<story><title>Ask HN: Is the market bad, or am I having the worst luck job hunting?</title><text>I got laid off at the start of the year, and ever since then, I&amp;#x27;ve been applying constantly but have only gotten one interview. Before being laid off, I held a job as a front-end dev for the previous 5 and a half years.&lt;p&gt;I&amp;#x27;ve had my resume looked at by three different services (TopResume, Indeed, Levels.fyi) and am currently subscribed to Resume Worded, which scores my resume. Despite all these efforts, I keep receiving rejection emails.&lt;p&gt;So, I just wanted to reach out and see if anyone else has had any similar experiences with applying for jobs.</text></story><parent_chain><item><author>blitz_skull</author><text>&amp;gt; whereas everyone else would call that person [with 5 years experience] a junior engineer&lt;p&gt;I’ve met people with 3 years experience who I’d consider more senior than myself (8 years). Some folks just learn really fast and&amp;#x2F;or don’t do much else other than work.&lt;p&gt;Not sure time is relevant to your skills or title after about 2-3 years.</text></item><item><author>rsynnott</author><text>It&amp;#x27;s not a good job market, but it doesn&amp;#x27;t seem normal to spend six months applying and only get _one_ interview.&lt;p&gt;It might be worth asking friends or former colleagues, ideally people who actually are involved in recruiting (hiring managers etc) to take a look at your resume and LinkedIn profile and see if there&amp;#x27;s anything glaringly wrong with them.&lt;p&gt;Is your resume in a weird format, or is it structurally weird&amp;#x2F;overdesigned? For instance, a recent trend in resumes was to show (programming) languages known in a pie chart (do not do this; it is nonsensical). In many companies, the text from your resume is going to end up in a standard format anyway; they&amp;#x27;ll have tools for this and if their tool can&amp;#x27;t extract your text they may not bother. Unless you&amp;#x27;re a graphic designer or something, you probably want a boringly-designed resume.&lt;p&gt;Are you applying jobs for which you are dramatically underqualified? One thing to keep in mind is that some small companies (if you&amp;#x27;re coming from one) have _wild_ title inflation; a small startup might call someone with 5 and a half years experience their director of frontend engineering, say, whereas everyone else would call that person a junior engineer.&lt;p&gt;Does anything particularly unfortunate come up if people Google your name? For instance, a real-life version of that Seinfeld episode where Elaine&amp;#x27;s dating a guy who has the same name as a notorious local serial killer.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>itsoktocry</author><text>&amp;gt;&lt;i&gt;Some folks just learn really fast and&amp;#x2F;or don’t do much else other than work.&lt;/i&gt;&lt;p&gt;Maybe it&amp;#x27;s just me, but I don&amp;#x27;t consider junior&amp;#x2F;senior to be defined by how &amp;quot;good&amp;quot; you are at programming.  Obviously the hope is that senior &amp;gt; junior, but there are other, softer, skills involved with being a senior.</text></comment>
<story><title>Ask HN: Is the market bad, or am I having the worst luck job hunting?</title><text>I got laid off at the start of the year, and ever since then, I&amp;#x27;ve been applying constantly but have only gotten one interview. Before being laid off, I held a job as a front-end dev for the previous 5 and a half years.&lt;p&gt;I&amp;#x27;ve had my resume looked at by three different services (TopResume, Indeed, Levels.fyi) and am currently subscribed to Resume Worded, which scores my resume. Despite all these efforts, I keep receiving rejection emails.&lt;p&gt;So, I just wanted to reach out and see if anyone else has had any similar experiences with applying for jobs.</text></story><parent_chain><item><author>blitz_skull</author><text>&amp;gt; whereas everyone else would call that person [with 5 years experience] a junior engineer&lt;p&gt;I’ve met people with 3 years experience who I’d consider more senior than myself (8 years). Some folks just learn really fast and&amp;#x2F;or don’t do much else other than work.&lt;p&gt;Not sure time is relevant to your skills or title after about 2-3 years.</text></item><item><author>rsynnott</author><text>It&amp;#x27;s not a good job market, but it doesn&amp;#x27;t seem normal to spend six months applying and only get _one_ interview.&lt;p&gt;It might be worth asking friends or former colleagues, ideally people who actually are involved in recruiting (hiring managers etc) to take a look at your resume and LinkedIn profile and see if there&amp;#x27;s anything glaringly wrong with them.&lt;p&gt;Is your resume in a weird format, or is it structurally weird&amp;#x2F;overdesigned? For instance, a recent trend in resumes was to show (programming) languages known in a pie chart (do not do this; it is nonsensical). In many companies, the text from your resume is going to end up in a standard format anyway; they&amp;#x27;ll have tools for this and if their tool can&amp;#x27;t extract your text they may not bother. Unless you&amp;#x27;re a graphic designer or something, you probably want a boringly-designed resume.&lt;p&gt;Are you applying jobs for which you are dramatically underqualified? One thing to keep in mind is that some small companies (if you&amp;#x27;re coming from one) have _wild_ title inflation; a small startup might call someone with 5 and a half years experience their director of frontend engineering, say, whereas everyone else would call that person a junior engineer.&lt;p&gt;Does anything particularly unfortunate come up if people Google your name? For instance, a real-life version of that Seinfeld episode where Elaine&amp;#x27;s dating a guy who has the same name as a notorious local serial killer.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>grumple</author><text>Experience is absolutely relevant. You are vastly more likely to be competent at 10 years than 5 or 3 or 1. Sure, I have worked with incompetent people with more experience and I&amp;#x27;ve been the &amp;quot;rock star&amp;quot; with 2 outperforming devs with 15, but there&amp;#x27;s still a strong correlation between experience and ability.</text></comment>