I've been back in the job market since the beginning of the year. I've probably sent out well over a hundred resumes (definitely over this number since I was keeping track until recently). I had a brief respite when I picked up a temp contract but that only lasted about a month.

I mostly get just rejections. I have over 15 years of experience. I literally know how to build out every part of a normal web/api stack.

I even have an active ongoing project I've run for 13 years and have scaled to support a couple million requests a day.

Nothing seems to matter.

I have maybe managed to get one actual call a week for the last year where I actually speak to someone from the company. And even then, it's been one "thanks for playing" response email after another.

I honestly don't know what to do. I've never had a problem at least getting interviews to the point where I'm at least in the consideration process.

I need help.

I revised my resume a few times and that hasn't helped. I've gotten more involved with LinkedIn and I get more noise but still low results.

I'm basically getting very desperate.

DevOps/Software Engineer with 20+ years experience. ~100 applications this year, a good number of interviews, but no offers yet. (2.5 calls this week scheduled)

It seems I either get:

- proto-startups with ~5 people and no concrete revenue stream, or

- 5k-person enterprises who want someone with a very specific skillset

Both are fine, but they're picky... as am I, so I'm doing my own consulting for a bit.

What happened to startups? What happened to the thousands of 50-300 person companies who need tech work done? The other day a headhunter called me... because they were bored! Rather different from last year when they were juggling 4-5 excited companies in front of me.

Given my experience, I'll be giving a "Fast Developer/Startup" class to a number of companies. That'll turn into a day-long workshop that will be very valuable :)

Strategies:

- DON'T TAKE IT PERSONALLY

- find roles on e.g. LinkedIn, but _never_ do "fast apply": go to the company's site and apply directly

- use a "highlight positives/negatives" tool to draw certain words in a web page different colors. By interactively seeing a mass of green (or orange) you can quickly make a YES or NO decision on a role. I adore the Chrome plugin Highlight This -- https://highlightthis.net/

- apply for jobs on a schedule (e.g. Mon-Wed-Fri), don't just struggle for hours at a time, it's soul-sucking.

- do Studying (job-related tech) interspersed with Fun Programming (generative art!) -- have fun!

- take care of your health and family, go outside and take walks

- DON'T TAKE IT PERSONALLY

Anyway, for what it's worth, I've heard it is increasingly difficult for experienced devs to get jobs now. I know that my team has more or less had a hiring freeze for about 18 months now, even though the company is doing better than ever.

Based on nothing more than headlines I've read, it seems the CEO class got spooked about the economy last year and hasn't eased up yet. It doesn't help that interest rates are high, which typically bodes poorly for tech(despite megatech having plenty of cash right now due to a number of factors, along with debt held at mostly low, fixed rates). Many, many smart folks thought the economy would have died last year. My guess is that we are largely avoiding it thanks to near-record levels of debt-based federal spending(govt debt more or less becomes an asset to private sector). If high rates force the feds to cut spending(unlikely, given war and going into an election year), I think we'll see things cool quickly, but barring that I'm not so sure the economy is going to crash anytime soon. Some sectors, yes.

After the interviews, I was told I was going to be offered a lower level role instead. I met with the hiring manager and expressed disappointment, saying it felt like a step backwards from my previous job, and I wanted to understand the new lower level role in more detail

What followed was one of the most surreal conversations I've ever had: he assured me that I would have the exact same set of tech lead expectations and responsibilities we originally discussed, just without the staff level title or pay.

Obviously, I rejected the offer.

I’m probably doing something wrong. I’ve likely made 50 applications at this point. 10-15 were earlier on and went well; I had around 5 roles to interview for and 3 went to final stages. One was a no, the other took too long, and the other was an offer. Things seemed to be going alright and the offer wasn’t great, so I kept at it.

Of the 30ish applications since, I’ve had 6 responses. 3 no, one bad interview, and two upcoming interviews I don’t feel too confident in. I’m well suited to everything I apply to, but sometimes you can just feel it. I don’t think these companies will see me as a good fit.

I’m about to ramp it up quite a bit and apply more and more often. Unfortunately I’ve been in the midst of a big move, so finding time to sit and focus on job searching hasn’t been easy. Fortunately, I’m done moving. Here’s hoping it goes well.

I haven’t extensively tapped my network for referrals, but I get a bad vibe from those, too. I’ve hit up about six folks and they all came back empty - no opportunities, even though they’d like to work with me again.

The only success I’ve heard is from folks grinding it out and playing the numbers game. It’s an employer’s market.

Edit: some data: Seven months, dozens of applications, four interviews. Two interviews were from applications, one from a recruiter cold-call, and one from networking. Applications to interview was about 4 months. Three were EM positions, one was senior engineer. Got through all rounds and was rejected at the end.

Fun fact: I have a canary in my resume that will normally raise a clarifying question during an interview. One of ~20 interviewers caught it. Hard to put effort into a resume when few people seem to read it.

I get a lot of 3rd party recruiters that seem to follow a similar MO: the recruiters are all people with south Asian names, calling from US numbers (I'm in Canada), with a vague job description, they want to hire me hourly, and they are cagey about the company that they are hiring me for. They ask for my CV, my work status, and what "project" I was on. They don't really seem to consider getting hired full time, they only talk about contract work. I have never progressed with them beyond giving them my CV and an authorisation to "represent" me (letting them act as a middle man).

At least for senior data leadership roles, I’ve hit a lot of JDs that were clearly written for one person (either internally, or the random Meta/Google/whatever layoff that this company is sure will take a 75% salary cut for). Networking has been really invaluable. ATS systems seem slightly more inscrutable than when I was looking two years ago (wonder if there’s some weird effect from LLM-enabled resume spam).

I dunno, it’s not horrible, but it’s definitely worse right now than I remember it in the last five or six years.

PLEASE stop applying to jobs that make you jump through stupid hoops or answer stupid questions that dont need to be asked on applications. Every person that applies and answers these questions are just helping to standardize their use on applications, and it needs to stop. Theres so many that i cant even think of a good example right now, but you know the questions im talking about.

Employers, please stop asking these stupid questions, and 100% double check what youre asking is actually allowed. Ive seen at least two places, recently, asking questions that im pretty sure could be considered discriminatory. Ive seen others asking stupid useless questions like "what would be your superpower" you know what mine would be? The power to make the hiring process not feel like a shell game filled with bullshit traps and gotchas.

Surviving only thanks to a food pantry and a house I bought for 30k$ in East Cleveland. Doing some upwork and garden work so that I can pay for utilities and taxes.

I touched up the resume a little bit but otherwise I'm not doing anything a whole lot differently. I was almost allowing myself to quit this ass job if I instead got some vendor certs, but I'm increasingly concerned that a decent job market might years away, not months, so the suffering continues. :)

Then I attended meetups when I wasn’t applying.

I worked harder getting a job than I am working this current job.

One quickly came back telling me that they did not do what I was applying for at the location I was applying at. Would I be willing to move for the job? No.

One invited me for interviews which I messed up.

One offered me a job after a first interview.

Then I stumbled upon a perfect match job description. Applied, went through 4 rounds of interviews and got the job.

So 2.5 out of 4 applications.

I've been at the same company for 15 years. Last year we got a new line manager and he is a bully and makes a lot of our lives miserable, recently he started targeting me. I thought it'd be fine because I can move on with my experience but because of the market I feel trapped and I've now got depression from the stress and being unable to sleep. I take pride in my work and put in more hours than the team but there is no pleasing him and upper management don't care because they love his reports.

Unfortunately even if you feel like your resume is super strong, getting a job now requires to literally excel in every single step of the interview and having the luck of having the team feeling you as a perfect fit for the team. Even a single meh would mean instant rejection. There are literally too many great people in job search and companies aren't certainly in a rush to close their openings.

My perception, and my network seems to confirm this as well, is also that the rate of new opening has slowed down significantly, which means that things are getting harder. I really hope that the market will recover soon for everyone.

On a related note, now it could be the right time to leave your job and create an opening to searchers if you want to have a software business with upfront development time investment. A lot of great businesses get the ball rolling in a recession. If things don't work out, you will probably face a better market on the way back, and your product has a higher chance of hitting a good market when it's ready.

I think that the low hire rate comes down to more competition, plus some larger companies maybe have zombie hiring processes where the effort to hire someone continues, but if they find someone the funding disappears.

I've been trying to supplement with consulting, but I don't have any experience selling myself in that way so progress has been slow. In the meantime I am looking ay it as a good investment to get some experience on that front.

Same number of applications this year. I’ve been ghosted, told my skills and experience don’t match salary expectations or level of seniority, and at times not made it past the initial application due to some short tenures on my CV.

I haven’t used any one specific strategy. I’ve been networking, reworking my CV to better present my experience, and building a small personal website to talk about some projects.

It’s a more competitive market for sure.

If you just have a security clearance and high competence with fullstack web you need to know what you are doing well to be competitive but should have no problem landing interviews. These positions are constantly getting candidates for interviews but none of the candidates are competent enough even with consideration for the big stupid frameworks carrying most of your job.

Even better is that security clearance positions appear to pay better if you aren’t already making Bay Area money.

My learnings:

* Applying directly to companies results in a failure to receive a response about 100%.

* GitHub repos need to be ridiculously simple or solve a common already solved problem or they are probably doing you more harm than good (scares people away).

* If you have a LinkedIn profile ensure it’s fully updated, lists all your credentials, and uses only your legal name.

* You stand a vastly superior chance of landing interviews using third party recruiters. They get paid on commission and may not understand the technical considerations of your job but then neither does the client HR or sometimes the hiring manager at the client. That means the job requirements tend to become a qualification checklist.

* At some point you have to make a forced decision between dicking around with arbitrary tools/frameworks or continuing to be unemployed. Keep in mind you gain superior competence by not wasting time on the tool nonsense and you need to be more competent than the next guy but you also need enough time with the nonsense to land/pass an interview.

got laid off again in May and took a break until September, which of course seemed to be the worst time for my industry. calls were extremely slow in September but I still got a few. got a more typical recruiter reach out in October. More early rejections than last time (i.e. past a recruiter call but not past the first team call), but IDK if that's more on my roles (I am being pickier than last time) or the current state.

I did get a LOT more auto rejects than before. I feel like I applied to more roles this time despite a narrower selection, so I don't know if that's simply a more representative result compared to last year or not.

I seem close to an offer I'll take but I have 3 other interviews to go for if it falls through. so, hopefully it ends with 2 months of job searching, which is about as good as last time. I took a break since I got laid off twice in 12 months and didn't want to rush to a new role like last time, but I probably would have accelerated my options if I knew it would get this bad this quickly.

The concept of "make six figures" while "working at home" makes literally zero sense to me, except with an image of a young `1337` coder abusing way-too-much speed performing back-end programming. I would love to provide my technical background to [perhaps project] management, but honestly have no github nor online coding examples to cite.

I can "program" an Arduino, by changing others' code/variables [but make it do things I want] — that's about the limit of my coding abilities. I am done with physically building houses IRL. Thank god I have enough savings to last a decade+, but I need/want to be using my brain to problem-solve [behind a computer screen].

I don’t mind interviewing, I just hate the pressure and uncertainty of job hunting in general. Just give me some work to do, already.

[1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36903624

I recently made a new business partner while interviewing for a position in a company that was just all sorts of wrong. The office manager listed for marketing but the guy wanted salespeople. We ended up hitting it off and now we're working on setting up a few new businesses together. Worked out great. Hopefully I can start hiring some teams, soon, and get some jobs out on the market.

There seem to be a lot of open positions, but I suspect not compared to the number of folks on the market. Big tech just dumped a bunch of folks. “Regular tech” seems to be doing fine.

I changed positions in April. I decided after 15 years at the same company that I wanted to work closer to home so I started looking and agreed to an offer about a week later. I gave a four week notice and the transition was smooth.

There are some fields and sets of skills where I think it might actually be impossible for someone to be unemployed except by choice.

I’m just hoping I can find a way out of the industry before it’s too late.

I'm curious why you're asking though? Wanting to switch and testing the water? Looking yourself and having a hard time?

Will see how the process unfolds, I definitely noticed a reduced variety of roles compared to last year.

There is also the issue of job posts that are not real, in the sense that the company isn't actually hiring. Unless maybe a unicorn drops on them I guess.

Can't help but feel this isn't just SWE. Feels like the world is wobbling for some reason I can't quite place

2 YoE - Cloud Data Engineer - new Job is DevOps Engineer - Location Germany