Struggling with job search after long unemployment. Should I continue with current strategy or start considering other options?

I've been unemployed for just over 4 years, mainly because of a long episode of depression. I'm not bringing that up to make this into a sob story, but just so that people know how I ended up in my current situation. I'm looking for advice, not pity.

Now I'm recovering from depression and trying to get back into the work force, but the length of my unemployment feels like a major obstacle. To make things worse, I have almost no work experience from before I was unemployed. I had just one job after graduating college which I stayed at for around 4 months before quitting (due to depression and some personal issues with the nature of the work, but the reasons don't really matter anymore). So the combination of those things means that I'm basically starting from scratch, with the added baggage of long-term unemployment.

One good thing I have going for me is that I have a degree in computer science from a school with a pretty well-ranked CS department. Because that's a fairly valuable degree and I'd prefer not to let it go to waste, I've been applying to entry level programming jobs for the past few months (regularly applying since about mid-October). I haven't had much luck in that time. Out of about 100 or more applications I've had only 5 job interviews.

My biggest "success" in my job search so far is that I applied to a software developer position at Amazon on a whim, expecting to get rejected immediately, but instead I made it all the way to the final round of their interview process before getting rejected. The fact that I made it that far at a well-known company suggests that I might not be in a completely hopeless position, but then again it may just have been a fluke that they didn't weed me out of the process sooner.

Other than that my job search has been going badly enough that I'm starting to wonder if I need a new approach, which is why I'm making this post. I'd like to hear whether people think I should continue trying to apply to programming/software jobs and just hope that some company eventually decides to hire me, or if I should consider something else. "Something else" could be a career change, getting a job with few/no requirements (retail, fast food, warehouse job, etc.), or really anything else you can think of. I'm open to suggestions as long as they are reasonably practical and realistic.

One other way in which I am very lucky is that my parents are letting me live with them, so I have a safe and stable housing situation and my other basic needs are provided for as well. So fortunately I'm not in a situation where I urgently need a new job to cover expenses right now, which gives me a little bit of extra flexibility. Still, I would prefer to find a job sooner rather than later so I can start figuring out how to get back to living on my own.

So please let me know if you have any advice, ideas, suggestions, or whatever. I'm feeling a bit stuck after months of unsuccessful job searching, so I'm hoping that hearing some different perspectives could help me get unstuck. Sorry this post is kind of long and rambling, and thanks for reading if you've made it all the way down here.

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Struggling with job search after long unemployment. Should I continue with current strategy or start considering other options? Struggling with job search after long unemployment. Should I continue with current strategy or start considering other options? Reviewed by Louhi on mars 01, 2021 Rating: 5

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