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I'd been job hunting for about seven weeks when I finally landed on Pearson's careers page and spotted their Junior Data Scientist listing. I'd already sent out 28 applications across London by then, cycling through job boards, LinkedIn, and direct company websites, and the hit rate was demoralising. Pearson was one of those rare cases where applying through the company website felt worthwhile. The role description was specific enough that I could tell a real hiring manager had written it instead of copy-pasting from a template.
Six interviews over 49 days. That's a long stretch when you're mid-search and trying to keep your momentum up. There was an initial screen, a technical take-home, two panel rounds with the data team, a stakeholder interview with someone from the commercial side, and a final conversation with the hiring manager. Each stage felt substantive. By the end I was excited about the work. They had a messy, interesting data infrastructure problem and actual budget to fix it.
When the offer came through at £55k I wasn't surprised it sat on the lower end. The role was posted as Junior. But the work they were describing mapped much more closely to what I'd been doing for the past three years at two similar-stage companies. I answered with a short document, three or four pages, walking through specific projects, the scale of decisions I'd influenced, and the measurable outcomes. Revenue impact, model performance improvements, team scope. I asked them to reconsider the level entirely, not just the number.
The hiring manager took it back to the panel. A few days later they came back with a revised offer: Senior Data Scientist at £78k. I started a fortnight later. The document took me an afternoon to write.
I had been applying for technical writing roles across Europe when I found a job on the careers page of a Lisbon software company. Before any recruiter call they wanted a writing sample. Take a 600-word section of their public documentation and rewrite it. Send it before they even schedule the first video call.
I almost decided not to do it. A 600-word rewrite sounds simple until you open their documentation and see that the section they chose was dense API reference material, with inconsistent terminology, three passive sentences one after another, and a structure that assumed you already knew what you wanted to learn. I spent four hours on it, exactly the time the brief suggested. I respected that they said this clearly instead of pretending it was quick. I restructured everything, made the definitions tighter, used consistent names, and added a short summary table that I thought would help people who read fast. I did not know if that last part would be appreciated or look arrogant.
They liked it. They moved me to three video rounds over the next two and a half weeks. The first was a recruiter asking the basic questions. The second was with the lead technical writer and an engineer, who asked precise questions about how I handle conflicting input from subject-matter experts. The third was a short panel that felt more like a working conversation than a formal interview. Twenty-two days after I sent that first application, I had an offer: a full-time hybrid role in Lisbon at 28,000 EUR. I accepted quickly, with almost no negotiation.
They asked me to start within ten days because the team was missing a writer and the problem was visible. I changed my plans and made it possible.
I was not looking for a job when I found Picnic. They appeared in a long article about startups working on food waste in Europe, and the mission interested me immediately. The article explained how their model reduces the surplus and the spoilage that cost traditional supermarkets so much. The details are what convinced me: a concrete operational problem with measurable impact. I stopped and read the whole article. No recruiter message had ever made me feel like that, so the same evening I went to their careers page and applied for a senior software engineer role.
The process was thorough and well organised. Five interview rounds sounds like many, but Picnic clearly knew what each stage was for. There was a technical screen early, about systems design, which I liked because it went directly to the substance instead of spending an hour on trivia. The later rounds included the engineers I would work with, and the conversations felt honest. People told me about real trade-offs they had made and real mistakes they had learned from. The thing I remember most is that they promised to go from application to offer in four weeks. They did it.
The offer was 70,000 EUR for a full-time job in Amsterdam, on site. Moving to the Netherlands was a big decision, but when the offer arrived I had already imagined myself there. I took the offer.
I'd been at Microsoft until a couple of months before I started looking seriously. There was the return-to-office mandate, work that didn't interest me, leadership I'd lost faith in, and on-call rotations that were starting to affect my health. Eventually it all added up to a clear decision to leave. I didn't rush into applying everywhere, though. I spent two weeks getting my LeetCode back up first, focusing on the patterns that reliably come up at the top companies: dynamic programming, graph traversal, system design. It's not enjoyable, but I'd done it before and knew what to expect.
I only applied to a handful of companies, all through their career sites. Google was one of them. I applied directly through the website and heard back quicker than I thought I would. To my surprise, they skipped the phone screen and put me straight into a virtual onsite. Five interviews in one long day: coding rounds, system design, and a behavioral one. The interviewers were sharp and the questions were hard. I felt okay about most of it but left unsure, which is pretty much how everyone feels after a Google loop. Forty-two days after I applied, the offer showed up: over $360,000 in total comp for the first year, a hybrid role out of Seattle.
And I turned it down. It wasn't that anything was wrong with it; it was a serious number and I respected it. But I had other offers that came out ahead once I actually ran the math, and I'd stopped seeing Google as the automatic top pick it used to be. The pay isn't the industry leader anymore, the path for internal growth felt less clear than it did five years ago, and at least one other company offered better benefits and a team I'd clicked with during the process.
I'd left Microsoft because the environment was wrong for me. Taking the Google offer would have been the same mistake.
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