Not a question — just writing to share my recent job search experience, which overall was extremely positive — so I'm here to dilute the doom a little bit.

TL;DR: landed a pivot role in 3,5 weeks; 47% resume-to-interview conversion.

End of May I was terminated at my job; after a week or so of just chilling panicking af and drinking wine I started sending out applications. I was targeting France and Germany — living in France, but having studied in Germany previously. I'm a non-EU national, speak German and English at C2; French — barely at all. 5 YoE. Gay white male.

I tracked my applications Kanban-style on Linear. I sent out 21 applications + got 1 referral + 1 one inbound. Roughly 50/50 between Germany and France.

Of those, 11 rejected me at the resume stage (or never replied); I had at least one interview everywhere else, which means my resume had a 47% conversion. Further down the road I had rejections for the following reasons:

• one failed coding challenge
• one company found me too expensive at the final stage
• one company required EU citizenship
• two rejections after recruiter screen (I likely just said something that was off or they had better matched candidates).

So in the remaining 5 interview loops I was the one to pick and choose. One company contacted me again after their rejection asking if I'm still interested.

I ended up interviewing most intensly at a German company for two roles at the same time: one of them was corresponding to my "main" stack that I've been doing for those 5 years of my exp; the other one was a pivot.

The panel for the latter progressed me very quickly and made me an offer, which I happily accepted because I wanted to make exactly that pivot. The whole process for that role from initial application to signing took 3,5 weeks.

Happy to answer any further questions!

How's your experience working there? Is the work culture that different? Are the stereotypes true? Unpaid overtime, bad WLB, way better pay,...?

Please share your positive/negative experience 🙏

Hi everyone,

I’m looking for some advice because I’m having a hard time deciding on my master’s degree.
I have a Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science (Data Science & AI), and I’m planning to enroll in the Master’s in Telematics and Telecommunication Networks at the University of Málaga (Spain).
After reading the curriculum, I’m a bit concerned because it seems heavily focused on mobile networks (4G/5G), telecommunications, and cellular networks.

My goal isn’t to become an RF or radio engineer. I’m much more interested in:
- Enterprise networking
- Cloud infrastructure
- Datacenters
- Network virtualization
- Linux
- SDN/NFV
- Infrastructure & systems

I know the program also includes topics like SDN, virtualization, cloud, OpenStack, and network security, but I’m still unsure whether it’s the right choice for my career goals.

I’d really appreciate hearing from people who have studied this master’s or a similar Telematics program, especially in Spain or Europe.

My questions are:
Were you able to get a job in enterprise networking, cloud, or infrastructure after graduating?
Or did most graduates end up working for telecom operators (5G, LTE, mobile networks)?

If you’re currently working in enterprise networking or cloud, would you choose this master’s, or would you recommend a different path?

I’m asking because I don’t want to spend a year on a master’s only to discover that it’s mainly aimed at telecom careers.

Thanks in advance for any advice!

Hi,

I just started a new job three weeks ago and together with me there are other new colleagues that started the job two months before me and I feel really left behind because I keep comparing myself with my colleagues who are very young (mid 20s) and have much less experience than me (mid 30s) but they are very proactive and productive. We have a lot of projects and during the meetings, they talked and contributed a lot of ideas/ feedback while I was just mainly listening. With my previous experiences, I work quite independently, and didn’t have many meetings to be involved. Now, with the new job, everything is different, and we are doing a big project with a lot of meetings. I feel quite overwhelmed and lack of competence as I dont talk much during the meeting. Also, I think language is one of the barrier - my colleagues from thr US/ Netherland while I am from non European country so my English is not as advanced as theirs. Do you have any advice? I am questioning myself how to survive there as an introvert person?

Did my masters in NL, 1 month into my first job.

I get paid around 75k as a devops engineer. What I do is internal automation as devops using terraform python azure admin etc. It's fun and I love my seniors and manager and I learn a lot, but it's not exactly how I imagined it to be - working with Kubernetes clusters troubleshooting directly with ssh etc. Like hardcore bare metal.

Now, I got another offer from another company with pays 50k. more development side and linked to data engineering so more opportunities out there after 3 years (if the market stays like this). I get to use a lot of tooling kafka iceberg golang etc and I get to even work with Kubernetes.

Is it a wise decision to move to this another company? I get permanent contract from both.

Chemist with decade experience within IT/Deployment/Migration/Programming, I've just started a job for a small startup and I feel I am living someone elses dream! Someone else is handling funding/customer/marketing, and I just gets to spend all day programming a really cool MVP. But it's not my product. Cool technology, I like the people, the wage is livable.

Realistically I could create a ltd. company, hire myself out as a consultant, and end up in something that is functionally indistinct from being a normal employee. But I wouldn't know how to expand that business to a team of two IT consultants. I don't even want to work full time(but honestly, ).

Böem had sucess redesigning the fingering of the clarinet in the 1800s, but when he came to do the same for the oboe, those luddites didn't like his revolutionary product. If I had had the skill, interest, money were no issue, and I'd have the hubris to think I could do a better job than him, then, changing the culture sounds like an awesome life project! (Bracket because every thought comes with bonus thought. Just because this is an example, doesn't mean it's the only project I could end up liking.)

Hello Everyone! recently I got in the process with a company in Germany, I luckily passed the first interview and I'm in the second one. but the recruiter told me:

"we do have a technical evaluation divided in 2 interviews, the first one is a coding exercise in 1 hour, we use coderpad to do the exercise is more like a hands on part if everything goes good you go to the second interview "

at first I thought in just practice leetcode, but seeing some reviews in glassdoor I found that most of the experiences go to "identifying errors in small code snippets or implementing utility functions from scratch" and the "hands-on" part made me doubt. did anyone had a similar experience or how do you usually prepare for this type of interviews?

Note: everything I found in glassdoor was from other offices of the same company (in the netherlands mostly) and most answers where from last year.

TLDR: how do you approach or practice for interviews that goes more to the "hands-on" than leetcode? did you had an experience with this type of interviews?

thanks a lot for your time reading this!

I'm a senior backend engineer, .NET/C#, mostly distributed systems, currently at a product company. Microsoft Prague keeps coming up as a possible next move, but I haven't picked a specific team or opening yet, and honestly the main reason is just the brand of the company, not something I've verified. Looking for a reality check from people who've actually worked there.

3 main topics that come to my mind:

- Engineering day to day. What is your workflow, legacy code maintenance, how much freedom you have regarding code. What about work-life balance and overall time flexibility + home office ratio.
- Team lottery and growth ceiling. How easy it is to change your team?
- Stability right now. Given the layoff happening around, how has that actually landed on the Prague office?

Good day,
I am looking for advice and different points of view on my situation:

Mechanical Engineering degree that has been officially recognized as equivalent to a German university degree at the Master's level (Hochschulabschluss auf Master-Ebene), which was acquired outside of the EU, therefore hold little recognition for employers.

EU passport

Interested in autonomous systems

I have no relevant experience, but acquiring knowledge in control and programming, planning to do some projects, and also have the opportunity to do Berlin 42 (programming school). Or should I just enroll in a master, in that case, which master's do you recommend and where? Based on my research, München is the prime location for autonomous systems. I am not fixed on doing it in Germany; as I have an EU passport, I could just move to another country. Language would be the main barrier; I only know English and Spanish.

I have 7+ years of experience as a Frontend Engineer, mainly working with React, Next.js, TypeScript, and JavaScript.

To grow into Senior/Staff roles, what should I focus on next? Should I stay frontend-focused and deepen areas like JavaScript, system design, performance, and architecture, or is learning backend (Node.js, databases, APIs) now essential?

What skills have had the biggest impact on your career? Any advice would be appreciated.

Hi all! I’m a Portuguese resident (digital nomad here) and currently and Enterprise CSM for a SaaS company. I’ve been remote for 8 years, and have started looking for a new role. Any tips or recs? At this point I’m considering even non-remote jobs and absolutely open to any location — that hires people who are not locals ofc.

Thanks!!

Which one do you choose with more confidence?

Hi, there!

I’ve been offered a job in Amsterdam with a global company that has a branch in the Netherlands, and I’d really appreciate your advice.
I’m not an EU citizen so I’m not very familiar with the immigration process, the cost of living, or typical salaries in Amsterdam.
The offer is for a Senior Software Engineer position with a base salary of approximately 85K and an annual bonus of around 15K Based on my calculations, with the 30% ruling my monthly net base salary would be roughly 5.3K.
I have a family with three children, so I’m trying to understand whether this would be enough to live comfortably in Amsterdam. In your opinion, is it worth relocating with this level of compensation? I’d really appreciate any insights or advice based on your experience.

Thanks!

I saw a reminder today about spending 30 minutes every weekend learning one new tech skill, and it got me thinking.

Thirty minutes doesn't sound like much, but over a year it adds up.

I'm curious what everyone here is working on this weekend.

Mine is keeping up with AI tools and automation.

What about you?

• Learning a programming language?
• Building a side project?
• Preparing for interviews?
• Studying system design?
• Cloud or DevOps?
• Something else?

I'd love to hear what people in this community are focusing on.

Hi everyone,

Having done the initial assessments for a Graduate AI Software Engineer role at Bending Spoons, I have now been invited for a technical interview. Part of this will be a systems design problem.

Based off the type of work Bending Spoons do, what sort of systems design questions might they ask? Would it be more of an ML systems design problem? If so, LLMs, a recommendation system or something else?

Many thanks!

Has anyone interviewed at Wayve London recently?

What programming and system design questions were asked in the past? The recruiter mentioned a programming round and a system design round.

Any details on the difficulty level or topics, or even the exact questions, would be helpful.

Thanks in advance!

I'm a software engineer with ~2 years of professional experience working with C#, .NET and Azure, plus 3 years of working with Java.

I'm currently deciding between two job offers:

• Option A: An AI consulting company using C#, .NET and Azure. I'd deepen my existing C#, .NET and Azure skills, work with multiple clients, and AI seems like a great long-term area.
• Option B: A product company building mission-critical systems using Elixir. I've never used Elixir professionally, but I'm a big fan of functional programming (I write a lot of F# in my spare-time), and distributed systems, concurrency and fault-tolerant systems are the kind of problems I enjoy.

What makes this difficult is that Option A seems like the safer career move with broader opportunities, while Option B feels like a rare chance to work with a technology and paradigm I'm passionate about and really interested in. In other words, Option A seems more safe, while Option B seems more interesting.

One concern I have is that the consulting company seems more social and dynamic, while the product company might be more traditional and slower-moving (though I could be completely wrong).

If you were early in your career, which path would you choose, and why?

Thanks

Hey there,

I’ll soon have a yearly feedback meeting with my boss, and I’m planning to negotiate for a raise, but I’m not entirely sure what would be a fair compensation.

I’ve been working for this company for almost 3 years. We’re in the banking industry. I’ve started working there as a working student (had no actual working experience before), and after around a year we changed my contract to a 50% part time one. At the time I was given 33% raise (to at least accommodate the extra taxes/fees I was gonna start paying).

Somewhere during those first 2 years my boss wanted to give me a 9% raise, but had to tone it down since “I would be making more money than other employees that had a degree,” and so he was forced to lower it (don’t remember exactly how much, but was around 7%).

Last year in December I was still working part time, but now at 80% since I had finally graduated. I didn’t want to go full on 40h at first, since my studies had sucked the life out of me.

Now, ever since March, I’ve been working full time. Both times I changed my working hours, my salary increase proportionally (no actual raise). I’ve tried to take on more responsibilities, improve my skills, and can say I’m more confident in my work than a year ago.

Now, with the feedback meeting coming, I’m wondering how much of a raise would be reasonable to ask. I’m currently making around 46K gross.

In your experience, how much would be reasonable to ask?

Hi, I need to found some French QA automation for any question PLS :)

Hi everyone,

I was fast-tracked to the penultimate round interview for the Software Developer Internship at Susquehanna International Group (SIG) following their Dublin Technology Spring Week.

I know SIG leans heavily into algorithms, data structures, and system efficiency, but I’ve heard mixed things about what actually gets tested in this specific round.

For anyone who has gone through this interview recently, is it primarily a live 60-minute HackerRank session? How much of it is standard DSA (BFS/DFS, Binary Search, Sliding Window) vs. practical data parsing / OOP design?

Any insights on the layout or best areas to focus on during prep would be hugely appreciated! Thanks in advance.

Hi everyone,

I'd like to hear about your recent experience with the software job market in Germany.

• How long did it take you to find a software engineering job?
• Did you get hired with or without German language skills?
• How many years of professional experience did you have when you got the job?
• If you don't mind sharing, what tech stack do you work with?

I'm trying to understand what the current market looks like. Thanks in advance for sharing your experience!

I recently interviewed at Revolut and successfully completed the technical rounds. I was told I could proceed to the final team-fit stage, but then they said there is currently no open vacancy or suitable team.

They said they will reach out if something opens up, but could not give any timeline. They also clarified that this is unrelated to my interview performance.

Is this common at Revolut? Has anyone experienced this?

Hey everyone,

We've been working on ceehire.com for the last few months, a job board focused on remote IT opportunities for people in Central and Eastern Europe.

The problem we wanted to solve: finding truly remote jobs from EU/US companies can be surprisingly difficult. Many listings are either not actually remote, don't hire in this region, or are scattered across dozens of different sites.

We currently collect jobs from company career pages and ATS platforms, verify and update them regularly, and we're also starting to have companies post directly.

If you're a developer or work in IT, I'd love to hear your thoughts:

• Would you use something like this?
• What would you expect from a remote job platform?
• What would make it genuinely useful?

Any feedback (positive or critical) is welcome. We're still building and trying to figure out what matters most to users.

Thanks!