Some of them come in during a hiring glut and then don't bother negotiating pay, accepting the initial low offer made by an employer. Others are hired when their specific skills are needed, and through skillful negotiation are able to work out a salary package far better than their peers. As a side note, two groups tend to not negotiate pay very often: according to several studies women only negotiate their pay about 1/3 of the time even though in other situations these same people are excellent negotiators; the second group who rarely negotiate their pay are individuals don't value their work or feel inadequate or have low self worth, many entry level game developers fit this group and inadvertently lower the value of the entire field. Understand your worth to the company and negotiate hard for your salary.
6. Cheapest Person Possible. Employers want to have the best employees for the cheapest payroll.
Yes and no. Employers want a good team that can make a lot of profit. Most businesses understand that seemingly highly productive individuals, seemingly positive individuals, and those with other strengths are very often worth a higher cost.
7. References. I tried to tell them that this was only once, and at an ON CALL job with a very high turn over rate, so there was no way I could provide a valid reference because not only does that test lead not work there anymore, I never knew his name either.
Yes, sometimes that happens. Keep applying at other companies.
The general advice (although it doesn't help here) is to just give them the name of the company and the name of the individual. A reply can be short and simple: "My manager was {name}. I have no idea if he still works there. That was many years ago and we have not kept in touch." Let them contact the company that used to employ you. Most likely they will only get the minimum required by law, just the dates that you were employed and if you left on good terms.
8. The Interviewing Process. Now this is what really bothers me. The one thing I hate most is actually getting a job.
Everybody hates it.
Those who keep up with literature know that even the most skilled interviews are only slightly better than a random selection.
Reading the rest of your comment, it seems like you misunderstand the purpose of the interview. You are not interviewed to be selected.
You are interviewed to be rejected. The employers are looking for any reason they can find to remove you from the job pool. Since the employer already knows that they could probably get a good candidate by just selecting someone at random, they are looking to bias the pool in their favor by shrinking the pool by looking for any faults they can find and eliminating them. Looking for any traits they think might be an issue, look for any attitudes that remind them of any bad attitudes they have seen, and remove them from the running. It is nothing against you personally, it is just the way the process works.
This is why you must interview at lots and lots of places. Keep hunting. The job hunting process looks like this:
No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. Yes.
There is nothing against you personally, it is just that they have a single job opening and one hundred applicants. Keep applying and eventually you will reach a yes.
9. Continuous Long Term Unemployment.
Yes, it is an unfortunate bias. It goes back to the comment above about the two things employers look for. The reasoning inside the employer's mind is that if other people have passed over you for so long there is probably a reason for it.
There are several great solutions for getting over that.
You already mentioned that you do contract work. You can fill that with many kinds of small projects, even volunteer projects.
Many small businesses will overlook employment gaps. Look for small businesses rather than big businesses.
Network. Make friends at a company. The majority of jobs are filled by direct placement by someone you know. I used to have the stats offhand, but no longer have the exact number; the majority of jobs are 'found' by somebody who knows somebody. You are far better off working your social networks, your facebook friends, your friends-of-friends-of-friends. One hour of working the social network is worth about ten hours of hunting job sites and direct applications at various companies. The individual has an incentive to paint you positively because usually they get a small recruiting bonus, you have an incentive because it gives you an 'in', can usually bypass most HR filters, and can often negotiate better pay.
A peaceful life in the mountains of western Hungary is sounding nicer and nicer by the day.
I'd go for my own personal island in the Caribbean surrounded by enormous piles of money, but I totally agree with the thought.