> but I'm curious what the HN community's experience has been recently.

TL;DR: Dreadful for me. Games was never stable, but these days it's imploding in real time and my calls slowed to a trickle. Crazy how much changed in 2 years. The worst part isn't the rejections but the disrespect.

For reference, I had 7 YOE when I was laid off in 2022, and it took maybe 40-50 apps leading into 6-7 interviews and I accepted my first choice while I was 5+ interviews deep into 2 others. 3 months or so of seaching.

Studio shuttered in 2023, took a break, started looking in September of 2023. Boy, it felt like finding my first job all over again. Hell, it's worse than that; I at least lucked out into my first FTE after 3-4 months. It's been over 9 months and I felt like I experienced every bad glassdoor review in the book short of outright scams:

- See an interesting role and it's closed after an hour.

- Try to contact recruiters or old colleagues to express interest. Sometimes I get a response from the recruiter for my resume, send it, then never heard from again. Not even a "sorry we're looking for someone with more experience/more experience in X".

- Interview one or two stages in and then a hiring freeze occurs. Or better yet, layoff announcements. Especially wary now when interviewing towards the end of a fiscal quarter.

- given some project that "only takes 2-3 hours". ends up taking more like 8-10 hours (even when I optimistically estimated the project scope to be 4-5 hours), turn it in.... and no response. This is how I got my first job back in the day but I will absolutely never do a project without talking to a human anymore. (fwiw, no. I highly doubt this was anything worthy of spec work to use professionally. Some were basically college math + comp sci quizzes. Some were basically filling in a template).

- Get referrals. Higher rates, but I'm shocked how many lead to no responses. my referrals almost always lead to at least an exploratory call. Here it's gone from 95% response rate to 40%. still better than cold applying but crazy how even people vouching for you on the inside may lead to nothing (not even a generic rejection. Some referrals had to prod the manager and get some response).

- Get an invitation to a recruiter call who reached out for me. I setup a call and confirm on email. No Show. Never responds back again. This has happened twice now. One of them delayed a call a week, then another week, and 10 minutes after the 2nd delay just deleted the call. Never heard back from them again.

- get a recruiter call, express interest, then say the role is filled... all within 24 hours.

- Go through 5 rounds of interviews, get good vibes from the team, expect good news (or at least "we went with the other candidate") and then... nothing. Ghosted after 6-8 weeks of interview. This happened Twice. What the heck? When did I enter the Ghost Zone? This is crazy.

I lost count long ago, but I must be well past 400 applications at this point. My current part time role came from a complete blind message on LinkedIn, so I'm not exactly going to say LinkedIn is useless or obsolete. I've tried half a dozen other websites and LinkedIn is only second to applying directly on the company website.

It's just weird times. My rates were never as stellar as many stories you read here (the 2022 experience was still ~16-20% response rate) so I'm used to that. But the real kicker is just how little respect there is these days. I'm more than burned out from trying to curate my resume and make a homely cover letter talking about their projects, what I liked, and what I can help with. I lose hairs every time I am lead to a workday application knowing I need to re-enter 99% the same stuff but under a "new account".

The only solace is knowing I'm not alone. Most of my close friends got hit or barely dodged layoffs. I think at this point almost all of them bounced back (except one that was laid off 2 months ago or so during the Activision layoffs), but I am treading water.

funny side note: got one more rejection (this one actually came from a HN Hiring post) as I wrote this comment. Fine enough (it's 2AM right now, so I'm guessing this wasn't a US company). I just can't believe I'm in a situation where a personal feeling rejection is one of my better experiences this year.