I'm curious where you find the time to apply to 500 jobs. You're not alone, I know, but is quality not better than quantity? Are those applications tailored to the jobs you're applying for?

Admittedly I've not job hunted recently. Are things really just that bad?

Yes.

I applied 4-5 days/week for 16 months and finally got a fully remote job, with a salary commensurate with what I had before.

The job I applied for was alive for less than 24 hours. They got 1,000 resumes. I just happened to be first and early.

I applied and interviewed at FAANG too.. they said they got 1,000+ resumes on day one alone, and they were screening 20 candidates for the one role.

If you've sent 500 resumes.. that's not enough / "a lot" nowadays.

“First”? Or “early”?

It seems to me that most job posters don’t even look at resumes anymore. I tested this by having logs for when the resume link is hit

I don’t doubt it. But most of my successful applications were either via indeed or submitted directly as uploaded PDFs to FAANG corp recruiting websites. For that reason I wasn’t tracking external PDF links. Those were getting me nothing…

Just a few applications every day, Monday to Sunday, it all adds up in the end... Except that the result, in this case, is zero.

Why not have an AI do it? Because it doesn’t know your history, right? So just write up your history and have the AI remix it and fill out forms.

Are you really married to those languages? Its not much of a jump to go to similar, but more popular languages. Like Ruby -> Python or C# -> Java/Kotlin.

There’s a huge platform “ways of working” leap. Not just switching languages.

The ways C# and Java are written, deployed, and tested are vastly different and if you don’t have that experience it’s not trivial to learn.

The market isn’t going to support changes like this anyway. Employers will still want actual experience.

almost all job descriptions demand multiple years of experience with their specific languages. i'd be happy to jump, but from my experience you don't even pass the initial filter unless you already know the target languages or frameworks.

why do you only care to work in these languages?

Mainly since employers expect you to have a high degree of competency on the stack they are seeking people for. Sure I have worked with other languages like Python and Go, but I don't have the breath of experience I have on Ruby or C#... I guess I picked the wrong languages =)

I think you picked wrong only in narrowing yourself so much. Nobody cares about your deep language knowledge unfortunately, unless that translates into more velocity. It's not pretty but it's what it is. For someone to care about your deep knowledge it needs to be at the level of writing books and being involved in the specs, with commit rights to core, and even then...

This isn’t true - many hiring managers and HR filters do in fact screen by language and keywords. I personally wouldn’t work there but it’s particularly true for non tech companies and especially true for sweat shop like environments. A lot of Java and c++ roles are also very specific in what they’re hire for because the frameworks and (in c++ especially) language complexity is profound. A competent ruby developer would take a decade to become a competent c++ engineer because it takes a decade to really learn the complexities of c++ at that level. (Which is one reason I’m a huge supporter of rust killing off c++). Companies built around modern tool chains tend to be more progressive in their hiring and their tool chains are more forgiving.