u/Double_Bid7843

I'm someone who's interested in networking and digital privacy, and wanted to build a React app that shows how devices on a network interact with each other and with external servers in a noob-friendly way. Not really sure how to go about this, I know my way around React and JS but am somewhat new to Linux so I don't know how to go about taking the real-time output of tcpdump and turning it into an API i can call from for my application. Any ideas?

Resume: https://docs.google.com/document/d/e/2PACX-1vTTdXriw4jqVqoDJBkqus_Jo05hZzFR8hBwlE2sZionSZ3xARqQ5O_ANakTunhH0Q/pub

I'm a frontend engineer with 5 YoE who was laid off in September of last year and I have made no real headway in the job hunt since.

I know thousands of you are more than familiar with the current landscape. Every single job site is completely hopeless. Even when I set the filter to hybrid and in-person jobs from the last 24 hours in my own fucking city (Chicago) it's nothing but over-applied roles, staffing slop, and outright scams. I have given out my phone number so many fucking times that lately it's been nonstop with the spam calls.

In 8 months of job searching sending out hundreds of applications I have had maybe 10 or so callbacks, four of which turned into actual interviews. One of them dropped me after speaking to the hiring manager, another dropped me after bombing a code interview, one of them I did great but they closed the fucking role mid-process and the last one was just trying to get me to do free work.

"Something's definitely wrong with your resume." I am regularly rejected from jobs I am clearly perfectly qualified for whose description matches my resume beat for beat, after running it through ChatGPT several times to optimize it the beset I can, testing it to see if LLMs thinks a human wrote it, and editing it to make it not sound like AI. I include metrics, and I follow that stupid fucking STAR method that everyone likes. Maybe something's wrong with my resume writing process, maybe not. I show it to several of my friends who are experienced devs themselves (some of whom have done hiring) and they think it looks good. I don't know. But if my ability to land work in this industry boils down to luck and trying to figure out the arbitrary biases of whatever ATS a given company is using to filter out candidates I might as well be doing nothing.

"Well, most people find jobs through networking and referrals anyway." Yeah, and every single one of my friends (which is more than a few people) don't have open roles at their companies or straight up froze hiring.

"You should upskill and go full-stack because frontend's dying." I am. I've been learning Java and Python while looking for work. But only because they're useful skills to learn. Not because I think they're gonna improve my chances, since all these guys care about is work experience and I can't even get my resume glanced at for frontend roles I'm qualified and even over qualified for with 5 YoE.

"Make some personal projects you can show off." Sure, they're important if I wanna get better as a coder, which of course I do. This worked - in fucking 2020, but what company in 2026 gives a shit anymore about CRUD apps with 0 users that generate 0 revenue? Which is funny because if I had a project that meant anything I certainly wouldn't be out looking to work at a company anyway.

The only thing I haven't tried at this point is straight up lying about what I did at my last two jobs to look better which, while I'm not morally opposed to lying to these greedy corporations who don't give a rat's ass about their employees anyway and don't deserve anyone's respect, could I even do it in a way that both makes me look better than all the fucking ex-FAANG senior and lead devs I'm competing with AND I can realistically defend when pressed?

So yeah - long spiel over. Is there anything else that's worth trying in this dying ghost job vibecode-ridden field, or should I just throw in the towel? You gotta believe that this is absolutely still a job I'm willing to do in spite of the huge rant, because it's something I can do, but as far as I can see I simply can't see any way through this miserable job hunt and I'm hoping someone can weigh in and give reasonable, actionable advice - whether or not that advice ends up amounting to "yeah, this isn't worth it, just quit."