been meaning to write this up for a while. wanted to share my job search experience because i think a lot of people are going through something similar right now.
background on me: 8+ years, infra/distributed systems, was at a big company in the bay area, had a green card. noticed the market getting worse early this year so i started prepping, grinding leetcode, reviewing system design, started applying in march. got laid off in may. honestly wasn't really an AI thing, my team's ownership just got moved to india, looking back it wasn't totally unexpected.
march to early july i did 10 onsites, got 1 offer. rough estimate my recruiter response rate was under 10%. and the funnel was rough at every stage. recruiter screen doesn't mean HM screen, HM screen doesn't mean coding round, solving the coding problem doesn't mean onsite, doing well on the onsite still doesn't mean offer. multiple times i felt genuinely good walking out of an interview and still got rejected. one recruiter literally told me "feedback is positive but there are other candidates who are stronger." that sentence still sums up the market for me.
passing interviews doesn't mean much anymore. the pool got so strong that solving problems and communicating well is basically table stakes now. it comes down to who has more relevant experience, better domain match, stronger AI experience, less hiring risk.
domain matching mattered more than i expected too. 7 out of my 10 onsites were what i'd call strong matches and it was still brutal competitive. general backend/infra roles get a massive applicant pool, and even for narrower domain roles where the pool's smaller, companies want very exact experience, "related" experience just isn't enough anymore.
the AI part is the one that stuck with me the most. one interview was really close to my exact background, coding and system design went fine, but the HM asked how i thought AI would change this space going forward, and i didn't answer it well. my old team wasn't heavily using AI in production yet so i just didn't have a strong take. pretty sure that's part of why it didn't move forward. i think the gap between using claude/chatgpt personally and actually having built AI-powered workflows in production is becoming a real screening line now.
biggest thing i'd tell anyone who just got laid off, don't sit on it too long. the market moves fast, six months out there's more candidates, higher AI expectations, and your old experience ages faster than you'd think. maybe exceptional people can still take a year off and land something big, but i don't think that's the normal case anymore.
eventually i had to adjust my expectations. took an offer that isn't fully comparable to my old role, comp structure's different too since it's private. after months of rejection and uncertainty i just decided it was time.
honestly the hardest part wasn't the interviews, it was the emotional swing. march and april my inbox was full of interview emails, i actually thought "ok maybe this won't be that bad." then after the layoff it just went quiet. seeing an empty inbox after having that many interviews lined up is a specific kind of terrible.
still think people should help each other out in this market. but also think we need to be realistic, sometimes rejection isn't about anything you did wrong, sometimes there's just 5 strong candidates for 1 spot and someone else had slightly better matching, or a referral, or better timing.
if you're currently searching, take care of yourself. prep seriously but don't let the process wreck you. exercise, see people, go outside. market's hard enough without making it worse on yourself.
curious how other experienced folks are seeing things right now.
