I’ve been out of work for about a year. I was never a top player in the field, most of my experience has been enterprise work and non tech companies, with some

I’ve been out of work for about a year. I was never a top player in the field, most of my experience has been enterprise work and non tech companies, with some tech companies (including the one that laid me off. I have a bit more YoE than you. For the first several months, I screwed myself by operating in a 2010s mindset “I’ll have a job in <= 3mo and I can be at least a little picky”. I was not targeting specific companies and looked at both tech and non tech companies. I was exclusively interested in remote jobs, mostly because I still had a lease and breaking it would be very expensive, as would keeping it and having to pay two rents. Remote roles were also scarce, adding that single filter could significantly cut the amount of jobs I saw. I did interview for a handful of on-site roles, mostly for practice, and those tended to progress better, but again, they all wanted me to move to even more expensive areas when moving at all was going to be expensive. After a while though it got worse and worse, my professional confidence flatlined. There were hardly any recruiters reaching out anymore, cold apps went to the void, and the few interviews I did get never made it past the first round. Never got any feedback. The few recruiters I could get were equally useless, usually showing off some roles that I looked like a good fit for before completely ghosting me. I wondered if my resume was the issue, and had several people, as well as ChatGPT look at it, and got nothing but good feedback with minor nitpicks. A lot of the jobs I saw within my area of experience either wanted high senior people, or people with very niche skill sets, and apparently they can afford to be picky right now. Most recently, I’ve had interviews that seem promising and people (family friends) now claiming they can get me a job, but unfortunately this year has battered me, with large expenses left and right My lease is up now, so I’m looking at on site roles, but the rental market is so bad here I’m afraid it’s too late. One one hand, I was never happy with my career, and now the golden handcuffs are off, on the other hand, I have nowhere else to go, and the shit that matters just keeps getting more and more expensive