This year we scored 119 senior engineers against the same assessment. Sixty-five were a yes. Fifteen were a clear no. Thirty-nine landed in the maybe pile, and the maybe pile is the interesting one, because from the engineer's side a maybe and a silence are the same experience.
A no is information. A maybe is not
When someone tells you no, you can do something with it. You know which door closed and roughly why. A maybe means the person reading you could not find a reason to say yes and had no particular reason to write back and explain. So they did not. From where the engineer is sitting, that is indistinguishable from being ignored, and they spend the next several months guessing at which part of them was the problem. Usually they guess wrong, because the obvious explanation is rarely the real one.
It was not the timezone
Timezone overlap is the thing European engineers worry about most and it is almost never the issue. Across the maybe group it scored 97 percent of maximum, effectively perfect. These are people in Central Europe with a real working overlap with the US East Coast, and the assessment recorded that clearly. Years of experience was fine too. Whatever kept them out of the yes pile, it was not the two things they were most anxious about.
It was the stack as it read on the page, and the commercial facts around it
What pulled the maybe group under was a cluster: how the technical stack presented on the page, and then the practical side of engaging them at all. What they cost. When they could start. How they would be contracted. What happens with the paperwork. None of that is a question about whether someone can build software. All of it is a question about whether a company can read the page and reach a decision without doing work of its own.
The stack problem is a presentation problem more often than a skills problem
A senior engineer usually lists everything their employer ran rather than everything they personally owned, in the order the projects happened rather than the order a US reader needs. The result reads as a broad, shallow surface when the reality underneath is narrow and deep. Two engineers with the same experience can produce completely different impressions, and the one who gets the call is not reliably the better engineer. It is the one whose page was legible in the few seconds it got.
Nobody writes back to tell you any of this
That is the part worth sitting with. There is no feedback loop. A company reads the page, does not reach a decision, moves to the next one, and the engineer receives nothing. Sending more applications does not fix it, because it is the same page hitting the same wall faster. The only thing that changes the outcome is someone telling you honestly which of those four things is actually yours, and most of the people in a position to tell you have no incentive to spend the time.
If you are a senior engineer in Central Europe, our assessment ends with a straight answer either way, including the reasons. See what we look for.