After my company had a bit of a rough patch, I was laid off in January 2024 along with most of the less-senior developers on my team. I loved my coworkers and the product (although I did NOT like using MobX for state management, smell ya later!), so I was sad to leave friends, but I was optimistic about searching for a new position. I thought it’d be a great time to explore some tools and solidify some foundational developer skills, so with my nearly 3 years of professional full stack experience as a comforting buffer against much of the dread a newer developer faces as they look for work, I eagerly began preparing for my search.
I assembled a few documents the day after I got the news- old resumes and cover letters, locations of previous sites to find work, etc, and slowly got the rest of the unemployment machine up and running. I reached out to friends and associates, did a LinkedIn post, made accounts on job sites. I was pretty sure that it would only take a couple months tops to find a new opportunity.
Unfortunately, I was wrong!
Before I go any further I want it clear that my point in writing this post is not to whine, complain, or discourage others who are in the middle of the hopeless death march a job search can be. I want to talk about my experience, and how much it hurt. These are things that kept me up at night for the past 17 months or so squirming with anxiety as my resources dwindled and my depression reasserted itself in ways it hasn’t for more than 15 years. I want people to feel seen, and I want to acknowledge how difficult it is to find work in an environment oversaturated with good, professional, candidates. Please use my words as a single anecdotal data point, and keep doing your best. Looking for work is really, really discouraging, and tough on every level of your humanity.
As I started having conversations with friends, one thing I hadn’t expected to deal with was hearing how AI had (apparently) complicated applicant tracking systems in a way I hadn’t experienced in previous job searches, which scared me quite a bit when my first applications were going out. After several months with little traction I spent some time refining my resume with a friend who told me after a few sessions together that what I had was totally adequate and to just move forward without letting AI-led ATS be a bogeyman. I guess this kinda brings me to the first thing on my mind.
Looking for work is so oppressive. I felt like I had none of the cards, and was at the complete mercy of uncaring hierarchal structures. I had almost zero insight into what was working and what wasn’t- even though I tracked applications I didn’t do a good job keeping track of interviews during the first 6-8 months, but even during the times I was keeping track, there was no rhyme or reason to getting through to a human. It basically depended on whose lap my resume happened to land in. Once I had a great interview with someone at a company where I wrote a good cover letter, and someone I happened to have synergy with happened to be the one to read it, and that was pretty much how it had to work to get in somewhere. Write a cover letter, don’t write a cover letter, apply for stuff only through LinkedIn or unearth a position through more obscure means, it just felt like I was screaming for help in a sensory deprivation chamber and hoping someone happened to be around to hear me.
Which brings me to my next point- everyone has an opinion on how your job search should go, how many hours you should spend per day looking, what makes for a good resume or cover letter, and any number of other related tasks, and while everyone means well, due to the lack of feedback, I felt like it was literally impossible to find a consistent strategy and everyone’s advice just confused me more. I tried LITERALLY DOZENS of resume permutations and scored interviews with many of them, even ones with typos, formatting weirdness, or general ugliness. I was grateful for the advice (see the earlier paragraph about being clueless!) but I had no idea what feedback to take since someone else was lined up to tell me that actually the opposite approach was correct.
Speaking of feedback, once I was fortunate to get rejected by a company that (praise them forever) remembered that actual human beings had applied for the role and included some information about why they decided to move forward with other candidates. On top of general advice (again, praise them), they casually mentioned that there had been 2000+ applicants in the ~48 hours the position was open- they simply had more than they could possible devote time to and scraped the cream off the top. While I was glad for the insight, it was scary to think that on every application I was going toe to toe with a regiment of ultra nerds. You’ve heard that the lists of skills on job applications are a company’s “wish list?” I don’t think that’s currently the case since a company has the freedom to pick an absolute match. While there are a lot of reasons I think you’d want me to work for you, I can’t exactly claim to be a perfect 10 in all categories on your application. I’ve worked with some truly top-tier individuals and they should absolutely be praised and recompensed accordingly for their abilities, but most of us are a little more average. Still worthwhile, but unable to knock every bullet point on a job application out of the park. A job market where thousands of people are vying for a single position immediately discounts a lot of people!
My next indicator that jobs were firmly targeting demigods was the coding challenges. I did a variety of activities to prove my quality and they were all fabulously difficult if not outright impossible. Who is actually passing these things?! “We expect this will take 45 minutes,” and 12 hours later there’s me, wondering how any mortal human can possibly put something viable together that quickly. I had another that said, “Count on 3-4 hours for this.” Since the scope of the project was significant, and due to the time limit imposed, I assumed they wanted applicants to use AI as a tool to get some foundational pieces in place. I spent a little more time making things sexy, and after 6-7 hours adding some extras and expanding on the initial project (which was something encouraged in the rubric) I considered things good enough to turn in. I read over the assignment one more time to make sure I hadn’t missed anything and I had! They said, “Please don’t use AI.” I hadn’t intentionally broken that rule, but I can tell you if I hadn’t used it to get a couple things up and running it would have taken me more time than their minimum expected to meet the basic qualifications. I know some developers who could probably pull off some of these complex projects in sub 4 hour timelines but these sorts of assignments (and they were almost all like this) made me feel like the 3 years of experience I had was nowhere near enough to be barely capable in my role, which added pressure to my search.
The surrendering of my personal information and trust that those posting roles were all good actors was another point of stress. I created countless company-specific Workday accounts under my junk email address. Workday is a tool used to collect information from potential employees- you add a resume and fill out fields, which are then submitted. It’s probably easier for HR teams to collect specific candidate data this way (and Workday, I’m sure, gets to brag about a growing userbase on quarterly reports), but it meant I was constantly deepening my digital footprint without a way to ever change it. I searched for ways to delete these accounts but couldn’t find one. When I reached out to Workday, I was told that it wasn’t possible to do it. I signed up for so many other sites as I searched for work, and it was clear that many of these places were looking for ways to make money, even if you didn’t have to pay for an account. I had an experience once when working with a vetted site where I filled out a form and someone reached out asking if I was still interested in the role. I responded that I was, and he sent me a PDF about the position and told me it explained how to schedule myself for an interview. Great! except that the PDF told me to join a Slack group. This was obviously a huge red flag, but I was curious. I joined. This group was brand new, with no conversational history in any of the channels. It did have a handful of deactivated accounts, though. I reached out to one of the discontinued users on LinkedIn and had a great conversation with him about the experience and complexity of the scam, but it was scary knowing that a well-known and used job site posted this (I wrote to them and let them know, and they removed the posting). Thank goodness I didn’t put any delicate personal information into the application!
When I wasn’t actively bashing my head against the wall modifying resumes, looking for jobs, applying, or (when the stars aligned) actually interviewing, I was working on projects. I focused on React, Ruby on Rails, and Svelte. I had professional experience with React and Rails and personal interest in the philosophy surrounding Svelte, and while I enjoyed learning and getting things to work I had a hard time juggling the stress of the job search with making meaningful and permanent steps forward in my knowledge gaps. I think I definitely improved on some things, but it was tough to know what was the most beneficial thing I could be doing with my time (the aforementioned dearth of overall job search feedback contributed here). Does adding new skills or strengthening old ones make you more valuable? I don’t know the answer to that.
Really, the only semi-viable sanity-preserving and feasible solution for finding work is, as has always been the best way, to rely on your network and friends and hopefully bypass as much of the uncaring machine as possible (the role I’m in now came as a referral from a friend). Even then, it feels like flipping coins and rolling dice when it comes to finding a good fit. A friend and coworker of mine at my previous company was hired and let go the same time I was; we had basically the exact level of experience. He was hired in a matter of weeks, while it took me about 17 months. I was and am happy for him, but I couldn’t help but wonder what I was doing wrong in my search. Was my failure to secure more viable interviews due to my relatively remote location in Maine? Was it due to having an unprofessional resume or cover letter? I don’t know; the only feedback I ever got on my resume was that I could make minor changes that frequently seemed preferential depending on who was offering advice and frequently contradicted other information I’d received. Looking for work is a horrible thing to have to do, and I wouldn’t wish it on my worst enemy. Actually, maybe I would- it’s that much of a punishment. To anyone looking, I have to reiterate something you’ve probably heard- right now looking for work really is an awful thing to have to do, even when you’re smart, capable, well-connected, and good at writing a killer resume.
Finally, this might be a bit cheesy, but I wanted to share a few songs that helped me get through a time I’d place up in my top 2 most difficult life experiences. I hope you can find some of your own if/when you’re going through a hard time. In no particular order:
The Best Day by Atmosphere
This song feels like it’s cheating because it’s practically a guarantee that one of the situations described will be one you’ll deal with at some point in your life, but you can tell that this track came from a place of deep personal experience. Also yes, I’m posting the clean version, this is a family blog, darn it!!!
Super Trouper by Abba
I was having one of my verrry bad days. The job search was feeling particularly hopeless, and I was fuming in the kitchen working on dinner and letting music autoplay. Then this song came on! Those of you who know me know I’m mostly a straight-ahead technical death metal guy who supplements with hip-hop, so this is certainly not my typical fare, but seriously, this song is a straight up banger. While the lyrics weren’t necessarily applicable to my situation, the way it’s put together, the production, the harmonies, those goofy honking synths in the chorus? All so fun, so positive! It was just what I needed to hear and I went back to it many times over the course of my search. My wife will also call me a liar if I leave out the fact that I was sitting in the kitchen weeping to an Abba song, so there’s that, too (“It was the onions, I swear”, etc etc).
Hearts Upon the Hill by Fellowship
Power metal is the epitome of cheese, but Fellowship really elevate it with great songwriting, vocals, and lyrics. This is not their best work, but I quoted this song to myself probably once a day during my job search.
So comes the day we forge another storm
And triumph in the end of things