(Bear with me, gonna anxiety dump a bit here ;) feel free to skip to the end where I have a pertinent question...=) )
Background: I've worked as a high-level contributor both at the management and engineering levels for the last decade of my career. Decently respected software dev/leader/whatever, lots of big and small projects and teams, all successfully delivered. People like working with me! I've had friends ask me to come work with them. And I like my friends. They are great people.
However, I'm also known to be really picky about the things that I want to be doing with my time and my career. I'm really protective of it overall, so when I have the opportunities to "do things" with friends or whatnot I have generally said no, for a variety of reasons. They are great people and wonderful developers (legitimately wonderful, brilliant human beings) but in many cases they work for environments or domain spaces that wouldn't really be "my thing". Sometimes I've just pursued my own stuff for a while, since I have had that ability...but what you're saying above sounds like that has been hurting me.
At the end of December, I was in a work situation where the entirety of the technical team was laid off, including myself. I figured at the time, given my general "level" and experience I'd be all right when applying for work.
While I haven't applied to lots of jobs since then, I did apply to a few that seemed like a great personal fit on paper, and that I knew based on my experience I should probably at least get an initial interview.
No dice. 0% response rate. I was shocked! I mean, it's been a while since I've been doing the interview dance, but 0? So I had my CV looked over by people ranging from C-level guys to other software devs of varying levels and no one could figure out why I wasn't at least getting into initial discussions. "It's not you, it has to be them", I got told. But really after a few of these things happening, you stop thinking that "it's them". That can't be, right?
I made a comment to one person that I felt far more desirable to companies when I had much less experience/professional success than after I had more significant accomplishments under my belt.
I hate mysteries - and I hate the not knowing. It's one thing for me to go through an interview process and not be a fit, if such a thing were to happen; it's another for me to never even get to the interview process and not understand why!
So while reading the above is kind of dejecting, thank you for writing it...I guess it provides some illumination for me on what might be going on.
Now rather than hop into my shower and softly weep - do any of your engineering manager friends spoken about above have any advice for people who may have that experience but just happen to be picky about what they want to do, don't want to move themselves to the USA, and don't always jump at referral from friend X?