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> I'm an average software engineer in Western Europe. When I was junior (around 2010-2015) I usually got a job after submitting ~3 job applications

Your situation is actually very rare unless you are accepting bottom of the barrel offers or very well connected landing quick offers. I am also from West Europe and for me with a decade of experience it still takes 30-45+ applications because most companies(except boring ones) do not publish a salary range and doesn’t share anything until the last stage, when I realize that what they are offering is garbage. On most applications, they also ask for expectations and some just outright ghost you after or simply hope that post interview they might be able to find some “shallow experience on this specific tech we use” so I might be willing to “take a bit of cut to work with their wonderful team..”.

Also typically every interview process is loooong, on average a complete process takes 4 weeks to 2 months.

Also, some one are out right stupid and start asking me about if am open/passionate about focusing on the work instead of “counting hours and going home”(ELI5: they want unpaid off record overtime).

So shifting through many garbages to find the one(or two) golden ones is a good effort.

> So shifting through many garbages to find the one(or two) golden ones is a good effort.

I guess that's my trick, then. Somehow I can filter out garbage by just:

- reading the job ad

- reading the company's website/social media

- checking who's working for such company (e.g., linkedin profile of employees)

It takes around 1-2h for me to check a company. That's why I only submit very few applications: because I know the companies I'm applying for are not the bad ones.

That was also my experience as last as last year. However, something has changed. I suspect a combination of factors have depressed the market - my top two guesses are massive layoffs of highly skilled FAANG candidates, and uncertainty about the value of tech skills in general in the age of cheap AIs. The market seems to be recovering as the laid off workers either reabsorb or move on to other things, and the limitations of AI become clear.

Without a second offer in hand, you're always going to be in a very bad negotiating position when it comes to salary. Avoiding the stress of multiple interviews is almost certainly costing you tens of thousands per year. Over your entire career we're talking about millions of euros.

By that logic, we should always be looking for another job, even when already working. It stops being a game of "having a second offer" and it becomes a "look for who wants to pay me more than what I am making at the moment".

Yes, you always should be available for work outside your current company. Staying in one bubble for long periods of time leads to brainwashing.

Sure. Someone should almost always be open to other opportunities that present themselves. But there's not necessarily anything wrong with staying in one place if it works for them. even if the "cool kids' are hopping around all the time.

Being available to work is not the same as interviewing so much that you need a dedicate webapp to help you keep track of what is going on.

Which probably describes how a lot of the people who hop from job to job every couple of years operate. That's never been me admittedly. And basically every job I've had since grad school has involved contacting someone I knew and ending up with an offer. I've done fine but arguably haven't maximized compensation though that really hasn't been my goal.

Obviously I'm not the target for something like this given that I've applied to three jobs in the past 25 years and none of those were through a regular application system.

I don't think this logic is solid.

> Avoiding the stress of multiple interviews is almost certainly costing you tens of thousands per year

If we are still talking about Western Europe, where almost no one reaches the 100K eur/year salary, saying tens of thousands per year (e.g., 20K? 30K?) implies a power of negotiation of 20%-30% (or even more if we are talking about base salaries of < 100K/year which are the most common ones) when negotiating a salary. Maybe in the US you can negotiate that when applying for a job, but around here I think asking for more than 10%-15% already is basically forcing your employer to pass on you (unless you are the Michael Jordan of software engineers).

Sure it's common and it really depends how picky you are. I have 20 YoE and applied to over 150 places last year, some in Western Europe and some remote jobs in the USA. In the end I only got one offer, which I turned down. But I did gain a greater understanding of the market.

That seems like an insane number for an experienced person--that's almost an application every two days--and a yield of less than 1% which presumably wasn't even a compelling offer.

Online job platforms like Monster, Indeed, Glassdoor, etc. have changed things significantly. If you can apply in one click, or just a simple form, it's trivial to send out 50 applications a day. Those easy-apply jobs will of course get hundreds of applicants, requiring an even wider net to stand a statistical chance.

My job search looked a bit like that. Luckily, I had just a few connections from grad school, which of course immediately led to interviews and offers while my hundreds of one-click applications lead to form rejections or have been ghosted. But without those connections, I'm not sure what choice I would have.

> Online job platforms like Monster, Indeed, Glassdoor, etc.

Maybe that's the problem. Those platforms are full of garbage job ads. I've never used such platforms (but again, I could be missing something).

This was my experience until this year. I’m looking for something full time, and despite my decade+ of experience, no one is interested. I don’t think I’ve ever interviewed for more than 5 jobs in my life, but at this point I can barely get an interview. I’m thinking I should have kept my last job at this point.

Although the timing isn’t great, I’m not unhappy about it. The push to improve my presentation and be more thoughtful about these things is ultimately a very good thing. It’s definitely a bit unsettling too, though. Until now I’ve been abnormally fortunate.

And you’re right, interviewing with several companies at once is very stressful. I struggle to keep all of the roles separate in my mind at once, and I’m terrible at knowing which voice on the call is who, and who I asked what, when, why, etc. I have to write absolutely everything down and look over my notes before every call.

10+ years experience here. I used to be like you until earlier this year when I was looking for a new job and thought it would be easy as it had always been.

Oh boy was I wrong. I tracked over 120 applications, had 20+ open processes with multiple interviews and in the end only got 1 offer (which I took).