You said that you were laid off in 2022. How recently did you restart your job search? FWIW I'm a software engineer with 25+ yrs of SaaS dev experience (since

You said that you were laid off in 2022. How recently did you restart your job search? FWIW I'm a software engineer with 25+ yrs of SaaS dev experience (since 1998) & 10+ years of .NET dev experience. It took me four months of job searching to find my current position, which I started a few weeks ago. I was employed during the first two months, when I first suspected I was going to be laid off, & was collecting unemployment during the last two months. I applied to 175-200 jobs, got callbacks from ~40, interviewed with ~10, and received one offer, which I accepted. I started off by grinding LeetCode easy & medium questions, but I stopped after 3 weeks because those types of questions have literally no bearing on the type of work I do daily (e.g. building/supporting APIs, datastore CRUD operations, performance debugging). If a company thinks that they're going to find solid candidates by requiring candidates to solve N Queens under time pressure, then they're not somewhere I want to work anyway, as that's probably just the tip of the iceberg in terms of the problems they have. Basically, it's a numbers game. On the one hand, you should be applying to a lot of jobs, to maximize your odds of getting selected to start the interview process. On the other hand, you don't want to waste your time with companies that are going to waste your time. For me, that meant ignoring job descriptions that wouldn't provide their salary range upfront, before talking to a hiring manager or taking any tech tests; bailing out on any job interviews that use LeetCode/HackerRank in the technical interview stage; bailing out on any job that didn't support an acceptable remote-work arrangement (in my case, I was only looking for 100% WFH). Also, the lead time for most of the jobs I applied to was 3-6 weeks. It's a slog, but playing the stupid LeetCode game is likely to only waste your time, if you're like me & don't live/breathe algorithms like I'm taking CompSci 101 in college again. Also, as other folks have said here, you should be doing everything you can to see if folks in your social network know of any roles for which you might be a good fit. I've landed several jobs that way -- it helps if you can get your resume seen by a hiring manager without having to deal with all of the BS that's typically involved in modern automated resume screening.