It's always nice to see posts from people who document their hiring journey with accurate statistics. Including number of applications sent, interviews, rejections, etc.

It is unfortunate that I can't help but compare my journey to whoever is posting.

Also unfortunately I have experienced the other side.... Being trans sure gives you a very unique insight into all subtle things most people on either side of the gender spectrum wouldn't notice.

I've lost my job exactly a month ago. I honestly didn't think it would be this big of a problem, but with Amazon laying off 28,000 people, Meta close to that and a combined effort from the rest of big tech pushing us over 100,000 just this year. Obviously this isn't the greatest time to be looking for a job, but it kind of never is. Also with one of the two metropolitan areas I'm looking in being Seattle obviously Amazon and Meta laying people off makes things quite competitive. So I'm competing with a lot of highly qualified people with big names on their resume, while the only big name on mine is Walmart (which is vastly underrated in terms of tech experience, so it doesn't actually help a whole lot).

I have applied for over 180 jobs now and with only two exceptions those were all jobs I'm qualified for. The two exceptions being two smaller companies looking for a level above what I'm looking for, but they were very interesting positions that I would have loved to have and prove myself in.

So far the results of the job search are exactly one interview, which I did very well in, before getting rejected a week later.

I'm not entirely sure what to do to boost my chances into the single digit percentages at this point, but I'm definitely going to keep trying.

My resume is here if you want to have a look.

I finally wrote a website again.... I think this one has taken me over 2 years.

The first one was a CMS I wrote in php which wasn't actually bad, but lacked many features I would have liked (comments mostly), but (safe and secure) comments are very hard, especially when you don't trust phps sanitation.

Then I ran wordpress for a while, which also wasn't bad. I just hate having 400 divs on a single page and the css is even more complicated....

So now I run a custom CMS again.... It's made with Drogon, it's in C++ and I actually like it a whole lot. Although the documentation leaves something to be desired and some things are very hard to figure out.... But it's good and I like it.

Now I guess we'll see if I actually continue working on this one :)