> once or twice a year Getting hired is a numbers game. If you really want a job, you need to go on 5-10 interviews PER WEEK for months. Even people in their 2

> once or twice a year Getting hired is a numbers game. If you really want a job, you need to go on 5-10 interviews PER WEEK for months. Even people in their 20s have to deal with this. That's just how it is. > anyone who seemed interested, most notably Google and Facebook Google and Facebook aren't interested. They have massive amounts of cash and earmark a huge amount of it to pay recruiters and junior engineers to interview literally every engineer they can find. Getting a first interview with FAANGM is easier than falling off a log. Getting a second interview is harder. A lot harder. > impossible to get even a junior developer job To many managers (not me), "junior" means "we're going to give you all of the shit tasks no one else wants to do, and we expect you to work insanely hard, AND we're going to not pay you that much, because there are others willing to take your spot". So vanish any thoughts of applying for "junior" jobs from your mind. You're not the target market. > after my skills no doubt became somewhat outdated The best piece of advice I can give is this: A lot of things that were once done manually are now handled by an open-source project. You don't make a search engine, you use Solr or ElasticSearch. You don't configure Linux, you use Docker configuration files. Become an expert in some project that companies actually use. Figure out how to re-frame your experience in a way that it applies to modern development. Did you spend years in the early C++ days, then C# or Java is probably the way forward. But you have to know it, and know the difference. You have to research. You can't say "I only know C++, I can't do Java" and you can't say "I knew C++ at one point, so I can do Java". Just interview with random companies, and ask THEM what they need. You have a fantastic free resource in front of you. Companies are looking to hire people, and they're willing to let you waste their time to ask them questions. Take advantage of it. One last thing. Don't take it personally if a company declines to continue interviewing you. A lot of companies (web and app startups) have zero need for someone with experience. They just want someone who can do a little HTML and CSS (and do it quickly). Experience just gets in the way. Learn what you can from them during the interview, but move on. You're looking for companies that are doing hard things, and can benefit from someone who's seen a lot of things before.