It would be interesting to know what type of jobs were you looking for if you're willing to share? Without context we can't really tell whether you found a good

It would be interesting to know what type of jobs were you looking for if you're willing to share? Without context we can't really tell whether you found a good gig impressively quickly or settled for below the market rate to start something sooner. I know experienced contractors who've been looking for software development gigs around that level for much of this summer. Some crazy proportion of the roles being pitched by recruiters or advertised on the boards seem to end up just being imaginary. Even for the ones that are real it sounds like multi-week delays for each step in the process have been common because everyone's been going off on big holidays again this year. So much time wasted even for good people who normally have no trouble finding work. I could probably write a book with all the excuses from recruiters I've heard about too. Possibly the most creative so far was some new government initiative that was due to run out of the Cabinet Office where apparently no-one actually knows which IT projects are still going ahead after the change in government.