I'm trying to get out, but not having much luck. I wonder if recruiters are turned off by the fact that I'm looking for another job again after just a few months.
Across the major markets in the USA and Europe I’ve never seen a hotter market. If you aren’t getting responses I would ask someone for help with how you are marketing yourself.
Post your LinkedIn profile if you’d like
The nice thing about remote though, is that it's easy for me to disconnect emotionally from how shitty my current job is.
I mean, one could say my city is also hot by the number of search results from the keyword software in the job portals but after closer inspection, if you've been around the block a few times, you can easily tell that over 90% of those jobs are shitty micromanaged fake scrum-driven burnout meat grinders.
Therefore, the remaining 10% are spammed to death with resumes so they can afford to be incredibly picky and wouldn't even look at you without seniority in other prestigious places that do exactly what they're looking for. And they don't care for leetcode either so the barrier of entry remains prestige.
IMHO that's not really hot.
3.5 years at gig X and then 5 months at crappy gig Y isn't an issue -- new gig wasn't a fit, easy to play that off. "I tried to make it work but it felt like a bait and switch" would be an acceptable answer.
But a track record of ~1 year or less at places says that you're the problem or you make a lot of bad choices.
Show up, and everybody is working on firefighting old bugs with a fake Agile approach. The kind where the manager hands out tickets to folks and the only metric is how many trivial bugs have been closed this week.
Every time I spent any time looking into the code (million lines of crap) to see if anything could be done, I'd get widely criticized.
I put up with it for a few months and bailed.