2025/08/26
I don’t think I’m the only one who can’t find a job right now. By the time my search passed the two-year mark, I had already realized how broken the system feels. Tools like LinkedIn turned out to be little more than noise—endless scrolling, false hopes, and disappointment.
If I think of it as a sales funnel, with myself as the “product,” the numbers are brutal: more than 1,300 applications in two years, each with a tailored CV and cover letter, and all of them directed at roles directly within my area of expertise. And because my field is broad, I even had a small advantage—there were more positions I could legitimately apply for than most people in narrower niches.
Even so, fewer than 50 of those applications turned into interviews. Out of all of that effort, I landed only one job, which I recently left. To be honest, it was the kind of job I probably should never have accepted in the first place.
The main problem, as I see it now in 2025, is the mechanism of hiring itself—at least for engineers. It feels like the whole structure has been copied from IT, and it simply doesn’t work for hardware roles. I often find myself dragged through five virtual interviews that make no real sense. The first one is always with HR, and to me it’s an absolute waste of time. It’s just thirty minutes of small talk where nothing is revealed, nothing is clarified, and no one learns anything.
The second interview usually involves someone from the team and a manager. In my experience, these are often tragic in their own way. I tell my story, I walk through my projects, I sell myself as clearly as possible. After doing this dozens of times, it’s become almost automatic—there’s no nervousness, no anticipation anymore. Usually one person in the room is genuinely interested, while the other is a manager half-present, running late from one meeting to another, clearly distracted. That, to me, is a red flag. But still, in our desperation, we keep going.
The third interview is often just a repetition of the second—sometimes framed as “technical questions” or “a small test task,” but by then everyone already knows I can do the job. At that point, the only real question is: when do you want me to start? Yet the process keeps dragging on, stretched across two or three months, because someone goes on vacation or cancels. By the time it finally happens, half the team has forgotten who I even am.
And all of this makes no sense for hardware engineers. The reality is, these companies aren’t testing skills at all—they’re testing compliance. They want to see how much you’re willing to beg, how ready you are to nod along, how far you’ll go to accept a low offer. If you show that you’re capable, experienced, and confident, that usually works against you. Because capable people ask for money. And the entire system is designed to trick you into accepting the lowest possible salary—as if you could survive on that as an immigrant in this country.
If I step back and look at the bigger picture, the deeper problem becomes clear. Very few people in Europe today can actually build something—physically produce, assemble, or create with their own hands. And even fewer can take nothing but an idea and turn it into a working device, a prototype, or a production line from scratch. Out of ten thousand employees in a corporation, maybe fifty or a hundred are doing tangible engineering work. The rest orbit around them in endless layers of coordination.
This becomes painfully obvious in older corporations, the ones that have been around for a century or more. They survive not because they innovate, but because they are monopolies. And monopolies inevitably breed the most idiotic distortions of what “work” even means. So when I try to distill the root cause, it always comes back to management. To HR, to middle layers, to people who don’t know what engineering really is. They’ve never built anything in their lives. To them, “creating something” means placing an order in China and waiting for delivery.
The result is predictable: in today’s European reality, there is almost no serious high-tech production left. What does remain often exists only to substitute for imports from China when logistics make shipping impossible—or to serve military and state-driven demand.
The second illusion is that corporations are somehow part of capitalism. In reality, inside they don’t function like capitalist systems at all. They function like communism—totalitarian, decaying communism. The people at the top are faceless, hidden. CEOs and “leaders” are just hired managers enforcing a hierarchy that only makes sense within itself. Titles like “Director of Advanced Learning Manufacturing” or “Center of Excellence” are inventions—meaningless outside the walls of the company.
The further a corporation decays, the worse this becomes. Innovation dries up, engineers leave, and the vacuum fills with narcissistic managers who cling to their authority. Their “achievements” are never technical; they’re political. They build systems of control and domination, and the organization rewards obedience over performance. If you comply—even with orders that are obviously destructive—you survive. If you resist, you’re marked as a threat. Either way, the system wins.
That’s why I’ve had to build my own internal filter. My task now is to structure myself in a way that keeps me out of those environments. I try to present myself with absolute honesty, even conflict. I ask direct questions that reveal the emptiness on the other side. I’ve spoken to managers who don’t know their competitors, don’t know their market, don’t even know how their company makes money. And yet, they sit across from me in interviews, acting as if they’re gatekeepers of something important.
They aren’t. They’re just cogs in a vertical of power, running from one “alignment meeting” to another. To me, they are the modern version of the man in a case—small (by Anton Chekhov), hollow, defined only by the shell of their invented title.
So for me, the challenge now isn’t just to find a job. It’s to keep myself from ending up in the wrong one.