I know, it should be the other way around. I asked some locals, and so far some of the best answers I got for this are that the best brains here are abroad, at the Netherlands, Germany, etc.. There's a lot of applicants for every position we advertise (especially if we need someone from DevOps or Web -- not so much for Fortran, Scientific Programming, but that's normal).

But most don't pass the first filter. We try to select those that fill the basic criteria, even if they don't fill all the boxes (it's alright to learn on the job for us), even select some that do not pass to call for a short interview with HR or even with manager, but it's quite hard to find good candidates.

> How many candidates coming from EU companies have the work they do at their company made public like that? I never worked anywhere where this was the case. So what do I do then?

It's quite common for some companies in my current field, earth sciences. Many companies have public GitLab servers, or host their own containers (e.g. Mercator Ocean International, DKRZ, ECMWF, etc.).

As I mentioned in other comments, I'd interview someone that doesn't have public repositories or containers anyway. But in the end, if there are other candidates with good CVs, and interesting projects public on GitHub, etc., or if they collaborated to good Open Source projects (Dask, Xarray, Singularity, Jenkins, Python, fortran, etc.) changes increase.

> Only if you work in FOSS is your work public, but if you work from some bank or any other private company they don't expose their work on GitHub due to IP and legal concerns.

I worked in banks, insurance, credit bureau, telco, and government. In most of these the work was done in private CVS, Subversion, or Git servers.

But in most of these, we used Open Source projects, and normally we were allowed to send contributions back upstream, when we found bugs in numpy, python, etc.. There were some companies where I couldn't contribute, so I can only explain the systems I worked, and the tech stack we had.

> So to me it sounds like you're only selecting those who worked at FOSS projects/enterprises

We hire people without public repositories too. Having worked at FOSS projects/enterprises definitely helps.

It's the same as the degree you have. In the end it may be an advantage depending on the company. I, particularly, do not care much if someone is coming from physics, mathematics, economics, biology, or even architecture (we just hired an architect that enrolled in a CS degree in Portugal to work with data pipelines/NetCDF/xarray/etc.).

As long as the person has the technical knowledge required for the job, and some experience if needed, that's fine by me. But I worked with manager that only hired those coming from CS.

So even those with good public contributions or coming from enterprise/FOSS, acing a technical test, etc., nothing would help you to be selected when applying for that team.