I had a hiatus from work in 2016 and when I tried to get back to the job market it was impossible …

I can relate to the hiatus situation and "one dislike". I'm employed right now, for about 1 and half years, but there was a time that I tried to switch path from Web/Mobile developer to full backend developer, and in this attempt I got a job interview for a digital bank; I had everything checked out and expected to continue to step 2, even a friend of mine who works there thought I'd pass the process easily, but to our surprise, I didn't make it to the next step, and when I asked the interviewer for feedback they gave me a bullet list with just one bullet saying that I didn't "explore business logic much"! It didn't make any sense! I found it preposterous and insulting, to say the least. When I ask for feedback, I want to know what are you looking for and why I wasn't compatible with your position.

There's just too many devs chasing too few jobs imo, programmers have become somewhat of a commodity and it's going to get much worse now with interest rates higher and staying higher. And soon A.I might reduce humans from the equation even further. At the same time there are professions like child care, education, healthcare where personnel is always needed and overworked. To me it looks like we need to reorganize the job market but we'll see what the higher ups come up with.

> Loop interviews were the worst because it generally takes just one guy out out five to dislike you even if you had a great time with the other four. Steve Yegge famously described Google's "interview anti-loop" where you got two interviewers in the pipeline that wouldn't have hired each other, so whatever pleases one interviewer would get you rejected by the other (and viceversa). In those cases there's no way to win. I suppose the length of the interview process increases the chance you'll hit this anti-loop.