I've been struggling to land a new development role. A lot of the responses I receive say they're looking for a senior developer or someone who has worked on production applications. My background is mainly building websites and products from scratch, shipping them, and then moving on to the next project, so I don't have much long-term maintenance experience.
I have more than four years of experience with React and Next.js, along with Node.js and React Native. I've also built projects with Three.js and WebGL and written technical articles about some of the features I developed. I'm willing to learn new technologies or work with a different stack.
I've searched job boards such as Wellfound, LinkedIn, and YC Jobs, contacted founders directly, and tried reaching out through developer communities, but most companies either aren't hiring or never respond. I'm also based outside the United States, although I'm open to remote work and earning less than a US-based salary.
What could I do differently? Are there other platforms, networking approaches, referral strategies, or ways to present my experience that might help me get more interviews?
2 Answers
This may not be a problem with your skills alone. The current market has a large number of experienced developers competing for fewer openings, and people from other parts of the industry are also applying for web development roles. Even strong candidates can receive very few replies.
Keep applying, but put more effort into warm introductions and targeted applications instead of relying only on job boards. Look for smaller companies that need someone who can work independently across the stack, contact engineers or hiring managers with a short message tailored to a specific product, and ask former collaborators or clients for referrals. A portfolio should also show deployed work, clear technical write-ups, and evidence that you can maintain and improve an application—not just start one.
The market is extremely saturated, and many candidates have similar React portfolios. Recruiters often screen for signals such as working on a team, maintaining an application over time, handling real users, or supporting a meaningful production workload. If your résumé only says that you built projects and moved on, it may undersell you.
Reframe the experience around outcomes and ownership. For example, describe projects as applications you took from idea through design, implementation, deployment, and maintenance. Include users, traffic, performance improvements, business results, deployment practices, testing, monitoring, and any difficult technical decisions. Saying you shipped several production applications and managed their full lifecycle is more useful than simply listing technologies.
That makes sense. I may be describing the projects too much as short experiments instead of showing the complete lifecycle and the responsibility I had for shipping them.