I am European and I work in a good EU company, but I am not growing anymore. I want to change for better growing opportunities.
What would you do if you were me?
Blindly applying to FANG?
Write to a recruiter?
Switch the linkedin flag?
I am recognized as a quite senior backend engineer, and I would like to try my hand into tech lead or engineer manager, but no company seems interested.
I honestly find the market quite dead, companies want to pay the very bare minimum and they don't seems a great opportunity anyway.
What would you do? What worked for you?
I am definitely not in an hurry, but I would like to get the ball moving.
If you aim your job search high and come up with some quick templates to speed up cover letters and the like, you can easily apply to all the most interesting, high paying jobs in your field pretty quickly, and then just keep up a steady stream of applications until you start getting contacted for interviews.
Don't be afraid to be scheduling multiple interviews with different companies, just be sure to give yourself adequate time to prepare for each. I've definitely flubbed a few by packing my schedule too tight.
I'm not sure where you're looking for jobs right now, I personally use a combination of LinkedIn, angel.co, stackoverflow jobs, and indeed. I prefer sites that let me filter on salary, but LinkedIn gets some bonus points for their easy apply feature and being able to filter by how many people already applied. Indeed gets me the most contacts from recruiters, but honestly the matches are lower quality since they tend to be based on me appearing in a search result based on my tertiary skills.
My recommendation is to consider an adventure as a change of pace. Take a job in a foreign country where you actively contribute your leadership and technology experience. Please note that you will be trading compensation and quality of living for something that matters, like Doctors Without Borders.