Tell HN: My advice after I applied to 450 positions before getting hired

Summary

I wanted to briefly share my experience as a senior engineer with 15 years of experience trying to find work in this market, because it was exhausting for me and i'm sure others will appreciate the perspective.As the title says, I have applied to over 450 positions. Most companies did not even send me a rejection. Ghost jobs are a thing, so are fake roles to get you to signup/join some rando job board.I interviewed for a director of engineering role, and all interviews went well, but they ghosted me at the end.I did several take homes and all were accepted, but companies dragged their feet on next steps.I did reject a few kinds of roles: ones that used AI for interviewing me, ones that had me do a coding challenge as the first step, and jobs that had "no working hours" and expected you to be "on" 24/7.Many of the job applicant expected me to answer asinine questions like "what excited you about this role?" and would say things like "don't use AI! we want your true self" or would go so far as to try to get you to agree to their AI interview policy. As If.I eventually did get hired as a software architect. the company that hired me was very professional, respectful, forward thinking (i used windsurf during the interview) and did not play games with me. They had a 4-step interview process, and asked a lot of good questions. One of the best interview processes of my career.My advice to other engineers on the job market: 1) Spray and pray. If its vaguely a fit, apply. It's a numbers game. Be shameless. 2) Always be willing to walk. Protect your time. Don't waste your time on lengthy job applications that take too long to complete. Some hiring managers will gladly waste your time. (one job application explicitly wanted you to spend 20 minutes filling out theirs) 3) Don't do coding exercises before you interview with someone, be weary of asymmetrical time expenditures. see #2. 4) You can probably do a lot of different roles, "prompt engineer" is a real job title companies ...