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It's quite bad atm. Senior C++ engineer specializing in system-level programming, worked across several challenging domains including database internals for the last several years. 10+ years of experience.

Applied to around 25 jobs. Ghosted by 15 of them. Out of the 10 remaining, 3 of them are limited in terms of remote - to be considered you have to reside within certain countries.

From the remaining 7 I only got the interview round with 1 of them. Did not get an offer because I was not strong enough candidate despite successfully going through 5 interview rounds. Whole process was very slow and lasted for about 1.5 month, with not getting the feedback something like 2-3 weeks after the last round. All in all very weird experience and unexpected outcome with no strong arguments.

From the remaining 6 I did not even get an invite to an interview but a direct decline.

Getting the (systems programming related) remote job while located in Europe seems like an impossible task to me right now.



> Did not get an offer because I was not strong enough candidate

I was laid off last year and went to interview at an adjacent employer. They had a bunch of employees (not only engineers) hired from the company that was laying me off. One of which had previously walked out the door with a bunch of code to form their own startup; they were hired as a staff engineer. That employee frequently reached out to me for advice and guidance on writing the piece of code that they made off with.

I flunked their cargo-culting hiring process hard. I knew I should have walked out of the interview the minute they put fucking Leetcode in front of me, but didn't.

Moral of the story: your interview success has little to do with your experience and aptitude as an engineer. Here's a list of shops where you might find more success: https://github.com/poteto/hiring-without-whiteboards


Where in Europe?


It's one of the European Union countries. I'm feeling uneasy to share more details here, if you want, you can reach out through my email (on profile).




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