I’m in Pittsburgh but didn't end up applying anywhere local. I was looking for remote-friendly positions to keep things flexible due to an upcoming move, which definitely limited my options. Out of the 50 or so companies I looked into, barely a third turned out to be remote friendly, with some only pretending to be (e.g. Meta seems to have gone out of their way to make remote suck for everyone involved by limiting it to staff+ on top of manager discretion).

I was definitely nervous about the time off being an issue. The usual stream of recruiter emails had pretty much dried up by the time I started looking for work, and I was fully expecting the search to take forever. It wasn’t an issue at all in the end - no one brought up the gap during interviews. I mentioned it in passing a few times when talking about why I left my previous job and mostly just got “dang that sounds like fun” from people. That being said, I have no idea if I would have gotten more responses to my initial inquiries without the gap on my resume.