the job search, honestly

I applied to 65 jobs. At my peak I had 3 active processes going at the same time. I made it to final rounds with 3 companies and all the way to the very end with 2. I got 1 offer. The other finalist liked me enough that even after the process ended, they wanted to put me in for a different role. And the third? A change in hiring plans cut that process short, but they invited me to come back later.

And for most of those interviews? I thought I was doing between mediocre to terrible.

That contrast, the numbers versus how it felt from the inside, is the whole story. So let’s actually tell it.

the setup

Leaving my last job was the right call, not an escape hatch. Those are different things, and knowing which one you’re doing matters for everything that comes after.

I was targeting TypeScript and Node roles, growth and product-leaning teams, remote or Boulder/Denver hybrid. The search started focused, got broader when the silence stretched out, then narrowed again as I learned what I actually wanted. First application to final rounds took about eight weeks.

I also logged everything. Every application, every rejection, every recruiter email, the moment it happened (AI did the bookkeeping; my memory did not get a vote). That discipline is the only reason the numbers in the first paragraph are exact and not vibes.

what it actually felt like

You are your own worst critic. Out of all those interviews, maybe one or two actually felt like they went well. The rest ranged from “fine, I guess” to “I feel like I just bombed that.” And yet: three final rounds, one offer, and two companies that wanted to keep the door open.

The internal scorecard is not a reliable instrument. Your read on your own performance is shaped by nerves, recency bias, and the one question you fumbled, not the whole picture. The interviewers are seeing something you’re not. If you take one thing from this post, take that.

The bar shifts in ways nobody warns you about. As an experienced engineer, it’s not just “can you solve this problem.” It’s: can you articulate every decision you’ve ever made and why? Can you hold ambiguity without freezing? Do you actually know what you know, or do you just know how to execute?

The system design rounds especially. You have to think out loud in a way that feels pretty unnatural, and the first few times it feels like performing expertise you’re not sure you have. That’s a skill you build by doing it badly a few times. Ask me how I know.

The network made it survivable. No lonely montage here, the opposite actually. I reached out to a lot of people. Former colleagues, community connections, people I barely knew. Most of them responded. Some of them opened doors directly. The job search is not a solo sport, and reaching out kept the momentum going during the stretches of silence.

There will always be some silence.

what it revealed

Here is the part few post about: the waiting.

The gap between interviews, between rounds, between the “we’ll be in touch” and the actual touch. That’s where the self-doubt lives. Not in the hard technical question. In the quiet Tuesday afternoon when you’ve heard nothing from anyone for four+ days. The antidote, for me, was keeping the pipeline moving so silence from one place couldn’t consume all my mental space. Having the whole pipeline logged in one place helped more than I expected. When a company went quiet, I could see at a glance that the silence was one row in a table, not the whole story.

A few other things the search taught me, mostly by force:

1. Dealbreakers are worth knowing early. You don’t always know your real ones until you’re in a room and something just doesn’t land. That feeling is data. Trusting it earlier saves everyone time.
2. Culture fit is not soft. It’s load-bearing. Technical fit AND the gut read on the people both have to be right, and you can tell surprisingly quickly when it’s there and when it isn’t.
3. What you actually want clarifies fast. The first few processes helped define what mattered. By the end it was much cleaner: the kind of work, the kind of team, the kind of problem. Logging everything from the start helped here too. The pattern of which conversations I left energized and which ones I dreaded was sitting right there in the record, telling me what I wanted before I’d admitted it to myself. Starting with that clarity would have made the early weeks faster.

the close

The chapter is closed. Something new has already started, and it’s good.

I won’t pretend the search was fun, because it wasn’t. But it was clarifying in a way I didn’t expect. I know myself better as an engineer than I did before it. I know what I’m worth. I know what I’m looking for. That knowledge cost 65 applications, and I’d still call it a fair price.

If you’d rather hear this story than read it, I recently unpacked the whole thing with Anna Miller in a LinkedIn Live. Same search, live reactions included. 🎙️

If you’re in a job search right now, I’d love to hear what it’s actually like for you. Not the version you post on LinkedIn. The real one. 💙