2026-03-16

It Takes All The Running You Can Do to Still Not Get a Job

It’s been almost 20 years since I started working as a software engineer. Finding my next role has become excruciatingly difficult. If you’re looking for someone like me, my resume is linked - feel free to reach out.

I rarely sent out more than three applications. Usually, from those three that I sent, two resulted in interview invitations that converted to offers.

Today the reality is vastly different. Out of 20 applications I sent, and those were carefully selected - I don’t like going wide - only four resulted in initial interviews. None have led to an offer.

It’s easy to conclude that it’s me; something is wrong with me. But I know that I’m not the only person in this situation. It’s a pathological game many of us have to play. A game where almost every corner is broken.

It starts with the listings.

When you see enough of them, you will learn to stop trusting them. Aggregators might have them outdated or incorrect. What is said to be a position as a staff engineer in back-end, turns out to be a regular front-end engineer job in a completely different technology.

Remote becomes hybrid. Hybrid becomes on-site. Office location shifts all around the world. And even when you follow the thread and read the original listing it’s not getting any better.

Given how heterogeneous stacks might be, the listings are often companies’ wish lists in a given stack. And it might not even be accurate. It’s not a secret that often companies don’t even know who exactly they want to hire. Ideally the candidate should be able to wear multiple hats that align with the work. But the work itself isn’t well specified.

And so I’ve seen Rust jobs that after careful analysis turned out to be Python jobs. I’ve seen back-end jobs that weren’t really back-end jobs. I’ve seen many listings where technology is not even specified, which might work for companies that hire for systems thinking, but it is not really helpful for applicants.

Once I spent 4 hours on an application requiring a precisely defined cover letter covering multiple aspects of my life. After preparing a comprehensive one, I found a one-word deal-breaker buried in the listing. Luckily I caught it at all.

Another time I ticked every box, only to receive a response that they don’t hire in Poland - despite the listing explicitly naming my region.

Even at this point it’s not the end. There are so many listings it’s hard to know what actually matches. I ended up writing software just to manage the problem.

I’ve always believed in two kinds of engineers.

The first kind is here because the work itself means something to them. Not necessarily passion in the romantic sense, just genuine alignment: they’d be doing something like this anyway. I put myself here.

The second kind looked at the compensation and made a rational decision. That’s not a criticism.

The problem is that hiring optimizes for the second group while claiming to want the first.

Career-driven engineers know exactly what the game is. They keep their stack narrow and legible. They avoid work that won’t read well on a resume. They learn to present their experience in whatever shape the job description requires. When there’s a gap between what they’ve done and what the employer wants, they close it with framing. They are very good at this, because their career depends on it.

Passionate engineers optimize for the work. Broad experience, unusual technologies, cross-team problems that nobody else wanted to own. Interesting resume to live, terrible resume to read. They’ll also tell you honestly that they match 7 out of 8 requirements instead of quietly pretending the 8th isn’t there. They believe the work speaks for itself.

It doesn’t. Not in a screening process.

So the filter selects for people who are good at being hired, not necessarily good at the job. And the engineers who spent twenty years doing hard, varied, interesting work lose to the ones who spent twenty years making sure it looked right on paper.

Guess who gets hired first.

Let’s move all of this behind us and think about what happens in the gauntlet.

I don’t know any other industry that would be so disrespectful and untrusting toward applicants. I’ve heard the rebuttal: other industries use certifications and formal credentials as proof of competence. Software engineering doesn’t have that, I agree. But it’s not the only industry without formal credentials, and none of the others do this.

Every software engineer should expect 3-8 interviews spanning three weeks to four months. Numbers comparable to getting hired at a think tank or applying to a venture capital firm.

You’re asked to reverse a binary tree to prove you can build distributed systems - two skills with virtually no overlap. You spend a weekend on a take-home assignment and get ghosted. Four months, six people’s calendars, no feedback. The process doesn’t select for the best engineers. It selects for the best interviewers.

I understand where this comes from. Cheaters and ghost applicants are everywhere. The arms race is real. But the hiring party misses one thing: cheating is easy. If someone decides to cheat, they have every tool available. They apply multiple times just to see the questions. They craft resumes that align perfectly with each listing. They rehearse their pitches. They memorize LeetCode.

This arms race runs directly against candidates with integrity, because they won’t do any of that. A high-integrity candidate wants to present their true self, not one fabricated for the process. And it never aligns perfectly.

So companies claim they want passionate engineers while optimizing for the opposite. What can high-integrity candidates do? Play the game anyway.

Look at my case. I have almost a one-year gap since my last job. I could lie - shift a few dates, make it disappear. Months here, months there, everything looks clean. But I won’t. I had bad luck of a kind I wouldn’t wish on anyone. A physical incident left me unable to work for months, followed by recovery that was slow and not entirely complete. Not something I’ll detail here, but real, documented, and not a euphemism for burnout or disillusionment. It ended in mid-December, when there are no jobs. Then came a company that took 10 weeks of my life and ghosted me.

I am no match for someone who has crafted a perfect pitch and won’t hesitate to lie. My integrity works against me in the gauntlet.

But it doesn’t have to be this way. I’ve been hired in hours, on trust, without credential checks. Those engagements went well - the feedback confirmed it afterward.

So I know it doesn’t have to be like this. But it is.

I need to admit that I was part of the problem I’m pointing at.

I spent some time as a senior screener at Toptal, and because of that I often helped in recruitment.

I didn’t consider how much time and energy candidates put into their applications. I was often on the sidelines of the process. I’ve seen candidates without a response for weeks, if not months. Candidates were put in limbo with no fault of their own, driven by the process’s indecisiveness. Each step was scrutinized without any regard for their human side.

The separation between candidate and hiring process, that detachment, is easy to fall into. I know because I fell into it myself.

Yet, I cannot shrug off Toptal’s recruitment process, at least the one that I observed. Clear, transparent, immediate or almost immediate feedback - always delivered. Processes were closed in weeks, and some could be even faster under specific circumstances. Utterly respectful of candidates. Toptal’s process was heavily optimized for a company that hires for a living and on a big scale. I think this is something that companies should strive for.

Respect for candidates - something I failed to exercise myself - is a virtue that not enough companies exercise in their process.

Nobody talks about what this actually costs.

Some applicants are going to care about the application they submit. I believe that they are of greater value to the company searching for people.

For them the application is like a ladder. Each positive signal is a step up. But even those that don’t receive positive signals are still pieces of hope. Because they might at some point receive one.

I cannot do a thing, yet the process still takes a piece of my soul. The greater the hope, the greater the need, the more of your soul it costs.

And so every application weighs on the soul. The higher you are on the ladder, the more it weighs. Who would plan for failure? At higher stages the stakes are higher - interviews require more preparation, more time, more of yourself handed over before you know if it’s worth anything.

So if rejection comes it’s like falling from that ladder. The higher you climb the more it hurts. Damage is real, and sometimes it’s even amplified by the lack of consideration. Weak feedback, long days before the response, or lack of response at all make the wounds deeper.

And the worst part is not even a rejection. It is the impossibility of reacting at all. It’s not possible to lash out at the game. Writing an email full of expletives may be deserved, but you know that strongly worded backlash can hurt your future more than it can give relief to a situation.

So the only direction of the hate is inwards. And then comes another process. A process in which giving thoughts on past experiences is not well taken. So you keep the hate, despair, all the daggers that cut through your heart, deep inside so they don’t interfere.

You smile, because the posture is one of the remaining arms you have. You take it lightly, you take it with a smile. You keep your head high, you brush off a failure. A costly dissonance sustained so that the future could bring you another ladder.

I know I won’t change the game. No one can.

But if you are in a position where you help with the process or own it, I’d like to ask you to think about the candidate behind the application.

I’d like to ask you to be transparent: tell candidates where they stand. Be prompt: uncertainty has a cost they pay, not you. Be candid: don’t hide behind artificial reasons.

If you can, fight for respect for the applicants. You might, sooner or later, end up on the receiving end.

Remember: the more someone cares, the more it costs them. That’s not a reason to filter them out. It’s a reason to treat them better.

A few companies handled the hiring process well and deserve to be named.

Bunny.net responded promptly and addressed directly the point on which we couldn’t agree - it felt human. FetLife proposed compensation for the take-home assignment and kept the process tight. MixRank evaluated my application within 48 hours. Toptal kept the process transparent and delivered feedback almost immediately.

Thank you.