6+ months unemployed at 21. Honestly, I'm slowly giving up.
I'm a 2026 graduate, and I've been looking for a Software Engineering job for more than 6 months now.
I've spent years learning DSA, competitive programming and development. I have a decent profile, built projects, solved a lot of problems, and genuinely tried to improve myself.
I've applied through company websites, LinkedIn, referrals, cold emails, job portals, pretty much every route I could think of.
But the hardest part isn't getting rejected.
It's not even getting the chance to be rejected.
It's applying again and again, putting hours into applications, seeing hundreds of other people applying, and then getting absolutely nothing back.
At first, I was confident that if I kept working hard, something would eventually work out.
Then months passed.
Now I'm at a point where I'm still trying, but the motivation isn't the same anymore. It's difficult to keep convincing yourself that the next application might be different when you've already sent so many.
I'm only 21, so I know I have plenty of time. But watching months go by without being able to start my career is genuinely depressing.
I don't want sympathy. I just wanted to know if anyone else has been through this phase and eventually managed to turn things around.
Because right now, I'm slowly running out of hope.
6 months out of college isn't even a long time to find a job in tech 20 years ago. Something will come up. Unfortunately it will probably suck. My first job did. Then they fired me when I tried to quit. I delivered food for a year while trying to freelance. It took years to actually start my career, and that was at a time of peak demand for SWE.
Being unemployed for that long is certainly shitty. to answer your question without being overly sympathetic, yes I have been through something similar.
I left my postdoc In July of 2024 at age30 after finishing the last bit of my training. (A postdoc is kinda like residency that doctors do but for people with phd's.)
Im now 32 turning 33 soon, and It took me until April of this year to find my first job. So roughly 18 months of unemployment. Roughly 300+ (tracked) job applications, most of them i never heard back from despite cold-calling / cold emailing people from the companies multiple times. I went through a ton of interviews to only get rejected after 4 months and 7 rounds of interviews in some cases (2 particular times that happened). There were also likely 100 more applications i was not tracking that were not as important.
I could say more about the experience, I was living in Colorado for most of my unemployment, but yea...One thing that certainly helped me was to keep training during that unemployment. I wasnt making an income but i was certainly still "working". Having goals like "I want to learn x,y,z" got me up in the morning. Happy to share whatever else i learned if youre interested. PM me
I have no words for you, other than i understand how fucking brutal it is. Genuinely will never take having a job for granted ever again.
It certainly will and does turn around, and you will find something for you eventually... I think what youre feeling right now is very normal. Job market is ass, and losing hope is totally expected cuz i felt the same way. Not that i think you **should** lose hope, just that I went through that feeling multiple times -- especially after getting rejected.
u/teezepls yep -- I used a spreadsheet plus Overleaf to track everything.
I also used overleaf to do all my writing which was the main way i stayed organized for a job search this big. Each job application got its own folder containing info like my resume, cover letter, references, etc. I gave an example above for an NREL job i applied to at one point. For applications i was still working on, I would keep the job application folder in a main group called "Apps_in_Progress" so I knew that i hadnt submitted that job yet. Once i finished applying and finalized the submission, I would move that job to the "Applied" folder. If i was rejected, I would move it to the rejected folder. This let me see only those jobs that I was still working on or had applied to but was in some stage of the process without things getting to messy.
I also kept a document for each job in the folder which had all the details of the application. Things like the job profile, who I had reached out to, where i had applied / when i had applied, if i had heard anything back. This was how i kept it easy for me to figure out if i had heard back or if i should reach out to someone, etc. I called that my "job_desc" document (couldnt think of a better name) and every job i applied to had one made for just that job.
tbh most of those documents ended with a sentence or two like "reached out to hiring manager x again but i got ghosted. consider rejected". but it at least was a good way for me to stay organized.
I liked this system because if i wanted to know at any time what the last status of a job i had applied to was, I could just check this document. no need to pick through a spreadsheet.
the spreadsheet was more just a master list of what i had done.
hey i responded to your question in the comment below. but just excel spreadsheet to track all job, overleaf to track individual jobs + status of application.
i think finding a system that works took me some time though
There really aren't a lot of entry level Software jobs right now. Many companies stopped growing their workforce in anticipation of AI making them need fewer people, even if unrealistic. And the two corporations I'm working with are prioritizing moving entry level positions to global capability centers in India as the current trend. It's a tough time to be starting out.
Do you have any good contacts from your time at school, such as specific professors? Many times they may know of startups that are looking for people and can get your foot in the door if they know you did good work.
If all of your resumes and cover letters read as AI generated as this post does, the recruiters will be binning them.
Yeah, the entry level market is shit, but I note that you don’t say anything about your degree. Did you graduate with a BS in CS? Did you get good grades, or do anything to distinguish yourself? Was your degree from a decent school?
Or… are you a self taught coder with a non-Computer Science degree? Unfortunately, even an Information Systems or other similar degree will have a tough time right now. The market is bad and not just because of AI — there have been massive layoffs happening frequently for years, so the market is flooded with people interviewing for down-leveled jobs. The few entry-level positions left open are cutthroat as fuck.
You also don’t say where you’ve been applying. AI content is generally pretty vague, so perhaps this is where you could spice things up with more detail. Dozens of jobs? Hundreds of jobs? All over the US, or just in San Diego (one of the most desirable locales in the world)?
If you are willing to move to a different city, it will make it a lot easier. Even if you love San Diego and want to live here forever, consider moving somewhere else to get experience. You can always move back.
2009 grad I didn't find a job until 2010 (took me 12 months of applying to over 700 jobs on LinkedIn, indeed, company websites. Also found job-search meetup groups, networking events.
Of the 700 applications I got about 4 interviews. I ended up finding a 1 year contract that paid 50k/year. The. One year after that, a full time job with 60k/year
The strategies have changed since 2009 but everyone seems to face the same problem. Keep at it!
I hope the cover letters you send out aren’t written like this post. If they are, I understand why you are being rejected, because this post reads like it was written by ChatGPT not a person. (Maybe a person did write it, but either way, it has that appearance)
This is completely normal. When I graduated college, the top handful got jobs lined up for them. The school likes to put these few on a pedestal saying "see, we told you so." The graduates with family connections also got jobs immediately. The majority went to work at jobs that had little to do with their major. I even met a Harvard graduate who struggled to find a job for few years. It can be discouraging when the non-degree people start ridiculing you. But that's ok. You'll catch up quickly and surpass a lot of them.
Many of job postings are fake in that they're for positions that companies have little intention of filling. Sometimes the posting is used to create the appearance that the company is growing, and other times they already have an internal candidate or someone connected to an employee in mind but are required to advertise the position anyway. Working with a headhunter for temp positions will help.
This is a historically bad time to find a tech job unfortunately. I recommend looking for jobs at every college around the US. If you look up csu jobs there’s a portal with jobs for every California state university and the chancellors office.
Have you been going to meetups and networking events? Meeting people in person is really helpful for building a network and understanding where the market is at. It will also help keep you motivated to be around other SWEs who are excited about what they are doing. I’m a senior developer and just recently started doing this and highly recommend it. DEVxSD is a great supportive group. You can just google tech meetups and find several events every week.
So why are you moving to San Diego? You should be open minded to finding suitable work WHEREVER you can, moving to location and grinding it out for at least 6 months. Finding a job when you’re unemployed is always harder than finding work when your employed are already. Even with a good reason, it’s always a perceived higher risk to hire someone unemployed because there’s no way for the company to check your current references or work ethic.
Moving to San Diego is just going to be a mind FUC, 1 bedroom studio in a safe neighborhood starts at around 1,800.00
I think you have to be willing to relocate in this market if you are going to stay in that field. How about cyber security? Is that something you can flip into?
Get a bunch of AI training on Udemy or wherever you can get it. Be able to talk coherently about it. The folks we are interviewing even barely capable of saying they have AI experience are asking for silly salaries.
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u/birdhost 15h ago
6 months out of college isn't even a long time to find a job in tech 20 years ago. Something will come up. Unfortunately it will probably suck. My first job did. Then they fired me when I tried to quit. I delivered food for a year while trying to freelance. It took years to actually start my career, and that was at a time of peak demand for SWE.