Five months ago, software engineer Shikhar Sachdev adopted a peculiar hobby. While his friends met for drinks or played FIFA 23 to unwind after work, he would come home, boot up his laptop, and spend hours filling out job applications, for sport.
Sachdev is content with his job at a San Francisco fintech company, but he writes a career blog in his spare time and had noticed a recurring sentiment: Job hunting these days is the worst. Friends described returning home from an exhausting day of work they hated, applying for new positions, and quickly growing discouraged by clunky application software and a low