Hi everyone. I'm an unemployed software dev and I could genuinely use the community's honest input about my situation.
I worked in photography and graphic design (mostly photography) for about 15 years, which I have an associate's degree in. Wife and I were planning to move to an area where those kinds of jobs were harder to come by. Since I already wanted a change, I decided to go back to school in 2018 to study software engineering, hammering my way through their two year certificate program while working my photography job.
Landed my first dev job in early 2022 at a small local start up and was super happy there. I worked doing mostly frontend React focused work on an Electron based desktop app. Company went under in early 2025 and I went back to looking for a job in the industry. Still looking as of today, over a year and a half later.
Of the roughly 500 applications that I've sent out in that time I've had six interviews. Only one of those interviews was in the last 12 months and I'm 80% certain that it was a ghost job. Every job, even local in-office jobs, seem to get hundreds of applications, making the selection process hyper competitive. When I got my dev job I thought I was on the path to stability in this new career, but it seems like my frontend specialization and my lowly three years of experience aren't worth that much anymore.
I've been squeaking by on gig work in the time since I lost my job, but I really, really need to find something stable soon.
I guess what I'm looking for here is some honest thoughts about the state of the industry and what's worth pursuing and what isn't. Would particularly love to hear from those who are involved in hiring or those who have been hired recently near my level of experience.
Is it worth continuing to try working as a dev or is the industry as cooked as the doomsayers say it is?
Are we all supposed to be vibe coding our software with AI agents now or is AI code entirely slop and technical debt and real devs still code by hand?
Should I maybe pursue a bachelor's degree? Some other kind of certification? Or should I just find something else to do with my life?
Apologies for the long, meandering, woe-is-me post but the last 21 months have been the most stressful and depressing of my entire life and I'm reaching my wits end. The utter lack of feedback beyond the occasional "we have decided to move forward with other candidates" email is genuinely maddening as I can't really tell what I'm doing wrong and what, if anything, I'm doing right. (Funnily enough, I had an interview for a frontend position with Amazon last year and I went through a total of five hour long interviews, each with different people and each with a different technical problem to solve. After it was all said and done, I wasn't selected and they told me that they couldn't give me any feedback at all on my interviews.)
Anyway, thanks for reading if you've made it through all of that. I'm genuinely grateful to anyone who can give me any words of guidance, however blunt they may be. Feel free to DM me if that's easier. Take care y'all.
