Looking for a Job Is Tough

1. Layoffs happening regularly.

2. Less Senior positions and virtually no junior jobs.

2. AI accelerating and reducing the number of software engineers.

3. Job postings being reposted with less salary and equity in US, EU and especially the UK.

You might as well take yourself off the job market / stay in current job, build a paying SMB company or side project on the side and make that your third income.

If it gets better and reaches sustainability you can choose to leave your job and live off it, or choose to get funding if need be.

After applying for over 60+ jobs after graduation and getting rejected over and over, I took myself off the market and started a pest control SaaS 4 years ago now it's bringing in over $2.2M+ ARR.

While the jobs I was applying for have now either shut down or not even bringing in anything over $100K ARR.

Since you mentioned a specific number of applications (60+), I just wanted to share my job hunt story. When I was last looking for a role (8 months ago), I started out thinking 5 applications a day was good, but then I spoke with an industry mentor, and he laughed me off saying that wasn't close to enough. Turns out he was right.

On his recommendation I started aiming for 50 a day. At first it's very slow, but you build up a corpus of cover letters and other material to submit applications.

This would have been easier if I was employed at the time, since so many places auto-reject if you aren't currently employed. This was also looking for fully-remote in APAC, which has far fewer opportunities than other regions/timezones.

And you might say "but I don't want to work for all these companies" and I would agree. But provided you are applying for a role that you are at least curious about, those ones that are not great fits can provide good interview practice.