Ask HN: Is My Career Salvagable?
I haven't been able to find any work since 2022. I worked in software for about 5-6 years and now I cant get anything. Not from startups, not from tech companies big or small, not from non-tech companies big or small. I thought it was just the market, but frankly I don't think so anymore.

A brief overview of my career:

Small Independent Company: First software job I ever got. I was hired as a contractor for a brief stint to help a very small company. The work mostly consisted of developing what was basically a small ETL tool to merge and normalize data from two different sources. The work was mostly modern PHP, but without any frameworks.

Small State Government Agency: Worked in a small team, but most projects were assigned to the different developers independently. The autonomy was nice, but the money was embarrassingly low. Most of the work I did was standing up new (albeit simple, low volume) CRUD applications. Mostly using old .NET frameworks. I left about about a year or two for better money.

Regional F500: Larger team and more collaborative environment, but I actually did very little work as bureaucracies just slowed my projects to a halt most of the time. The work I did do was mostly minor maintenance on old legacy internal business .NET applications. The company was beginning to embrace more modern technology and cloud platforms, but not the team I was on. I again left after a year or two, mostly because they RTO'd after covid and I had started to like remote work.

Small SaaS Company: My last job. Got hired on during the big hiring boom in 2021. Worked on a small team mostly doing integration work between the SaaS and various customer platforms. Tech was a little better, using newer .NET frameworks, and modern cloud technloogies, but it was all still very shallow. Things were going good for a bit, but the company ended up making some bad strategy bets, and in the midst of that post-covid market, ended up laying off half the company prior to a rebrand. This was last year and led to where I am now.

I have been searching for jobs forever now and I can't find any work. Most of the jobs require vast experience with tools or platforms I just haven't ever used professionally. Often stressing those skills above the programming skills. Many times its not even something you can just spin up yourself to do a side project with. But even jobs that seem a perfect match for my resume and history don't go anywhere anymore. There's a lot of stuff I've learned on my own or on the job, but very tangential to the actual work, and not to the extent that companies want. When I do get interviews, I mostly get ghosted and occasionally rejected, sometimes after the first round, sometimes after the final round. I thought I could at least go back to working on legacy stuff at slow non tech companies, but they don't even want me anymore. I've done some more interesting things outside of work, but they sound more impressive than they really were. I'd like to think I'm pretty good and quick at figuring things out as I go, but not being able to instantly recall things on the spot. I used to at least be able to get a lot of recruiters in my inbox, but not anymore. I've had two since August, and they mostly ghost me as well. It seems like everyone wants a specialist now, but I never got the chance to specialize.

I even have gotten a few referrals from people I know who think I would be good for a position, only to get grilled by hiring managers and recruiters for not hitting their checklist. Maybe the short tenures are killing me, but really I think going into this field of work was a mistake. Unfortunately, there's no realistic alternative except to work for barely livable wages given my lack of credentials. I started programming as a kid, and always knew I wouldn't like it make it in the industry. Now I hate it, but I need to know if it's worth even trying to salvage my career now, or if I should just cut my losses.