I finally got one of the papers I'm proud of published! It was in review at a major journal for over a year, and then was soft-rejected for being too specialized (nice comments from referees though). Then it went to another journal, and was most of the way through the review process when the entire board quit to start an open-access journal. So we withdrew the paper and submitted to the open-access journal. They finally accepted with revisions last fall, and so I think it'll get published soon. Only three years from start to finish, where "start" refers to posting the finished paper to the arXiv!

Every job application process has its own kinds of luck and failure modes. The time scales of academia lead to very different distortions than those in software engineering.