I got laid off in early August of last year. I had planned to take a few weeks to a couple months to deal with a medical issue that I was likely to need surgery for. That said, after those first couple months, when I started searching, the job market was really weak/rough. I tried not to stress too much on it until around December, when I know jobs tend to start interviewing for the coming year, but even then it was very dead.
I managed to finally find a permanent position in April of this year. Needless to say, much more in debt than I had planned to be. I don't enjoy the job I'm in today which has been strictly in Architecture/Planning and hands off from code. Of course, through my passively looking at what's out there, there are a relatively few jobs and lots of people applying. The pay rates are also a lot lower than I would expect and much lower than just a couple years ago. I'm seeing senior positions paying what I made back in 2004 or so.
While searching, it just sucked. The only thing worse than no answer, was the relatively boilerplate answers. The resume upload sites mostly sucked even after specifically working through formatting and generating the PDF to get better, but still it doesn't work. Interviewing is also much worse. I hate the auto-graded leet-code type auditions. They all have way too many assumptions and give no indication of experience or actual problem solving ability. I'd much rather have a relatively simple "take home" assignment that is assessed by a human. Dropping me into a leet-code test using some ORM that I'd never seen and hiding half the code isn't going to be done in the timeframe and will only work against me.
I still think it would be nice to see a more formalized guild around software development and IT, where you stake reputation on endorsements, but even that could easily be gamed.
In any case, currently working through a technology consulting firm at a very large banking company on a large project. I sit in meetings most of the week, and make drawings and read technical documentation the rest of the time.
I managed to finally find a permanent position in April of this year. Needless to say, much more in debt than I had planned to be. I don't enjoy the job I'm in today which has been strictly in Architecture/Planning and hands off from code. Of course, through my passively looking at what's out there, there are a relatively few jobs and lots of people applying. The pay rates are also a lot lower than I would expect and much lower than just a couple years ago. I'm seeing senior positions paying what I made back in 2004 or so.
While searching, it just sucked. The only thing worse than no answer, was the relatively boilerplate answers. The resume upload sites mostly sucked even after specifically working through formatting and generating the PDF to get better, but still it doesn't work. Interviewing is also much worse. I hate the auto-graded leet-code type auditions. They all have way too many assumptions and give no indication of experience or actual problem solving ability. I'd much rather have a relatively simple "take home" assignment that is assessed by a human. Dropping me into a leet-code test using some ORM that I'd never seen and hiding half the code isn't going to be done in the timeframe and will only work against me.
I still think it would be nice to see a more formalized guild around software development and IT, where you stake reputation on endorsements, but even that could easily be gamed.
In any case, currently working through a technology consulting firm at a very large banking company on a large project. I sit in meetings most of the week, and make drawings and read technical documentation the rest of the time.