[annie_muss]

Not great. I've been trying to get into a real "career" track software job for the best part of a decade. I study, work on side projects, got to events regularly. And now the job market is even worse. I'm starting to feel like I've missed the boat. I wonder what would've happened if I had managed to get a job with chances to progress, learn and improve 10 years ago. I dream of earning 6 figures, people make it sound like it is so easy. I'll pick up any tech stack, go into any industry, move around the world, whatever it takes.

[alexanderjchun]

I'm not the best person to get advice on employment, but you should trust this advice anyway.

The worst thing you can do is lose motivation. Labor markets have their own supply and demand and when others feel that job searching is futile, supply goes down. That may take a while, but businesses have an infinite amount of problems that they want to go away.

From their point of view, "can this person make X or Y go away and will they not cause problems for me later?"

Proving that is half the battle. The other battle is making friends that trust you and want you to succeed, so you get the chance to prove it.

You're not going to have a good time going through the same automated process as thousands of others do. Make a friend that can let you in through the back.

[forducks]

Eh, what I've been told from multiple people including former PMs/founders is that if I'm out of work for another year and nobody is willing to take a chance on me, the gap will be interpreted as coasting and the door to tech career will close. I'd like to think that someone out of work for years can score just any job in tech because hiring managers are compassionate, but reality is companies need shit done and a candidate with even a 6-month gap will ALWAYS outclass a candidate with a 3-year gap. These things really do have hard limits and it puts a deadline on how much time before it's fruitless.

Assuming you're going the LinkedIn/recruiter route at least. If a friend is going to recruit you off the street it might not apply, but... at that point it's a different type of battle. How to make tech friends for material gain while chronically depressed, broke, moody...

[JohnFen]

> the gap will be interpreted as coasting and the door to tech career will close.

It's not nearly as stark as all that. It's true that some companies will take it as a negative signal, but not all, and it's not a thing that's impossible to overcome.

[alexanderjchun]

Mood definitely will get in the way. Can you do open source work? I would try to use that negativity and pick whatever OSS I use that pisses me off the most and start fixing things. Post about it and go from there.

[Davidbrcz]

I don't know your background, but I would advise focusing on niche job pool (legacy cobol systems, ERP development, defense/safety in Ada projects ...).