I've been unemployed for about 14 months since resigning from my most recent role -- a role which my close family and friends characterized as "destroying me."

After becoming unemployed, with enough savings to sustain myself for a long search, I then faced a significant family trauma that required me to move away from Boston (where I had lived and worked for most of the past decade), back home to do basically full-time care for the family situation -- located in a very rural part of the Midwest where e.g. I don't even have reliable access to internet connectivity here.

Despite this, I've managed to start a newsletter/website for one of my interests (by teaching myself simple usage of the Hakyll Haskell-based static site tool), and start a pedagogical side project using Cython to write some stuff using fused types and typed memoryviews. It has been utterly demoralizing to try to do these projects in the midst of my family situation and the lack of resources here in this rural area.

I've done literally hundreds of phone interviews, had 7 different on-site interviews, and received offers from 2 of them (both of which I rejected because they asked me to accept compensation/benefits packages that were substantially worse than what I had when last working).

Most interviews have been OK, but I reject a lot of companies if I pick up on red flags, especially related to start-up culture bullshit or poor work/life balance, to protect myself from the insanity that led to this in the first place.

In my experience, tech hiring is just an unbelievable shitstorm of irrationality. I've been rejected for over-engineering (because I included tests and wrote a necessary sorted dict data structure for a take home submission), for not "focusing enough on product" when submitting statistical analysis code for a data science take home test, for not remembering an obscure fact about GCDs and integer lattice points (even though I had correctly solved two difficult coding problems already in that interview), for not having X years of on-the-job experience in any one of Hadoop, Spark, various DevOps tools, and web frameworks (I am a statistician with lots of scientific computing experience, never applied to positions that list DevOps or web development as important needs, even though I'm happy to learn them on the job).

At this point, my extended professional network has basically given up on me. My grad school friends have recommended me for jobs with biotech companies, Facebook, fairly prestigious finance companies, with endorsements like "he is the best Python programmer I know, and it's not even his primary skill set" -- most reject me immediately because of the gap on my resume.

I don't have any more people to ask for job leads. I scour Indeed.com for hours every morning, which is extremely demoralizing. I have a reasonably significant amount of Stack Overflow rep (> 17000) and joined their career site long ago but have never found a single realistic lead since it's dominated by web framework jobs. Most employers (or their needlessly combative tech hiring staff, anyway) seem to make a point of saying cutting comments to me about my university degrees (two Ivy degrees) and my Stack Overflow rep -- even though I don't ever try to project pride about these things and fully welcome and prefer to be judged solely by my talents and do not want any form of laurel-resting, especially not based on "prestigious" degrees (though, to be fair, I did work extremely hard in university and accomplished many things that now seemingly no one cares about).

Recently I got rejected by Snapchat literally less than 11 minutes after submitting my resume and application through their online application site. It was a form letter rejection in 11 minutes. I started to wonder if maybe the application portal just sends them a Snapchat photo of my resume, so they have to accept or reject before it gets deleted. But I'm so cynical by now that it wasn't really funny.

Practically the only ways I can stay motivated after such a long and soul-crushing spell of unemployment have been focusing a ton on personal exercise, focusing on my family and continuing to help them, and focusing on creative efforts that are 100% not related to software or coding.

The degree of burnout frightens me greatly, but currently the financial demands placed on me by my family's situation are so great that as I no longer can afford any form of health insurance at all while unemployed, I cannot even see a counselor or anything to help process my feelings.

Much like this elementary school parable I read where the Sun and Wind have a competition to see who can get a man to remove his jacket, I am like the man when the Wind character just blows harder and harder -- he just pulls the jacket tighter and tighter.

The more that interfacing with the labor market causes me to deal with bullshit start-up culture, the less willing I am to take a job. I simply will not compromise my standards, even literally to my own destruction. It reminds me of a David Foster Wallace quote: "I had kind of a midlife crisis at twenty which probably doesn’t augur well for my longevity."

I've been surviving this long enough to know there just is no answer to the problem of seeking a job that actually makes your life better, certainly not here in the Hacker News echo chamber -- just look at all of the Who Is Hiring threads, where, for my given skill area, there has been somewhere around a 1% relevance rate (just try searching for NumPy).

I'm not looking for encouragement, sympathy, or (more likely here) unsympathetic market-perspective brass tacks criticism. I just figured it was worth sharing.