[chairmanmow]

I didn't see it mentioned here, but worth pointing out if it wasn't obvious it's the 4th quarter of the fiscal year and hiring drops off - it's the worst time of the year to land a job. That being said, I may have some advice as far as how to land a job under less than ideal circumstances - it requires a bit of salesmanship, both in how you layout your presentation and who you are speaking to/targeting.

Are you creating a custom cover letter for each job you apply to? How do you apply - do you submit a form or do you try to get your resumé to someone's email either HR or someone related in the department where the position was posted for? If you're willing to work for low pay, are you sorting job listings where the bad pay shows up first? Are you labeling yourself as a "mid-level" engineer in your application or do you use your cover letter to demonstrate your comfort and experience with the skillset or domain?

Creating a nice cover letter that shows sincere interest, thought and understanding of the industry and the duties that come with the job then getting it into someone's hands who knows who to pass it along to or is a decision maker is your best bet.

Writing all those cover letters though can be draining, I know, I once did it manually and could get one a day done, maybe - never got a job that way. At some point, I realized all the best cover letters stuck to a format, and job listings weren't too different either. I made a spreadsheet that could draft cover letters for me, I'd just add a row for a job listing in my spreadsheet, select from some dropdowns (or add to the list as necessary) and then it would pull some statements relative to those parameters in and generate a cover letter that usually needed less than 5 minutes of editing (the cover letters could get long winded and sound conceited sometimes, good problem to have) to be ready to send out. I also added some job/skill type parameters where I could rank my compatibility for a job, like if two jobs were the same except one used PHP (not that experienced) on the backend, and one used Ruby (more experienced), I'd be able to prioritize the one that was a more likely fit. Once I built this spreadsheet to generate cover letters and rank jobs, I literally got the first job I applied to despite being mostly self-taught and trying to break into the industry. I just sent it to [e-mail] and got a callback in 10 minutes too, FWIW. Pretty sure the general gist of this advice applies to any job - send a nice cover letter!

[anon50118810]

I appreciate the instinct to try to help me personally, but as I said in another comment I'm keeping a lot back for privacy reasons so it's difficult for me to engage in that sort of discussion. There are issues with my overall situation that make job searching difficult, which I won't share, going beyond tweaking things, which is why I've asked for help identifying, basically, boring unprestigious developer jobs where I might have a better chance.

I've generally looked at smaller employers with simple applications that I assume go either to an internal recruiter or the technical team. I don't think these are situations where there's a need to bypass a lot of bureaucracy.

Deliberately searching for lower pay is a good idea if done carefully. If it's too low then the job might be abusive or not actually a software developer role. Maybe $80k is the floor depending on industry and location. Unfortunately it doesn't look like the major job sites let you search that way, but I might be able to figure something out.