As luck would have it, I'm living in Nuremberg and would love to work at SUSE. However, I didn't get any feedback at all of my applications. Any hints on what I could do to improve my chances?
You should get some feedback. Can you tell me for which positions you applied? I will make sure that it gets fixed for the future (dmacvicar at suse dot com).
Speaking only for the positions my team/department: Our positions include a small challenge. You need to add a small feature or improvement via a Pull Request on Github to some code and ping pong with your future team members.
The goal not only to see technical skills but also how do you work together with the current team members, how do you handle critics in your code, how do you structure your changes, etc.
The challenge is not difficult, but we value the time and courage of the people who took part in it. My team tends to focus its energy in those.
If the job description gives you a chance to highlight yourself from the rest, take it!.
Thanks for getting back to me. I've currently applied only for the OpenSUSE developer/packager position, but I'm curious about several other positions.
A general question I have is if it's a problem that I wrote my application in German. Afaik the HR team is located in Nuremberg, but I'm really not sure if English or German is expected. Personally, it's easier for me to write a formal application in German, because it's my native language.
I'll take a look at the challenges as well. The benefit is, that many of them include technologies I'm not yet familiar with, so I can at least learn something new from it.
Giving that you want to highlight yourself for an international company doing Open Source, just follow common sense and use English, write a good cover letter, link your Github projects/repos and contributions, and avoid a .doc file :-)
