Eh, what I've been told from multiple people including former PMs/founders is that if I'm out of work for another year and nobody is willing to take a chance on me, the gap will be interpreted as coasting and the door to tech career will close. I'd like to think that someone out of work for years can score just any job in tech because hiring managers are compassionate, but reality is companies need shit done and a candidate with even a 6-month gap will ALWAYS outclass a candidate with a 3-year gap. These things really do have hard limits and it puts a deadline on how much time before it's fruitless.
Assuming you're going the LinkedIn/recruiter route at least. If a friend is going to recruit you off the street it might not apply, but... at that point it's a different type of battle. How to make tech friends for material gain while chronically depressed, broke, moody...
Oh how I would love to just stop looking for jobs for a bit and leave it on rest.
Unfortunately I am selling things off right now to not go homeless and refusing to apply to jobs is an admission of defeat to me. Said as a (former?) tech worker.
Other side of the coin: I have less YoE but I've been senior engineer in the past. Over past few years I sent 10x the number of applications pretty much the same way as OP and combed my entire network and ultimately never got past a second round interview. The daily job search was a huge opportunity cost I should have taken into account and now my job-hunt savings are exhausted. To avoid homelessness it felt I had little choice but to take up menial jobs. If I'd spent that time getting certified instead I might have been able to land a marginally better position in a different industry, but nowadays if I want a roof over my head I pretty much have to work multiple jobs doing stuff I dislike. I had to move my certification studying to the weekends since there's no other time for it anymore. Hoping I can get out of my current situation ASAP.
In this market, I would die for a 5 hour take home over 500 hours of a completely fruitless job search purely for the motivation that results from knowing at least one company did not just throw your application in the trash.
If someone had phrased it years ago to me like "if you just send a banal two sentence message to these random people in LinkedIn once a week you will avoid losing all your savings and worrying about going homeless in X weeks", I probably would have networked more. Network is exhausted now and that seems to be the end of my rope in this industry.
I mean, I did exactly this for past few years unemployed and I'm up to applications in the thousands. No luck and I just burnt myself out in the process. Maybe my YoE aren't enough for this market and I need to go elsewhere at this point.
Even if you're only applying to one opening per company per day, from a recruiter's perspective your application is likely to be equivalent in value to most of the 1,500 other applications they have still to weed out. Your advice boils down to "stop applying to tech jobs."
Unsure about the author's financial situation but the calculus tends to change depending on it. I wasn't applying to Anthropic mind you but $50k-80k tech positions with 4 YoE in industry already. I had already burned through nearly all my savings before hitting another interview and rejection (for far less than what I used to make) and then realizing the job search had burnt me out and I was in danger of losing my lease and everything on top of that. I haven't gotten past a phone screen for half a year by now.
When America prescribes that you only deserve health insurance and shelter if you have a good enough job, and you're at the end of your rope financially, it is in my experience very difficult not to take things personally. I was actually pretty good at this earlier on, when I still had savings! But contrary to what some people say, it became harder and harder to stay positive as time went on until it became all but impossible. The last straw was when 13/hr jobs started rejecting me for not having "moving things around in a warehouse" experience.
I'm now having to work an eye-wateringly menial job with no experience requirement just to make ends meet, and even that still isn't enough for my poverty-level expenses. It's not the prestige of the job that bothers me but the fact that it isn't livable. It does feel sometimes that my life could have diverged significantly if I had just passed that interview all those months ago. So much was riding on that final interview and yet I didn't perform to some arbitrary unknowable standard to deserve a livable salary, and this is the end result of my rejection.
I'm hoping that if I get an HVAC certification or something I can just... survive comfortably. I don't think I'd be happy changing careers and I wanted to work in tech until I died or retired, but seems like it's not going to happen at this rate.
Laid off from tech and out of work for two years. Thousands of applications. Ran out of contacts, luck, savings, patience, everything. I start my retail career next week earning $12/hr. I can't even provide for my own rent and utilities anymore, even after moving.
I almost can't believe it's come to this, sometimes. But another part of me says that's just ego talking, and anyways plenty of others are also desperate for any and all scraps to feed themselves. Problems like mine aren't difficult to come by.
Assuming you're going the LinkedIn/recruiter route at least. If a friend is going to recruit you off the street it might not apply, but... at that point it's a different type of battle. How to make tech friends for material gain while chronically depressed, broke, moody...