Ask HN: How to overcome job search exhaustion?

The point where you about to give up is the point where you are about to make it.

1) Take a short break of at least a full day and do something you enjoy. Get some exercise and some fresh air if you can.

2) Mentally prepare yourself for the grind ahead. A lot of the jobs you are applying to are already filled by the time you get there or the job has been pulled due to economic slowdown but the company is still interviewing because they are disorganized.

3) Try and make a list of the reasons why you are pursuing this job and this career specifically. Clarity around why you are choosing to take on potentially hundred of these gruelling interviews can help you keep your eye on the prize.

4) Be conciously grateful for your blessings. Some people never make tech lead but want it, you seem to have accomplished it early and have acquired a ton of valuable experience. There are others in far worse circumstances. Take heart, although this situation is very tough, because you have a set of problems that many would love to have.

Hope this helps you in some way. May God bless you.

I wouldn't get discouraged since most people don't even make it to that stage, and being exhausted is certainly understandable after 40 interviews. But have you analyzed or asked for feedback on what it is that was missing from the interview step that the employer was looking for?

You gotta change something up. Get a certification or learn a new skill if you have the savings to do it. Get a job in another field that hires everyone -- I once took a job as an SAT teacher while I was between jobs because at least it gave me something to do.

Volunteer. Especially if you can volunteer at a relevant industry conference, where you can at least mingle with people who might be able to give you a job lead.

Since you said you had 10 years of experience I assume you haven't gone through a downturn before (or maybe got in right at the end of the last one). It's tough but it's a numbers game. Eventually you'll find someone who is hiring, but you may have to do something else for a while.

I wanted to make an app to make job searching easier. It's a pain in the ass on both side and imo current tools on the market suck.

I have been in exactly this position. It does end. In the meantime, make sure you're getting fresh air and plenty of sleep. And try not to schedule an interview every day, you need at least one weekday away from it.

Has the market become this tough/bad?

> gives me anxiety and makes me depressed

Nope. It may not entirely seem like it, but our emotional response to things are ours, they're not inherent in the objects of our focus. At least that's what my old and moldy stoic teachers tell me.

> I am exhausted

That's the key. That's real. There's no arguing with that. That you know it is the first step. I agree with another commentator, take some time off. But I'd add that the time off should be smaller and more frequent, something calming and sustainable.

> I've done around 40 interviews > Technical lead with over 10 years experience

Holy smoking duck nuts, that sounds exasperating! You have my sympathy.

Someone once asked a man how he was. He replied, “I’m going through hell!” Said his friend: “Well, keep on going. That is no place to stop!”

Best of luck!

Having similar professional experience I'm thoroughly interrogated by people much junior. They're looking for lies, for fraud, for incompetence, for inconsistencies. Once a week or so I just drop CV compiled for the specific opening. My motivation to answer to their sorting-tree-hashmap-angular-state-management teasing is below zero. I'd been hired and I know how it feels like to be hired, if they are into butt sniffing I disconnect. I'm haven't been working for over one year now and I don't care.

Interviewing is "selling" yourself. Do you have a portfolio of some kind that you are actually showing during the process? Are you asking for feedback from the organization interviewing you? Following up til you get a "no" is also important. If they say anything besides no, you need to keep following up.

If you have done 40 interviews, you are clearly qualified for the roles. I think you need to be more selective about what roles you apply to, and spent more time preparing for the interviews. Answer basic questions like why are you applying to that company? What do you gain from that role? People can smell desperation.

I only started job searching seriously in July and I even took 2 weeks off in August. I was also unemployed. I only interviewed for the roles that I clearly felt was what I wanted. I spent weeks preparing for them and only did 2 final interviews. One I got rejected due to hiring freeze, but I got an offer for the second one in mid September.

So my advice is to really ask yourself why do you want to apply for a role. Don’t machine gun it.

There's a lot of woo-woo going on in this thread.

You need to find the actual problem. You're making it to the interview, so all these companies feel you're at least minimally qualified for the job. Are you just getting unlucky that all these companies are in a hiring freeze and aren't willing to commit right now? Have you changed up your interviewing, tried anything new? Are you having further post-interview discussions that are turning sour? Money discussions?

I would look at doing a few paid practice interviews online. Their services are designed to provide you honest feedback to help you. There may be something going on that you're not aware of and interviewers don't want to tell you.

>Technical lead with over 10 years experience. I often get praises during interviews, but never an offer.

If you have 10 years tech lead experience I assume you are applying for 200k+ base salary positions. The competition for these staff/lead roles is steeper, especially for remote roles during a recession.

Take a couple interviews for less senior positions and knock them outta the park, get your confidence back. Probably won't require too much prep and will be low stress if the job is in your stack.

Getting an offer feels nice - it's validating, especially in a dry spell.

I don’t know OP, I’m a tech lead who has done his fair share of interviews and based on your few comments on HN there seem to be some red flags with how you’re viewing the interview process. Saying “one person derails things because I’d outshine them” seems to externalize the blame. I don’t know that I’ve ever worked with any engineer who thinks they’d be worse off by hiring an extremely intelligent engineer. I’d love to be “outshined” as it’d make my life easier to have someone competent writing code with me and teaching me new things. I have a strong suspicion “I’m too smart” isn’t the issue here.

Also, do you honestly think this has been the case at over forty places? That in dozens of separate cases you weren’t the problem, the interviewers were? This seems like an extraordinarily hostile and pessimistic worldview and I’d guess it’d come across in an interview. Eventually you need to do some soul searching into what’s going awry in the interviews. I have a good friend who is a software engineer and is autistic. He speaks about his interviews similarly to what you’ve said. Maybe ask a friend about what they might think is the problem. Be prepared though, because often if you solicit honest feedback from friends you won’t like what they have to say.

Also why are you only applying at places that do leetcode style interviews? There’s plenty of places where that’s not the case, especially if you work outside of tech companies. There’s plenty of great Fortune 500 companies that will expect a 9-5 and are doing good engineering out there. Most of them are hiring remote. Although if you’re expecting FAANG salaries it might be harder to find that type of place.

I wish you the best and hope you get to a better place. Good luck!

Where do you think you are falling down in the interviews? Is it technical Qs? Behavioral? You might try post interview analysis with a friend or professional.

If you're a former tech lead with 10 years of experience, and struggling to get a job then you're doing something wrong.

Have a friend / former colleague who knows you and the industry. Get them to look at your CV and do a mock interview. Then listen to their advice.

You are probably making a basic mistake like badmouthing former employers / being bad at leetcode / not having good reasons for gaps / unreasonable requirements ...

Increasing resilliance will just make you keep failing. You need to fix the problem that has caused you to fail 40 interviews despite 10 years of experience.

Sounds like you could benefit from a coach to help you to find out why you're being rejected. It's likely something you're not aware of and if 40 different interviewers can spot it in an hour then I'm sure a coach could too.

Assuming you are making it to final rounds, 40 interviews, at an average of 6-8 per company, means you have been rejected by 5-7 companies. If you are aiming for only FAANG-equivalents then competition for the open positions is obviously intense, and your experience isn't too out of the ordinary. I'd wager the best programmer on the planet will have a <50% success rate at leetcode-style interviews. Remember that you are aiming for $300K-500K/yr salary at age 32. That puts you in the top 0.01% of the global population. It isn't meant to be easy.

You have two paths forward. Either double down, do more coding prep, more mock interviews, keep applying, and eventually you will get that offer. Or aim for one tier lower and find a smaller company or startup that is a good fit for your skill set.

  at an average of 6-8 per company

Which part of the world are you located?

When you say 40 interviews, do you mean 40 separate companies?

You probably need to get your interview behavior evaluated by a friend or someone else. Either your technical chops are not good, or you're giving off the wrong vibe. Maybe get rid of Technical Lead off your resume and shoot for a lower-level position, and see how you do.

At this point in your career if you are good at the people side of things you should have former cow-orkers who want you leading a team.

One thing I found helped during my 9-month job search was to have a project I was working on at the same time. A huge factor why job searching is exhausting is that one doesn't see any progress. Having a 'resume filler' helped me feel like I was still moving in a positive direction.

Job market is weird and gets weirder and more hostile as you grow more senior and older.

Yet, it is a numbers game. Just keep at it and maybe change your focus a bit. E.g. if you target startups leave them aside and focus on banks or health sector. Pivot around.

Similar situation here with over 30 years experience. Early on there were some obvious flaws in my resume, cover letters, and interviewing. Some of that can be fixed and some of that is just me being anxious and autistic which isn't going to completely go away though to some extent that can be controlled. In general there is a problem that I mostly interview with people who have around 5-15 years of experience and to them my resume and skill set don't fit in the usual boxes.

Many replies in this thread are suggesting that there is one thing going wrong but in my case a potentially interesting conclusion is that there are lots of different failure modes coming up. Mostly things come apart in coding evaluations where I get nervous and make mistakes and in general go too slow. Other points of contention that have come up is a lack of experience with specific tools and libraries involved in the work. Experience and methodology with testing and ideas about management is also a big deal. Several interviews have gone off the rails when my take on Agile didn't completely mesh with what companies are doing. So it is good to always look for what in yourself you can improve but also be aware that no one is completely perfect and in many cases even one minor issue can prevent an offer from being made.

If you need a job, any job, try consulting companies. Often they just need warm bodies and if you are minimally competent and aren't a jerk in the interview you will be ok.

Definitely get some mocks if you can. There may be something that is easy to fix that you are unaware of.

For better jobs, it is not easy right now. On my most recent job search I had 1.5 offers from big tech (congrats you passed but no more hiring this year!), and 30-40 rejections, from the other big tech, to large enterprise, to small startups. If you are only going for the big jobs, might be time to just chill for a while until things start to thaw.