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First, the most obvious: bang the drum in your network to see if anyone you know is hiring. Facebook, LinkedIn, etc. Just post everywhere. If that doesn't work, you'll need to go through application processes. Smaller companies are hiring now and larger companies are laying people off, so you'll need to optimize for getting hired at smaller companies. Smaller companies tend to interview for the specific skills that they need as opposed to hiring generalists. Between frontend/backend/adminstration, you'll want to specialize in one of them to make it easier to get through the interviews. You'll need to get through the funnel at each phase. To get your foot in the door, you may need something beyond your experience that separates you from other devs. A portfolio is a good example: build a project or three in the specialty that you picked. For example, if you want to be a frontend engineer, build some UIs that have some justification for using nontrivial React techniques, write tests, write a good README that points to the files and lines of code that use different techniques, throw them up on Netlify, and post the code to Github. You can add a "portfolio" section below your work experience section on your resume to highlight your recent work. You'll also need to get through the technical and culture interviews. For the technical interview, you'll probably want to be able to solve at least Leetcode medium problems (not everyone expects you to be able to do these. But many do). Just try them. If you can't solve them, just go into the discussions and keep reading through different solutions with names like "simple with good explanation and comments" until you understand how to solve it, and then make sure that you can code it. You should also search for "$specialty interview questions" and be able to solve any of them quickly. You really want to polish this - I went through the interviewing process recently and failed a React interview when I hadn't really done much frontend coding in the past year. I thought with 20 years of coding experience I could just wing it, and I was wrong! You really want to make sure that you can solve simple problems in under 40 minutes with minimal searching. To get through the culture interview questions, you're going to need to find a way to address your experience gap. My advice is to find a way to frame everything positively when possible. Talk about the positives from your time away. Talk about what you learned about yourself that makes you a stronger engineer now. Talk about how energized you are to come back. Whatever it takes. If you're like "oh man I was so burned out and I had so many health problems and now I'm running out of money so I have to work again," they will probably just pass on you. If you say "I got to the point where I could take a step back and address long-lingering health problems, so I made the decision that I had to. It took longer than I thought, but I'm so happy they're behind me, and I was able to use the time to reconnect with friends and family. I'm excited to get started on my career again, and here's why I'm the perfect match for your company", you'll be more likely to pass. If you struggle, focus on the part of the funnel where you're running into problems: getting a call back, getting past the recruiter, getting past the hiring manager, getting past the coding interview, getting past the culture interview, etc. Best of luck. |