A little experiment you can try:
Whenever you find a position you like (location/company/role/perks), do this:
Check the minimal requirements listed there.
Copy the name of the position's title (example: Software Engineer - Backend at Google) and the relevant part of the job post's description in a document.
Do this for all the positions you like / would like to have / are interested in.
After a while, when you have a few of them, check which of the "required skills" are overlapping and often coming out.
Use this to direct your career: go in the direction that'll get you these skills.
Here’s how I used this method and how it benefited me
When I came up with it, I was mostly targeting roles I liked in big tech Zurich and Europe.
Implementing the method, I noticed some skills were recurring in my notes:
Language-wise, Java seemed to be coming out often and apply to many if not all roles.
Skills-wise, Large-Scale Distributed Systems were also oftentimes there.
Full-Stack / FE skills / Python were sometimes there.
This helped me narrow down the set of target roles I would aim for: most of them had backend distributed systems and Java in there.
Create a list of target roles and companies
BTW, I recommend creating such a list of target roles and companies to everyone.
Try to keep it as high-quality and usable as possible:
Keep the list curated: your list should have roles which you really like and which are good for you - cut out the junk.
Keep it actionable: if you create a Frankenstein of a list with every random good-sounding job in there (London HFT roles/companies, random big tech roles and offices, academia, management roles, engineering roles, etc), this won’t serve you much. The goal here is to implement a targeted search, and to prepare ourselves to “attack” this carefully-crafter set of roles to the best of our abilities and beat the competition.
The one I created for me at the time ended up being a subset of this.
Today, I’d add there also remote companies like these ones / the ones you see in here.
In general the idea of eurotoptechjobs.com is to be a baseline for such target roles’ list for every dev in Europe.
Then, by applying filters you should end up with your subset of target roles.
Two different documents
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