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I've seen co-workers, who were way more skilled than me, be on the market for almost a year. One in particular was my mentor and it took him about 8 months. Another was my direct manager and it's been over a year.

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There is an order of magnitude fewer jobs available for manager than for regular engineers. That's why it probably would take about a month to find a job as an engineer with a few years of experience, but 6 months or more for an engineering manager with 10-20 years of total experience.

That makes sense. I think my manager is going to go back to being an engineer.

The rule-of-thumb is that you should expect to spend 1 month looking for a job for every $10,000 of salary you expect to make. So it's not at all surprising that an engineer would take 8 months to find a new job.

I don't think that's a very helpful rule of thumb. For one thing, it defies the notion of supply and demand.

The hot jobs with modern skills are paying the most and also desperate to find people. It's people who favor older stacks who have trouble finding a job and get paid less.

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