It's quite bad atm. Senior C++ engineer specializing in system-level programming, worked across several challenging domains including database internals for the last several years. 10+ years of experience.

Applied to around 25 jobs. Ghosted by 15 of them. Out of the 10 remaining, 3 of them are limited in terms of remote - to be considered you have to reside within certain countries.

From the remaining 7 I only got the interview round with 1 of them. Did not get an offer because I was not strong enough candidate despite successfully going through 5 interview rounds. Whole process was very slow and lasted for about 1.5 month, with not getting the feedback something like 2-3 weeks after the last round. All in all very weird experience and unexpected outcome with no strong arguments.

From the remaining 6 I did not even get an invite to an interview but a direct decline.

Getting the (systems programming related) remote job while located in Europe seems like an impossible task to me right now.

I was laid off last year and went to interview at an adjacent employer. They had a bunch of employees (not only engineers) hired from the company that was laying me off. One of which had previously walked out the door with a bunch of code to form their own startup; they were hired as a staff engineer. That employee frequently reached out to me for advice and guidance on writing the piece of code that they made off with.

I flunked their cargo-culting hiring process hard. I knew I should have walked out of the interview the minute they put fucking Leetcode in front of me, but didn't.

Moral of the story: your interview success has little to do with your experience and aptitude as an engineer. Here's a list of shops where you might find more success: https://github.com/poteto/hiring-without-whiteboards