I’m a senior developer with 20 years of experience, and until now I had never really struggled to find a job. Recruiters used to reach out regularly, and opportunities were always there.
This time was different.
After more than 100 applications, I started noticing patterns that didn’t make sense. The same companies reposting the same jobs every day. Listings with hundreds of applicants that never seemed to close. Automated responses, but no real follow-up.
At some point, it felt like I wasn’t applying for jobs anymore, but feeding a system. Resumes parsed by algorithms, filtered by keywords, reduced to a score. No human interaction, just signals and pipelines.
Then came the interviews. Weeks between each round. The same algorithmic problems, disconnected from real-world work. The kind of questions that reward practice, not experience.
I started questioning everything. Not just the process, but how developers are evaluated today.
It feels like the system is optimized to filter people out, not to find the best ones.
I don’t think I can fix it. But I had to adapt to it.
Curious if others here have experienced the same thing recently.
Btw this is happening now in Canada, so I guess it s the same in the US.
What was effective was advertising my availability on LinkedIn, Indeed, and Dice, and waiting for recruiters to contact me. In other words in the current environment passive options were far more effective than active searches - the process is definitely upside down.
The only alternative approach was knowing someone at the company and in a similar role, making a referral. Unfortunately that is often a limited opportunity pool for most people.
In my case I am a government contractor so candidates will not even be considered unless they exceed nearly all points of the job requirements. No exceptions.
Also it used to be all about tech stacks and tool trends. As software employment continues to shrink that is also going away. It’s more about skills and experience on a given platform or family of languages than a tool or framework. The upside to this is that while positions continue to shrink the expectations and salaries appear to be going up proportionally.
I’m mostly focused on software full-stack, backend, automation, and building products.
The problem in my case is that I’m too passionate about it. I was so committed to web and software development that I don’t really have easily transferable skills outside of it.
I’m currently training for some certifications, but I still feel like it’s not the best use of my time.
I just landed a consulting gig installing network hardware. I'm a full stack web dev like yourself. I did a web project for them before they asked about this one.
I'm simply the only technical person they know.
Thankfully, the network requirements are simple enough I could confidently agree.
team lead / full stack / frontend , reactjs , nodejs , reactnative