Quick question and a cry for help. :-)

My name is Jesse. I've been writing web applications (predominately on the backend) professionally for around 8 years with some downtime here and there for personal reasons. I wrote code as a hobby for around 6 years before that. I've provided links below to GitHub, LinkedIn and so on...

There's a major problem with me, the market, or both. I've been absolutely unable to get offers in the last 6 months and out of around 100 applications, I've gotten three interviews, two of which ended short, as in, they cut the interview short. I'd love to blame myself for this but it didn't used to be this hard and honestly makes no sense why this is happening. One ill-mannered lady asked "Why did you only last 6 months at that one position?". My response was "Well my little brother died during my employment there so I decided to take some time to myself to cope.". She cut the interview short right after that.

I get a call from a recruiter every couple of days or so and I'm asked a bunch of questions and they put me on their "hiring list" after telling me they had a job in mind for me. I fall for it every time. I've never once gotten a call back about the job (or any for that matter) that they originally pitched from a recruiter in the last couple of years.

Don't get me started on the interviewers. I don't know what they're expecting sometimes. I was given around 40 minutes today to solve three questions about two CSV data sets...Couldn't do it in the allotted time. I explained what I was actually able to complete and how I would approach finishing a very rough prototype of a function (that I had 5 minutes to complete btw after setup) and went on to explain that 5 minutes isn't enough to replace SQL implementations... I would need more time. I would have sat there for days learning to implement LSM trees and so on if they had asked. They didn't ask. The interviewer said I should consider trying "project management". Ouch! I asked for tips on solving the problem faster and got a really short and lousy answer that was basically "use python and some library". What in the actual **?

tl;dr: What the ** is going on and what have you all done to my job security? I heard some companies let go of a bunch of engineers? I need help desperately. I will give the rest of my savings to whoever can help me figure out why I'm unhireable.

p.s: I'll take the first $60k offer I get, so let your bosses know you found them a great deal! I swear it on my honor. After 5 months of searching, I'm officially out of money and have a family to feed. So, don't ask me to relocate (I live pretty cheap already!) but please offer me a job.

I love you all.

https://github.com/jessehorne https://linkedin.com/in/jesseleehorne