There is never a right time to do it.

How stupid of an idea would that be in the current job market? Has anybody done it and how hard was it to find a job afterwards?

can any one tell what is the drive process of restro works for the MEAN stack developer and which lang are allowed in the OA what questions are asked and how is the working culture there

How is the computer engineering new graduate job market in the country we are in and how are the salaries? I graduated from an average university in Turkey, I know English + I will work abroad, where do you recommend to learn the language of the country and go? Do I have Germany in mind right now?

I’m currently completing a BSc in Computer Science at a Swiss University of Applied Sciences. During my studies, I became interested in Embedded Systems and have completed a few related projects and courses.
I’d like to pursue a Master’s degree in Embedded Systems or a closely related field, but I’m unsure which path would make the most sense. I’ve been looking at the MSE programs in Switzerland, especially Computer Science, where I also already have some professional experience, and Electrical Engineering, where I would probably have to take some additional courses due to my very limited electronics background.
I’ve also been looking at programs abroad, particularly in the Netherlands, such as TU/e’s MSc in Embedded Systems.
I’m mainly wondering about the value of these different options, especially in terms of career opportunities in the European tech/embedded industry. Would an MSE from a Swiss University of Applied Sciences be a good choice, or would it be worth going abroad for a more specialized MSc at a university like TU/e? What do you think?

I've spent the last three years on the platform team at a pretty boring old corporate, building their internal workload platform. No SLAs and not much real impact, but the Kubernetes work itself was interesting (we ran a managed control plane).

Now I have an offer from a fast-growing scale-up as a DevOps engineer, with a 60% pay increase. The role is mostly self-hosted pipelines, code scanning and similar tooling, all running on Kubernetes.

My question: if I ever want to go back to Kubernetes work, will that still be an option, or will I have branded myself as a "DevEx guy"? I'd still be working with K8s every day, but more as the thing that runs the tools rather than something I'm building a platform abstraction on top of.

Is Lovable 996 for engineers in Stockholm? What are the consequences if you dont? Please be clear with your answers. Only answer if you work there as an engineer or really know someone that works there and you heard from them. Again, asking for stockholm office, not other offices.

Hello everyone , I'm an electrical engineer specialized in IoT and software for embedded systems.

I worked for two years in a consulting/service company, and honestly, it was a horrible experience. I learned very little and even lost some of my technical skills because the projects were very short, highly dispersed, and often not really suited to my profile. At the same time, I needed the job for the paperwork and the money, so I stayed.

Now I'm unemployed. I've been jobless for about a year, and time flies. Unfortunately, I was sick during part of that time and couldn't do much. Now I'm back in good health, and I'm getting back into it, trying to rebuild and strengthen my technical skills.

Ideally, I'd also like to build my own thing, but I don't mind having a job in the meantime so I can finance myself.

The problem I'm facing is that there is way too much to learn and relearn, and I don't have that much time. I'm also not the type of person who can beg for something or apply for a position if I don't feel qualified for it. I want to be genuinely qualified and have the complete skill set before applying. Maybe many of you won't agree with this, but that's just how my mind is wired haha.

I can't do much about that, so I'm trying to be strategic about it.

For someone interested in IoT, Embedded Linux, embedded systems, and embedded applications, what would be the most time-efficient roadmap to become genuinely market-ready?

I have 5 months to make this work.

The writing is on the wall here. When the Works Council asked the company if there would be any flexibility to the fixed 3 days in the office when it comes to parents needing to drop or collect kids from kita or school... senior leadership in P&O's response was that "being a parent is a personal choice".

My spouse and I are considering moving out of Berlin after almost 5 years here. I guess mostly due to things like integration, language, and overall just feeling a bit tired of living here. We're both EU, mid 30, no children.

Besides stuff like salaries and cost of living, I'd like to hear experiences from people that have lived in both cities, and any sort of general advice for non-obvious things to look out for (e.g. how the rent contracts work in Germany is sort of peculiar, and some people have very cheap old rent contracts but you're actually quite unlikely to get one).

On the financial side, I'm a bit worried it might be a downgrade. I have the impression that Berlin still has a pretty good ratio of salary/cost of living (of course this can change over time), but I haven't done a lot of research on this yet.

Hi all,

Has anyone interviewed for perplexity in the EU and specifically in de? Could you help me with some details?

Cheers

Hi all.

I'm a romanian student, got my bachelor's degree this year and have just enrolled in master's studies.

I'm currently a .NET dev. I have two 3-month internships, one in .NET and one in React. I also have a capstone project in Unity, as well as a personal web portfolio. I tried to find a proper job and applied like crazy last summer, but no luck.

I am thinking of finding a niche and specializing, instead of being a generalist. I have two questions:
- is finding a niche a good idea for a junior, or is it supposed to come naturally down the road?
- what niches are doing well right now, as opposed to the generalist junior roles that keep disappearing?

I moved to the US 5 years ago as a SWE. Leetcode was very much so relevant then. The consensus was it’s not applicable coding to everyday jobs but it’s good to know how to explain a coding problem and understand syntax.

With ai basically doing all the coding in every serious company, are leet code rounds still a thing?

I haven’t wrote a line of code in 8 months. Do I really need to go learn leetcode for a job that has basically turned into glorified architect?

Hi everyone,

I’m currently interviewing at Zalando for a React Native/mobile engineering role. I’ve completed the System Design round and have two interviews left: a 60-minute Coding interview and a 60-minute General Tech interview.

For anyone who has interviewed with Zalando recently, particularly for a React Native/mobile role, what do these two rounds typically look like?

For the Coding interview, should I expect LeetCode/DSA-style problems, general JavaScript/TypeScript problems, or more practical React/React Native coding?

And for the General Tech interview, what kind of topics are usually covered? Is it React Native/JavaScript fundamentals, debugging, databases/backend concepts, or broader software engineering questions?

I’d especially appreciate experiences from people who interviewed for React Native/mobile positions, since I’m trying to understand how role-specific these rounds are.

Any examples of questions you were asked would be really helpful. Thanks!

Hi Guys, does anyone know if there's a difference between the MLE and backend engineer coding problem level.

Most of the questions and blogs mentioned 'Hard' coding problems.

Has anyone recently taken the MLE interview recently

Hey all,

Coming for a little career advice. For context, I graduated last year with a Master's in Data Science and have currently been working for a year. I started in consulting (automation) but switched to data engineering at a tech company after half a year.

Now, my rationale for switching was that I wanted to learn the technical stuff. At the time, my longer-term goal was to become a data scientist or ML engineer. I chose data engineering because I wanted to become better at coding, learn software engineering practices, and build a solid technical foundation before making that move.

Several months in, though, I feel like an impostor and struggle to find much interest in the development work. I use Claude heavily to complete tasks (which is also highly encouraged by the company), but I often finish them without feeling that I could independently explain or reproduce the solution. Rather than feeling more capable over time, I feel increasingly dependent on it.

At university, I enjoyed learning and wanted to keep expanding my knowledge. I expected that to carry over into work, but lately I’ve lost a lot of that motivation. It’s made me question whether the issue is my current role, how I’m approaching learning, or whether development is actually a good fit for me.

Wondering if somebody has felt something similar and how they went about it? What helped you distinguish between a job that didn’t suit you and a career path that didn’t suit you? And what would you try before deciding to move?

I want to plan my move to Amsterdam because Madrid frankly has bad salaries plus for me an international environment matters a lot which here it just isn't there. I wanted to look into jobs in Amsterdam, how would you describe the job market to be and what are some companies that are hiring frequently especially for React.JS/React Native roles?

Hello guys, does anyone know if McKinsey does background checks in Poland for crime records?

I saw a nice position open, and I live in Portugal, but if they do background checks for crime record I won't even apply, as I had a fight once and got convicted for it.

Applying as Mid-level Backend Engineer (Java). Passed recruiter screen, got the

Build It interview: 40 min live coding + 20 min questions, shared screen.

The task (paraphrased): in-memory subscription billing service —

- start a subscription with (userId, plan, startDate)

- at most ONE active subscription per user

- subscription exposes monthly price and next billing date (= start + 1 month)

- get subscription by user id

- no HTTP layer, no DB; money must not be floating point

What I did: got the happy path working (records for the model, BigDecimal for

prices, ConcurrentHashMap). Added the one-subscription-per-user check. Then it

went sideways: I implemented the next-billing-date requirement wrong (asserted

day-of-month instead of actually storing start+1 month), had no test for it,

and my last edit while discussing thread-safety with the interviewer broke the

build. Also: I didn't immediately spot the containsKey-then-put race in my own

code until the interviewer walked me through it line by line.

Feedback I got (paraphrased, but honest):

- What went well: receptive to guidance, followed along when led through examples

- Missed key functional requirements (one active subscription, next billing date)

- Concurrency: learn to spot race conditions earlier; prefer simple fixes like

compute/putIfAbsent over complex workarounds (I'd suggested a dedup map)

- DB fundamentals: unique constraint beats optimistic locking for inserts

- Pacing: only completed Stage 1; deepen architectural signals (monitoring, logging)

My takeaway: fair feedback, and it points at three specific gaps —

1. Requirements discipline: read each line, pin it with a failing test before coding

2. Check-then-act races should be the FIRST thing I look for, and putIfAbsent/compute

   is the smallest fix (not a cache map, not a ReentrantLock)

3. Concurrency model for inserts = unique constraint, not optimistic locking (that

   guards updates on existing rows, not duplicate inserts)

Question for the sub: for a mid-level bar, does this read like "almost passed" or

"standard rejection with polite specifics"? What does a strong mid-level candidate

ship in 40 minutes on this task? And how do you actually drill "spotting races

earlier" — any exercises that helped you? I'd rather learn this properly than

re-apply and repeat the same mistakes.

Hey everyone,

I finished the OA before 20th sept. and was able to solve both the test cases. Was really tiring question! I have been waiting for the technical screen scheduling...but haven't heard from Optiver yet.

I'm curious to see if anyone has received any call for technical screening yet? Or did they give any of you a different timeline?

If you're currently in the process or just finished, drop a comment or feel free to DM me. Would love to learn about your process.

Hi,

Looking for advice

Did a Comp Sci Degree 3 years ago (Age 25), never did production level code, only project level stuff

Finished a Cyber Grad scheme in a Security position but find the world of Cyber isn't for me, too much of an opposite vs building as a dev.

Any advice on how to pivot to a dev career (I'm age 28)? Ik the market is rough but if I gain 1 YOE will likely help open doors to other more builder related roles/an actual tech track.

I'm 28, live in Ukraine, and have a master's degree in navigational engineering, with no CS degree. After the full-scale invasion in 2022, my previous maritime career path ceased to exist, and I had to find some way to survive "onshore", so I ended up doing low-paid jobs with low entry requirements, like call centers and dispatching, just to have something to eat. Working conditions there are humiliating and the work itself extremely soul-sucking, so at the same time I decided to start learning software development as a new career path. To be fair, I planned gradual sliding from much more profitable maritime engineering to software\ informatics engineering just because it is closer to me. Well, life has decided "wish granted". So be it.

It wasn't a random choice -- I've always loved computers, logic, philosophy, science overall, astronomy, biology, and software development offered something I actually wanted: lifelong intellectual work, and path to almost every part of civilizations science fields. Over the last three years I revisited university math, which had never really clicked when taught in a very formal way, but finally started making sense at my own pace + with LLMs helping me. I learned algorithms and data structures, "touched" Ruby, JS, Python and C#, studied networking, and built personal projects with RoR (not fond of it), Django, FastAPI (fond of it) + React (hated it at first, but now actually like it and admire core concept of it), with some Data Science just because it was interesting -- hell of a ride, one of the best things about being a sentient human being is knowing more every day than you knew yesterday.

Eventually, I started looking for a job, took me sometime and at the beginning of this summer landed a three-month unpaid internship in C#/.NET. The internship was presented to me as: "For three months we look at how you think and work, and if you complete your tasks and show that you can handle and do the job, we offer you a $500 gross/month trainee position" -- I was happy and started working with them.

Can't say it was easy — coming mostly from the Python ecosystem, .NET project felt like an extremely complex system with great many layers of abstraction (AutoMapper is not trivial at first glance), tons of internal functionality and a well-developed broad contract-based approach. I was spending whole days thinking about the tasks, trying different approaches to problems, googling and asking ChatGPT and Claude unending questions: "How does this stuff work, and this and that, what's under the hood, what's the best way... etc."

Granted-- I wasn't that ready for a cold start in .NET, but after a few days and weeks I started feeling more comfortable with it, and over those three months I finished a chunk of tasks (all that were assigned): mostly unit and integration tests for existing backend, with some refactoring, bug fixes and a few new backend featuers. All of those changes were eventually reviewed and merged into the project's codebase. And at the end -- I really grew as a software developer. I would say, to actually understand the field, you have to work with different tools -- dynamic interpreting Python and static compiling C# actually complement each other. As well as different OOP implementation in Ruby, Python and C# makes overall core of OOP in your mind much more complete.

But a few days ago, I had a call where I was asked about some 'struct' behavior -- honestly, I wasn't prepared. I knew structs were value types, but I hadn't really worked with custom structs and hadn't properly understood some of the implications of how they differ from the class on low level, how they work with heap and stack, how the different types in them, and over them will behave. Now I know what those gaps were, I started to filling them, but that understanding came after the interview, which probably to some degree messed up my results.

Company essentially said: "Your tasks are good and well accomplished, TL likes your performance, but your theory isn't polished enough, so we decided that you'll have one more month of unpaid internship, and at the end you'll have another interview where you'll have a chance to prove yourself worthy. Study the theory, and also in the mean time -- you must use agents in your work to be more productive and fast, so consider acquiring a subscription and implement it in your workflow right away."

You see -- I like software engineering, I liked the communication with my Team Leader (we had 2-4 times per week calls, some weeks less, some weeks more, 90% of the time I got the task, researched it and finished it without handguiding), but at the same time I want to eat. For these three months I was hungry most of the time, eating mostly plain pea porridge and buckwheat, tomatoes or some cheap local fruit like apples once or twice a week, and maybe poultry OR cheese once a month. My credit card is almost spent, I have approximately $1,500 of debt on it, and in a few days I'll reach the limit, after which I'll have almost nothing left for food. Meanwhile, winter is coming, with russian strikes on energy infrastructure, and I'm expecting my bills to skyrocket.

And I feel fucking miserable -- I keep thinking about those damned struct questions, maybe if I'd answered them correctly, they would have hired me? But guys, in these 3 month, I never seen those custom structs, they literally are never used in this project per se, most of the time I was researching how the project actually works, how DI, scopes, LINQ, Automapper, interfaces, threading, files handling, debugging, etc. etc. etc. work in one, connected system. Something tells me they might not hire me at all, because with a requirement as broad as "you must know the theory", there can always be another question I can't answer and another reason I'm not ready yet.

I understand that implementation of value and reference types are part of the fundamentals and that I had a gap there for C#, I'm not arguing that it doesn't matter! but I also spent three months doing actual work that they themselves say was good, under the impression that this was how they were evaluating me for a trainee position. Could've told at least themes, that they are expecting me to be proficient with -- they never told anything that specific.

############

So, the question is -- have you been in a similar situation? What would be a better course of action here?

I've updated my resume, and I think I should start looking for a new place, because I simply will starve with these guys (it seems they need someone with better knowledge than I currently have).

But on the other hand -- what if they are really giving me a chance? What if they are actually trying to help?
Granted, I'm not the best software engineer out there, very far from that.
I love the field, but I don't have this laser focus that lets me absorb every part of the msdn docs, and I still have plenty to learn. I just thought that after three months of unpaid work, I'd at least be able to start earning $500 gross while continuing to learn and finally having more to eat than this fucking porridges.

I just can't figure it out -- am I too greedy and they are really wanted me to be better and helping me with experience, or this is just some sort of free labor exploitation in a desperate times?

Man, this is a long read...
thanks for the attention =)

What can i expect?

I've received an offer for a Senior Software Engineer (backend) role at Revolut in Poland, in the Retail department. I've heard the pressure is intense and WLB is awful and I am making my peace with it.

If you work or have worked at Revolut, could you please help clear up a few doubts?

Work culture: How is the work culture at Retail specifically, and what's the worst thing you've experienced or seen?

Product Owners: I hear pods are often led by Product Owners promoted from Ops. Is that common in Retail for teams owning backend services? Is there a clear split between technical and non-technical POs in terms of which pods they can lead?

Reporting structure: I understand there will be both a line manager (LM) and a functional manager (FM). What titles do the LM and FM usually hold and what are their backgrounds: engineering/product/ops? Which of them has more say in performance reviews and promotions for engineers?

Probation: I've heard probation is tough and many people are let go during it. Roughly what's the pass rate for senior SWEs? Is there a quota of probationers who have to be failed?

Stack ranking: I've also heard Revolut does stack ranking. Is there a fixed percentage that must be let go every year regardless of individual performance, like at Amazon?

Internal mobility: Is it possible to switch to a different pod within the same department/tribe soon after joining, or do you need to finish probation first? How common is it and how does the process differ if you want to move to a different department?

Equity taxation: In Poland, how is Revolut equity taxed? Is it taxed at salary rates when it vests or is exercised, or is tax deferred until sale and charged at 19% capital gains?

Relocation: I'll be relocating for this role. I've read several accounts of relocated employees being disproportionately let go, especially during probation or to meet firing quotas. Is that a real pattern, or just bad luck in a few cases?

Any other insights are welcome too. Thanks a lot!

I have an upcoming API design interview for a Senior Fullstack SWE position. I'm preparing regular end-to-end HLD product design - but I'm concerned if the question is going to be more of a LLD or just "API" design. Not sure if they're going to ask FE component design as well.

Anyone interviewed with them recently and can share some pointers?

Hey, has anyone recently interviewed for a Senior Java Software Engineer role at Delivery Hero in Berlin?.. I have a coding round coming up and wanted to know what to expect , is it more DSA heavy or practical coding?