The search itself: ghost postings, pitfalls, and staying sane

[MadsLorentzen]

The job search is a job nobody trained you for: it's draining, full of traps, and mostly endured alone. This thread is for talking about the search itself - not the wins (those live in #137), but the process, its pitfalls, and how to stay sane inside it. (Thread idea credit: @rasstamann.)

Some openers - answer any, add your own:

• Ghost postings. Roles posted with no intention to hire - budget placeholders, pipeline-building, compliance postings for pre-decided internal hires. How much of your effort did they eat, and have you found reliable tells before investing a tailored application?
• What drains you most? The tailoring treadmill, the silence after applying, the calendar Tetris of interview rounds, explaining the same career story for the fifth time?
• Traps you fell into that others could sidestep - and yes, scams belong here too (this project's README carries a no-crypto disclaimer for a reason; job-seekers are actively targeted).
• What actually helped. Routines, hard limits on daily applications, tracking honestly (the funnel is brutal but it beats the fog), a person who reviewed your letters, going outside.

House rules are the same as #137: share what you're comfortable with, no personal data, no company-bashing with names unless it protects others from a scam. Be the comment you needed to read at your lowest point in the search.

[rasstamann]

Hey, thanks for opening this topic :) I always like to talk and share about mental strain of everyday life. It's very unfortunate when a loss of job becomes a part of daily life, so I wanted to write a message for everyone that might be struggling these days. Buckle up, it's gonna be along read.
TL;DR job search burnout can happen, be prepared to deal with it by yourself or with the help/support of friends and family; keep networking, it helps a LOT!

My background is in computer sciences and I mainly worked on projects that involve hardware and writing code in C++ at OS level. I wanted to stay in this field because I find it very fulfilling, but I am open to positions that don't perfectly match my list. Because of this relatively loose set of criteria, my potential job market is somewhat wide so I started applying for quite a lot of jobs and I eventually reduced this number.

My job serch started off "strong", because I started applying for all existing positions, but then I slowed down simply because I was only applying for new positions. This is a pitfall, if your metric of success is number of applications per day/week/month: you start strong, but then slow down. It can feel like you're underachieving, but you are most likely doing ok.

I went into this in January of 2026 thinking that finding a job in IT is easy in Germany, but the market shift really swept the rug from under my feet. Result currently, after 200+ applications sent, is 3 interviews with companies and 2 interviews with consulting agencies.

For several months I gave myself a task to apply for one job a day. Some days I did more, some days I failed to do even one, but on the average, I think I was around 1.5 a day. I was applying for anything that fit at that point, because I felt the time pressure. A month or so ago I really felt the burnout and I spent two whole weeks not sending any applications, just focusing on myself and my family.

I think my biggest drain was ghost postings, before I realized what they really are. Nobody told me that was a thing when I first started, so I didn't know to look out for those and I probably applied for a decent number of them. Having to write cover letters for possitions that were just going to proverbially be thrown straight into the trash bin is exhausting and infuriating to me. But unfortunatelly that's the reality of the market and we have to deal with it.

After identifying the burnout, I decided to swithc gears. My new strategy is to spend up to 30 minutes a day doing job applications and the rest of the time goes into self improvement. I started learning a new programming language, improving my German (I live in Germany as a non-native speaker with ~B1 level of German), practicing writing code so I don't fall out of shape and learning how to use AI tooling for my job. Other than this, I started doing stuff I like again, like cooking and reading, doing some minor improvements around the house, etc.

My advice to everyone that lost their job and is trying to fill their time now: try to strike a balance between what you must do, what you can do to make yourself more attractive to employers and what you like doing. Sometimes gaming for 20 minutes a day can make all the difference between you going to bed drained and maybe half-drained. Cooking a meal you like can fill up the other half.

Making a plan helps too. Write your todo list for the day and if you complete all the items from it, you did your share and that's enough. If you constantly fail to complete something, for instance your job search allotted time, it is a good idea to address that as an issue. You might be in burnout.

Finally, I would heartily recommend networking with peers. Preferrably live, over a talk, workshop, pizza, beer or all of the above. You get to go outside a bit, meet like-minded people, find out how things are in your field, learn something new, maybe even make friends with similar interests. I would argue that word of mouth is still the best recomendation you can get. So be in the back of everyone's mind when they need to recomend someone for a position you might like.

If you read this far, thank you for your attention. I hope this helps someone who's strugling.

[MadsLorentzen]

This is exactly the comment the house rules asked for - the one you needed to read at your lowest point. Thank you for writing it.

The applications-per-day pitfall you named deserves to be pinned, because it's subtle: applications sent is an input metric, and the input naturally dries up once you've cleared the backlog of existing postings. The count slowing down feels like you failing when it's actually the market thinning. What helped me was switching what I measured: I tracked the funnel instead. Mine ended at 69 tailored applications, 20 first interviews, 1 contract - and the stage ratios were the real signal. No first interviews means the targeting or the documents need work; first interviews that go nowhere means interview prep. A funnel can tell you "you're doing fine, keep going." A daily count can only ever say "more."

On ghost postings: I never found a reliable pre-application tell either. Repost cycles were my strongest suspicion trigger (the same ad vanishing and reappearing for months), but never certainty. So I ended up attacking the other side of the equation: the cost per application. If a tailored application costs an evening, every ghost posting that eats one is infuriating - your words, and I felt them. If it costs 30 minutes, a ghost posting becomes an acceptable tax on being in the game. That's honestly half of why this project exists, and it composes exactly with your 30-minutes-a-day cap: bounded time in, rest of the day for becoming better and staying human.

And the to-do list point should be said louder, so I'll repeat it: if you complete the list, you did your share. The search is an unfinishable job - there is always one more posting, one more tweak - and a finished list is the only honest stopping point it has. The corollary you added is just as sharp: consistently failing the same small item isn't laziness, it's a burnout gauge.

Last thing, because I don't think you've noticed you're doing it: your networking advice is being demonstrated by you, in public, right now. This thread was your idea. The portal index in #78 came out of your suggestion. That's word of mouth in the making - somewhere down the line someone needs a C++/machine-vision person, and you're already in the back of their mind. Keep going.