Two years ago before we knew anything about Broadcom, I was thinking of leaving and I had applied for a bunch of roles at companies like Splunk, Microsoft, AWS, Cohesity, and some startups. Out of the 11 job applications I made, I got interviews with 5, and job offers from 2 of them. This was all in the space of 2 months. The salary being offered was on-par with the VMware salary from both offers, but I decided against accepting (yes, I screwed up) for personal reasons.
This brings me on to January 2022. Since the beginning of the year, I have applied for 22 roles, and had 2, yes only 2 recruiter return my call. One of them was unable to match anywhere near my VMware salary, and the other one I am currently interviewing with. This has been a shock to me. I've never had this much trouble getting job offers, let alone a single interview.
You might be thinking, well perhaps you need to update your skills. The thing is... I have. I have gained 3 new certifications, one very significant, but they seem to make no difference. I've also put a considerable effort into networking, and updating my resume.
Is this a result of a saturated job market with all these layoffs? Who knows, but if there is another mass round of layoffs at VMware later this year, many of us are going to be in a very troubling spot indeed.