I’m curious if it’s just me or not. I’m an SE with 10+ years of experience, mostly in full-stack with a wide variety of languages and stacks, and my last title was at the “staff” level. I’m almost 40 years old; not sure if age discrimination is much of a thing (my interviewers have been mostly around my age or younger). I’ve been looking for a job for months. I’ve been applying to just about every job posting where my skills match on LinkedIn, Indeed, and ZipRecruiter (mostly just the Easy Apply option lately, so I can send more applications out). I’ve even been applying to positions that just require 2+ years of experience; I’d take any job (except defense or big tech). I’ve probably sent something like 400 applications out at this point. I’ve gotten a few interviews, and think I did OK, but I guess not good enough since I was still rejected. Is this normal?
The last time I was looking for a job (2021), I only sent 20 applications out, and landed a job on my first interview. I also tried Upwork for a couple weeks, but wasn’t able to land any contracts. I think everyone there is either looking for very cheap devs in the developing world or rockstars with tons of contracting experience and large portfolios.
I got sponsored recently through the EU Blue Card program. It’s generally targeted at what would be considered ‘high-skilled individuals’, which may or may not be applicable to your situation.
Although it’s an EU program, each country gets to set their own requirements and these can vary quite a bit. Might be worth looking into, since if you qualify it is almost always much easier than other paths.
interesting, thanks for the tip. I’ll check into this, did you seek out companies that offered this specifically? Or did a company happen to offer it after you applied for the position?
To be honest, I wasn’t fully aware of it at the time and had been targeting a different country-specific program. For this other program I had checked that I fulfilled the requirements and put something like “eligible for program” on my CV. This seemed to help, since I got a lot of responses and we generally discussed this aspect in interviews.
Ultimately though, after getting a job offer, my current company found out about the Blue Card program and we decided together that it was the easiest path. For my country (Austria) the requirement was basically that you had a job offer which paid over the national average, which is pretty typical in tech.
I think a lot of companies aren’t aware of all of the different options, so making them aware of these can’t hurt!