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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 honestly 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 rather than performative, which at least made the wait easier to justify. By the end I was genuinely 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. So instead of a flat counter-offer, I put together 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 framed it less as "pay me more" and more as "here's where I actually sit on your levelling rubric." 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 two weeks later. The document took me an afternoon to write and it was absolutely worth it.
I'd been applying to technical writing roles across Europe when I found a listing on the careers page of a Lisbon software company. Nine applications in, and this one felt different right away. Not because of the job description, but because of what they asked for upfront. Before any call, before any recruiter screen, they wanted a writing sample. Take a 600-word section of their live public documentation and rewrite it. Submit it before the first video call would even be scheduled.
I almost talked myself out of it. A 600-word rewrite sounds simple until you open their docs and see that the section they'd picked was dense API reference material with inconsistent terminology, passive constructions stacked three sentences deep, and a structure that assumed you already knew what you were trying to learn. I spent four hours on it, which was exactly what the brief told me to budget. I respected that they'd said so plainly instead of pretending it was quick. I restructured the whole thing, tightened the definitions, introduced consistent naming, and added a short summary table I thought would help skimmers. I had no idea if that last bit would land or just seem presumptuous.
It landed. They moved me to three video rounds over the next two and a half weeks. The first was a recruiter going through the basics. The second was the lead technical writer and an engineer who asked pointed questions about how I handle conflicting input from SMEs. The third was a short panel that felt more like a working conversation than a formal interview. Twenty-two days after I submitted that first application, I had an offer: a full-time hybrid role based in Lisbon at 28,000 EUR. I accepted without much back and forth.
They asked me to start within ten days of accepting because the team was down a writer and the gap was showing. I cleared my schedule and made it work. Worth it.
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 honestly, 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.
Saying no to a $360k Google offer still feels strange to write down, let alone to have done. But I'd left Microsoft because the environment was wrong for me, and taking a big-name logo over a better fit would've just been the same mistake again. Where I actually spend my days matters more than the brand on my badge.
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