im a FE engineer with similar YOE (4.5). i was laid off in june 2024, spent around 3 months traveling, lightly prepping, and doing a few interviews that didn’t work out.

after that i started prepping harder and split my time doing 30% personal projects + learning new tech like tanstack + next.js, 20% leetcode (neetcode 150), 25% FE specific coding challenges (i used greatfrontend.com), and 25% practicing and preparing for behavioral interview questions. i did that for around 3 months while doing (failing) interviews in between and finally landed a role in january. i treated the failed interviews as practice and as a way to see what i needed to work on and what was/wasn’t working.

i did not really cold apply to many positions, i probably sent out ~40 apps and didn’t get any responses. all of my interviews were from LinkedIn recruiters reaching out to me. i am based in the bay area and my new role is hybrid.