A few years ago I decided to leave my job, I was secure but unhappy with the company, so I took some time to try to find a good fit. Looking for a new job wasn'

A few years ago I decided to leave my job, I was secure but unhappy with the company, so I took some time to try to find a good fit. Looking for a new job wasn't a full-time affair, but I'd say I spent about 10 hours a week on it. I didn't collect metrics like this, but it took about a year and something north of 170 applications/reachouts. I received zero direct rejections. Probably actually talked to about 15 different companies. Phone interviewed with 3 or 4 and interviewed directly with 2. I ended up not getting any of those positions. But I don't feel bad about it, the positions where I made it to the interview rounds weren't even the ones I applied to within those companies. Both of the interviews were friendly, but almost entirely pointless and were non-representative of what I would have likely been doing there anyway. Finally, after really wanting to leave, I just did the time honored thing of asking a few friends who worked at places I was interested in if they'd refer me. Two places said they'd like to talk, and I work at one of them now. This process took about 3 weeks and I ended up in as near a perfect fit as you can get. Side-effect, after working at this new place for a couple years, those friends I asked, keep popping up every once in a while to see if I'd be interested in something where they currently work...so they've kept in mind that I both: - switch jobs - thought of them when I was looking to do it I'm not a developer, I'm much more into Technical Project/Program Management, so YMMV, but I also noticed that the hiring processes for people like me have almost no steam behind them. Most companies tried real hard to fit me into developer or engineer pipelines, they had almost no ability to entertain anybody outside of that kind of hiring experience. Of the few that I phone interviewed with, at some point the subject of doing a coding assignment came up and I simply told them that we'd all be sad at events around that idea: I'm a passable coder, but years out of date. I haven't coded professionally for probably getting onto 15 years now. The job I wanted didn't involve any software development, so the exercise wasn't very useful. If I passed it, it both said something about their engineering maturity (and I wouldn't want to work there) and again wouldn't be representative of my work. The actual hiring machine at most companies seems impossibly broken. I ran into a few good recruiters, but most were just trying to make quota or show effort.