He was laid off from a software engineering job in March 2025. What followed was the routine: applications, interviews, rejections, and months of it. Eventually he took a role paying roughly half his previous salary — $76,000, health insurance, nothing else — and started in January.
He kept applying.
By October he had spent almost three months inside a single interview process, round after round of technical screens, while working the job that paid him less. There were rejections between the rounds. There was a stretch, he wrote, where he questioned whether he was any good at the work at all.
Then the offer arrived: $230,000 in total compensation.
He did not write to celebrate the number. He wrote for the people still in the middle of it — the ones applying after another rejection, working something that pays less than they are worth, wondering whether the effort is compounding or just accumulating. His answer was that it can turn, and often does, later than you expect. The offer was not proof that the process is fair. It was proof that the process is not finished.