The fact that none of these companies will actually *tell* me the specific reasons that they passed on me doesn't help me a single bit. And with the last couple of interviews, I've gotten past the parts that usually trip me up and start to get invested and excited about the position only to get rejected after investing so much time and energy into the process. What's really going on here? I can't address the deficiencies if nobody will tell me what they found to be lacking!
I don't know if this is ageism, being "over-qualified", waiting too long to start looking since my last job, or if I've inadvertently hamstrung myself by not learning front-end development. My recruiters and former co-workers all talk about what a pleasure I am to work with, and then I hear rumblings that maybe something in my "HR assessment" is vaguely not matching, and I have no idea what.
I don't know what else to do if not software. I don't know what else I *can* do in the short term. It makes me want to just give up. I don't think I suffer from what can be definitively called depression, but right now I'm demoralized, hurt, frustrated, baffled, confused, and broken. I no longer know what is expected of me, and I'm worried that nobody wants someone who's been "out of the game" this long.
I'll be okay - I think - but right now I just want to quit trying, knowing full well that I can't. One can only hear, "well, this just means that wasn't the right place for you" so many times before one starts to think that *maybe I'm the one that's broken?*, even when I *know* how broken the corpo system is.
