Is the market bad, or am I having the worst luck job hunting?

It's not a good job market, but it doesn't seem normal to spend six months applying and only get _one_ interview.

It might be worth asking friends or former colleagues, ideally people who actually are involved in recruiting (hiring managers etc) to take a look at your resume and LinkedIn profile and see if there's anything glaringly wrong with them.

Is your resume in a weird format, or is it structurally weird/overdesigned? For instance, a recent trend in resumes was to show (programming) languages known in a pie chart (do not do this; it is nonsensical). In many companies, the text from your resume is going to end up in a standard format anyway; they'll have tools for this and if their tool can't extract your text they may not bother. Unless you're a graphic designer or something, you probably want a boringly-designed resume.

Are you applying jobs for which you are dramatically underqualified? One thing to keep in mind is that some small companies (if you're coming from one) have _wild_ title inflation; a small startup might call someone with 5 and a half years experience their director of frontend engineering, say, whereas everyone else would call that person a junior engineer.

Does anything particularly unfortunate come up if people Google your name? For instance, a real-life version of that Seinfeld episode where Elaine's dating a guy who has the same name as a notorious local serial killer.

I hate to say this, stop applying.

Find a recruiter on LinkedIn. This is what it has come to. There are thousands of resumes being sent at my company, yet the recruiter can't find anyone. Why? Because no one is applying through her link. The regular resume channel is reserved for bots at this point. Contact a person and you have more chances.

As someone on the other side, with open positions we're hiring for:

There are probably fewer job openings than there were, but I don't think my company or anyone in my network have changed HOW they're hiring, but we have definitely noticed a huge uptick in volume of applications. Earlier in the year, we were getting almost nothing. Now we're getting hundreds of resumes a week for each open position, and the bulk of each one of those resumes do not come close to even being in conversation range of the posted JD.

There's just a lot more to wade through from an HR and hiring perspective now, orders of magnitude more. It takes way more time/resources and is way more draining for the people involved.

I think my suggestion is, do what you can to stand out. Don't go overboard or anything, but if you're submitting your resume to an HR software or something, maybe try and find someone in the hiring chain on LinkedIn and email them directly either with your resume or just asking how its like to work there before you submit. Something like this.

I've gotten plenty, though I am a decent bit more senior than you. It's very hard to get an offer right now, but for sure you can get interviews. I think I've interviewed with ~10 companies for positions since June, and all passed on me, but it's mostly because I didn't take the time required to prepare. In hindsight nobody asked anything _super_ hard, but you cannot make a single mistake, or a suboptimal solution, or give the wrong response to a question right now.

I've started grinding leetcode, reviewing system design, and behavioral questions. You MUST memorize perfect responses to regurgitate as fast as possible on the interview. Again, you cannot afford a single mistake in process right now or they will pass on you.

Tech is a really weird place in general these days, maybe we need a hard reboot in the sector, or maybe we should all go do something else with our lives.

Reach out to people you've worked with in the past. After having five years of experience, you should have worked with at least a handful of people who need someone to fix another broken website.

These could be managers, people on your team, people on OTHER teams, vendors, salespeople you've spoken to, anyone.

Ideally, you should ALWAYS keep in contact with people you've worked with, even if it's just emailing them "Happy Birthday!" every year for the rest of your life, but the best time to plant a tree was ten years ago, the second best time to do it is now.

A warm referral is the best way to get a job. It's tough doing cold outreach. Good luck!!!

I believe the market really is just bad right now. When I was job searching it probably took me 3 times as long. I noticed that there were hundreds of applicants per role when normally I'd have noticed less than 20 maybe? Even at my current company they told us that hundreds of people were applying. That's how many you have to beat just to get in the door.

I think it's caused by a number of factors:

(1) Investors are spooked about the health of the economy and are giving out less funding. Less funding = slower startup growth = less hiring for new roles.

(2) Since funding is slowing down startups can't count on future raises as much and are being told to preserving capital. Runway becomes more of a priority = also less hiring.

(3) ''"Covid revenue spikes lead to surges in hiring and lay offs when revenues reversed.'" I've been told it was only non-technical roles but I don't buy it.

I think what happened was companies needed to trim fat to satisfy scared investors and Covid was used as the perfect excuse to make layoffs seem like they were outside of companies control. But everything was about the mentality of scared investors. Investors were literally angry that more people weren't fired... So yeah, this is quite a toxic time to be in tech. But I do think it will stabilize eventually.

I was laid off in August 2022, and it took me 6 months to find a new job. I was able to land a decent number of interviews but I interviewed poorly and didn't get any offers. Doing interview prep actually helped a lot -- now having been on the other side it is very apparent when someone hasn't prepared and practiced interviewing. It really is a skill in and of itself.

I found my current job through the January HN Who's Hiring post. This company doesn't post anywhere except HN. Would definitely recommend that since the August post is coming out soon! This experience inspired me to build a tool that uses AI to match your resume to the best matching jobs: https://hnresumetojobs.com/

Give it a try, maybe it'll help you! Best of luck, it truly is a grind and is emotionally taxing -- but you WILL find something soon.

I tried advertising as a consultancy, after an exceptional career in tech.

* Client emails me asking if I can help with his site. I respond. He asks for more details. I respond. He provides a website with an MLM video on how to "be your own boss and sell a product that sells itself". I was talking to a bot.

* Try upwork. Spend all day to send 15 proposals, get 3 views, no replies. Upwork wants me to pay money monthly for more "connect" points. Looks like you need to do work for nearly free to get ratings, and you're heavily competing with offshore. close tab ... Try fiverr. Get no messages.

* Startup with revenue contacts me, shows me their business, discusses their problems, seems very interested in hiring. Offers $20 - $30 an hour for Cloud security work; software engineering, seems price sensitive to the extreme, doesn't seem to want want to pay for any time spent reviewing docs/analysis, only wants to pay for the execution time. Say no. Guy keeps calling. Guy agrees to higher rate for a tiny amount of hours to be done next-day. Guy doesn't give access, asks to review more stuff. Wasted many hours for no money.

Lesson learned, try to find a fast growing company and stay away from people that sound like they would negotiate on the price of corn kernels in the back alley of aldi

I've had similar issues - so much so that I've created Resgen[0] just because it was tough getting call backs. It turns out I really needed to tailor my resume to each job and it resulted in a lot more call backs.

[0] https://resgen.app

We are getting literally thousands of more or less qualified applicants for most of the roles we're hiring for at Dropbox right now. Can't speak for other places but I imagine it's similar for some. I don't know anything about your resume or qualifications but it very well may not be _you_ that's the problem, per se. As others have suggested I would see who you know places who can pull you out of the pile.

My linkedin views are basically rock bottom and the twice-daily recruiter spam has stopped entirely. From my assessment of my network anyone who lost their job is looking, or has been looking for a long time.

The market is effectively dead. Even if you set your sights extremely low. Even corporate suit-and-tie programmer jobs are drying up. I don't know what I'll do if I lose my job. Construction, maybe. I can't be without health insurance so I am always terrified of markets where it might take months to get a new position.

Rejection email?

You were lucky to get a rejection!

Or an email.

We used have to lick the bosses boots clean, applying for a job paying penny a year, an' if we were lucky we might get a thrashing to within an inch of our lives, and a rejection screamed in our ear.

Luxury....

.

Yes sure, I'm in the same boat, but probably with worse prospects (took a 'career break' to work on side projects, etc), and it feels like I'm boxing in a cloud - 90%+ of applications are just ignored, not even a rejection.

This advice won't help you right now, but when you do find your next role, try take an active role in tech interviewing. It's something I pushed hard to take part in two jobs ago, and it's shown me what good candidates and bad candidates look like, how to interview and how not to bomb the interview in the first few minutes. It's also helped me massively as a candidate.

Same here. 22 years experience full stack; leadership roles. Can't get an interview. Taking an ML class. I think telling some recruiters I had a baby on the way was a mistake.

The market is indeed not the same it was during the past 2 or 3 years. But these last years were abnormally good for IT professionals. Too much cheap money distorted the job market and, if you don't have much experience on how things used to be before that, you may find it difficult to adapt.

Suggestions:

- Try to expand to back-end and advertise yourself as a full-stack. I'd say that many companies are currently in "maintenance mode", putting their new projects in a wait list and focusing on maintaining their existing systems. A generalist developer, able to work on the entire stack, would be more valuable in such cases -- and that would also explain why UI designers are having such a hard time to find new jobs.

- Submit resumes to the "Who is hiring" lists here in HN

- I don't know if that's your case, but anyway. If you live outside US and EU, worked for companies from these regions in the past few years, and are trying to find a similar job now: it's gonna be harder than before. Those are precisely the countries where the cheap money caused the most severe distortions. Too many small companies with very little potential were full of cash and hired tons of developers from abroad. These days are over. Such jobs still exist, as they existed before the pandemics, but are harder to get and the competition is tougher. If that applies to you, I suggest you to start focusing on "traditional", on-site jobs in your country, and keep looking for better, remote jobs while you are employed and less preoccupied.

I posted something similar just a few days ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36876485

I worked as a cybersecurity engineer for 2 years and I've applied for over 300 _entry level_ developer jobs over the last few months and still haven't heard back from most places. It's definitely not just you!

I've heard from family and friends that are still in the tech field that most companies still have a hiring freeze in place and that this will probably stay in place for the remainder of the year, maybe even into Q1 or Q2 of next year.

The best idea right now might be to get _any_ job (even entry level positions) and just hunker down while we wait for the market to recover before we can apply for jobs that are more commiserate with our experience levels.

I decided to go back to school and get my Masters in CS while I wait and I'm also planning on doing some web or app development on the side just to pad my resume a little.

I'm sorry I can't help any more, other than to say that you're not alone in this :)

Just so hopefully this doesn’t come across as insulting and for context, I spent my entire long career as a journeyman enterprise CRUD developer until 2020 working for mostly unknown companies.

What do you think you have that sets you apart from all of the other developers who are looking for a job?

If you can’t answer that question and you are randomly applying for jobs through job portals, it’s no better than playing the lottery.

While I have been working for a long time, I stayed at my second job for nine years and by 2008, I was very much an expert beginner at 34 years old. The only thing I had going for me were soft skills and I was a good “developer”. But I was a horrible “software engineer”.

2008 was the first and last time I randomly submitted my resume to portals. After getting another job and while muddling my way through the recession, I answered every recruiters call, accepted lunch invitations, went to local tech events and built a network.

I got laid off at the end of the last year and had some savings which allowed me to live comfortably for another 6 months jobless. I enjoyed this time, worked on some personal projects, and learned a lot. Eventually ran out of savings and started applying in the spring – the recruiter will set up an interview for you very quickly, so there was no problem on that side, although the quality is low, usually, it is a mechanical interview for X/Y/Z 10000-employee conglomerate looking for 10001st with cosmic high expectations (from a 2007 methodical book), so you have to rely on the quantity a lot to find what you want (it's a good practice anyway). In the end, I was lucky to find my gem by leaving a short resume in an HN "Who wants to be hired" thread :) You never know when and where you will find your destiny – but you can always pull more out of the chance – if you advertise vigorously!

Could you elaborate on how you're applying to these companies?

The highest probability approach to getting an interview is via an internal referral: i.e. someone at the company you want to work at refers you.

After you've exhausted your network, cold emails with a strong pitch to engineers & engineering managers at companies that are aggressively hiring is the best approach to gain referrals.

A couple of friends and I wrote a playbook to help folks land interviews: https://koopuluri.com/get-interviews. We go into detail about what a strong pitch is, how to craft one, and how to effectively cold email.

Happy to help in any way, feel free to reply here / email me (in bio).

I thought I'd add a data point to this discussion.

I'm in the UK and the traditional dev/tech job route was via something like JobServe, Indeed etc., where you see a role advertised via an employment agency and you send your CV hoping for a callback.

I'm in a stable contract so I'm not looking but two weeks ago, I was contacted by two agents, one day apart, both unrelated to one another, completely out of the blue.

The first agent was more like a headhunter-type in that he arranged to "interview" me the following day via Teams to drill into my background and skillset. It lasted about 40 mins. Now, I can say, hand on heart, that in all my 20+ years of work that has never happened. Ever. He didn't have a role in mind, just that he wanted a few good candidates to pimp around to his contacts (CTO's and such).

My experience in the UK has been that you apply for a role you find on JobServe, you phone and chase the agent, and you hope to get through the cattle market, not this US-style agent-works-for-me stuff.

The other agent had a role in mind but he also grilled me extensively. Again, never happened before... they usually ask you about the keywords they're looking for and that's it: call done in 2 mins. This call took over 30 mins.

I asked the first guy what was going on as his style was more like the US system where a recruitment agent will work for YOU, and try to get you a role somewhere, whereas the UK model (unless headhunted!) was very much that the agents worked for the companies in question and acted like a CV-buffer to filter out the crap.

One of the agents hinted that there are a lot of average candidates out there at the moment looking for a smaller number of roles so they are aggressively filtering them before handing over to the clients.

I suspect that there have been a bunch of rejected CV's sent to the clients and they're now wanting better candidates... either that or agencies are indeed swamped in average candidates (not pissing on them, but if you have avg candidates and good candidates, the avg ones will lose out).

Anyway, things are a bit weird in the UK at the moment so I thought I'd chime in.

Remember the FAANG layoffs were huge. You are competing against those folks (you may also be one of those).

https://fi.money/blog/posts/faang-company-layoffs-what-cause...

The market is pretty horrible right now, in my experience. Speak to a recruiter and it should be a little easier to find something. I used to have roughly 1/2 of applications leading to interviews and around 3/4 of those leading to offers but this year had a 20 application dry streak. I think the market is pretty flooded with good talent from the large tech companies layoffs and the number of people going through bootcamps for junior positions too.

Hoping to get an offer in my final interview for a role in 10 minutes!

Things that disqualify CVs straight away for us:

* Unclear if have right to work in country. This needs to be stated up front! Our company can't sponsor visas, so if based in another country unless it says something about the visa status, we basically have to throw it away.

* Poor grammar, spelling, attention to detail on CV. I get some CVs through that are almost unreadable. I'm not saying if there's a single typo then we'd disqualify, but if it's littered with them it shows poor attention to detail and that's quite important professionally!

Things that would make me think twice about interviewing:

* Too much emphasis on stuff that's not relevant.

* Big gaps in employment

* Working for weird companies that show poor judgement in itself. For e.g. - Crypto exchanges, predatory companies, etc.

For what it's worth, I'm in a 'hot' area and my application response rate is something like 3%. I've also had this bad luck where a lot of the larger companies I've been interviewing with have rejected me without giving a reason, and then a month or two later (or one time, the day after the onsite!), I'd see that they were having layoffs.

edit: and just as an aside, I'm a minority in tech, and I feel a bit like I'm more likely to get an interview (some recruiters have told me as much... wanting to increase diversity on their teams) while also more likely to get a "technical rounds were great, but not a culture fit" final decision.

It's really tough for remote jobs. In-person jobs, on the other hand: people are literally reaching out to me (a first in my career) about on-site jobs but it's just not tenable for my lifestyle atm. So yeah I've been unemployed for nearly a year now.

Be careful when batch applying. My company, for example, requires applicants to repeat a code word in the email subject line. Last time we had an opening, it was clearly stated in the job description, yet 90+% of applicants didn't do it. We then sorted them onto the same pile as those guys from India that booked a CV spamming service, meaning no human ever looked at the CVs of people who didn't follow this simple request.

I was laid off in December, a week after a rallying speech from the CEO declaring all jobs were safe.

I was surprised at how difficult it was to get an interview as I have a somewhat unique skillset. But understandable if 50-150 are applying.

It took seven months before I found something, by which point I had to bullshit about the gap in employment (left to spin up my consultancy!).

Agree with some of the comments here. Find a good recruiter who is a straight shooter, they will be able to get you an interview or tell you what you're missing.

I can't speak for everyone, but in the 6 years and 4 companies I've worked for, we have hired only 2 front-end engineers. Full stack is simply what we want a vast majority of the time. So I'm not saying it's impossible to find something but just from a numbers perspective it's just not in demand (I worked at 2 startups and 2 mid-size companies, big tech probably does hire front end devs, but I can't say for sure).

At my last job, I had a little bit of experience on the other side of the hiring table – our founder walked me through our hiring process, and it was really eye opening.

Any posting we had immediately got a lot of responses. We heavily tailored our postings to appeal only to people we actually wanted (e.g. were super clear about requirements, or talked extensively about company culture), and we still got dozens of applicants almost right away. And IIRC that was just through Linkedin, I hadn't even seen how many applied through other channels.

Granted, most of them were mass-sent resumes, but that still crowded any good-fit applicants and made it a pain to look through.

For positions at bigger companies, you could easily be competing with hundreds or thousands of mass-sent applications. Even if a human being ever looks at your resume, she'll most likely make a decision on whether to throw it away in a few seconds before moving to the next one.

At this point I think applying to postings is pretty much dead. Instead, I'd focus on contacting your past colleagues asking if they know of any openings at their companies.

Instead, I'd suggest: - Contact your past colleagues if you hadn't done so yet. - If there are relevant conferences or meetups in your area, consider attending. - Also, look into meetups for groups that might look for someone like you. E.g. if you go to a front-end meetups, you're just another guy in the crowd, but at a marketing or local chamber of commerce meetup there might be only a few people with the same skillset. Granted, this one often works better for freelancing, but still. - A friend of mine found his previous job by contacting people in the field and asking for advice. He moved to a different city right after university, so had no local contacts – I told him to look up people in the companies he wanted to work for, and just message them asking for a short advice call. I think the third person he spoke to recommended him to someone that was hiring. Though the key here was that my friend was only asking for advice on how to get into the industry – but once he spoke with people, it was easy to make a good impression and they kept him in mind next time they heard of an opening.

I’ve been out of work for about a year. I was never a top player in the field, most of my experience has been enterprise work and non tech companies, with some tech companies (including the one that laid me off. I have a bit more YoE than you.

For the first several months, I screwed myself by operating in a 2010s mindset “I’ll have a job in <= 3mo and I can be at least a little picky”. I was not targeting specific companies and looked at both tech and non tech companies.

I was exclusively interested in remote jobs, mostly because I still had a lease and breaking it would be very expensive, as would keeping it and having to pay two rents. Remote roles were also scarce, adding that single filter could significantly cut the amount of jobs I saw.

I did interview for a handful of on-site roles, mostly for practice, and those tended to progress better, but again, they all wanted me to move to even more expensive areas when moving at all was going to be expensive.

After a while though it got worse and worse, my professional confidence flatlined. There were hardly any recruiters reaching out anymore, cold apps went to the void, and the few interviews I did get never made it past the first round. Never got any feedback. The few recruiters I could get were equally useless, usually showing off some roles that I looked like a good fit for before completely ghosting me.

I wondered if my resume was the issue, and had several people, as well as ChatGPT look at it, and got nothing but good feedback with minor nitpicks.

A lot of the jobs I saw within my area of experience either wanted high senior people, or people with very niche skill sets, and apparently they can afford to be picky right now.

Most recently, I’ve had interviews that seem promising and people (family friends) now claiming they can get me a job, but unfortunately this year has battered me, with large expenses left and right My lease is up now, so I’m looking at on site roles, but the rental market is so bad here I’m afraid it’s too late.

One one hand, I was never happy with my career, and now the golden handcuffs are off, on the other hand, I have nowhere else to go, and the shit that matters just keeps getting more and more expensive

The market is definitely bad! Headcount is tight at companies, so they are trying to make each hire count hard, plus the market is saturated with talent (compared to how it used to be) because of layoffs.

Something that worked for me is that I have a profile where I am a domain expert who is reasonnably good at data science and software development. I am no rock star in any of the three fields, but this particular combination is pretty rare. I got my last 2 jobs this way: most applications just got lost, or ended in a meh screening interview, but there was this one job posting in the year that required this mix of skills, and I was just the obvious choice and got hired pretty much without competition.

I am not suggesting that you start a PhD in some obscure domain, but any additional skill can help stand appart from all other generalist front end developers. For instance in my last company we did quite a lot with geographical data, and if a front end dev showed even just the slightest knowledge of geodata (like knowing what a map projection is, or a knowledge of the technologies used to display maps efficiently on the web), he would quickly go on top of the pile. So if the is any domain where you know just a bit more than the average guy, even just as a hobby, I would say that it makes sense to display it on your CV and search for postings that might be related.

When you say "applying constantly", what do you mean? A few years ago, when tried cold-applying to jobs, I had to send several hundred applications to get a few good interviews, and I have a very strong resume (15 years of experience and worked at NASA). During the pandemic, I was hiring for an engineering role at a fairly unknown startup and we had to filter through over 500 applicants and interviewed only 15-20. Now, with LLMs, I imagine those numbers are an order of magnitude worse and applications are looking more and more personalized. A few bits of advice:

- Don't focus your efforts on cold applications, the numbers are against you

- If you must do cold applications, use LLMs to customize applications and aim to send out >50 per day

- Focus on your personal and extended network, reach out personally to people you know and ask them if they have any opportunities they can connect you with. Personal connections are always going to trump sitting in a stack of 1000 cold applications

Supply simply far exceeds demand. Unless your highly specialized, connected, lucky or perceived as a “James Bond”, the employment market is dire.

This is the inevitable consequence of too many entrants into the market, past over-hiring, and a profession where experience doesn’t count and your competing against ever more newcomers with a high IQ, less expectations, and a better ability to “leetcode” and memorize those algorithms and data structures.

Your prospective employers probably get 200 resumes or more for every general position, but of course “we’re hiring” (sic).

I think regardless of the job market situation, the time-to-hire has become unreasonably long and I'm not optimistic that this will change for the better anytime soon.

The trouble with job-hunting these days via web is that the signal-to-noise ratio has decreased dramatically over the years. Being able to apply to hundreds of jobs is a double-edged sword where hiring managers also have to filter through thousands of profiles so now everyone pretty much have to play resume-seo of some sort.

If you admit that you have a slight bent towards entrepreneurship or similar you are out of the door instantly. If it’s somewhere like a YC startup and they realize you’re not young and willing to sacrifice your life, same thing.

Edit: to make that less bitter sounding.

To be more helpful: A resume gap that you’ll casually admit to or honesty in monetary requirements also are instant disqualified status these days. No more low interest rate free for all.

Bots and scams. Housing, dating, job search - these three have become hopeless "marketplaces", hopefully we are at the tipping point and they will collapse. I compile Latex CV for every job application and make an extra effort to apply directly to the company. Every time they have direct one to one communication with an experienced professional with relevant education, and they... insist on digging into inconsistencies and gaps in the CV, search for fraud on my side, ask for salary upfront (ie. "we want cheap" or they simply probe the market for salaries). The market is bad, you have bad luck, the shit's fucked.

The market is bad. I've been unemployed for 9 months, almost no interview invites and the ones I did have led to nothing (also to no alternative hire of someone else for the allegedly position). And I've got almost 20 years of Product Leadership experience, Stanford, Google, myspace, Booking and Trip.com Groups, that stuff. The market (in my case APAC: HK/SG/AU) is shit and frankly not really worth engaging in right now.

I'd love to be employed, but a low IC position (haven't done that in 13-14 years) for 60-70% less pay (the last one who contacted me) is a bit of a tough pill to swallow in a market with (last year) 10% inflation.

Yes, it's awful. I applied to 60 companies and got 3 responses. I have a background in big tech and applied to mostly large and medium sized tech companies.

I’m sorry this is happening to you. The job market is very bad right now by tech standards, but people are definitely still hiring. A few things I notice from my very-myopic view as a backend engineer at a large-ish tech company:

- Hiring has ground to a halt for generic FE developers. The general strategy seems to be that we should have enough FE people to move around to get new features done. No more big UI rewrites that would require an expanding FE dev force.

- Hiring for specific roles is still good, but I guess the applicant spam has gotten crazy bad, and now most hiring moves through direct recruiter interaction and other side channels. We’re still hiring a good number of backend distributed-systems devs, specialized mobile devs, and tons of the ever-popular “ML Engineer”.

- The finance industry is apparently having a great time right now because their recruiters won’t leave me alone. Multiple people we laid off on my team landed at cushy or high paid jobs in banking or finance. All backend engineers tho.

My probably worthless advice would be to start spinning your resume differently and target a new position. I suspect FE rolls are really taking a hit as companies seem saturated. Start reaching out directly to recruiters. If all else fails, consider a career move or even the classic “go back to school to weather out the downturn”. Good luck!

One resource you can look into is specific channels for your skills. For example, if I'm looking for Elixir work, I'll look at the jobs in the weekly Elixir Radar newsletter => https://elixir-radar.com/. And there is also an #jobs channel on the Elixir Slack account => https://elixir-lang.slack.com/

Good luck OP!

I'm outside of FAANGs and the valley and in biotech and formerly DoD.

For us, it's always been 'this bad'. Applying for thousands of jobs isn't too terrible, depending on the economy of course. Covid was a rare bright spot for biotech applications, unfortunately.

My advice is to ditch the applications entirely and go straight to networking. Yes, not exactly the most revolutionary advice here. But, if you;re in that kind of competition/environment, you've no choice but to work your network.

If you've already done that and found no luck, find people at the companies/departments you want to work for and figure out what hobbies/side-projects they do. Then try to make friends and try to get a job through that connection. Yes, it's a lot longer and more fraught process, but it can lead to results. Church or other community based methods are also possible, though it takes longer to build up the network that way.

Outside of that, recruiters/headhunters have been something approaching a way to get a position. Try looking for them online too.

Really though, work your network and don't be shy about it. Let your friends know you are looking for work, don't be embarrassed.

It seems to be bad. I have applied to 600 software dev jobs in 2/3 months and have had around 8 interviews but still no dice.

Reading the other comments, it's wild how different people's experiences with this can be even in the same country. In my experience, in the UK, the availability of types of jobs is dependant on the city and seniority level. London seems to have the most front end jobs for example.

As to how to get hired, although I have succeeded with direct application, recruiters are a very popular way here to get a job, especially in web development.

Finding a recruiter you trust to be working close to your interests is important, but not critical. The best recruitment firms I have found through talking to colleagues and managers. Managers often have a strong opinion on which firms refer the best candidates.

I expect another angle is the type of company you're expecting to get a job at and the compensation level. I've never applied to a FAANG, but I expect all of this advice goes out the window. Perhaps though if it is applying to too-senior jobs that is your problem then talking to a trusted recruiter could be helpful.

I don't know anything about resume scoring services, but perhaps they are flawed in some way? Your CV could be great for applying to certain types of jobs, but not for the ones you are applying for. I can suggest forwarding it on to someone who you look up to, who is able to give candid, honest thoughts on it. For example the company you were working at may not be a prestigious company or the technology you were using may not contain the keywords that hiring managers often are looking for.

You haven't given much information so there are many possibilities as to what is going wrong, including ones outside of what I have mentioned. Good luck.

FED is finished . i would suggest moving into something with higher barrier to entry.

last 4 FED my company hired are ex-sales/ex-whatever bootcampers (yes my company is cheap).

remote working is the final nail.

still few good FED jobs but you have 10,000s expert leetcoders fired by faang to compete.

Applying and interviewing for software jobs has become possibly THE most toxic thing I've ever experienced:

- ghosted by companies if you don't EXACTLY match and 'gel' with their stupid full stack takehome projects to the T

- multiple cases of simply no response

- hours of interview rounds taking my time away, when it's clear they won't take you

The list goes on, there is truly nothing I hate more.

If you have any entrepreneurial tendencies, starting a simple LLC and selling your services to local businesses can be a solid option right now.

Industries outside of VC-backed consumer technology are making money and need technology generalists to amplify their businesses. Just protect yourself with contracts and you’re good to go.

It's not you. The market is really bad. I thought the massive layoffs in the US wouldn't have an effect on me here in Bulgaria but it just took a while to propagate. My LinkedIn spam is just the site looking for engagement, not recruiters.

I was s contacted by Microsoft representatives offering 5000 USD as a B2B. It's that bad.

Feels like my FE days are over.

Just from my own perspective and in speaking with recruiters (UK), I've never seen the job market this bad before. I have 20+ years’ experience, Harvard, senior leadership positions, and long tenures at reputable places. Yet I don't hear anything back from applications I put out (and these are senior positions).

I think one huge factor at play is the move to remote work, before you would compete with the people in your area who had to physically be able to turn up to a location to interview. What has happened is the opening of the gates to anyone in the world being able to apply to that same job, so you now have 500+ applications for roles that would have previously gotten 20. There’s only so much headspace one can give to that quantity of applicants so I suspect the first 25 get a look in and the others go in the bin.

My sense of the Tech industry is almost all the companies just jump to the new flashy hyped up buzz word "Thing". There is no real expertise any more. So its more sensible for companies to hire inexperienced people at a lower salary or offshore.

If you have to learn the "new tech" every few years there is no point of your experience.

Back in 2001 - 2002 I was out of work and it was miserable. I had been doing webdev for 2 years in nyc during the dot com bubble. In addition to looking for work I was also trying to move cross country. I remember days of just spamming my resume out to 40 or 50 new email addresses that I would harvest from monster.com. This got me 2 interviews in 3 months.

I was very surprised in terms of how much harder it was to get interviews compared to just 2 years earlier. During the height of the dot com boom I had arrived in nyc on a greyhound bus and found a job writing java servlets against mysql/postgresql in 3 days w/o any contacts.

Looking back I would have been better off taking any job and reading as much new tech as I could. The long aimless days were as damaging as the lack of income.

The market is bad. Since getting laid off in March, I've applied to 185 jobs. I'm a director, 25 years, and I can only work remotely.

What's new this time around is: + Nobody at target companies will respond to questions (via email or linkedin) + At least 50% of application forms require desired salary (seriously who does this for a director or VP role?); I've dropped my limit by 50k + Radio silence from companies. most never even send a rejection. Very few applications get to screenings. + For some openings, I write some test code up front top demonstrate my interest, and still no bites.

I suspect that TA teams are getting blown up by the traffic, but... for leadership roles, I would expect more careful handling.

I know this is completely off-topic but I am Dutch and never MET anyone that was laid off. Non of my friends, family and even colleague's (and I work in IT-consultancy so I see loads of people). How common is this in America? Is it normal that in your career your are fired at least once?

Market is same as before, here in EU, but people just got a bit more cautious and economy is not exactly prospering with the war and inflation. Hence, a lot of risk aversion and tightened purses. Also, due to sudden spike in interest rates, raising investment(previously you gave a shiny pie-in-sky presentation and got money, now you need to demonstrate demand and having actual revenue and improvement plans etc..) hiring became much more slow and competitive. Also a lot of people left school due to inflation and higher taxes and scrambled to find some work as savings were abysmal due to follow your dream and get rich quick schemes(crypto/social media shills etc).

I think the market is perhaps a little worse for developers, compared to other positions. It might also be localized to certain areas. I'm in Denmark and there is certainly no shortage of SRE/operations types of jobs. So if you know Windows or networking then finding work is really easy, but overall there's a shortage of pretty much everything.

Just the past two months I've gotten four offers (granted two was from the same company), but they are straight up job offers, not asking me to do interviews and I'm an average SRE/operations person.

So I think it depends on the area and whether or not you're want to work for small to midsize companies outside the bigger metro areas. Some of the jobs also isn't that exciting, but it beat doing nothing.

In November I was getting ~10 inbound emails a week from top-flight shops, that had been typical for at least 5 years. In December that was zero and has been since. I was an L7 in ML infra at a FAANG a few years ago.

I did some marquee loops in Jan/Feb, and my “fuck this” point was when I did a coding screen at $KNOWN_COMPANY highly recommended by a former colleague and ended up with a 24 year old in a hotel room on a MacBook Air looking at his phone for 45 minutes and the back channel was that he had flunked my trivial 50-line Python program less than 10 minutes after the interview was over.

After that I was like, I’m consulting for a while, catch you all in 2024 once Powell gets brought to heel for the geberal. :)

It’s not just you.

I am right there with you. And so are several other super senior (10+ years) developers that I know.

A couple years back employers were begging to hire seniors in a heartbeat, now its nearly impossible to get an interview. I am wondering if I should retake the CISSP and just abandon software for corporate security.

Depends where you are and what you're looking for I guess. Here in Poland the market for remote jobs is great.

Of course a big factor is that on average I estimate the rates paid here are half of these in UK/US (comparing my own rates for remote vs on-site).

Also the way you look for work matters a lot. Every market has its specifics. In some locations it's better to send dozens of cv's in the others it's better to have alerts for exactly matching jobs and when they appear phone the recruiter within the first 5 minutes after the ad was posted. I used both techniques with great results.

And the most important thing. Do not give up! And never trust words, unless they are in a form of a contract.

The volume of applications we are getting for our open roles is huge and the proportion of them applying because they were laid off is higher than I've ever seen.

Given that, as you will expect, hiring teams we need to process a lot of applications and make snap decisions. You need to ensure you rise to the top by

- Keeping your CV brief and relevant

- Making it clear what things you specifically did in previous roles and their benefits

- Make it clear (e.g. in a side panel) your abilities and how they match the role you are applying for.

But yes, it's hard. The days of applicants getting ten job offers at once are over for now. At least outside AI and outside of senior positions.

If you must apply via online job applications, definitely change your resume to include as many of the keywords in the job description as you can, while still being truthful. If you don't, the first-level automated filtering will screen you out of the group moving on to the HR department. This is a huge amount of work, but even a little bit of an edge can help.

That said, DON'T go through online applications if you can avoid it. Many of the jobs I (and others around me) have gotten are through their personal network.

Develop your personal network now. Question: When is the best time to plant a tree if you want to enjoy it? Answer: 20 years ago. When is the second best time to plant a tree? Today.

1. Connect to everyone you know personally or have ever worked with on LinkedIn, and use the "Send a note" function to give them a reason to remember you, and say you'd like to add them to your network. Once you've got a decent number of connections (at least a few hundred?), post a "looking for work" type of message with your skills, experience, and interests. Be sincere and not "network-y". Do it with the intention that they might be able to help you now, but you may be able to help them in the future.

2. Reach out to friends and coworkers that you had a closer relationship with, and let them know that you're looking for work in a particular area or field, and do they know of anything available (or companies that fit your area). Friends and ex-coworkers are the best because they can get you right into the HR department or the hiring manager.

3. Do not discount the many people on LinkedIn who currently or recently worked at a company that you are considering applying to (but that you don't know). Sign up for the paid LinkedIn service for a month, and use the ability of paid users to email anyone, to reach out to people who might be in the department of the company that you are looking at. You'd be amazed what information or help you can get from total strangers, just by sending them a nice note explaining that you're looking at the company/department and would like to speak to them for a few minutes to get an idea of the company culture. This is scary for many people (a younger myself included), but I've done it and it works. Most people will give you a few minutes to talk to you. And you could get valuable information about the team/department/manager, that could help you present the side of you that works best in their culture (laid back, hard-charging, early-risers, dog-friendly, tabs not spaces, etc.).

Good luck with the search!

I've been applying too. I've landed tons of interviews about 40 total. Did them all.

All failed but one. It's definitely harder than before. Much harder.

I got failed for the most trivial reasons. There were interviews where I passed and did all the tasks required and the interviewer gave me positive signals like "good job", "talk to you soon" and boom the recruiter told me I was rejected the next day.

There was one where I made it to the final round onsite. Everyone liked me in the onsite. Schooled the technicals with code that worked first run and they canned me because behavioral. One guy (the director who I wouldn't even be reporting too) didn't like my reasoning for wanting to work at the company because I focused on my interest in the technology rather then the mission.

Like literally I just didn't talk about the mission... a specific thing and that was it. Besides that 4 out of 5 people during the final interview told me "talk to you soon" and one told me "I hope we see more of you in the future".

So yeah it's harder, brutally harder not just on the screening but even up the pipeline. I would say my resume is impressive enough that recruiters still contact me and I can make it to a first technical.

I think the people who are getting hired the most right now are people with connections. Who knows who.

How many applications have you sent?

Oh average I send 250 applications in a job hunt to get about three offers, two of which are for positions I actually want.

It's my opinion that in general people don't have a proper expectation for the volume of applications necessary to find a good fitting job. Or dating to find a good partner, for that matter.

Many of my friends often "settle" for the first company that gives them an offer because the job hunt is so tedious and emotionally exhausting. It requires a shifting of a mindset imo: every rejection is not telling you literally that you're not a good fit. First of all, I've met very few people that are good at hiring or evaluating engineering ability, let alone their own engineering needs. So most rejections just come from that lack of skill in that area, they failed to realize or evaluatedthat you would have done a good job for them. Second, it's not a reflection on your ability, it's just that you require 197 rejections to get the three offers. It just takes that. If you settle in for the ride I think it goes better.

I've blogged about this in regards to boot camp grads: https://blog.calebjay.com/posts/bootcamp-job-search/#the-res...

Whenever I mention this people often say that that strategy is too impersonal, that I'm not leveraging warm leads enough, etc. Of course you should also do this. And attend meetups. All the steps, lol. Treat the job search like a full time job.

I will say this round of my job hunt my numbers are off. I'm at 80 resume sends to one call back. I should be at about 20 call backs now. It might be because I'm full remote now though.

Have you considered moving to Europe? Germany, Switzerland, Austria? With my senior salary and depending on frugality I can save between 1000 and 2000 € a month in Austria and have a very pleasant life. If you ask if there is gonna be leetcode bullshit in the interviews, most people laugh in your face because the idea is so alien to us. People want to hear about your authentic experiences and see you solve real world problems / take home tasks. Small no name companies are as desperate for talent as ever, while the banks, insurance providers, retailers, government related entities and consulting companies feeding on them have open positions all year round.

I don't think anyone experienced with fighting on the US software engineering market would have any struggle to get something here. Though it does depend on your expectations: You generally will not get 300k, 200k or maybe not even 100k starting and won't get any name worthy stock options unless you are doing very special things for very special companies.

Second consideration: Have you considered not applying for those FAGMAN level companies and their inflated salaries or overpaying startups, but something boring instead? Government, insurance, banking? In other words, have you considered lowering your expectations and standards?

From the other side of the table, we just went through a few months of interviewing (we're devs) and boy were there a bunch of lemons. We were offering 6 figures for a junior/mid in a low cost of living area too, with 100% remote. Only a few even had the slightest idea what they were talking about when asking questions and they were softballs. One guy was even googling the questions we were asking him. We used multiple recruiters from multiple companies.

We ended up having to pick one because, "it's just a junior, they can learn." We suspect the guy was working multiple jobs because he was hard to reach and wouldn't return messages and calls for a day or two, even when we were letting him go. He was hired as full time salary.

From my experience, the tech labor market is really messed up right now, there are a lot of people who shouldn't be in it. I'm not sure how long that will take to correct. You're not really competing with good people, you're competing with a huge glut of bad people with well written and probably highly embellished resumes. I'm not really sure how to stand out in that type of market.

You did not ask for feedback on your resume (found through your profile), so I hope you won't be offended by my observations. Your resume looks good: format is clean and will probably scan well, you've highlighted your technical skills and kept the list to a reasonable length, and you've done a good job of providing an appropriate level of detail about your past experiences. You probably know all that because the services you have used have told you.

Here are a couple of things that you may not have heard yet. First, I think for now it would be better not to list your intention to start an undergraduate degree in the fall. I think almost any hiring manager would see that and wonder how you were going to be able to balance being a student and settling into a new job. Remember, the point of your resume is to get you an interview, not to give the hiring manager reasons to reject you. Even if you are committed to being a part-time student in the fall, you don't have to put that in your resume. You may feel that showing you are committed to getting a degree will address concerns about education, but hiring managers are selfish -- first and foremost they want to know that you are going to be focused on doing the job.

My second point may not be popular, but I feel I have to bring it up. Your experience and skills, and your stated focus on front-end development, position you in what is essentially a commodity market. There are lots of developers these days with strong Javascript and Python skills. If you want to stand out from the crowd you are going to have to work really hard to differentiate yourself. What particular skills or experience could you highlight that make you a premium resource, and not just a commodity programmer? It might be knowledge of a CMS that is not widely used. It might be practical experience with a very new technology. Maybe it's your familiarity with a particular business function or process. I think you need to figure out what makes you special and highlight it more in your resume.

I hope these thoughts are helpful. Good luck with your job search!

I can only speak to my personal experience of attempting to hire engineers.

We started a hiring 2 weeks ago, the top engineers are taken off the market _before_ we even get a chance to interview them! (usually within 3-5 days).

We had to accelerate our process and nearly double our offers to have a fighting chance. So at least from where I'm standing, the market is pretty aggressive at the moment.

I've been looking for 6 months too, I'd say I've had 5 or 6 that got to the interview stage. Lots of screening calls and nothing much afterwards. Came close 2 twice to landing a job but too much competition. It's a bad market. I have another 2 interviews Monday but I'm dreading one that is like a pair programming test which I get anxiety over just thinking about it. I much prefer take homes but IDK we just gotta keep looking and hope things bounce back I guess.

I got laid off, started working for an unfunded start-up, they ran out of cash. Had to look for other jobs, it took something like two months to find one. I applied to probably the most jobs I've ever applied for whilst on a job hunt. Previous job hunts have taken like... a couple of weeks and I've had multiple offers to choose from. It really came down to one solid offer this time around. Most of my applications were just rejected immediately, without even speaking to anyone. It's easily the worst I've ever seen it. I suspect a lot of jobs are waiting to see if folks laid off by Google/Meta/Twitter would apply, hence why I was getting rejected immediately, having not worked for one of them. Just a theory though... but either way, it's really really tough at the minute. Hang in there, mate. You will get something, it's just going to take a bit more digging this time around.

I have been getting a lot of spam from India or Pakistan trying to sell me front-end or app development for several years now. If people are so desperate they resort to spam, maybe that that kind of job is just not in high demand anymore?

(I have no idea, it's not my area of expertise; just posing the question)

EDIT: I have heard stories that companies keep job offerings open when they are not actually hiring. They want it to look like they are dynamic and on the way up and just can't find good people to hire, when in reality their business is stale, their prospects are grim and the inflation and previous over-hiring has doomed them and what they are really looking for is a Google to buy them out.

In fact I have heard of companies hiring people they don't need because they think that makes them more attractive as a buy-out opportunity to companies who actually do need those people.

Have you tried niching down on a tech stack, an industry, or even the types of teams you want to work on? It's a good way to stand out from the crowd. You might have to turn away more recruiter screens, but it gives you a much stronger profile against everyone else with the companies you have strong fit in.

As a hiring manager, I would say that the job market is still pretty strong for any engineer who can do fizzbuzz on the spot.

However, its now much tougher in the tech-adjacent fields such as graphic design, copywriting, and project management. Not so many openings, many applicants. Even if you get the job, pay and prospects are not great.

I've been mentoring many new engineers and students this past year and there's a lot of people in your position.

Overall, the biggest setbacks are network and a lack of focus in the niche. Frontend developer at a professional level requires a top 5% (roughly) resume to be a competitive applicant.

I live streamed about some of the harsh truths people are dealing with now (not learning fundamentals being one of them) https://youtube.com/live/yNqWwX4jsI4?feature=share

Let me know if you (or anyone) want to discuss this further. There's a lot of ways you can set yourself apart but it's good to understand that we're not in the 2015 tech market anymore. Most people have to have an exceptional resume/network/or a calculated niche.

I can't say about the current market but I got my last job over a year ago by posting on HN who wants to be hired (this month's post is here https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36573869) try posting there on the 1st.

The market is probably not super great, but one interview in 7 months. There's something with your resume or your search.

I went from being contacted once a day to once every two weeks. Market is definitely colder than it used to be. Much colder.

Part of me thinks it's gonna stay like that for some time, some of the weakest profiles may even have to change line of job entirely as the entry level got much higher.

Perspective from a PM who runs a job board - Yes it's hard right now, but the reason why changes depending on where you look.

We saw mass layoffs (https://layoffs.fyi/) at the beginning of the year from what we used to call FAANG companies. Economic fear is a major motivator, but there's also been a shift in investor's mindsets. Growth at all costs isn't sexy anymore - we want to see realized profits. In response, these big names tightened up their expenses. And where you used to be a hot shot for having 2 years at Google or Amazon, you're now just another in the flood of extremely highly paid workers looking for a similar salary.

At the same time, the VC market sobered up. 10 years ago you could get a couple million on a powerpoint deck for wifi enabled dog food. It was the end of the great recession, let's get rich baby! Today the startup scene is much tighter and SMB's in any industry are nervous.

Then there's inflated title demand and emerging tech. Scroll any job board; 2/3rds of those roles will be at a senior level or be in something new like AI that few have real experience with. Do companies actually need Seniors? Usually no, but they believe 1 Senior can do the work of multiple Mid-levels and the cost per head drops. Do companies actually need an AI team? Usually no, but they believe they can replace departments with it.

So who's winning right now? It's not 'Tech Workers at Tech Companies'. It's not smaller SaaS businesses who can't afford all the talent sloshing around. Consultants might see some gains as a 1099 isn't the commitment a W2 is. But the real winners are the "Non-tech Tech" companies. Insurance companies, construction, brick and mortar retail, the IT department at your local hospital; they don't sell software, but they need tools to stay competitive. Those hiring teams have the pick of the litter right now.

Last thought: Firing all the recruiters during covid was a stupid move. You're not getting a callback because they canned the person who did the callbacks.

It's bad! I got laid off late last 2022 when I had just joined in 2021

When I got 2021 New Job, I continued to interact with recruiters and even did a few more interviews into December! My inbox was full of recruiters, as it had been for the 4-5 years prior.

The recruiter spam started drying up for me around June/July 2022, what used to flow became a trickle. By November 2022, my inbox was a bunch of tumbleweeds and I had just been laid off.

I followed 6 referrals from ex-colleagues and only 2 got me to an actual phone screen.

I got my current job a few months ago, but that was after weeks of pinging recruiters directly on LinkedIn and stumbling on a exactly-perfect fit of a job description to my resume which I boasted about.

My inbox is still mostly dry.

Reach out to your personal network to try to get some connections to get your resume to the top of the stack.

Reach out to former co-workers and see if their current companies have any openings.

It's tough to stand out in a stack of 200 applicants without a connection.

Is your front-end stack or experience too narrow? What are you using for frontend. Are there more front-end languages you have experience with that you could broaden your search/resume?

Have you done any backend? Is now a good time to learn Rails or Laravel?

Can you seek out any alternative job boards that are more specific for your niche? Linked and Indeed are the most saturated with applicants.

Freelance and Contract work might be an option to stay active and show on your resume. Show Consulting as your current gig from when you left your last job.

Lastly you could reach out to your old company if it's a place you'd like to go back to, not sure how things left off. A lot can change in a year.

Its combination of location, experience, salary expectations and sectoral business conditions.

In a good market everybody needs warm bodies, the standards drop, the pay levels rise.

In a poor market people focus on the absolutely required positions (e.g. replacing critical vacant roles) and pay levels drop.

Location (country / region) is quite important too, there are places with chronic and dire shortages in IT expertise (but salaries might not be great).

These are the fundamentals. Then you have the overlay of market making / matching which is clearly totally broken and only gets worse.

What is important is to find the discipline and energy to keep developing while job searching. Maybe work on a open source project or learn something new, expanding your expertise by going deeper or broader.

I’ll be honest. Some people are bad at interviewing and selling themselves.

Some of the best people I’ve worked with are getting passed over because they’re quiet and undersell themselves. Some of the more incompetent people can bullshit their way through the process and really oversell themselves. They think they’re gods gift to the field, and believing that, they can sell it.

It’s 100% Dunning Kruger.

I don’t know how to advise someone in this position. You just have to be willing to psych yourself up and believe a story about how great you are. Paradoxically it’s probably a TRUE story, but the great people won’t want to believe it about themselves. You CAN however put energy and practice into putting on a kind of performance of your (actual) competence.

The best people can probably say things like “oh I’ve never done X before”. They think of all the ways that can go wrong doing X. Because they visualize all the things that would go wrong they actually perform better at that task (research shows negative outcome visualization is actually better than positive visualization at achieving a goal[1]). Yet it sets you up to undersell yourself.

You have to suspend disbelief and remind yourself you can do hard things. And say “oh wow X sounds cool! I’ve done Y related thing, not X directly and I really would love to take a crack at X. I think I’d really love digging into it!”

1 - https://mindowl.org/premeditatio-malorum-negative-visualizat...

I haven't been on the "applying" side, but in my company we just had four replacement openings in the tech team (after more than 9 months without having a new hire) and to our suprise we received 5x times more applicants to all positions than we used to get one year ago, and salary expectations were at least 15% lower than in 2022.

We ended up hiring five devs on the same budget of the four original positions.

We are a data analysis and digital/mobile marketing survey startup located in São Paulo, Brazil. So at leat around here the job market is much different than the hiring craze of 2022.

This is an unsatisfying answer but if you are depending on your resume going through the hr process cold you are unlikely to have success no matter what it looks like or what experience you have.

A better approach is to find someone at the organization you are applying to who can shepherd you through the process. The best way to do that is via your personal network from prior jobs. But you can also do it by going to meetups, doing open source work etc. Even your non-work network can be helpful. Churches and country clubs were powerful professional tools for a very long time.

If you want, feel free to send me your resume and I can "review" it for you. I've have hired dozens of engineers and EM across ML, BE, etc roles.

Info to contact me in my user account (handle + gmail.com)

33 years in Software Development and the only job I have ever “applied” for was a seasonal job at Costco. All the other jobs, including IBM, 2 startups and currently Accenture were through my network.

how its suppose to be done and how it worked for me in past in order of the most effective to least:

1. social circle 2. attend conferences, exchange business cards, contact info 3. apply to companies through their own job portal or direct hr email 4. don't go for shiny companies (either location or business must suck, less competition this way)

anything else such as random recruiter agencies, linkedin, job portals is not going to yield any effect in this day and age. there is just too much saturation and bots + we are in a layoff cycle and AI uncertainty.

The key is this:

While you browse various job boards if there is no direct contact to a person or the email / phone is obfuscate, just find contact details online.

I often pay for various services that can give you contact details based on linkedin profile - give them a call and most often then not you will have interview shortly after.

Do the work to reach out to those people, establish rapport and you will be in a good place. If you are great professional they will make sure to keep you on their roster as an ACE candidate.

I've been looking for nearly a year. I've done the same work having services write/rewrite my resume. Having friends, loved ones, colleagues etc review them.

Few bites here and there. Made it to the third interview once. Ive only had 5 or 6 actual interviews. Not including initial contact interviews with recruiters (more like 10-12 of those). It's rough out there.

There’s a few motives in play; office leases, are part of it.

But senior workers were getting too full of themselves a social agents for good and political status quo is coddle the government agents and their lobbyist/think tank leaders.

Now it’s templated to some dependency imports, leetcode, some well known TF; they can backfill with lower paid newbs.

I’m working on a Linux distro where the install sets up an LLM and boots to GPU accelerated 3D viewport where a little entity acts as my chatbot.

Goal is to show the world we don’t need corporate controlled software.

If you can I would recommend making sure you can do some backend work to. I started in front-dev and expanded into backend. Backend devs are often seen as more valuable as that manages the biz logic. You can argue if that's right or wrong but it is what it is. As I look for people I appreciate folks who can do one area very well and want them able to do multiple areas, especially in a startup.

If you're not even getting interviews, neither of those things is responsible and there's so something wrong with your strategy.

Definitely try linkedin, as they said, and talking to your contacts (outside of LinkedIn, I mean).

Basically don't spam the same thing but treat it as scientific experiment and try different things. Also prepare yourself for the different interviews.

When you get those, remember not to work for free "for interview projects" and stuff like that.

I can relate. I have 25 years of experience as a senior and lead frontend developer, with some management experience.

I've applied at over 80 roles. I've received 35ish rejections and about 18 interviews. 4 put me through to final interviews and chose someone else despite liking me more, I was told. (one person had a smidge of java experience, one was a female and they needed a diversity hire, etc)

I'm curious: when you say you've 'been applying constantly', how many jobs have you applied for?

Assuming the number of available roles isn't a limiting factor, you probably applied for ~1000+ jobs in that time. (1 job per hour * 40 hours/week * 4.3 weeks per month * 7 months)

Is that right? If so, where have you had drop off in your funnel? Are you getting dropped before or after the recruiter screening call?

If after, then the problem may not be your CV.

With all of the layoffs, we're seeing about a 50-100x increase in number of applicants for open rolls, so the market is definitely more flooded. Also I'm regularly finding applicants were over-lelveled in past roles, and so usually have about one or two titles higher expectations for level than they actually are capable of having.

Market job is bad, but it also depends on the industry (tech had a lot of layoff) and on the benefits you are looking for. Speaking of benefits, since "everybody" want a remote position, if you're not too picky, it's probably much easier to find an on site position at the moment, without even compromising on the compensation

Currently at WeAreDevelopers congress in Berlin. It is conference that is heavily skewed towards businesses advertising their hiring efforts.

Have no comparison to previous years but it looks like there is tons of jobs offers.

And the compensation seemed to increase as well. It is now SV level, but we are talki Europe, where 100-130k puts you in top 5%.

It sounds like you’re working with a number of services right now, so take this with a grain of salt.

Joinrelentless.com does resume review and coaching and then gets people first interviews. Not cheap, but it’s nice to literally just have interviews put on your calendar by someone.

(Not a customer, just no the CEO)

Lot of things depends on where you are located.

In EU, market is not very bad as compared to US. It is still easy to find a good opportunity.

In US, it is really hard hit.

In South east Asia/India, it is calm before the storm as operational costs are low, it is last one to experience the stream of layoffs. It hasn't hit the market yet.

Try to add some experience using LLAMA2, OpenAI and AI models. Then add this fancy tags in the CV.

Have you tried freelancing platforms like Upwork, Fiver and other apps?

Sometimes getting started as a contract worker/part time consultant and then transitioning to a full time role would be easier.

(This helps in building confidence for the recruiter)

So this is what neoliberal hellscape looks like from across the big pond. Feel sorry for you :/

What is your education background? I've noticed that more companies want front-end engineers with STEM education creds than they do front-end devs with non-STEM education.

If you have a non-STEM degree and/or a weak portfolio, your resume might be getting filtered out.

Do you adjust your resume before applying to each role? If so how? If not, why not?

Also do you send a cover letter?

Same here. No problems with call backs but many rejections after technical assessments as each company only had 1 position.

Except the very first in person interview I did resulted in a job offer, just like in the beforetimes.

But it is hybrid, but I also wasnt opposed to that in the whole job search.

Are you on LinkedIn? I am not currently looking for a job but I still get a lot of recruiters on LinkedIn reaching out to me. I get the impression that there are still a lot of opportunities out there. But then again this may not be the case in your location.

Its rough and people seem picky. I've been out of work for around a year now, partially by choice. I still get interviews here and there.

Post your resume in a comment here maybe? And as much as it sucks shoot a little lower? Are you you only applying to house hold tech companies?

It's bad, but it's not that bad. The fact you have only had one interview this year is very odd in my opinion. I've been on the market twice this year and it's been harder for sure (especially earlier this year), but it's far from impossible to find something.

I don't know if you're looking for advice or just anecdotes here, but I'll share some thoughts for what might be happening...

Frontend development has changed a lot over the last 5 years. Obviously I don't know what skills you have, but a few years ago it was common for companies to be looking for a "frontend developer" with just HTML5, CSS & jQuery experience. These roles basically don't exist anymore. Typically a frontend developer today would be someone who's got experience with a modern JS framework like React (or similar), knows TypeScript, has experience writing tests, possibly has some experience with dev tools like Storybook or docker, etc... At least this the kind of thing I typically see companies recruiting for these days.

The last 5 years also haven't been very representative. The tech job market from around 2016 on has been very strong and there was a huge under supply of labour (especially during the pandemic). Today tech companies are cutting jobs, or slowing their hiring, meanwhile your average 12 year old has done some basic HTML and JavaScript coding. Just knowing your way around HTML and CSS isn't going to land you a job anymore – companies can afford to be much more selective.

If you're not even getting interviews you can assume your resume is the problem. Again, I don't know what skills you have but you either don't have skills that are being sought after or you are not showing your experience in a way that highlights those skills well on your resume.

It may also be that you're applying for roles that are beyond your experience level. In my experience if you've been a developer for 5 years that would typically mean you're a bit better than a junior developer, but unlikely to be a senior. A couple of years ago you may have been able to land a senior developer role, but today the market is far more competitive and you'll have people with well over a decade of experience applying for these roles in most cases. I know it sucks but you may want to look for roles which require a little less experience even if you believe you're worth more. It's far better to be employed and in a role where you're growing your experience than being unemployed. You can always look for something else when you have the experience you need or when the market picks up a bit.

The fact you've been out of work for about 6 months now would be sending huge warning flags to me if I were a recruiter. Recruiters want to place candidates that are in demand and as harsh as this may sound a 6 month gap in your employment will suggest you are not an ideal candidate. I would seriously consider coming up with a back story to explain why you've been out of work for this long.

Some will disagree with this, but you should think of your resume like an Instagram profile – only show the things others want to see, and don't be afraid to represent yourself in a slightly exaggerated way. Obviously you need to be able to do what you say you can do, but you need your resume to give a good impression of you and your experience if you want any chance of getting an interview. So for example, if I was the primary dev on some project I'll typically say that I "led" the project on my resume. I'll also always include things like "senior" & "lead" in job roles because, "Lead software engineer" looks way better than "Frontend developer" imo. Minor things like this can make a big difference and help your profile stand out from the rest.

I guess to concluded though, the market isn't that bad that you should be getting at least some interviews. It sounds like your resume is being dismissed for some reason and you should try to understand why that is. If you want to anonymise and share your resume I'd be happy to take a look.

You need to do some personal hustling and find hiring managers or founders of recently funded companies that someone in your network can introduce you to. Otherwise you're just another resume in a sea of thousands. Do something to make yourself stand out.

I'm a Sr. SRE (IC5) with corporate, startup, and consulting experience also looking.

Even when the market was good, I never got jobs by applying for them. It was always either recruiters cold-calling, or through my network. Maybe focus there instead of grinding out hundreds of applications.

Are you only applying for front end? You might consider trying backend and devops too if not. Anything where code is written. Then if you get interviews, invest in learning the stuff that gets you past their tests and interviews.

Applyall.com is a good option for you, too. I feel like the longer you're out of the interview game, the more you need to get back into the flow of interviewing / talking to new options.

Do you have skills outside of front-end?

I've said for years that heavy front-end development is a luxury. In down economies companies are looking to do more with less.

Everyone wants to work remotely. But that means now you are probably competing with hundreds of other applicants for any halfway interesting job.

Post a screenshot of your resume, with identification redactions. You have 500 programmers here on this thread ready to give you free advice.

I am going through the same experience. For now only referrals seems to get me a response from HR. Otherwise it's just radio silence.

You left off the most important pieces of into - where are you? Are you looking for remote, hybrid, in office? Do you need visa sponsorship?

What state? Also do you apply only 6 figure jobs? What is the minimum are you asking for frontend jobs? IMHO these affect the job hunt the most.

>I held a job as a front-end dev for the previous 5 and a half years.

That work can be done by pretty low skilled people. Get out of that sector.

Ask your friends, family and university connections/network for referrals. That will almost certainly get you an interview.

Try applying with a different name, maybe there's some discrimination factor at play as well

My initial thoughts (gotta help out a fellow Chicagoan):

* Let your resume be your landing page, rather than the recent work - save a click. And make your resume viewable on the web, with a PDF version downloadable. Point being, you want to reduce friction. As it stands, if you want someone to look at your resume, they need to (1) visit the site; (2) (i) find and then (ii) click 'Resume'; (3) locate the downloaded PDF; and (4) open it. Compare that to: (1) go to your site.

* I do not recognize any of the names on your 'Recent work' landing page. This may be a fault of mine as my field is not particularly IT-heavy . But for those who might be clueless, it may be worthwhile to briefly state who they are, or what type of work they do.

* FWIW, have someone look at it for grammar/spelling, and tell them to be picky. "Self-taught", for example. When people are trying to seek reasons to wade through tons of candidates, even the smallest stupid mistakes can be used as sorting criteria, under the umbrella of "showing attention to detial."

* I'm not sure if "self-taught" is something to advertise; I see the appeal, but if I'm someone anal, then I may wonder what holes that left. Self-taught means you only had to meet your own standards.

* Are you saying - with your education - that with your Bachelor's, you expect to enroll this fall? I would take this completely off your resume; it's not an existing skill, then. It also is going to leave a lot of people thinking that your focus will be split.

* Generally, overall, retool/rewrite a LOT of your items by backing up claims and orient it more as a sales pitch. If you are an employer, what version of this tiny little sentence would make you want to hire you? You don't want to just say 'experience in...', you want to say the things you did. "Shepherded six major projects in high-level companies from brainstorming to rolling out the door." You don't want to say what you're seeking, you want to say what you can do for the person looking at your resume.

* Some of your verb choices are very passive. "Acted as the developer of" -- no, it's "Developed". "Experienced in implementing a range of" -- "Implemented eight contant management systems" - use active voice and provide specifics.

Look into whether you want some items on your resume at all, given the impression they might give. The National Safety Council was a two-month gig; Thrive Creative was an eight-month gig. If you just HAVE to include it but there are things that explain it, incorporate it into your resume. "(Short-Term Assignment)", etc.

What is your area of expertise? I have 25 years in cyber security. I left corporate world for a few years which made it very difficult to get back in. So I stated a profile on upwork with with a low rate. Now, after 2 years, I'm flat out, and earning more than I did in corporate world and I can pick and choose the projects I work on.

software engineering is incredibly saturated at this point

you have to be marketable in another way

In my experience, the market is a lot worse than a year ago.

What market are you in? Are you only going for remote?

When do you think the market will start picking up?

Don't use resume websites. Use company links.

I'm a new grad and I didn't have too much trouble getting interviews. Most interviews came from large "startups" based in the US.

Nope, in the same boat, unfortunately.

Have you considered contracting work?

My strategy is being firmware/10 years… works pretty good, getting an interview per week.

(note: much of this advice is based on the assumption of a permanent resident of the US applying to a position in the US. Things may be different in other countries)

From the interviewer side of the house, the purpose of interviewing is to hire the least risky candidate - not the best candidate.

As you get closer to senior job titles, a longer duration of employment in the latest position is more desirable.

If you have three or more jobs in that 5.5 years, you may be a more risky applicant. It isn't necessarily the case that you do from your post here ("I held a job as a front-end dev"), but switching jobs frequently is not uncommon and may catch up with people in time as they try to move up. For more senior positions, initiative and projects may last longer than the length of a job hopper's tenure and can be seen as a negative as they are less likely to see the project through to completion and the company may need to hire someone in the middle of the project.

If you have had multiple positions, companies with a longer onboarding process it may be that you won't even get to being a positive ROI before your feet start itching again for a new position.

In companies with faster onboarding (dump into the pool and see who swims) a less risky applicant will have a close match to the skills and responsibilities listed on the job description. This entails making sure that each job application that you send out (my reading of the post is that you only have one) emphasizes familiarity with their technology stack rather than just a list of tech that are tossed into a line on the resume without care for order.

If applying on job boards for listings that do not specify a company or are "an exciting opportunity with a client", you are applying to a 3rd party recruiter and not an actual job.

If applying on job boards for companies themselves, realize that these jobs may be scraped, unmaintained, or otherwise not representative of the current jobs that company has open. I have seen jobs listed on indeed for positions that were posted in January and closed in February showing up months later. Likewise, job listings on the company's current career page may have openings that are not on Indeed.

Make sure that you're applying for jobs that are a fit for your experience. Job boards are notorious for having poor search criteria for experience. Doing a search for entry level jobs will pull up principal engineer positions and searching for senior jobs will find entry level ones. Mass applying to everything that shows up will result in a higher percentage of rejections.

If you only have one resume, create one resume for each type of position that you are looking to apply for. Create one resume for React developer, one resume for Angular developer, one resume for Php developer - and then send the relevant one. If you are sending a "5 years of React experience" to a position that is looking for someone to work in their Angular application, there will be a subset of applicants who are less risky than you (based on the resume) that are selected for interviewing.

While not applying for jobs, use the job requirements for positions that you've applied to (or interest you) as a guideline for personal projects to work on to keep skills fresh or to learn sufficient information about that technology stack to be able to competently answer questions if you are interviewed.

Make sure that you are also looking at public sector employers. State and local government tends not to advertise on career boards but rather on the state's workforce development board.

Make sure you are applying to non-remote jobs. Yes, everyone wants a remote job. The applicant pool for such positions is much larger than the local jobs and instead of competing with people who live in the area or are willing to move there you are competing with everyone who can legally work there.

A lot of times people get put on "cool down" after applying.

Apply to a job and even if you don't get a rejection letter, they may still say, "Let's put a pause on this guy for the next 6 months."

So if your resume didn't start out strong the first time, they may not even be looking at the revisions.

Similarly, if you're applying in the same city, in the same sort of work, don't be surprised if the HR teams have shared notes on prospects.

When I worked at an agency, we had one talent scout who was just head and shoulders better than any we had worked with.

I asked her what her secret was, "How are you able to find such consistently good developers?" and she said, "I get plugged in to the network, and I listen to my peers -- if they pass, I pass. Saves me time to go after better candidates."

Anyway I don't know if something like that is impacting your job search, but I'd try and diversify a bit. If you were a dev, look at Test Engineering, or DevOps, or Project Management work for a bit.

Remember you never have to list a job on your resume. It's always OK to say, "I took a sabbatical." And it's OK to shine rainbows on the truth, but it's never OK to outright lie. If you get caught doing that, you're burned -- to everyone in that network.

Anyway, if I had time off, I'd spend time on Udemy, and YouTube, and such. Just learning as much shit as I could.

I really want to get better at SketchUp so I can do more woodworking projects, but I haven't had time.

I have a billion things that need repairs, or modifications in my house, and it's always, "Sigh... I'll get around to it next weekend..."

And if you finish your little home project list, hit up your parents for things they need help with. Odds are, if they're elderly, they need a lot of help with tech and cleaning and even simple stuff like getting their oil changed can lead to old people getting ripped off these days. Anyway, if I had more time I'd want to take care of more of that sort of stuff for my mom...

I could be laid off tomorrow in this economy... so who knows.

Oh, also I feel like most companies are aware that salaries have plummeted in the last year. If you were making $200k in SF, and are asking that for a remote job... yeah, basic stuff like that can sink you. Make sure you are pricing yourself for the role.

EDIT: One last thing... I have seen a TON of people lately who are really shiftless. One guy literally said, "I only work remote because I don't ever want to wear pants again." And it's cute I guess, but it's not something you want to bring up in an interview. Make sure you don't come off as someone who got "laid off for cause." Keep your background clean when doing video calls and... put on some pants even if they can't see them! (=

It's bad if you're in the U.S. Companies hire folks in the US to fire them later if they want to. That's how it works, and everyone understands that we can hire today, we can fire tomorrow, because of "employment at will". Those high salaries don't mean anything anymore. If your salary was $200K and you spent 1 year to find a job, your salary is now $100K. Compare it to other countries - Germany, for example. Salaries are lower, but if you work, you can't be fired. You're getting your paycheck, you're protected by laws, and it's your American fella who is going under the bridge with his family, not you.

We really need to make "employment at will" illegal.

Personal anecdote from Russia (I hold expired Russian passport and have many friends from there). Auto-translated from chats (reach out if you're curious getting the origin link):

=== 8< ===

Another moment. When I was completely desperate to find a job here in our region, I published a CV on the Russian HH.ru. And there is a lot of activity there. In one day, they wrote to me vk, sber, yandex and several other fairly well-known offices. And all as one are looking for remote employees, but for some fucking reason that is not clear to me, I have to be on the territory of the Russian Federation. That's just an exception with Yandex. They can arrange in Serbia. But you also have to go there.

=== >8 ===

I don't know what they did to the US economy, so now it's even worse here than it is in Russia.

This is a topic, I really dont want to comment on:

But here it goes:

Job sites are spam. Supply and demand is all that matters. People who suck got laid off. So what. These companies are incredibly dysfunctional at hiring ANYBODY in software. That includes FAANG.

Software Engineering is no longer a respectable career regardless of pay. The reason is that the goal of "de-professionalizing" software engineers since the mid-90s has been accomplished within 15 years since 2005.

This de-professionalizing effort was the purpose and reason for the H1-B program expansion during the Bush and Obama administrations.

The main drivers behind it were Bill Gates and Steve Jobs. Neither of whom wanted to pay engineers, (Bill G was more entrenched though as he said in the 90s he wanted to pay software engineers 6-7 dollars an hour)

Unfortunately for both Bill G and Steve J they were caught (red-handed by the way) not only trying to fix engineer wages, create blacklists but also trying to "KILL JAVA" which is all on DOJ grand jury testimony video recordings you can access yourself. Fortunately (for them), however, the US govt cares not about what it pretends to care about in public.

So the GOOD news is: Tech hiring is corrupt, managers are usually going to be gone after they fail to build their "kingdom" which they ALWAYS do and even in a market "full" of genuises and apprentices, noone will read your resume anyway.

Because IT hiring is and has been a scam for almost 2 decades.

Does that answer your question?

Good luck.