I have pinged my network, and am very grateful for all the job offers that have come of it. However, at least half those offers have come with technical interviews that basically ignore my work experience, or in one case the recruiter could not even determine why my experience was relevant (even though it was). Some offers involved getting paid to continue working on Voxel Quest. However, one such offer was in a remote country where the US dollar is much stronger, and I could not have operated under the salary they were offering (at least, not without moving to their country, which is very far away).
At this point I am trying to figure out the "best" path, and that involves many factors, one of which is trying to ease up on the stress I have put my family through. By insistence I have put up Patreon although I am not yet touching the money until I know what my future job is and what that means for VQ (and as mentioned I'm also refunding all the money put into VQ).
I always thought I just wasn't as good as I think when I didn't get a job, but I know your work and it is amazing, so hiring companies just don't know what they doing anymore
I'm sure a lot of developers who are currently employed are put off applying elsewhere because the whole process has become so demanding and unpleasant and disrespectful.
One company I applied to for example asked to do a take-home test, maybe 2 hours. I did the test, only to be told it was the first stage of a long and gruelling process involving a further 8 hour take-home project (unpaid, of course) followed my several rounds of technical and non-technical interviews. I immediately withdrew my application. When would I have the time to do 8 hours - it was timed for some bizarre reason, so it had to be done in a single block of time - on a project? Maybe for my own projects, sure, but that's my spare time.
Interviewers and recruiters are, after all, being paid to sit there, while interviewees are - unless they're unemployed - taking precious time off to travel, maybe stay overnight in a hotel, sit through hours of gruelling interviews and tests, all for a job that may or may not offer anything much better than what they've already got. And yet the penny hasn't yet dropped that maybe your shitty process is the reason you haven't found anyone yet?
I'm not sure what the solution is, but I'm convinced that it wasn't this bad 5 or 10 years ago - maybe if you were interviewing at Google or Microsoft, but not if you were applying for a bog standard dev role at a startup or SME.
We should unite together and form an organization that blacklists companies with incompetent hiring practices. :)