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I published the case study on a Tuesday afternoon. By Thursday morning I had three replies in my LinkedIn inbox.
I had been thinking about looking for a job for a long time without doing anything. My plan was always the same: finish the portfolio first, then start applying. After two months of polishing, the portfolio was still not finished, so I tried the opposite. Take one project, write about it completely, publish it, and let people tell me if it was good enough.
The project was a redesign of the onboarding of a fintech company where I did not work. I was a customer and I had noticed three problems. During one long weekend I made a prototype of a flow that solved two of them, built a Figma file with notes on the frames, and published a text of 600 words on LinkedIn explaining what I changed and what I did not touch.
N26 answered within one day. Their head of design said the writing was the part that made her stop. Most case studies she sees are only images, with no explanation of the thinking behind them, and she wanted to talk to designers who can explain their trade-offs out loud.
The first call was 45 minutes with the head of design. We did not talk about N26 until the last ten minutes. Most of the time she asked how I made specific decisions in past projects: when I disagreed with a PM, when I delivered something that I knew was a compromise, what I learned about onboarding metrics from my own mistakes.
I presented three case studies to two designers from the team, one hour in total. They were interested in the decisions in between: why this typeface and not the obvious one, why I recommended removing a feature instead of repairing it. The questions always returned to constraints, not to craft.
Round three was a paid exercise at home: redesign their settings flow and document the trade-offs in a written summary, with a limit of five hours. I treated it as a real project, I did not polish it too much, and I delivered exactly what fitted in five hours. The summary was three paragraphs about what I cut, why, and what I would do next if I had a full week.
The last round was a conversation of 30 minutes with the CTO. We talked about the role, the team, what they would release in the next quarter, and if I would stay for two years. He was the most direct interviewer in the whole process.
The offer was €58,000. I asked once for a higher base salary, and I explained the scope they had described in the final round. They answered the same day with the same number plus a sign-on bonus that covered my relocation. I signed the contract.
I sent 18 applications in this whole search. Three of them were the answers to the case study post. The rest went to companies I chose because their product was close to the subject of my case study.
Over about five months I applied to roughly 50 positions, almost all through LinkedIn, with a handful via Glassdoor. No networking events, no warm introductions, no carefully crafted cover letters. Just a well-put-together profile, a clean CV, and a lot of scrolling through job alerts on Sunday evenings. I'd always assumed that breaking into a better-paid in-house Legal Counsel role would mean knowing someone on the inside, or at least having a former colleague put in a word.
The process took around 150 days from first application to accepted offer, which felt like an age at the time. There were weeks where nothing moved at all, and I wondered whether I was pitching myself at the right level or aiming at the right sectors. Out of 50 applications I got three interviews, which sounds like a low conversion rate, but each one was for a role I'd read carefully and felt I could do well. I didn't spray applications around. I made sure my experience matched the specifics in the listing before I applied. Everything clicked in the third interview process. The role was hybrid, based in the UK, and came with a salary of £60,000, a meaningful step up from where I'd been. There were also travel perks built into the position that I hadn't even thought to look for when I started. I signed.
Eighteen applications into my search, Mews offered me a Senior PM role: €96k base, equity, fully remote from Amsterdam. I almost took it.
The interviews were very good. The hiring manager returned again and again to ownership, to giving PMs real authority over the roadmap, to moving fast without the slowness of a big company. After every round I felt positive. The equity conversation was clear, the base was the number I wanted, and remote work meant I did not have to move. I was close to signing without thinking much more about it.
Before I signed, I spent two evenings on LinkedIn looking for people who had been PMs at Mews in the last two years. I found two of them and sent short, direct messages, saying I had an offer and asking for fifteen minutes. Both answered inside one day, which already told me something. What they said was too similar to ignore. The roadmap was rewritten about every six weeks, not because the market changed but because senior leadership kept reversing their own decisions. Two PMs had left in the quarter before my offer, and neither departure was planned. One of them told me she spent her last month rebuilding a spec she had already delivered once. That detail stayed with me more than the rest.
I declined the next day. I kept the message short and professional and gave no specific reason. After that it took longer than I hoped to find something else, and for a few weeks I asked myself if I had decided correctly. But I never regretted it.
About six weeks before I got this role, I was frustrated after a difficult phase of migrating our legacy product, about 200,000 lines of React code, to React 19 with concurrent features enabled. Most articles I had read about React 19 skipped the difficult parts, so I wrote an honest LinkedIn post instead: what we migrated, how we did the concurrent rendering rollout, which assumptions were wrong, and the two weeks we spent looking for small tearing bugs in our data-fetching layer. I did not expect much. It was a long technical post with code snippets and a lot of "here's what we got wrong".
Inside one week three recruiters wrote to me. I was also running my own search at the same time, 14 applications to companies in Amsterdam and to remote-friendly companies, but the messages that came to me were of a different quality. One Amsterdam software company was clearly better than the rest. Their recruiter quoted specific paragraphs from my post in the first message, so I knew that somebody technical had read it before writing to me. The process confirmed this. Instead of a LeetCode round or a whiteboard session about binary trees, they asked me to do a code review on a real part of their own codebase, with the permission of the team that owns it. I spent about three hours on it, wrote comments as I would for a colleague, and explained the trade-offs instead of only marking problems. It felt like real work, and that made it much easier to stay interested through all five rounds.
The offer came 42 days after that first message. The base was 82,000 EUR, full-time and fully remote. Before signing I negotiated two things: remote-first as a written policy and not only as a tolerance, and a four-day week instead of five. They agreed to both, and I signed.
I came to Germany as an international worker with self-taught frontend skills and a portfolio built from online courses and personal projects. It felt almost impossible. The rejections arrived quickly, hundreds of them. Some were automatic, some were short and polite, and a few were detailed enough to hurt. Every time a good application stopped, I had to tell myself not to read too much into it.
What helped was persistence and using many channels at the same time. I was active on LinkedIn, on Xing, and on the German Make-it-in-Germany program, which exists to help international workers enter the local job market. LinkedIn gave me the best results. I improved my profile, started to contact recruiters directly, and put my portfolio links at the top. I tried to treat every rejection as information and not as a verdict. If my HTML and CSS projects got no attention, I worked more on JavaScript. If a cover letter did not work, I wrote it again. Slow work without glamour, but methodical.
In the end a company was willing to look past my unusual background. The interview process had four rounds, from a technical skills test to a conversation about cultural fit, and each one felt like a real test of my progress. When the offer arrived for a full-time junior frontend developer role, hybrid, at 45,000 EUR, I accepted the offer.
I finished the bootcamp in March with no commercial experience and a portfolio that felt very thin. For the next weeks I applied to anything with "junior" or "graduate" in the title: 47 applications in about two and a half months, mostly through LinkedIn. Almost nobody answered. Some companies never replied at all, a few sent automatic rejections after a few hours, and I started to ask myself if a bootcamp certificate was worth anything in a market full of computer science graduates.
The thing that changed everything was a side project that I almost did not publish. I had built a small open-source tool on the Spotify API that creates personal listening statistics. Nothing revolutionary, but I was proud of the structure of the code and of the documentation. I posted a Show HN on Hacker News, mostly to get feedback, and it grew much more than I expected. About 200 stars in the first month, some good comments about the architecture, and a few people opening issues and pull requests. I checked my GitHub notifications again and again, all day. About two weeks after the post, an engineer at a Madrid startup starred the repository and then sent me a DM on LinkedIn. He said the queue management pattern I used had interested him, and that they were hiring.
The interview process had three stages. First a technical call, where we went through the project together and talked about how I would scale it. Then a take-home exercise: build a small queue worker that processes async jobs with retry logic, which felt like normal daily work and not like a whiteboard puzzle. Finally a calm conversation with two senior engineers, more about culture than a test. The whole process took about two weeks once it started.
The offer was €26k, which is low for Madrid. I negotiated a little, without much result. But the team is almost all senior people, and they pair-program with juniors on purpose, and for me right now that is worth more than a few thousand euros more. I said yes.
47Applications
3Interviews
2 monthsSearch length
LinkedInSource
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