I also applied to about 10 other places directly but never heard back from any of them. Got contacted by Meta but then they cancelled my interview. Weird to me that everyone is saying that it is a white hot market but I can't even get an onsite.

For example, Meta probably cancelled your interview because they now have a hiring freeze on E5 (Senior) and below.

Tech stocks are down a ridiculous amount and funding for startups is now much harder to come by. Probably other factors I don't know about as well.

Any idea why that happened? Were they overvalued and the bubble finally burst?

For stocks like Netflix I understand why, that's obvious, but for the rest, I'm kinda scratching my head.

This is bizarre to me. How many years of experience do you have? I am in the US.

I get almost a 1/1 interview to application ratio and numerous offers, and I'm nothing special. I've just "been around the block" and I can convey that I've dealt with the big, difficult problems in the real world and have tackled them head on. Maybe it's the honest "been there, done that" I can convey after 20 years in the industry.

We may also be applying to different types of companies. I don't go for the "5 rounds of social fit" type companies, I go for straight engineering.

I'm nothing special. But I do learn a little about each company I'm applying to and tailor my resume to each position. If possible I develop an internal contact so I can get some informal information on the position from the inside in advance. I only had inside contacts for two of the companies last time though.

I can't imagine doing that for 100+ companies like some people apply to. I have to imagine most people applying to that many are just doing a spray-and-pray method.

Or maybe advertising themselves but not selling themselves. In some cases a 2% conversion rate is a decent goal for a marketer advertising to the general public, but would be pretty bad for a salesman getting commission from personalized sales.

I'm no salesman, but approach the job hunt like an enterprise salesman who needs to land a good account with a good commission to live on.

The overwhelming majority of companies simply ghosted my application – Spotify, Atlassian, ADP, Lyft, Stripe, and Squarespace were all applications I made in one week, none of whom ever responded.

Hopefully I'll be closer to 1:1 once I've got 20 years under my belt ;)

It is my belief that, like most tech companies, they have pretty much a huge raging river of good candidates to choose from, so they have to use a very coarse filter (ignoring almost everyone), in order to deal with a manageable number of them.

here in Eastern EU if you have >= 3 years of xp then probably almost all of companies that are hiring will try to talk to you if you apply

ofc if your skills/tech matches their requirements somewhat reasonably

Western EU thing as well. There's an oversupply of candidates (everyone wants move/live here) and a low supply of jobs (in some countries), so companies can afford to be very picky.

Eastern EU has the opposite phenomenon, oversupply of jobs due to outsourcing/nearshoring coming in, and lack of skilled candidates since may skilled ones moved west.

So most companies here have raised the hiring bar accordingly due to this oversupply of applicants, therefore getting a job now is pretty rough if you're not at the top of your game in terms of experience and skillset.

I was supremely nervous about them before but I actually wound up doing really well (save aforementioned DB crap). It was a chance to talk about my personal niches, like accessibility and load times.

Frustratingly, every single one was wildly different. I found that approx. 0 of the “cracking the system design” stuff I read beforehand helped in anyway.

This was my 4th application where I was rejected after final round. A lot more where I didn't get past initial screening etc. Feeling down right now.

I have 15 years of technical experience, I never got a chance to specialize but I can handle everything, DevOps, database, frontend, & backend. Perhaps that's my fault for just getting work done instead of focusing on my career. Perhaps I am getting really old for this industry. Maybe I really should go in the management.

Nope, rejection comes 2 weeks after the on-site with no explanations, and they refused to elaborate further.

The sole advice I can give is unfortunately to just keep going. Wish I had more. Best of luck.

Until this job search, I usually had two interviews, one technical screen and one behavior interview. And this was for senior roles. And usually, I almost always got offers. Most of the time, I was deciding between two jobs.

I think everyone is trying to replicate FAANG's success by copying their hiring practices. Maybe this is a hazing ritual to find really obedient workers.

Either way, we have to play this game and keep trying.

No. Companies don't give feedback for the most part.

> Maybe there's something in your CV that's being perceived as a red flag but ok to you.

I have shared my resume with many people in the industry, and they only suggested minor changes which I made.

Now, some of that was motivated by referral bonuses on their part, but still.

The old cliche that "it's not what you know but who you know" is still very much a thing.