If I were at 5-10 years experience, I'd probably have much better luck. That seems to be the sweet spot.

You think there’s a difference between 10 years and 15 years? Get better at interviewing. The years of experience you put on your resume isn’t what’s losing you the job. “Too senior but willing to work for just senior rates” certainly isn’t it.

Something else that tends to change around the 10 year mark is that if you prefer to continue your career with IC roles then the people interviewing and making hiring decisions will often be younger and less experienced than you. Obviously at good employers that makes no difference but ageism is certainly a factor in this industry. It's not the years of experience that are losing those jobs, it's just the years.

Are you trying to interview for principal eng positions? Imo it’s hard to do except for some super early stage enterprises no matter the market conditions

imo the meaning of "principal engineer" is wildly different between companies anyway. That means something if you're in a FAANG shop but if it's some place nobody's ever heard of it's just needed because all the midlevels already have senior titles.

Lets rephrase it as “most expensive engineer company has on its roster”

Haha, true, the last time I got this title it was when they decided to align titles based on salary.

I have 6 years of experience and it took two months of active recruiting(since July) for me for Senior/upper Regular positions in non-faang companies. I ended up getting a pretty decent but boring project in a small company that pays really well. I applied to dozens of companies, had actual response from maybe a third of them, more than half of those offered heavily under-market salaries or ghosted me. Ended up with ~5 actual tech interviews, with three offers. Only one of them was actually interesting but they tried to undercut what I wanted by 20% after two months long recruitment process which I found disrespectful, especially since they knew what I asked for since the beginning. Chose the 'stable boring thing' in the end. So it's not that much different with 5-10 years of experience, sadly.

I wonder what this spells for remote work?

If it’s a buyer’s market then employers can say “work in the office” - take it or leave it.

I just want to state the obvious, interviewing is a different skill than developing. You get better at interviewing with practice and the more interviews you do, the better you get.

Also, you got to be confident and toughen up before your interviews, because even if some would be interesting, constructive done in a pleasant way by nice people, many will be nasty. I got through many interviews were there were several people acting like machine guns, spitting dozens of sometimes silly questions just trying to catch me with a mistake.

Boy, how much I would wanted to switch roles a bit and show them that is not a constructive way to lead an interview.

Interviewing is a skill, but luck is obviously a huge factor. My current job for a relatively mediocre salary at a smaller startup took a year and a half to find.

I applied for around 30, interviewed with 5, got 2 offers accepted 1. I canceled 2 interviews and got only 1 rejection (they said I was too senior for the role even though it was a senior developer role).

The process is kind of random. I aced all the coding tests but ultimately I ended up accepting the offer from the only company which did not make me do a coding test.

IMO, the smartest engineers can identify talent without relying on the outcome of a coding test. Coding tests are shallow and misleading; they don't evaluate the skills that really count.