Nine months of silence is a long time to spend shouting into a void.
Since last July, I have been a full-time participant in the current job market. My background isn’t thin: it’s a ten-year portfolio of coding that includes six years of self-taught grit, 2.5 years of professional full-stack experience across multiple companies, and the ongoing management of a live production site. I’ve even sat in the lead chair for a startup, handling everything from embedded software to team management and architecture decisions.
Yet, despite a decade of technical work, a small portfolio, and consistent applications for roles I have already performed, the result is a perfect zero. Not a single interview request in 270 days.
The Audit
When logic fails, you start running experiments. To see if the issue was my approach or the platform itself, I treated my search like a technical audit:
The Rebuild: I scrapped my CV and built new versions from the ground up, matching the specific vernacular of each job description.
The Stress Test: I even tested the "validity" of the listings by slightly embellishing qualifications to create a near-perfect match for the algorithms.
The response remained unchanged: absolute silence. It is a strange reality when a candidate with high-stakes production experience cannot even trigger a screening call.
A Professional Marketplace?
It forces a necessary question: Is LinkedIn still a job board, or has it transitioned into just another social media platform for sharing opinions, accolades, and memes?
The math doesn't seem to add up. It leads one to wonder if many of these "openings" are actually legitimate opportunities. Are we looking at ghost roles—corporate theater used to project an image of growth and strength while hiring is effectively frozen?
The Documented Reality
This isn’t a hot take; it’s a record of a broken feedback loop. When 270 days of consistent effort from an experienced developer yields zero engagement, the system has drifted far from its original purpose.
I am documenting this simply to ask: is this the new standard? If the primary goal of connecting talent with work is no longer being met, is it time to consider a major migration toward something that actually works?
Has anyone else met this level of silence?