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.
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 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
Move closer to your next job offer
Get expert help with your CV, interviews, salary negotiation and job search.