[_xrp0]

If you can't find a job with a "proven track record" in this market, you're doing something horribly wrong. I'm willing to bet $100 that your resume is not stellar.

Many people are bad at evaluating themselves. I've seen countless posts by juniors apparently "grinding hard" to get a job, and you just take 1 look at their resume and everything makes sense. Zero research on how to write resumes, zero prep, projects are garbage, shotgunning on indeed without some creativity etc.

[PainfullyNormal]

> If you can't find a job with a "proven track record" in this market, you're doing something horribly wrong.

Can you define both what "horribly wrong" looks like and what "not horribly wrong" looks like? Because I can't.

The problem with a "proven track record" is that nobody believes what you write on your resume and nobody wants to bother looking at your code. That leaves hiring on "feel" and I have no idea what somebody needs to put in their cover letter and/or resume to "feel" right to a recruiter, an HR rep and a hiring manager all at the same time.

[_xrp0]

> nobody believes what you write on your resume

That's nonsense.

It's quite straightforward actually: go through the CVs of engineers working at top companies and look how their resume looks different from yours.

Chances are that they're actually selling themselves properly, using lots of jargon, using strong action verbs, and following the advice that has shown to work for the last decade.

[jongjong]

I started coding at 14 years old and have 10+ years of software development experience in a range of companies; both startups and corporations in a range of industries. I have 10 years of experience with open source. One of my projects has almost 6K stars on GitHub and almost 100K downloads per week. I even worked for a Y Combinator-backed company for over a year which had tons of big name SV investors including the famous actor Ashton Kutcher and Michael Jordan. My last job was leading the P2P team at a top blockchain company. The scalable P2P network solution which my team developed is still used 3 years after launch and never encountered any issues once launched (no vulnerabilities or bugs which needed patching). It only took 6 months for my team of 4 devs to build it from scratch. I'm willing to bet that it's among the simplest and best designed P2P libraries in the industry.

My record is impeccable. I build highly reliable software fast both as part of a group or as a solo freelancer. Much of my work is in the public domain on GitHub so it's easy to verify all this and check my code quality, automated tests and PR review history.

[_xrp0]

Well, that's an insane background, so that can't be the issue.

One question though: how many of those years 10 years have you worked in a full-time position?

[ipaddr]

The market is pretty rough now. Layoffs are flooding the market, pay is not going up and companies happy to interview are scared to hire.

[_xrp0]

Layoffs hit overvalued, bloated companies, and the majority of laid of people are non-technical staff, or junior employees.

None of this has ANY effect on competent software engineers. Most of my peers keep getting massive offers left and right. Nothing has changed for them.