What did you do to get a response back from jobs you've submitted an application to? Round an unsolicited job application down to a no-op; this is not how the

What did you do to get a response back from jobs you've submitted an application to? Round an unsolicited job application down to a no-op; this is not how the majority of jobs get filled. Instead, you should find someone with decisionmaking authority in the company, talk to them, and get them interested in you. The "N years of experience" thing not a requirement. It is a polite fiction. It was put there by someone who may not even be associated with the team that is doing the hiring. But if you come through the front door, there exists a team of people who will aggressively filter on that fiction because if they don't filter on it then the larger organization will ask "What is it, exactly, that you do here?" Your mission, should you choose to accept it, is to only have these people involved to schedule the interview that a decisionmaker has already committed to giving you and/or collect the resume that they need for their records now that you're hired. Senior engineers applying to junior roles are selected against fairly aggressively. This is an unfortunate shibboleth, but it is a widely used shibboleth. Senior engineers should apply to senior roles; the vast majority of hammers swing in approximately similar fashions and as you get more senior you're not being hired to hammer in nails-per-hour. You're (hopefully) doing things like helping younger employees understand the difference between screws and nails, pushing back on the person who asked for 100k nails on a house that has been uninhabited for 6 years, developing processes to avoid wood rot around your nails, etc etc. Incidentally: Serious software shops are largely aware of this. If a company thinks that a Pythonista with 5 years of Python experience cannot be a Rubyist in single-digit weeks, that company is probably not a great place for software people to be.