--- title: "Retrospective on My Job Search" url: https://daily.dev/posts/retrospective-on-my-job-search-yram5rekx source_url: https://kittygiraudel.com/2026/05/25/retrospective-on-my-job-search type: article source: "Kitty says hi." author: "Kitty Giraudel" published: 2026-05-25T07:10:27.549Z updated: 2026-05-26T04:00:16.025Z tags: ["frontend", "leadership"] reading_time: 8 upvotes: 67 comments: 8 language: en --- > ## Documentation Index > Fetch the complete documentation index at: https://daily.dev/llms.txt > Use this file to discover all available pages before exploring further. # Retrospective on My Job Search **[Kitty says hi.](https://daily.dev/sources/kittygiraudel)** · [@kittygiraudel](https://daily.dev/kittygiraudel) · 8 min read · 67 upvotes · 8 comments ## Summary A senior frontend engineer and former VP of Engineering shares a detailed retrospective on a 5-month job search in 2025-2026. Out of 60 applications, 78% were rejected without an interview, 23% ghosted entirely, and only 13 led to conversations. Key observations include the rise of AI-automated screening making it harder to pass initial filters, the blurring of job levels (junior, mid, senior, staff), and the challenge of being simultaneously over- and under-qualified when transitioning from executive leadership back to IC roles. The search ended successfully with a role at Duna, which was praised for its humane hiring process. ## Full article daily.dev links to this article rather than hosting it. Read it at the original source: ## Community discussion Top comments from developers on daily.dev. **@neoscripter** · 9 upvotes > Well, glad it worked out for you. I am kind of scared to look for a job right now, to be honest. When I checked postings, there were a lot of "Agentic developer", "Must you AI for everything, we will monitor your token usage", "you will thrive in our company if you use AI a lot" thing which means if you get lucky and your boss will not fire you for not vibecoding, you are going to have an amazing time getting sloppy pull requests from your colleagues who decided to thrive at full speed with 50.000 lines of code each that you will have to review. Not to mention working with sloppy... **@arlangalvez21** · 2 upvotes > 'Agentic developer' is the latest trend, and AI is creating a significant technological debt that is hindering all processes. **@lotus015** · 0 upvotes > Clean graphic for the application stats. What did you use to make it? > Also congratulations! **@glnuraltan** · 0 upvotes > It's even harder for juniors because they lack experience and often don't know what to do next ## Similar posts on daily.dev - [The Lion, The Witch, and the audacity of recruiters](https://daily.dev/posts/the-lion-the-witch-and-the-audacity-of-recruiters-fiofo0jao) · Beam Bloggers Webring · 2 upvotes · 1 comments --- Tags: [#frontend](https://daily.dev/tags/frontend), [#leadership](https://daily.dev/tags/leadership) [View this post on daily.dev](https://daily.dev/posts/retrospective-on-my-job-search-yram5rekx)