Ask HN: 5th Month of Unemployment and Still No Job

I graduated university in December 2022. After interning at my former company for about a year, I was hired full-time, working on federal healthcare contracts for the HHS. In August of this year, I was laid off after the federal government canceled all the contracts I was working on, and there were no other positions available for me. I had been at the company full-time for almost three years before being laid off.

I have been applying for jobs for almost five months now, and I have had no success. Most of the time, I do not even get interviews. When I do get interviews, I have reached the final round at Meta but did not get an offer. The same happened with Fanatics. At IBM, I failed the first programming interview after the coding assessment. I was interviewing for a C++ role but had limited experience. I have also interviewed for three local roles and made it to the final round in all of them.

The only feedback I have received came from my two most recent interviews. For Company A, they said I did not perform well in the programming project during the interview because I focused on new Java features. However, they also said positive things. They thought I had the right culture fit and technical skill, but I lacked experience in DevOps, which I believe was not part of the job description, and I was relatively slow. For Company B, they said, "We do not think your skillset is the best fit for the fundamental development tasks that will be our primary focus in the months ahead."

My experience at my former employer was mainly with legacy systems, which is typical for government contracts. We used AWS for the entire system: ECS, RDS (Oracle SQL), DynamoDB, API Gateway, Lambda, and S3. But all the backend code, where I worked full-stack, was in Java 8, later upgraded to Java 21, SpringMVC (no Spring Boot), Apache Tomcat, Apache Maven, SVN, and Git. The frontend consisted of JSPs that loaded XML files with vanilla JS, Bootstrap, and jQuery, along with CSS and HTML.

It seems many companies are looking for reactive websites, which I have no experience with, or Spring Boot and more modern tech stacks. I am getting almost no interviews, and the process can take a month or more just to end in rejection. I know the job market is very difficult right now, but this is taking a serious mental toll on me. I already have disabilities and mental health issues, and I feel like my life and career are falling apart. I do not have skills for "normal" non-tech roles, and I do not know what to do. I know the obvious advice is to improve my resume and interviewing skills, but at some point, even getting an interview feels completely random, and the same goes for the interviews themselves.