Woke up this morning to an email after a phone screen with a potential employer.
We have decided to move forward with other candidates who are a closer match to what we’re looking for right now.
I’m tired.
I moved out to the west coast in 2023 in an attempt to be closer to my partner of 5 years. We live in a rather small town, which does not particularly help with job prospects. And at the same time, the economy was circling the drain and all these factors culminated in me being laid off in June 2025 from my remote job. I could see the writing on the wall, reorgs were becoming more frequent, town hall meetings were getting smaller, Slack channels had this weird undercurrent of anxiety… I tried my best to freshen up my resumé, apply to jobs when I had the time, and in general just try to keep my head above water. It didn’t work too well.
Ever since, I’ve been applying to job after job — so many in fact that I’ve lost count trying to track them all (I switched from an excel spreadsheet to using an online site tracking service). In the timespan of the last 8 months, I’ve had exactly three total interview loops and made it to the final round of one of them (after 5 grueling rounds) only to get rejected.
I’ve had my resumé professionally reviewed, I’ve studied DSA, leetcode, and system design (arguably my weakest area) and haven’t been able to land anything. I’ve applied to senior roles, junior roles, mid-level roles, hybrid, in-person, remote. All of this to radio silence 98% of the time, the other 2% being a smatter of automated rejections, with the occasional recruiter phone call. Being a minority in tech, there’s also this added invisible pressure of feeling as though I have to shrink myself in order to appear “hireable”, don’t be “too” Black, don’t be too loud, too exciteable…I’m sure you get the idea. And despite all that I’ve still landed nothing.
All this feels like a rather sisyphean exercise in humiliation. Applying to multiple jobs a day, every day, only to never hear back, and when I do hear back, 9/10 times it’s an automated rejection. My savings are dwindling, my mental health is degrading, my relationships are suffering, and I’m realizing very quickly that I will most likely have to move back in with my parents and I won’t lie — it really hurts. It makes me feel like a failure. Not just to me, but to my partner as well. I thought that doing good work, being personable, and helping out when needed would be enough for me to keep steady employment. I thought I was good at what I did.
Apparently not good enough.
Now, hyperbole out of the way, I know that none of this is actually my fault. Capitalism is capitalism and I recognize that as a remote employee (especially at non-remote-first companies) I’m the first on the chopping block. I am now in therapy (thankfully pro-bono, because being jobless in America means that I have insurance that nobody really accepts. My therapist is a true godsend.) and it has definitely prevented me from slipping back into another years-long battle with depression (a story for another time) but, this entire process has also made me realize that once I come out of the other side of this - and I will come out the other side of this, I have no other choice — things will have to change. Whether that means saving more money, focusing on a plan for FIRE, or just being more cutthroat when it comes to work, I refuse to put myself through this again.
Whether this sort of anger/desperation fueled motivation is enough to keep me going is something I’ll probably write about once I’m on the other side of all this.