The tech job market is so fucked right now.
Less short answer: Find people in the software space that appeals to you, and build a reputation of the sorts of competence that they will seek.
Even less short answer: Publish (your own software portfolio) or perish. Network (with people who you want to work with) or change your career path towards one that you can network within. Read books about connecting with others in your field, have conversations with people who know more than you. Establish yourself as a job-seeker, with job-seeking as your day job until you find one. Adapt. Adapt. Adapt.
Nobody can find the magic path for you, you must take one step at a time and learn from every failure. There is no honor here, only temporary respite, for the days of remaining at a stable tech company through a decade or two of a career are over, and those who do not adapt will not weather this storm or the ones yet to come.
If you can, find a different career path.
I cannot emphasize this enough.
Make software your hobby, and learn to herd yaks, work wood, or bend metal.
It's hard but tbh if I saw applicants with those things I'd definitely want to hire them.
We've had a strong focus on interviews in the past, but we had bad hires (well, one bad hire, but its a small team) get through those.
Someone can BS in an interview, but they can't BS months of open-source contributions or a tech blog they've kept or whatever. At least nowhere near as easily.
What kind of job do you want? What companies have that kind of role? That's your top of funnel. If you're not sure, look at what other smart people you know seem to be doing. What kinds of companies are they working for? What are similar kinds of companies.
OK now make a shortlist. Do some research into the companies in your funnel and knock out companies you definitely don't want. Maybe you've read that their working conditions are terrible, their pay is bad, the location is wrong etc. You want to narrow the funnel down to a manageable size. What will determine what that size is is really up to you, how hard you want to work on the next steps vs how selective you can afford to be based on how big your funnel starts off. The bigger the starting funnel the more selective you can afford to be obviously.
Right now you have your shortlist go on their website and look for career pages with job listings. Connect with their in-house recruiter on linkedin. Send them a nice, short, non-AI-generated message about why you are interested in their company and what kind of role you're looking for. Even if they don't have such a role right now, this will help. If they have a role you're interested in, mention it and ask any immediate clarifying questions you have.
Cool. Now you have hopefully gone from a shortlist of companies to 1)A (probably very short, but that's ok) list of possible roles to apply for and 2)A (probably slightly longer, and that's a good thing) list of possible companies to apply to 3)A (probably medium-sized) list of recruiters you're starting to form initial working relationships with.
Now apply to the roles you are interested in and go through their process. Don't try to game things, just pay attention to what they are trying to recruit for and be good at that. The research you've already done will stand you in very good stead.
For the companies you are interested in, pay attention to what's happening in those industries, look for roles that spring up, look for new entrants and research them to see if they are companies you might be interested in.
For the recruiters, keep on good terms with the ones of these that seem good/non-douchy. Good recruiters may move from company to company and will place candidates multiple times over the course of their career. Additionally they will bear you in mind and put you up for roles as they arise. There are lots or recruiters but not that many good recruiters so it's really not too hard to keep on top of these connections and they will stand you in very good stead. Also do the recruiters and your friends a favour and refer smart friends you have for roles if you see something that is a good fit for them even if it's not right for you (obviously ask permission first).
Here's one thing I'd say right off the bat: I applied to a role at OpenAI about eight months ago. I have a resume that, while certainly not the best, is definitely qualified for this role, and is entirely human written. I have not heard back, in the positive or negative. The job opening is still posted.
I suspect this is a common story in many companies, because I have been on the hiring side this year. At a small-ish startup, which no one has heard of (relatively speaking), we posted a new mid-level software engineering role on only our own job board; we never got to broadcasting it to linkedin or within our local networks because, within the first 24 hours we received 800 applications. Our aging CTO was blown away, wow there must be so many fantastic candidates we'll work all night to sort through these; and I had to break it to him, man, its AI. But, ok, let's remain hopeful.
- Using a combination of human might and HRIS AI tooling, we narrowed down the list down and started scheduling interviews. This was extremely expensive (person-hours + how expensive these HRIS tools are).
- Many (~30%) of the applications were ghosts. We'd email them back trying to get an interview scheduled, and get no response. In a few cases we got email delivery bounce-backs.
- But, after doing a handful of screening interviews, it became abundantly clear that many of the resumes were straight-up lies, not just concerning their depth of experience, but even the specific technologies ("Oh, I don't have much experience with React." "Your resume says you do..."). My leading theory is that there's some AI Job application tool out there which will both automatically apply to jobs for you, and generate a resume which is well-matched to the job description. A couple of the candidates seemed to be oblivious as to why their resume said what it said; but certainly if it were happening at scale most would have just lied about it.
We paused the process, as it was clear that even with our HR generalist and me trying to sort through the slop every day for a week we have no way to trust the applications that were coming in. Fortunately, around the time we started wondering what we'd do, an old buddy came across my radar as looking for a new role; he did one interview with the CTO, I vouched for him, we extended an offer, and its been a great hire.
The conclusion to this story: blind applications and blind job posts are dead. They do not work anymore. I had one former colleague tell me "I've applied to 800 jobs, I'm not finding anything, no one is even calling me back" yeah you're not adapting, my dude. The problem isn't the tech industry, its not the economy, its not you: its AI. I'm aware of one company in our local tech scene that won't even broadcast roles on the public internet anymore; we have private social networks in our 2nd tier US city that they exclusively share through. If you don't have a network; you're toast.
The new grads coming out of college are so fucked, its not funny, its not ok.