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Job hunting absolutely sucks right now
Feeling pretty discouraged after taking yet another spin around the tech interview circuit for naught
I was feeling pretty good this time around as I've interviewed with this company before and was runner up for previous role. The hiring manager contacted me for this new one, and again I aced it until the final stage where I got punted for the all nebulous "culture fit" reasoning. My mood isn't helped by the constant AI doom clouds hovering overhead that makes me wonder if I need to make bigger career changes.
How's everyone else fairing out there?
I was also laid off from my SE job back in October due to "restructuring." I've been in the field for 17 years and I'm just so burned out from repeating this cycle every 1-3 years. All I've ever wanted was long-term, stable employment doing what I love without waiting for the axe to fall. AI has changed my relationship with coding, I still enjoy it somewhat but I sure don't want my job to be babysitting Claude while it makes subtle questionable architecture decisions in customer-facing products I'm supposed to care about. I've always hated the tech interview process. Just looking for a radical change now, because I can't keep spinning in that hamster wheel.
Ugh, same. I can’t believe I find myself longing for the old whiteboard interviews, they were less nerve wracking than the leetcode ones.
I graduated from college over 20 years ago, I’m so tired of the whole data structure memorization cycle - I’ve never needed any of that memorized at work without access to the web. The hard parts of development are figuring out stack traces, interpreting the real intent behind a requirement, and elusive bug fixes. I’ve only done one interview that tried to acknowledge this, and of course that company was acquired by a company that was acquired by another company that uses leetcode.
Why are manhole covers round? Because the manhole is round.
What are your radical change prospects?
Well if I had any actual prospects I probably wouldn’t have been unemployed for 5 months, haha. Truth be told I’ve been taking a bit of a (probably financially unwise) unplanned hiatus because of the burnout. My spouse recently started a higher-paying job which takes some of the pressure off me and I’ve enjoyed having more time for my kids and creative pursuits.
I’m hoping maybe I can leverage one of my passion projects into something that will help pay the bills. Main focus right now is a solo game dev project, and I’m working on-and-off on a screenplay concept. Both feel like long shots but I’m keeping my eyes open for new opportunities and networking. I may end up picking up part-time work just to give me more time with these.
That's so reassuring to hear. Funny, I just added a question in the thread about what sort of hobby projects people were after in their free hours.
A colleague of mine who moved on from full stack development joined our humble secondary Ed team at likely half his salary to develop web apps for students. Money matters, of first, but for him, a reasonable salary, flexible hours and the chance to hang with intellectuals was a great trade off as he sought to get off the hamster wheel. Not sure if post secondary appeals to you, but I'll vouch for it as a great live to work environment
I am not sure if you meant part time dev work, but I tried for a year and wasn't able to find anything part time that paid anything close to market rates. Talking to recruiters about it was like speaking to them in Martian.
My theory is that most places (especially startups) want people working more than 40 hour weeks as a matter of course, so any conversation that limits hours (or pays by the hour) is off the table.
I have not tried it (yet), but I think the best way to get part time dev work is to work somewhere full time until you're established, then ask to switch to part time. If someone offered me 3/4 salary for a 30 hour work week, I'd take it in a heartbeat.
I’ve worked at a couple of startups where 30 hours was fine and I didn’t get any reduction in pay. There seems to be some kind of bimodal distribution in tech where one group is working 50+ hours per week and thinks that’s normal. And then there’s another group getting paid to work 0-30 hours (yes, zero hours) per week. The struggle is finding a place where you actually are needed and can do meaningful work, but at a moderate pace. I’m not sure why that isn’t more common.
I’ve recently been able to find contracting work paid on a project basis that paid $125/hr effective, and I did maybe 20 hours per week. But finding that was dependent on networking in SF.
Yep. My s/o has been out of work since last August. They get interviews but they’re out of practice so keep failing the tech interview. Its a matter of time I think.
Its cause they worked at a bank for over ten years so when they see problems they read it, walk away, go pee, make coffee, go for a walk, maybe make lunch, oop now its 5pm. Mull it over in the shower. Do morning meetings the next day. Mull it over some more. Two days later have an idea how to start. A day after that get mostly done but that last 10% of debugging is a killer. A week later finally finish just in time to prepare a 20 min demo for the end of sprint demos.
Tech interview is like nah do this shit cold turkey you have 30 mins good luck
Also in software engineering. I’ve stopped actively interviewing at the moment.
At some point I stopped getting actual interviews and I don’t know why. Were any of them real jobs? How many were fake companies, fake jobs, expired reps, or “we’re always hiring, for the right person”, but not really? Was my obviously female name the problem, now that DE&I is out of vogue and the pendulum has swung the other way? Did I remove enough experience to not look overly expensive, or maybe too much and they want more?
On the other side, companies get thousands of applications for each position. How many of those applicants are bots? How many are research studies looking for acceptance rates or discrimination?
I used up my network a while ago. Unfortunately at the time I had some health issues that resulted in pretty bad interviews, when I’ve tried reapplying I no longer get callbacks.
So I’m growing some food and learning Blender right now. Maybe I can sell some assets or plugins.
How's your blender journey been going so far? I'm on a break, but I had a lot of fun using geometry nodes to extrude and map an entire city's worth of structures to a topographical plane.
It's been a lot of fun. I'm digging into physics at the moment, making volcanoes and fireworks.
Very cool. Did you build the doughnut to begin?
If you feel like going down a fun 3d design rabbit hole and don't mind VR, there's a piece of software called Gravity Sketch that makes the whole creation experience very interesting.
Yes I did!
I don't have a VR headset because they give me motion sickness.
I think it's like 1/3 of people who get motion sickness from it. Probably the reason it didn't catch on!
Good luck!
You're certainly not alone in your struggles, the market feels similar to what it was in 2023 amid similar mass layoffs too. Some of my friends graduated undergrad in 2023 into that crappy market, decided to get graduate degrees, and are now about to graduate again into a similar crappy market. I truly feel for them as they're all brilliant individuals. Another friend of mine unfortunately got laid off last summer and he's been interviewing heavily since the fall. They've gone through I believe 110 separate interview rounds at countless companies. I was fortunate enough to land a mid-level engineer role last Fall, I don't think I'll be changing companies again anytime soon. I'd be happy to review your resume if you'd like! My experience is primarily backend technologies (Java, PHP, Python, Spring, SQL) and I'm still fairly early in my career so I'm not sure how helpful my reviews would be but still, happy to help!
Software engineer interviews are also evolving in this AI age so I do wonder if you might have some better luck in the near future, at least at bigger tech companies. Previously, these companies relied heavily on Leetcode and Leetcode-esque puzzles to evaluate engineers, along with system design questions for mid-level and senior engineer roles. However, it seems like going forward, companies will evaluate you more on your engineering skills along with your AI prompting skills. DoorDash just published a blog about this a few days ago where it seems like they will be evaluating your real-world skills more. In their blog they wrote that they want to evaluate how well you:
all while explaining your "why" as you normally would in an interview. From what I heard from my friend at Meta, they're also moving towards an interview process like this. Meta's been trialing this since October as far as I know.
Doordash blog about rebuilding engineering interviews around AI usage
Hey thats the stuff I’m good at. I hope you’re right and this means the market will work in my favor. So far it has.
I'm an independent IT guy. Been doing it for 25 years. It has never been as hard as it is now to get good work, and I know I have it luckier than most in that people will always need tech help. But damn, it's rough right now. I post in commiseration, fellow techies. Good luck out there.
I had been constantly searching on and off for the better part of a year with not many bites.
Some that could have gone further had I tried a little harder I think. And only recently had I found a new role (a few months ago).
It's a rough market, and I've got about 12 years of professional Software Engineering experience. It is very strange indeed. Let me know if you need coaching or resume review (if you're in the same area of tech as me).
I'm happy to help how I can.
Also in Software Engineering, and have been not so seriously looking for 12-18 months
My perception is that employers are looking for a deal right now. Everyone seems to want to pay a bit less than they were because of AI, market/economic concerns, or some other nebulous reason. In a way, I feel like this is the pendulums return swing from the great resignation a few years back where it seemed like everyone in the field was hopping to new opportunities for significant salary bumps, but I have no doubt that employers are trying to play any advantage that they can get.
I'm lucky to be fairly comfortable in my current role. Excuse the pessimism but I don't envy anyone urgently looking for a position in this field
Spouse was laid off almost three years ago and doesn't have much of a network for a lot of reasons. Still gets an occasional interview, but the overall response rate is <1% (n=3200, yes, seriously). Doing my best to hold up sanity for them, but it's tough.
Evil pays (at least, in our area) so it's mostly the Amazons and Palantirs and Oracles of the world posting new openings. If you do get an interview, a lot of companies really love making you face AI interview bots, though of course they don't want you using AI tools yourself. And you have to deal with LinkedIn all the time, which is its own source of despair about the state of humanity.
My own workplace has done stupid layoffs touting AI, though it's obvious that was an excuse. I feel trapped, playing nice with people who were responsible for causing that wholly unnecessary misery, but only have a few hours each week to look elsewhere. Even then, I'm in a more desirable market field, so I get interviews at a higher rate than my spouse, and it's hard not to feel a little guilty. But so far my only 'success' was a lowball offer, where the company tried to tell me I should accept because I'm somehow unqualified for the role I've been in for years.
Keep your head up, folks. Everyone has their own best coping strategies, but for me it's helped to remind myself that we humans are resilient things. I've lived through a few market crashes at this point, and was homeless during one of them, but I'm still here and still learning. In the immortal words of my favorite AI bot, just keep trying 'til you run out of cake.
Also software engineering. I'm really sorry you're looking for a job right now, it's definitely very difficult.
We've been recruiting this year for all levels, junior though to senior and it's extremely rough for everyone. There are volumes more CVs for each position than previous years meaning we've had to do more aggressive screening. Then when it's come down to choosing a candidate a huge amount of it comes down to luck, because we have an unusual amount of choice and sometimes it's just who we interview first or some arbitrary thing like someone has a shorter notice period.
I guess it's probably only going to get more difficult. I can honestly see AI making software accessible to a different group of people it didn't before, while probably alienating a group of current developers. Who knows if one group is smaller or larger than the other.
I don't work in software development and I'd argue that my profession got hit even harder by the rise of agentic AI, post-COVID mass layoffs and the global economic shocks of having a warmongering human-sized cheeto as US president.
There are hardly any accountancy jobs now, which means this is the second time I've gone into higher/further education and ended up with worse job prospects. Firstly it was graduating from university with a History degree on the lie that I could "walk into a job" once I graduate only to end up unemployed for nearly two years, and now it's not even being able to find low-paid accounts admin work despite having full AAT qualifications and being ACCA part-qualified.
I recently quit a temp purchase ledger role which paid like shit and involved a two hour commute. On days where I had to wake up at 5AM and get ready for an 8AM start, I kept asking in my head why I was torturing myself with that shitty job. But apparently this is what you have to do if you want money in your bank account.
My brother is a software engineer working for a FAANG company. His entire field has been hit with wave after wave of redundancies and RTO mandates. I genuinely worry how he'll manage if they decide to give him the axe.
I remember this from earlier in my life, before I got away from anything that involves trying to hire on to large companies.
It sucked. I remember filling out application after application, taking crap temp work in the in-between times. I remember it being absolutely demoralizing.
Eventually I set myself up in a position where I wasn't reliant on that kind of work anymore - my primary income is work from home, I buy / refurbish / sell lab electronics, with some occasional side contract work in security systems and less often in telecom survey.
Overall my experience has been that the larger the company is, the lower your probability of hiring on. My easiest / least-hassle job hunting successes have been hiring on with smaller companies.
I sympathize with the frustration you are enduring. Never a fun experience.
I’m trying to convince my partner to get into refurbishing and selling music equipment. They want to, they have a ton of inventory already, but they have ADHD and they find it hard to follow through and finish fixing something and then sell it.
We’re stuck because they cant organize themselves without me, and I’m absolutely slammed at my soul sucking useless corporate job that pays all our bills. I want the freedom to help my partner so badly.
Wow, I identify with so much of that. I live with and take care of my girlfriend in a similar situation, though she does have a job, she just hates it while also having health problems that makes it difficult for her. The issue of having difficulty finishing a project is very much a common experience for me.
I have Autism and ADHD. She's also on the spectrum, though she has a crap ton more emotional intelligence than I do. We both have issues with executive function - for her it impedes her ability to do most normal life stuff, which I help her out with, while for me it makes it difficult for me to do my electronics / eBay work consistently.
Things have gotten a bit better. I started on meds around... half a year ago ish? - Welbutrin and Vyvanse to help with depression and the ADHD / executive function issues respectively. They have made a difference, though things are still hard a lot of the time.
They just use coffee to self medicate and it seems to work okay I guess?
We’re trying to hold off on drugs because they can be taken away at any time by insurance or government or the manufacturer just decides they want an artificial shortage but if partner doesn’t find another cushy bank job we might have to cause they really cant do more than 1 almost finished task a day.
This is what I did for years before meds! Though for me it was intermittent use of sugar-free energy drinks while keeping my coffee intake consistent. I found I had to keep it intermittent to prevent caffeine tolerance increase, but it did work in terms of high-caffeine days leading me to be productive and effective. It did tend to consistently mess up my sleep schedule though.
I absolutely understand not wanting to put yourselves in a position where you are functionally dependent on medication that has unreliable availability.
They’re not really into energy drinks, just coffee all day long haha
Its not really effective. Problem is it only bothers me cause I have to live here amongst all their unorganized half broken stuff. Doesnt bother them at all. They start a project, make a big mess, then leave it cause they never finish. Then eventually they stop doing anything cause theres no space to work. Rinse and repeat. I see the cycle, but I don’t think they can.
I've been a software engineer for 16 years, and have moved into management. Reading through a number of comments here, figured I'd leave some advice from my perspective.
As a hiring manger, I can attest that our internal recruiters are completely overloaded by spammy AI applications, making it very difficult to find the few real applications.
This obviously differs person to person, but the key points I care about on a resume are:
If you get to the interview stage, here's some recommendations:
People use LLMs during an interview??? That is wild. A huge purpose of the interview process is assessing a person's personality, judgment, and fit, and if someone can't hold a basic conversation without relying on a machine to tell them what to say, that is a big red flag.
Unfortunately yeah. There are cheat tools out there that listen to the conversation and display answers to questions on the screen.
For those job hunting, is there a case to be made for hobby projects? I'm sure tha it hardly translates 1:1 as the kind of experience employers are after, but does working on open source or community projects help to keep the mind sharp? Does anyone work on hobby projects to fill the hours?
Depends on the project. I have certainly benefitted from my Klipper contributions in the past.
I believe a huge part of why I got my current job was because of a dinky incomplete vue + go web app. I’m not part of the resume screening process (yet) but I would be biased towards people who have side projects. It’s like a take home interview you started before even applying.
I'd say: Yes. I think I would have been worse off in my job search had I not done any coding. More details in my top-level comment.
I'm not in tech, but the world of environmental science has also been hit really hard by funding cuts, federal downsizing, and economic woes in the USA and Canada. In early 2025 there was a huge exodus from US federal jobs, and tariffs have led to a lot of belt tightening in Canada, too. There are so many people with decades of experience applying at my level, which means I have to look down the ladder as well. I've heard at multiple interviews that people hiring are spoiled for choice - I've been in queues where they're interviewing 10+ people for non-academic permanent jobs. My interview rate is good, my offer rate is terrible (and usually only for term work). It feels impossible. I can't imagine how awful it must be as a fresh grad trying to enter the job market, when all the people at the top of the ladder have flooded the market. There's nowhere to go. I also feel like I have been highly qualified for jobs on the coast, but they don't like that I currently live in the Midwest, and I get rejected out of hand because of location (which is also ridiculous, because I've worked on both coasts for multiple years).
The good thing though is that I've been looking outside my field so that I can support my household financially, and I've been able to really ask myself what I want to do and how I'm ok to spend my time. I have spent decades working myself to dregs to support work I thought was important...but the thought that I have to take a break in a field that I don't care as much about and dont feel beholden to work extra for means that I can leave my work at work and spend more time doing more fun things, or projects in my field in my free time, when I'll have more mental energy. I've also been able to look into other potential careers and consider my skills in those realms - like taking civil service exams for positions that make use of my typing and problem solving skills - and it's been fun to explore other potential versions of me. It's also made me realize that my career is not everything, and some things are much more important.
I say all this having a new position to fall back on, without being forced to be unemployed in the States. I was looking for work for over a year, with roughly half of that knowing my funding was being terminated, and it led to a lot of misery, woe, distress, and panic about how I was going to hold things together. Now that I've broadened my expectations for where I'm willing to work and considered what is a good use of my time, it has genuinely brought me peace, but I am frustrated about the state of my field and about the consequences for the environment generally. Those federal workers are not coming back, at least not where they were before - I definitely no longer consider that a viable long-term career path, and I'm not the only one. The whole thing is incredibly disappointing, and I would much rather find work I care deeply about, and I feel like I'm being kicked out of a field I'm actually pretty good at. It's difficult to reconcile.
The weird part is that usually in free markets, inefficient things fade out. So is having horrible employment processes efficient in some weird way?
I think in free markets anyone who owns a product just optimizes to extract as much value out of that product as they can, and that means things like wage slavery, enshittification, processes which sacrifice literally everything just to extract more profit.
I know that sounds like a really basic and media driven idea, but I cant think if any other reason why it seems like we stopped a lot of our innovation almost 20 years ago. Its like we got smart phones and everyone just decided okay we’re done now.
This is such a poignant case that resonates well with me.
I cannot tell you how many times I talk to loved ones about this. I'm the "guy angrily shouting at cloud" whenever tech topics get brought up and I'm inevitably dragged in for my experience with family.
I always bring it back to how none of this has to be this way. And we (as a society) have collectively decided to check out for some reason and just allow everything to decay into mediocrity and user-hostile design.
Like, why does my laundry machine need to connect to the cloud? (Oh obviously for planned obsolescence and for mining my network data). But if you understand how a "smart device" like this works, you don't need it to be over the Internet to operate internally. You can have a phone app that communicates locally over the network to run a "smart device".
It's just like, it's maddening watching greed drive every decision.
The only reason I can think of is that companies have been cheaping out on software development for years now and they cant actually get a good reliable working version of the embedded software out ever so it needs an internet connection for ongoing bugfixes.
I know the actual insanity of that idea but knowing what I know from my entire career working on cloud services…. i wouldn’t put it past them.
That is the most incredibly generous take I've seen.
I don't buy it, but it's generous and I applaud your effort lol.
I imagine that’s possibly part of it but I think causality is the other way around — when companies realised they could patch things on the fly, they stopped caring about building robust systems and just slapped the “we’ll fix it in post” sticker on everything they touched, because there were suddenly much lower consequences for shipping trash if your complaining customers could just get a hotfix a few weeks later.
I imagine if all these smart devices couldn’t get updates, there would be a lot more people returning “malfunctioning” devices and getting a refund, which would hurt the company’s wallet and incentivise actual change.
Edit: but yes as Tukajo pointed out, even this is a fairly generous interpretation, and probably only a small part of the picture if it’s considered in board rooms at all.
Yeah bit of a chicken or egg in this specific thought experiment
Theres an entire ‘move fast break things’ culture in tech right now and I’m not a fan.
(Speaking about the US)
The thing is, we don't really have free markets in the economic sense. There are too many barriers to entry, too much consolidation of market power. In a free market, if a company starts enshittifying their product, or they start adding features people don't really want, another company would come and start making the product without those and people would choose it because it's better aligned with their needs and wants.
The reality is that patent portfolios and big legal war chests let a large company litigate a new competitor out of existence as soon as they become a threat. Or they just acquire them and then shut them down, whichever is cheaper.
I think the real problem is that we have accepted as a society that the end result of a corporation should be to make money for its shareholders, and that's what matters more than the product that they make. With that goal in mind, the enshittification process is actually rational.
In my head “capitalism” has shifted from meaning “free market” to meaning “where the corporations tell the government what to regulate instead of the people”
Because when you don’t have a strong government, but do have a strong criminal justice system, this is always the result.
We kept the government small because we wanted a free market, and the corporations used the toothless government to ensure that there is no free market.
I think it's a state of affairs that arose naturally from a myriad of factors, but will likely stick around for a while now because it's good for big companies. The more candidates they see, the less negotiating power any individual has. And big companies are better able to absorb any increased costs than their smaller competitors.
So I guess it's an efficient move to kneecap labor, and I don't see the situation changing until the balance of power swings more towards workers.
Versus interviewing 1000 qualified people for one position? I’d argue so.
I'm a Software Engineer. I was out of work for an uncomfortable number of months, but recently finally got hired. Some thoughts:
$tech, but proving in interviews to have literally no demonstrable experience). Such companies have found more success going in the opposite direction: reaching out to prospects themselves, whether with their own internal recruiting team, or third-party.I hope this helps some people.
I've had a few recruiters reach out because of my endpoint management certs - but there's never a salary range and it's pretty much always contract work and hybrid or onsite.
A company I've been a long-term contractor for has offered some nebulous roles but we've never been able to align on duties and compensation.
I've never gotten a job from cold applying, and it sounds like that's even more dead than it was before. I basically want something that's functionally 30 hours per week remote.
I have a friend that got into a role after five to seven interview rounds and has been there a year and it's been a great fit for him — but it also took a lot of tears in other roles to get there (who also had too many rounds of interviews).
A little late to the party but I've been looking for a new job since the beginning of the year and it's been awful. 90% of the jobs I apply for (audio/video production), I never hear back. LinkedIn is useless as by the time the email with the job postings makes its way to my inbox, the ads have already been closed or they have hundreds of applicants already. I'm trying desperately to find remote or work in a different state (US) and I'm also very discouraged.
Sorry to hear about your situation, especially with the multiple interviews.
I don't work in audio/video, but I do have some amateur-level experience with it. Can you speak to why that industry might have been hit the same way as tech?
I’m not sure that I can speak for the industry as a whole but in my experience, AI features within post-production software has eliminated a lot of work for people. AI features allow you to auto-edit, reframe, and color correct at a baseline level that can take the place of assistant editors (video) and AI features within audio production software can auto-mix audio for video projects good enough where smaller budget studios/creators will forego hiring an audio engineer/sound mixer.
Separately, I was working for a creative agency as a contractor and when all of the tech layoffs started a few years ago, they basically got rid of all of the contractors and did everything in-house, in addition to laying off some employees.
I’m not in the film/TV industry but browsing industry online spaces, the film editors have been having an awful time since COVID lockdown. There are endless posts about trying to find work or having to take work criminally underpaid.
Music production software, 3rd party plugins, and consumer hardware has gotten so good that a lot of musicians don’t have to spend the big bucks on studio time and don’t have to have land a record deal with a label to distribute and market their music.
Again, not an industry leader who can speak for anyone other than myself and what I am seeing.