No, I'm not fresh out of school and I wasn't unemployed (...well, see below). I have about 20 years of experience and have worked in 5 countries. However, my situation was... well, not unique (unfortunately), but challenging:

- Yes, I was employed. In a startup paying me about 60% of the current market salary, no benefits of any kind (they promised shares and many other stuff, never delivered), with incompetent managers and going downhill towards bankrupcy (I don't understand why the only investor they have keeps giving them money). Obviously I wanted to leave.

- I joined said startup because of my personal situation. I was diagnosed with leukaemia in 2015 and spent almost a year in the hospital. When I finished that part of the treatment, even thinking was difficult (chemo brain is a real *&%#) and I still had 2 years in front of me of daily chemo ("only" tablets) and weekly visits to the hospital. Even after I finished the chemo, it took me almost a year to go back to normal. The founders of this startup were friends of a friend, gave me a lot of flexibility and the minimum salary that I needed to live (pay rent, utilities, food...). I started going to the office to help with database queries and ETL processes, ended up managing the data science and data engineering teams and looking after most of the infrastructure of the company. But neither my salary or benefits changed.

- I made many mistakes in my first interviews. I hadn't done an interview in 9 years and even then I used to interview for engineering roles while now I was going for senior manager/VP level roles (basically, what I've been doing for the last 7 years). It took me a while to learn the lingo, to identify the red flags and prepare good answers for all the common questions. Funnily enough, not many people asked me about the obvious 1 year gap in my cv.

- Hot market depends on your location and what roles you look for. Developers with a couple years of experience? Sure, way more companies looking to fill in roles than people wanting to move. Specialists in a niche field? Might have problems finding a new job. 40 year old generalists looking for management positions? Not that many open positions that are posted online and not filled in by personal recommendation (and yes, most of the jobs I've applied to have been through my network).

- Many of the companies I interviewed with had all the issues OP mentions and a couple more. Some gave me topcoder-style interviews, where I had to come up and code efficient algorithms for complex problems. I understand (and welcome!) a technical test to prove that I'm not lying and I do have a technical background, but asking a VP of engineering to code an efficient solution for the knapsack problem in 1 hour is stupid, any way you look at it. Personally, all the code I've written in the last 6 years has been either a) as a hobby, b) small, non-critical-path tasks that helped me maintain some familiarity with the different environments and reduced a bit of load from my team(s) or c) stuff that no one else in the company understood (mostly around infrastructure). Ask me about sofware architecture, data storage, distributed systems and machine learning and I can easily argue with you pros and cons of different stacks and approaches. Ask me how to manage fully remote/distributed teams and I'll talk about lessons learnt, things I tried and worked and mistakes I made. Ask me about hiring, mentoring, budgeting, project managing, investor relations... Whatever you want, and I'll be completely honest about what I know, what I've done and what I don't know/haven't done. But ask me to write a java class and I'll need to google the correct way of declaring a constructor ("public void"? "public static void"? How did you declare the args parameter? an array of Strings?).

- Why I applied to so many? Because I had to. I would have loved to get an offer from the first 2-3 companies I applied (and I applied and got interviews from some really cool companies, including the one I've signed with). But I didn't. So I had to continue searching in a race against time before the place that I was working at imploded. After how my life has been the last decade, I have no safety net and can't afford to be unemployed.

- Interested in all of them? Of course I was. I didn't apply to any company I disliked, for example consulting companies, offshore/nearshore and most of fintech. Either you are much pickier than I am (at the end of the day I mostly look for a few things: Good, professional people, a company that values its employees and a decent compensation package, anything else is a bonus) or seriously underestimate the amount of companies out there that are doing interesting things even in the most boring environments.

- A lot of work? Well, yes and no... I've spent most of my vacation days on half-day offs to go to physical interviews and working evenings to recover time spent in phone/video interviews. But in general it's being easy managing the latter and if you look at it as a time management problem, there's plenty of tools out there to help you keep track of everything (calendar, trello, job alerts...).