I’m curious if it’s just me or not. I’m an SE with 10+ years of experience, mostly in full-stack with a wide variety of languages and stacks, and my last title was at the “staff” level. I’m almost 40 years old; not sure if age discrimination is much of a thing (my interviewers have been mostly around my age or younger). I’ve been looking for a job for months. I’ve been applying to just about every job posting where my skills match on LinkedIn, Indeed, and ZipRecruiter (mostly just the Easy Apply option lately, so I can send more applications out). I’ve even been applying to positions that just require 2+ years of experience; I’d take any job (except defense or big tech). I’ve probably sent something like 400 applications out at this point. I’ve gotten a few interviews, and think I did OK, but I guess not good enough since I was still rejected. Is this normal?
The last time I was looking for a job (2021), I only sent 20 applications out, and landed a job on my first interview. I also tried Upwork for a couple weeks, but wasn’t able to land any contracts. I think everyone there is either looking for very cheap devs in the developing world or rockstars with tons of contracting experience and large portfolios.
Is this the US talking? I still have recruiters contacting me, not as often as before but still getting messages on LinkedIn (European here).
The market here seems to be buzzing if you are willing to move. There are pages and pages of devops, sysadmin, software developer, software architect,… . On one website j searched “sysadmin” and it found 10k jobs across Europe! They also seemed up to date when I was checking them out.
Most well paying jobs are in West and North Europe, they also have quite interesting jobs, even in opensource companies. Italy and Greece can’t seem to be desperate for people, but their wages are trash. They don’t seem to be doing much interesting stuff either. Just run of the mill stuff.
But yeah, Europe looks busy busy busy at the moment and very acceptable for people willing to move.
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Any US companies eager to hire new CS grads?
US citizen here living in Spain. Any good tips on how to get a job in the EU if I don’t have residency? (I’m here with my wife who is on a student visa) I have had a few recruiters reach out, and some good interest when I have pinged some companies on linkedin but no one is able to sponsor a work visa. Maybe I’m looking in the wrong country.
Spain seems to have a digital nomad visa option that seems pretty easy to obtain: https://movingtospain.com/spain-digital-nomad-visa/
However, it seems that you need to have a job for at least 3 months before applying from a company outside Spain. Maybe you would have to obtain a job for a short period outside Spain and then obtain the visa to move back in. Another potential difficulty is that your employer would have to be willing to keep you employed in another country and possibly pay you in a different currency. There are contracting firms that can help with this, but it’s not guaranteed and ultimately your employer could just say no and let you go. Still, it’s a possible avenue.
Also worth looking into whether your wife’s student visa allows you to work, but I’m guessing that you probably looked into it already and it doesn’t. But just mentioning it in case you haven’t already thought about it.
I got sponsored recently through the EU Blue Card program. It’s generally targeted at what would be considered ‘high-skilled individuals’, which may or may not be applicable to your situation.
Although it’s an EU program, each country gets to set their own requirements and these can vary quite a bit. Might be worth looking into, since if you qualify it is almost always much easier than other paths.
interesting, thanks for the tip. I’ll check into this, did you seek out companies that offered this specifically? Or did a company happen to offer it after you applied for the position?
To be honest, I wasn’t fully aware of it at the time and had been targeting a different country-specific program. For this other program I had checked that I fulfilled the requirements and put something like “eligible for program” on my CV. This seemed to help, since I got a lot of responses and we generally discussed this aspect in interviews.
Ultimately though, after getting a job offer, my current company found out about the Blue Card program and we decided together that it was the easiest path. For my country (Austria) the requirement was basically that you had a job offer which paid over the national average, which is pretty typical in tech.
I think a lot of companies aren’t aware of all of the different options, so making them aware of these can’t hurt!
Sorry, I’m European myself, so it’s not in the same situation and I have no experience with it. Most of my non-EU colleagues got here through student visas, then got a job, and just stayed. Others started out in large companies abroad and relocated with those companies. The only US American I know here was relocated by their company.
A quick search found https://relocate.me/ Maybe they can help you?
Good luck!
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cool site, thx!