Ask HN: How's your job search going in this current economy?

Maybe Netflix or TikTok?

There may be a bias here due to some correlation between employment status and participation in online discussion forums.

Anyway, for what it's worth, I've heard it is increasingly difficult for experienced devs to get jobs now. I know that my team has more or less had a hiring freeze for about 18 months now, even though the company is doing better than ever.

Based on nothing more than headlines I've read, it seems the CEO class got spooked about the economy last year and hasn't eased up yet. It doesn't help that interest rates are high, which typically bodes poorly for tech(despite megatech having plenty of cash right now due to a number of factors, along with debt held at mostly low, fixed rates). Many, many smart folks thought the economy would have died last year. My guess is that we are largely avoiding it thanks to near-record levels of debt-based federal spending(govt debt more or less becomes an asset to private sector). If high rates force the feds to cut spending(unlikely, given war and going into an election year), I think we'll see things cool quickly, but barring that I'm not so sure the economy is going to crash anytime soon. Some sectors, yes.

CEO class is spooked by either haemorrhaging money during Covid or haemorrhaging after (depending on what kind of company is was).

Then economy was “definitely a recession coming” for like 12 months. I think people are waiting for a rate cut to unclench their sphincter and start hiring again.

That, and likely it all got a bit over the top anyway. When you have Meta product managers with TikTok videos about how cushy their job is, you know there was a bubble.

Really, really, really bad. I'm a full stack engineer. I took part of the last 4 years "off" due to having savings and finally settling down to pursue my own SaaS attempt.

I've been back in the job market since the beginning of the year. I've probably sent out well over a hundred resumes (definitely over this number since I was keeping track until recently). I had a brief respite when I picked up a temp contract but that only lasted about a month.

I mostly get just rejections. I have over 15 years of experience. I literally know how to build out every part of a normal web/api stack.

I even have an active ongoing project I've run for 13 years and have scaled to support a couple million requests a day.

Nothing seems to matter.

I have maybe managed to get one actual call a week for the last year where I actually speak to someone from the company. And even then, it's been one "thanks for playing" response email after another.

I honestly don't know what to do. I've never had a problem at least getting interviews to the point where I'm at least in the consideration process.

I need help.

I revised my resume a few times and that hasn't helped. I've gotten more involved with LinkedIn and I get more noise but still low results.

I'm basically getting very desperate.

Pretty good, actually, although I've just been using LinkedIn recruiters. It's important to optimize your profile such that you get recruiters to contact you. I usually have 5-10 recruiter messages per day asking me to work for some company or another. A lot of them are startups though, which is risky in this climate, as I've heard many that got fired or laid off from their startup job this year.