> Is it better to get any job than keep searching for the job I'd be most suited for?
In general I'd say no although I'm not sure it applies to you. I know some people who graduated into the Internet apocalypse of 2002. They picked up crappy jobs and then got pigeon-holed into that crappy job for a very long time. It's a lot easier to get a job in a cool field as a new grad than it is as someone with experience doing manual testing or another crappy field.
Normally I'd recommend someone in your position to go for their Master's or Ph.D rather than getting a crappy job, but you already have your PhD so I'm not sure how much of my advice applies to you. PhD signals a deep specialization which may overcome the stigma of a crappy job.
This is an absolutely horrible idea. Pride never paid a bill.
It’s almost always better to take any job you can get and keep looking. Every month that you aren’t working, you have to make more to make up for the time of unemployment.
I would rather be “pigeonholed” (won’t happen) than be unemployed. The hardest thing is breaking the can’t get a job <-> don’t have experience cycle.
I’ve transitioned between many technologies since I started working in 1996.
You can always take a crappy job to pay the bills while looking for something better. You can decide later if you want to put it on your resume or not.
But you're out of the new grad hiring pipeline. It's probably different in 2022 than it was in 2002, but in 2002 when companies wanted to hire new grads they posted jobs at Universities and did job fairs at Universities. So if you weren't at a University it was harder to get a new grad job.
And you have a hole in your resume you have to explain.
No, if you don't list the job, it looks just like it does if you didn't take it and kept looking. You have the "hole" between graduation and first job same as if you took nothing.
In general I'd say no although I'm not sure it applies to you. I know some people who graduated into the Internet apocalypse of 2002. They picked up crappy jobs and then got pigeon-holed into that crappy job for a very long time. It's a lot easier to get a job in a cool field as a new grad than it is as someone with experience doing manual testing or another crappy field.
Normally I'd recommend someone in your position to go for their Master's or Ph.D rather than getting a crappy job, but you already have your PhD so I'm not sure how much of my advice applies to you. PhD signals a deep specialization which may overcome the stigma of a crappy job.