A field guide to finding tech work in the US and Europe

Scope: this focuses on the US and European markets, including remote work from those regions, and on the first 5–10 years of a career. Other regions need different strategies. So does selling a unique, niche expertise — at that point it’s sales, not a job search: you approach a chosen segment as a seller rather than replying to postings. Working for the US from Asia is harder still: the time-zone gap and employer preferences work against you, so talk to local specialists for that case.

The main principle: search through people

Mass-applying through job boards, company sites, or auto-apply bots converts poorly. It can supplement a search, but it should not be the main channel. Live people — referrals and direct contact — convert far better.

Use the through-people approach when:

• You need work fast — contacts are quicker than the queue.
• You want the right role, not the first one — especially early-career or niche.
• You’re improving your current position — mass-applying is acceptable only when you already have a job and are testing the market or practicing interviews. It’s slow.

Your situation	Best channel	Why
Need work fast	Through people	Contacts skip the queue
Want the right role, not the first	Through people	Especially early-career or niche
Improving from a stable job	Mass-applying is OK	Only to test the market or practice interviews — it’s slow

Why mass-applying fails:

• The candidate pool is large and uneven; AI-generated resumes have made it worse.
• Companies filter with ATS parsers, spam filters, and outsourced screeners. These make mistakes — a strong candidate can be filtered out roughly half the time, and a recruiter may never see the resume at all.

When to look

Judging the market from social media, layoffs, or expert takes gives a distorted picture. People who struggle are visible; people who found a job in two days through a contact stay quiet. The market is cyclical and seasonal:

• Companies have different fiscal years (starting in January, June, etc.), and hiring budgets track them.
• Some countries have vacation seasons (e.g. Germany) when activity drops.
• In large tech hubs there are always openings, including unpublished ones you hear about first through meetups and contacts.

The strongest position is to look while employed. Searching without a job is weak leverage: if a recruiter sees urgency, they can push the salary down. Expect a long search, be ready to decline unsuitable offers.

Resume

A resume exists to pass ATS and give a recruiter a reason to talk — not to be a work of art. Rewriting it obsessively for every posting doesn’t fix low conversion if you’re applying where you aren’t expected.

A good resume is minimal and tells one coherent story: who you are, what you specialize in, and experience that backs it up.

• Write achievements with numbers and context — the metric, and how it was measured. Instead of “wrote code and shipped features”: “Shipped a feature that raised sales ~10% by improving UX, measured via analytics.”
• List technologies in the context of each project or company, not as a separate wall of tags.
• Use a plain ATS-compatible template (e.g. Google Docs → PDF). Simple structure parses correctly ~80% of the time; reordering blocks (company / title / dates) breaks some parsers.
• The headline should say who you are (senior, mid, manager), and the experience below should confirm it.
• If you have two distinct profiles (e.g. IC and management), keep two resumes and mention the secondary experience in a single line rather than merging both.
• Cut irrelevant detail (talks, hobbies) unless it maps to the role — one line at most.

Over-optimization is a failure mode: stacking too many achievements or profiles (developer + mentor + manager) makes it unclear what role you want. Focus on one and back it with experience.

Keep it minimal for another reason: any detail that enables discrimination (age, gender, photo, date of birth, a hard-to-pronounce name) can be used against you, and no one audits how resumes are filtered or states the reason for rejection. US resumes are deliberately anonymized; Europe is similar despite anti-discrimination law.

A resume is read late — after screenings, by a hiring manager or interviewer who may just check LinkedIn instead. Make it skimmable: bold the things that matter (numbers, achievements) and keep a plain structure. Icons, non-standard fonts, or skill progress bars (“4 of 5 stars in JavaScript”) read as amateur and push a resume onto the reject pile.

The ATS is the main obstacle: an automatic parser that breaks a resume into tags. Some ignore an entire experience block if company, title, and dates are in the wrong order, so fill a standard template as-is. One plain template covers ~80% of the market — Greenhouse and other serious systems parse it well; smaller ones are worse. At FAANG scale (50–100 filtered candidates a day per role) the gap between 80% and 100% parsing matters; at a small company it doesn’t. ATS-simulator sites that score your resume and sell fixes aren’t worth it, and A/B-testing resume variants is ineffective.

A resume also outlives the application. ATS and third-party candidate databases store resumes, work history, and recruiter notes — and they get sold, so an old resume can resurface years later.

LinkedIn

LinkedIn matters more than the resume. Recruiters search there and cross-check it against your resume, so treat it as the master version — more detail, more results.

• Set the location correctly. If you’re in one country but targeting another, list the target location or you won’t appear in local searches.
• State relocation up front: “Open to relocation, need visa sponsorship for Germany / UK / US” in the first lines. Most recruiters send cold, automated outreach without reading; a target location gets you into more searches.
• Describe achievements in more detail than the resume, with results and numbers.
• Claim more, not less. Undersell is common; if it feels like bragging, it’s probably still modest.
• Feedback is slow (~6 months). The quality of inbound recruiter messages tells you whether the profile works.

Location, relocation, and remote

Location drives hiring through taxes and jurisdiction, not just time zones.

• Keep the resume location consistent with LinkedIn. State it in the first line: “Based in [X], seeking relocation to [Y], need visa sponsorship.” Raise it with the recruiter first thing to confirm fit.
• If listing multiple targets, prioritize active markets (e.g. London, then Germany, then the Netherlands, then the rest of the EU). The US pays more but visas (e.g. H-1B) are a lottery many companies won’t play.
• Low-tax jurisdictions can be an automatic barrier — companies hiring from them face extra tax and legal load, which makes hiring harder.
• “Remote” is often geographically bounded — frequently US-only or Europe-only for tax and labor reasons, and you may not learn the boundary until you’re rejected. LinkedIn is weak for remote search; niche channels that post remote roles work better. Companies with a legal entity or an employer-of-record (e.g. Deel) in your location can hire you there.

A rough priority order for European relocation targets, by market activity:

Describing achievements

Achievements should be concrete, with numbers, tied to a metric — not a money amount.

❌ Vague	✅ Concrete — action + metric + how measured
”Wrote code and shipped features"	"Shipped a feature that raised sales ~10% via UX, measured in analytics"
"Increased sales"	"Increased year-over-year revenue ~5%"
"Improved engagement"	"Raised DAU ~30%, measured via the observability stack”
Exact figure under NDA	”Grew users by tens of thousands” — a range, no trade secret

• If you lack exact data, use orders of magnitude or percentages (“increased the metric by tens of percent”).
• For senior/manager work, add scale and timeline: “Launched from scratch, hired a team of 5, grew to 20 in six months, built delivery processes, which moved metric X by Y%.”

NDA: confidentiality typically restricts disclosure for a few years after leaving. Speak in ranges or percentages (“grew users by tens of thousands”) rather than exact figures. Not everything is covered — a result that reveals no trade secret can be mentioned. Tie numbers to metrics, not to money; talking openly about money can read as a confidentiality breach. Money figures also invite scrutiny — a non-managerial employee rarely has access to revenue data, so quoting it raises questions rather than settling them. Anchor numbers to product metrics you’d plausibly own.

Team achievements: if a result was the team’s, you can list it, but be ready to explain your specific contribution in the interview. Not being able to measure your impact is itself a career problem — knowing how your work affects the business, even indirectly, is an advantage. Tracking achievements year over year is rare but useful; keep a running note so you have data for interviews.

Industry is rarely a red flag on its own — the barrier is usually location and its tax implications, not the sector. Some sectors are even a plus: adult and gaming companies (Pornhub, for example) run serious engineering for content delivery, retention, and scale, and that experience is valued when recruiters understand the domain.

Reaching people

Referrals are the primary channel. Many companies run referral programs that pay employees a bonus (commonly ~$1,000–1,500 for a mid-level hire retained past six months), so employees are motivated to refer. Some companies route referrals through intermediary staffing firms to cut hiring costs — the more people employed through such a firm, the lower the company’s overhead.

• Find them in communities, meetups, and conferences, where it’s easy to ask directly: “I saw you’re hiring — can you refer me?”
• Make it easy to say yes: have a resume, a short pitch on why you fit, and ideally the job link ready. A referral system usually takes the resume plus the referrer’s comment tied to a posting.
• Better still, ask to be introduced to the hiring manager (works from senior level up). Find them on LinkedIn, ask who owns the role, request a short call — coffee or Zoom — to discuss the role and fit. It’s a pre-introduction, not an interview. Managers want to grow their network and remember interested candidates for future openings.

In-person beats a digital footprint: after meeting you, people refer with more confidence — and you also learn who wouldn’t work with you, which saves time. Informal gatherings count; showing up when the local devs go for a beer is worth it.

Cold outreach when meetups aren’t available (e.g. targeting another country): message people on the team from the posting, especially developers who can refer. “Hi, I saw this opening [link], I’d like to apply — could you refer me? Resume attached.” Roughly 10% reply; the rest ignore, which is normal. Conversion is higher at larger companies where referrals feel routine. A clear, specific message stands out against the recruiter spam engineers already ignore. LinkedIn is built for this and cold messages are the norm there; Twitter is harder, Facebook harder still. Cold-messaging recruiters directly has little upside — they earn no referral bonus and will only route you through the standard process (occasionally a proactive one shepherds a candidate, but that’s the exception).

The flip side of high volume is fraud. Interview proxying — where one person sits the technical interview for another — is a known pattern, and it’s part of the noise hiring managers screen for. It rarely affects you directly, but it’s why some processes feel needlessly suspicious.

Recruiters and headhunters:

• Independent agency recruiters handle less prestigious roles but are a good source for interview practice and company introductions. Good agency recruiters know the stacks (e.g. that TypeScript candidates can apply to JavaScript roles). A recruiter contact often means a technical interview or a light screen next.
• Headhunters source narrow specialists against specific requirements, earn large fees, and only forward candidates they rate — so being put forward means high odds, short of failing the interview.
• Get to know independent recruiters, stay on their radar; they’re a steady source of live contacts.

	Agency / independent recruiter	Headhunter
Sources for	Any fitting candidate, broad roles	Narrow specialists vs strict criteria
Fees	Standard	Large
Best for you	Interview practice, company intros	High odds — they only forward who they rate

Work the relationship: recruiters’ KPIs are often tied to a hire staying six months to two years, so they want you to pass. After a screen, ask for feedback and what to prepare next. After an interview, follow up with your strengths (“showed experience with high-performance React components”) — at high candidate volume, this reminds them what to relay to the manager.

English level

• Mid: B1 is enough if you can explain yourself (also enough for a Blue Card in the Netherlands or Germany).
• Senior: B1 with limited experience; B2 preferred with more, since you need to express detail.
• Better language means less room for discrimination. If you read technical material without a dictionary and people understand you, that’s enough — a certificate usually isn’t required.
• If a posting asks for higher, apply anyway; strong experience earns leeway. For roles not centered on communication, level matters less.

A hard-to-pronounce name

A name recruiters stumble over is a friction point and, in practice, a discrimination vector. If yours is hard to pronounce, offer a short form (Aleksey → Alex, Vladislav → Vlad) — it lowers the barrier on calls and in writing. Surnames matter less; people rarely address you by them. Ask a native speaker whether your name reads easily; if interviewers hesitate on it, a simpler handle helps.

Reading demand

Ignore the general “market state.” People find work in downturns. What actually drives demand:

• Company budgets. Cuts to engineering spend lower demand; you rarely see this directly.
• How the company makes money. Software companies value engineers more and ride their own cycles. In 2022, B2C grew while B2B SaaS dipped. Service businesses (outsourcing, consulting) follow seasonal and client-driven demand. Companies where software isn’t the core (banks, insurers) run their own market, often prefer cheaper labor, and become easier to enter after big-tech layoffs — they favor candidates with similar-sector experience.
• Company stage. Early stage wants top specialists; growth stage hires aggressively; steady profit wants hands and hires slowly; new directions need whole teams. During contractions the market floods with candidates.
• Company location. A global company hiring in the UK follows UK hiring rules and local pay; a US company’s London entity does not pay US salaries. Companies open local entities to access a local market.

Companies prefer candidates from similar sectors: to move into product, start at any product company; the same holds for outsourcing or banking.

Two market quirks worth knowing. Some companies hire in bulk mainly to keep talent from competitors — Microsoft has done this to deny hires to Google — which makes it easier to get in during that phase, though it’s hard to spot one from outside. And booms reverse: in the 2021 US surge, changing jobs alone brought ~1.5x pay, and many of those hires were laid off soon after.

Local experience and relocation

Without local experience you’re an unknown, which reads as risk — and to employers that risk is concrete. Berlin recruiters reported around 2018 that roughly 15% of Eastern European candidates who signed a contract never showed up for the job — one in six — so everyone gets painted with the same brush. In Berlin, offers can run ~20% lower for someone with no local track record than for someone who simply showed up to a meetup and met people.

A practical relocation path: take any role on the target market — even a startup at lower pay — to get the visa and residence (Blue Card, PR). After a year, switch as a local candidate with local experience. In Berlin, local experience can add ~10–15k to a senior offer.

State relocation needs early. A visa or relocation requirement is a dealbreaker for many companies, especially in the US. Some hire remotely worldwide but expect relocation to the US in 2–3 years; if that’s not discussed up front, the parting is unpleasant for both sides.

Mid vs senior, and planning

There are far more mid-level openings than senior ones, but seniors have an easier time: fewer interviews, less competition, higher odds per application. When choosing between applying as mid or senior, aim higher.

Planning a career:

• Start from your own experience. If a theme you enjoy exists (e.g. three years optimizing Go backend services), pick a segment — banks, insurers, product companies — and build depth there. If there’s no theme yet, take varied work to build range — developing taste in a career is like in art: you have to see many examples before you know what you like.
• Plan two steps ahead, not one. Optimizing only for the next salary risks a local maximum with no deep expertise, which stalls when the market shifts. If the end goal (e.g. big-tech) is out of reach now, find an intermediate product company for 2–3 years. This also gives a real answer to “where do you see yourself in five years.” On interviews, probe the growth path directly (“Could I become the Go expert here?”) and read the interviewers’ reaction — it tells you whether that future is realistic.

Specialization vs generalization: over 5–10 years, specialization grows career and pay faster. Long term, generalists transfer better across contexts — seven years of only one language makes switching hard. Broaden responsibility over time.

Horizon	Winner	Why
Short (5–10 years)	Specialist	Faster career and pay growth; easier to get hired
Long term	Generalist	Skills transfer across contexts; less lock-in when tech ages out

At senior+ a fork appears: technical depth (DB tuning, sharding, large data) or business problems (cloud choice, analytics). They’re hard to combine — you can’t credibly position as an expert in both. Technical specialists are sold through conferences and reputation; business solvers through consultants, headhunters, and business events. Avoid betting the whole brand on a single framework that can age out; bet on engineering or business depth instead.

To stand out past confident-senior, build on a genuine strength rather than the median “writes features and tests” path — it lowers competition. A strong mentor who actively promotes you matters more the higher you aim.

Concrete trajectories vary widely. An engineer who built a widely used product (e.g. Mike Perham with Sidekiq) can move into entrepreneurship or consulting, selling an outcome rather than engineering hours. A deep-technical path toward someone like Jeff Dean depends on luck, sponsors, soft skills, and a mentor who promotes you — hard to plan directly. Technical specialists on narrow, measurable problems (platform optimization) can earn a lot precisely because their impact is easy to quantify; business solvers earn well too but are harder to sell. A concrete niche like payment systems is attractive because it pairs a clear business domain with an engineering core, so it sells easily.