Search real stories by role, salary, location, source of hire, interview process and what finally worked. Use these stories to understand the market before your next application or offer negotiation.
I had been working as a freelance brand designer in Buenos Aires for two years. The work was not stable. Some months were good. Some were not. I had been thinking about going back to work inside a studio, for the routine and for the team, but most of the studios I liked were in São Paulo, or they paid in pesos at rates that were too low for me.
One design studio in Buenos Aires was different. They were small, six people, and they paid in USD through Deel because most of their clients were in the US. On their public Instagram they posted the work they did for one regular client, a health tech company in the US. I had been following them for about a year.
Then I had an idea: maybe they would look at a small spec project. I chose their main public client and made three concepts for how I would change the brand. I was honest with myself about it. Nobody had asked for my opinion, so I decided to send it as a piece of work, not as a job application.
I sent a DM to the founder. The message was three sentences: I had been following their work, I had made three versions of a brand refresh for that public client, and did she have ten minutes to look at them? I put one Figma link in the message.
She answered two hours later. She said clearly that my versions were not what they would use, but that this was the kind of work she wanted to buy, and she asked if I was free for one project they needed to give to someone outside. I was.
The project was a brand refresh for a different client. Three weeks of work. The fee was five figures, in USD. I delivered on time. The client approved it with no changes, which does not happen often.
One month later the founder asked if I wanted a longer contract. We agreed on a three-month rolling contract. After two months she asked if I wanted to join full time. The job was permanent, paid in USD through Deel, and I would work inside the team of six instead of continuing as a contractor.
The offer was US$30,000 base. In dollars that number does not look big, but with the exchange rate it works here, and it is better than what I earned on my own. I asked for US$36,000. I explained the work I had already delivered for them, and what it would cost me to change from contractor to employee. They came back at US$36,000.
I said yes. I sent two real applications in the whole search. Both went to job boards and nobody answered. The Instagram DM was my real application.
I was a PhD candidate in statistics in Manchester. I'd been working on my thesis for about two years when I decided I needed to find commercial work. Partly because the funding situation had changed, partly because I'd realised, late, that I wanted to leave academia.
I had no commercial experience. I had three published papers, one of which had been cited fifty times in a small sub-field. I'd taught two undergraduate modules. I'd built a small simulation framework in R that nobody other than me used. The CV looked like a CV for a postdoc, not for a junior data scientist.
Cold emailing hadn't worked when I'd tried it for a week. I'd sent twelve emails to data teams in Manchester and London and got one polite reply.
The thing that worked was a public dashboard. I'd been wanting to learn dbt and Streamlit. I picked a topic, UK retail footfall, using publicly available data from one of the data trusts, and built a dashboard over six weekends. It wasn't elegant. It worked. I put it on a free Streamlit hosting tier and tweeted about it once.
About two months later the head of analytics at a mid-sized retailer in Manchester found the dashboard via a Google search while researching a specific footfall topic. He didn't contact me through the dashboard. He searched for my name, found my LinkedIn, and sent me a message asking if I was open to a junior data scientist role.
The interview process was three rounds over five weeks.
Round one was a technical screen with two senior analysts. They gave me a piece of their data, a retail transaction dataset, and four questions. I had a week. I sent back a six-page Jupyter notebook with the answers, three caveats, and a writeup. They'd been hoping for code rather than narrative. I gave them both.
Round two was a case study presentation. The brief was to take one of the answers from the take-home and turn it into a fifteen-minute presentation for a non-technical stakeholder. I rebuilt one section from scratch, simplified the visualisations, and presented to a panel of five: three analysts, the head of analytics, one product manager. The questions afterwards were about what I'd cut and why.
Round three was a team chat with three other junior data scientists who'd be my peers. Less of an interview, more of an "is this person tolerable to work with" check.
The offer was £25,000 base, the higher end of the junior band. I asked for £28,000, citing the four months of search, the depth of the process, and a slightly higher quote I'd received from a competing offer. They came back at £28,000.
I said yes. I'd sent five formal applications in total.
I'd been applying selectively, only four applications over those two months, because I didn't want to waste time on roles that weren't actually interesting. Most of my search was slow and discouraging. Then I came across a Substack post by the CTO of a New York data company about their decision to refactor their entire data pipeline around dbt and Snowflake. The post was technical, specific, and honest about the tradeoffs they'd made. It wasn't marketing. It read like someone who actually lived inside the problem, and I recognized a lot of the same pain points from my previous role.
I spent a couple of evenings on a cold email. I didn't pitch myself generically. I referenced specific paragraphs from the post and linked a public GitHub repo I'd built for stream-to-batch reconciliation. The repo wasn't perfect, but it was real work: documented, tested, and directly relevant to what he'd described. I figured if he was the kind of engineer who wrote that post, he'd at least look at the code. Three days later he replied. No recruiter, no application portal, no automated acknowledgment. Just a direct response asking if I wanted to jump on a call that week.
The process ended up being four rounds over about nine weeks. The first call was conversational, more mutual vetting than a formal screen. The third and fourth rounds brought in the broader data team and covered system design and past-project deep-dives. But the second round was the one that stuck with me. It was framed as a live SQL pairing session, and it started that way, but somewhere around the thirty-minute mark we were both heads-down on an actual production query they were struggling with. We went ninety minutes. I didn't solve it completely, but how I reasoned through it mattered more than any clean answer would have.
The offer came in at $145,000, hybrid in New York. I accepted.
I had been watching a US software company for a few months before I wrote to them. They were clearly preparing to expand into Latin America. Their blog posts mentioned plans for the region, two social posts in Spanish looked like a test, and their job board had nothing in Latin America yet. I decided not to wait for a job post that might never exist. I spent a weekend writing a one-page proposal and I sent it directly to their CEO. My argument was simple: if they expand into Latin America without a full-stack developer who speaks Spanish and works in the same timezone, they will have problems, and I could be that person. I kept it short and specific to their product, and I sent it cold on a Tuesday morning.
He answered the same day, and we had a call in the next 48 hours. That speed told me the timing was right. Then there were four rounds of interviews over about one month, in a format I had never seen before. The founder runs the company async-first, so there were no live technical interviews. I recorded Loom videos explaining how I would solve two architecture problems, and I wrote exercises about a localization strategy for one of their main features. It was slower and more careful than a normal interview panel, but it suited the way I work. I had time to think instead of performing under pressure, and I believe my answers were better for it.
The offer was USD 65,000 for a full-time job in Buenos Aires, on site, with quarterly meet-ups in Mexico City. On site made sense for this role. Being in Buenos Aires was the whole point of my proposal. With that salary here my purchasing power is strong. The number is not the top of the market, but in real life it is a lot, and that made the decision easy. Thirty-one days from my first email to a signed offer. I said yes the same afternoon.
I had wanted to write for a Madrid magazine since I moved to the city four years before. They were a serious publication, long-form, properly edited, careful with facts, and they paid their writers, which is rare. I read every issue I could find for a year before I did anything about it.
When I started looking for a job, it did not go well. I sent thirty applications in three months, mostly for content roles at SaaS companies that wanted "blog posts" and not journalism. I got two interviews. One of them was the most depressing forty-five minutes of the whole search. A content marketing manager told me directly that the job was producing SEO content with an LLM, and that the human writer was there to "make it sound better".
That night I went home and decided to stop applying for content jobs. Instead I would write the kind of article I wanted to be paid for.
I chose two ideas that I thought the magazine would really publish. One was about a small Madrid neighbourhood that remote workers had slowly changed. The other was an interview with a local food cooperative. I wrote a pitch of three paragraphs for each one and emailed them to the editor.
She answered about one of them, the neighbourhood article. She liked the idea, she had been thinking about other pitches on the same subject, and she offered me a 1,500-word draft on spec. The fee was €200, paid within thirty days after publication.
I wrote it. It took ten days. The editing was thorough. She disagreed with three sections and I rewrote them. The article was published in the May issue.
In late May, two months after we agreed the freelance article, the editor emailed me. They had opened a permanent staff writer position and she wanted to talk to me before they published it. The shortlist was already her, the editor-in-chief and the publisher. The "interview" was a conversation of forty minutes about the work I wanted to do, what I was reading, and one article in the magazine that I would have edited differently.
The "test" was a 600-word article on a subject she gave me the next day. I had two days. I wrote eight hundred words, cut one hundred and fifty, and sent it. They sent the offer two days later.
The offer was €26,000 base, which is a normal staff writer salary in Spain and is acceptable. I asked for €30,000. I explained the freelance work I had already done for them, and that the role included running their newsletter. They came back at €28,000 and a small monthly payment for travel for assignments. I took it.
I was a recent graduate looking for my first sales role. No commercial experience, a degree that had nothing to do with sales, and a private suspicion that I'd be bad at the job for at least the first six months. I'd tried the job-board route for two weeks and gotten exactly one rejection back.
The pivot was simple. I made a list of forty SaaS companies in Austin I'd seen hiring SDRs in the previous month. I wrote one cold email template, three sentences, asking for a fifteen-minute intro chat about the role, not asking for a job. The first sentence I rewrote for each company specifically. I sent the forty emails over four days.
The first reply came back that afternoon. Eight people replied in total. Three of those turned into real interview loops. One was a SaaS company in the healthcare niche.
Their process was the fastest. The intro chat was thirty minutes with the SDR manager. He'd read my email, my LinkedIn, and the one Notion page I'd linked, a writeup of an outreach experiment I'd run for a friend's startup as a favor. We mostly talked about that experiment. He asked what had worked, what hadn't, and what I'd do differently next time.
The second interview was a forty-five-minute role-play with the VP of sales. The scenario: thirty seconds to introduce myself on a cold call, ninety seconds to handle the first objection. We did three different versions. I bombed the first one. The second was OK. The third was actually good. He said he liked that I'd tried different openings rather than reusing the same one.
There was a third "interview" the same day with a senior SDR, less an interview than a conversation about the hours, the comp structure, and what the team was like at 7 PM on a Thursday. I asked direct questions and got direct answers.
The offer was $58,000 base plus uncapped commission with a realistic OTE of $80,000 in the first year. I asked specifically about the ramp and whether the OTE was based on a tenured rep or a first-year rep. They were honest: first-year reps usually hit about 80% of OTE, which would put me around $64,000 all-in. I asked for a $2,000 sign-on bonus and a slightly higher base. They came back with $62,000 base and the sign-on. Realistic year-one comp: around $78,000.
Forty cold emails took four hours to write and send. Most got no reply.
With no professional design experience and a bootcamp portfolio only a few months old, I decided not to use job boards at all. Through the normal channels I would be one of hundreds of more experienced candidates, so I went directly to cold outreach. I spent two weeks researching technology companies in Barcelona, reading their press coverage, looking at their product pages, and taking notes about what each one was really building. I wanted every email to sound like it came from somebody who cared about their work.
I wrote to about 20 companies. Every email was personal. I mentioned something specific from their recent press coverage, said what interested me in their product or their design decisions, and added a link to my bootcamp portfolio with a short note about one project relevant to them. Writing those emails took real time. Some of them I rewrote three or four times before I felt confident enough to send. I kept a simple spreadsheet with who I contacted, when, and what I wrote, mostly to avoid repeating myself, but it also helped me improve my approach.
Twenty emails became two replies and two interviews. The first was with a founder, a general conversation about the direction of the company and about how I think about design problems. The second was with a senior UX designer who wanted to understand my process and how I handle feedback. Both felt like real conversations, and I think that came partly from how I wrote the first email. One of them became an offer: a full-time hybrid role at Inqbarna in Barcelona at 28,000 EUR. I said yes to that one.
It took eight hard months, 135 applications, and interviews with 15 different companies before I landed my first developer job as a Frontend Engineer. The first few months I blasted out applications through job boards, tailored nothing, and wondered why I kept getting ghosted. I think I sent around 80 that way before I accepted the strategy wasn't working.
The shift that changed things was dropping generic listings entirely and going straight to people. I started doing cold outreach to senior engineers and engineering managers on LinkedIn, keeping the messages short, specific, and built around something real I'd noticed about their product or stack. Most never replied, but the ones who did opened doors the job board route never would have. Alongside the outreach, I started treating every surface of my professional presence like a product I had to ship. The portfolio got rebuilt twice, the resume got stripped down until every line earned its spot, and I wrote and rewrote a two-sentence pitch until I could say it without thinking.
I also made a rule for myself: between every round of applications I had to build or meaningfully extend a project. It kept my skills moving, but more practically it meant every interview I walked into had something new to talk about. I got rejected a lot. Some stung more than others, especially the ones that went three or four rounds deep. By month six I was questioning whether this would happen at all.
When the hybrid offer came in at $72,000 and I said yes, it was anticlimactic. A PDF in my inbox and a quiet exhale.
I had been following a design studio in CDMX on Instagram for almost a year before I was brave enough to write to them. Their client work in Roma kept appearing in my feed, and every time it did I saved the post, took a screenshot, and thought "someday". I liked how simple they kept everything, and the way they used type on printed signs and installations. It was the kind of studio where I wanted to learn. I had already sent cold messages to two other studios in the city and neither one answered, so I knew that a normal "I love your work, here is my portfolio" message was not going to work.
I spent one afternoon reading their recent open briefs and chose the one I felt most sure about. I did not write a long cover message. Instead I made three quick sketches with ideas for that brief, rough and not finished, and sent them to the founder in a short DM of four sentences. He answered the same day. I read the notification twice before I believed it was real. He invited me to visit the studio in person, at their space in Roma Norte. The visit went well, and they offered me a trial week and paid me their full day rate for it. Many studios ask you to work that week for free. That mattered to me.
The trial week was hard. They put me on a real project that was already running, gave me feedback while I worked, and expected me to help from the first day. Two weeks after my first DM, they offered me the job full time, with a hybrid schedule.
The credit made my decision. The studio puts the names of junior designers on the work it publishes, and right now that is worth more to me than more money somewhere else. I said yes immediately.
3Applications
2Interviews
2 weeksSearch length
Cold outreachSource
Move closer to your next job offer
Get expert help with your CV, interviews, salary negotiation and job search.