I found a job as a developer after about 10 months of applying for 100 jobs per month. It was very weird this time round. Especially weird considering that my resume is exceptional (lots of experience; corporate, startup, back end, front end, full stack, distributed systems, open source). The list of technologies that I'm competent with is long and, for most of them, I've got open source projects to prove my claims. Air tight situation.

This time round, employers had all kinds of weird esoteric requirements which made no sense.

For example, I applied for a job where I matched every single technology in their stack (and it was a long list), I even had proven experience in 'Web Components' which was still niche in a professional setting (most jobs are still React, Vue, etc...) Anyway, they ended up rejecting me with the explanation "The head of engineering is very particular, even though this position is Node.js/JavaScript, he likes to hire candidates who have a background in C#." There was no mention of this on the job advert! Besides, I did use C# full time for 2 months during the summer break while at university which I mentioned after she seemingly invented this requirement but she responded 'He likes candidates who started with C#.'

There is no way they would find anyone who meets all of these requirements who also happen to know this completely unrelated technology.

Anyway, after 1 year, out of 1000+ applications I submitted, I got about 5 phone screens with recruiters and 2 interviews with actual company insiders.

The first company Founder I interviewed with seemed keen to hire me at first and kept leading me on; but they always waited for me to ask them about the next stage in the process before actually proceeding... They kept half-ass ghosting me until the last phase and then I was like "They can't be serious about hiring me" and I stopped asking about the next phase.

My sister works in HR and she told me that I only needed to match about 60% of tech requirements to get a job. It didn't correspond at all with my observations of reality...

Putting 2-and-2 together, it seems like they were giving all these high paying jobs to beginners and tossing experienced candidates' resumes in the trash... Probably the HR leads were not even seeing the resumes of experienced candidates coming in.

It all seems kind of conspiratorial if you ask me.

Another weird thing that happened (going 2 years back and which led me to being unemployed) is that the startup I was working for was getting very few job applications when I applied. They were super keen to hire me and I got a big salary, share package, everything... Then 6 months in, candidate applications started pouring in by the thousands... After sifting through thousands of applications, they managed to hire an absolute weapon; this guy was not only sharp, but he was churning out maybe 1K lines of code per day. Really impressive. I had not seen anyone code that fast before. He built features really quickly. I was doing peer reviews for the whole team, which was hard work and essential at the time, especially with code being churned out at that rate! Anyway I was laid off because the founders didn't see the value of my PR code reviews.

They didn't understand how important it was to have someone looking over this superhuman code churning to keep complexity under control. Multiple times, I saved the front end from memory leaks and rogue setInterval/setTimeout which were unnecessary or not cleaned up properly (among many other issues). Sigh. I feel like this situation would have been a startup founder's dream, surely combining the massive development speed with the safety/de-risking I was adding was worth the tiny sub-% equity I was set to receive 4 months later... Sigh.