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The whole thing took about six weeks from the first message to a verbal offer, and on most measures it looked like a win. Eighteen applications into my search, six interview rounds with Mews, and a Senior Product Manager offer at €96k base plus equity for a fully remote role out of Amsterdam. On paper, exactly what I'd been aiming for.
The interviews were polished. The hiring manager kept coming back to ownership, to giving PMs real authority over the roadmap, to moving fast without the usual enterprise drag. I left each round feeling energized. The equity conversation was straightforward, the base hit my number, and the remote setup meant I could stay put. I was close to signing without thinking much harder about it.
Before I did, though, I spent a couple of evenings on LinkedIn cross-referencing people who'd held PM roles at Mews in the last two years. I found two former PMs and sent short, direct messages saying I had an offer and asking for fifteen minutes. Both replied within a day, which probably told me something on its own. What they said lined up too closely to wave off. The roadmap got rewritten roughly every six weeks, not because the market had moved but because senior leadership kept reversing decisions they'd already handed down. Two PMs had quit in the single quarter before my offer, neither of them as part of any planned transition. One of them told me she'd spent her last month rebuilding a spec she'd already shipped once. That detail stuck with me more than the rest.
I declined the next day. I kept the message short and professional and gave no specific reason. Finding something else took longer than I'd hoped after that, and there were a few weeks where I questioned the call. I never regretted it, though.
Around six weeks before I landed this role, I was riding a frustrated energy after wrapping up a particularly rough phase of migrating our legacy product, roughly 200,000 lines of React code, to React 19 with concurrent features enabled. Most write-ups I'd seen about React 19 glossed over the hard parts, so I wrote an honest LinkedIn post instead: what we migrated, how we approached the concurrent rendering rollout, which assumptions blew up in our faces, and the two weeks we spent hunting down subtle tearing bugs in our data-fetching layer. I didn't expect much. It was a long, technical post with code snippets and a fair amount of "here's what we got wrong."
Within a week I had three inbound recruiter pings. I was also running my own search in parallel, 14 applications total across Amsterdam-based and remote-friendly companies, but the inbound interest felt different in quality. One Amsterdam software company stood out immediately. Their recruiter referenced specific paragraphs from the post in the first message, which told me someone technical had actually read it before reaching out. The process reinforced that. Instead of a LeetCode round or a whiteboard session on binary trees, they asked if I'd do a code review on a real piece of their own codebase, with explicit consent from the team that owned it. I spent about three hours on it, left comments the way I would for a colleague, and explained the tradeoffs rather than just flagging issues. It felt like actual work, which made it much easier to stay engaged through all five rounds.
The offer came 42 days after that first message. The base was 82,000 EUR, full-time and fully remote. I negotiated two things before signing: remote-first as a formal policy rather than a tolerance, and a four-day workweek instead of the standard five. Both landed. I accepted without hesitation.
I finished the bootcamp in March with zero commercial experience and a portfolio that felt embarrassingly thin. I spent the next few weeks applying to anything with "junior" or "graduate" in the title: 47 applications total over about two and a half months, mostly through LinkedIn. The response rate was brutal. Most companies ghosted me, a few sent automated rejections within hours, and I started to wonder whether a bootcamp certificate was worth anything at all in a market full of CS graduates.
The thing that changed everything was a side project I almost didn't publish. I'd built a small open-source tool on top of the Spotify API that generates personal listening stats. Nothing revolutionary, but I was proud of how I'd structured the code and documented it. I posted a Show HN on Hacker News mostly to get feedback, and it took off unexpectedly. Around 200 stars in the first month, some nice comments about the architecture, and a handful of people opening issues and pull requests. I was refreshing the GitHub notifications like a slot machine. About two weeks after the post, an engineer at a Madrid startup starred the repo and then DMed me on LinkedIn, saying the queue management pattern I'd used had caught his attention and that they were hiring.
The interview process was three stages. First was a technical call where we walked through the project together and talked about how I'd handle scaling it. Then a take-home: build a small queue worker that processes async jobs with retry logic, which felt very much like day-to-day work rather than a whiteboard puzzle. Finally a relaxed team chat with two senior engineers, more of a culture conversation than an interrogation. The whole thing took about two weeks once it started.
The offer came in at €26k, which feels low for Madrid, and I negotiated briefly without much movement. But the company is an almost entirely senior team, and they pair-program with juniors deliberately, which to me is worth more right now than an extra few thousand euros. I accepted.
47Applications
3Interviews
2 monthsSearch length
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