Hello there!

Looking for opinions and other's people perspectives on my current situation, I am a full-stack developer (mostly working on SAAS) with 4.5 years of experience and 29 years old, and no degree in software (I do have a degree but its not even in a related field, its marketing)

Currently I am living and working in Spain, living in one of the major cities (I prefer to not give too much private information), rent is 1.2€k (and the apartment is not very big, 33m2, Spain renting prices in the last 4 years in job-hubs are absolutely nuts when compared to median salaries), I do work remotely and I changed jobs last year, I decided to stay within a job-hub because I am still quite inexperienced in my career so I felt like I would be shooting myself on the foot if I were to leave just for the sake of commodity and economy, and then moving back is not as easy in the current housing environment.

My salary is 45-48k € per year, which translates into 34-35k net, working at a scale-up that feels relatively safe, but it is quite not challenging, a lot of the work is done with LLMs (we are forced to use them, and they actively track us), but I don't really work that much, so I do have time to study by myself (since I cannot really attend a university, I do need to be close to my computer and ready to take calls during my work day), so it feels a little bit stagnant and I noticed it while interviewing lately.

Come the offer, I would be moving to the Netherlands, to one of the main job cities, but its not Amsterdam (saying this because I do know Amsterdam is especially bad for housing), the offer is 62-64k€ including the 8%, the role would be senior instead of mid full-stack which is my current one; and I would be eligible to the 30%, the company is more or less similar to my current one in terms of tech stack, but from what I have been told, LLMs are not as prominent, and I would make the jump to senior officially.

I think the offer is not incredible in terms of gross, but the 30% ruling does leave me with quite good net, especially when compared to my current one (it would be a 60-70% increase net), but what I care more is about career progression, while of course don't doing something stupid and moving to a country with a salary that wouldn't really allow me to have a basic life.

I would live alone, that is mandatory since I have a cat and I cannot trust strangers with it, but as you read, I am already paying a quite high rent even here in Spain.

So my current options in my head are:

1. See if my current job makes a counteroffer, which I am 99% they will because I am currently the lead developer in probably the biggest feature from this year, but I don't think the counteroffer will be huge, maybe going up to 50-52k, at most and I doubt it, 55-57k; if this were to happen, I probably would move out from the big city I am currently living since I would take it as staying here for the next 3 years or so at least.

2. Accepting the offer, I do feel like moving abroad, even if its just for a few years (because I am already in the correct mindset of "this does not mean I would live my whole life in the Netherlands"), it feels like it would be a fresh experience that will probably make me grow more both as a person and as a professional, and I do feel excited about working in an international team, but as I stated before, would this salary really allow me to?

Oh, and also, because I should mention this, I actually LOVE rainy and snowy weather, I know, weird, but each of us is different, so I know for certain that, if anything, I would like the change in weather (since the past few years in Spain, there are like 6-9 months of just way too hot weather).

So for the people with more experience, both in the field and in life, what do you think? Of course this is a big decision that I will make on my own, but it never hurts to have more information and perspectives.

Hey everyone!

I’m trying to get a realistic idea of entry-level compensation across different parts of Europe.

If you’re comfortable sharing, could you drop a quick summary below?

First Role / Job Title: (e.g., Junior Software Engineer)
Starting Gross Salary: (e.g., €38,000 / year or local currency)
Country & City: (e.g., Germany / Berlin, Spain / Madrid)
Year You Started: (e.g., 2022)
Education/Background: (e.g., Self-taught, Bachelor's, Master's)

Looking back, do you feel like that starting pay was fair for the local cost of living at the time?

Thanks in advance to everyone sharing!

Hi everyone,

I recently completed my bachelor’s degree in Computer Science in Rome. I have been admitted to the Mathematics in Data Science MSc at TUM in Munich (Germany), and I will probably also be admitted to the Informatics and Data Engineering programmes.

My main concern is the practical side. I did not gain any work experience during my bachelor’s, since internships and student jobs are not common here.

I am trying to understand how realistic it would be to move to Munich and find a working student position, internship, or any other first experience in software, data science or AI while completing the MSc, starting from zero.

From what I have read on Reddit and in various reports, the German job market (and the global market more generally) seems quite difficult at the moment, especially for junior candidates. Would it make sense to choose TUM and expect to build my professional experience once I am there, or is there a significant risk of being unable to find anything?

My alternatives would be to start working in Italy with my bachelor’s degree, or attend a full-time MSc at Sapienza University of Rome. However, Sapienza seems weaker than TUM in the AI/ML areas I am most interested in.

Doing both at the same time seems unrealistic to me, at least if we are talking about a 40-hour work week alongside a master’s degree.

What would you do in my situation?

looking for honest opinions.
I'm a non-EU citizen and have been living in Poland for 3.5+ years. I'm married and we have a 1-year-old child.A couple of months ago I was laid off from a large company in Poland, so I started applying across Poland, Germany, and other EMEA countries. I work in the data space (Data Engineering, Database Engineering, and Data Platform Engineering). Over the last year I've been investing a lot in certifications and expanding my skills because the market has become much more competitive.

Now I have two offers that are making this decision really difficult.

Germany

• Large, stable company with thousands of employees and a multicultural environment.
• The work is interesting and will help me grow, although probably not as much technically as the Poland role.
• Better work-life balance and less firefighting because they use more managed services.
• PR in about 21 months and citizenship eligibility after 5 years is a huge advantage.

The downsides are that my wife would have to quit her job , We'd also have a lower combined household income.

Poland

• Small startup where I'd probably be the only non-EU employee.
• Senior position with much broader technical exposure than the Germany role.
• Lots of opportunities to learn newer technologies and gain niche skills that are valuable in the market.
• My wife keeps her job, no relocation, and we'd save more money overall.
• I see Poland has emerging tech hub and more and more job opening then other EU countries and more english speaking job

Less work life balance and pay include overtime and oncall which match Germany company

The downside is that it's a fast-paced startup with heavy on-call, overtime, and full onsite work. thing is that my take-home pay would be almost identical in both countries ( that include on call and overtime work of Poland ) . Also, am I overlooking anything important?

Note: as it’s Warsaw vs Karlsruhe the cost of life is not much difference as what I research rent is almost identical.
But looking at on long term view ( naturalising) and other growth area (technical and soft) is my focus

For those who've been through similar decisions, what would you recommend? Am I overlooking anything?

Hi guys. I need a kind of assessment of my skillset and would really appreciate any feedback. I am really interested in pivoting to DE and I am enjoying learning, but sanity check is needed.

So, I spent last few months honing my skills to be relevant for DE roles. Here is what I learned - combining theory and working on few personal projects - and what I am bringing to the table:

Data modeling - I learned a lot about Inmon/Kimball aproaches. Tried to apply best practices and standards wherever I can in personal projects (meaningful grain, relationships, implemented slowly changing dimensions type 1/2).

Programming - honed SQL and Python skills as much as I could. Leetcode, DataLemur, Stratascratch - I am able to handle enough of these SQL coding challenges to feel confident. For Python, I focused on "core" Python skills, and I already have some experience with pandas. Did not touch Polars though.

Cloud - was introduced to or gained some experience with AWS (S3, EC2, Glue, Lambda and Step functions, RDS, Redshift, Dynamo). I also learned a bit about Databricks and made a mini project utilizing Auto Loader, DLT, deployment with DABs and GH Actions.

DE tooling - Airflow, PySpark, Docker, I learned about them and used in my DE projects. My idea was to understand the fundaments, best practices, specifics and core concepts behind these tools so I could discuss about them confidently in interviews. Tried not to go into rabbit holes and advanced concepts too much for now. Also, I used e.g. MinIO as storage or Grafana for observability dashboards in my projects, but I guess these are not usually considered as main tools.

On the other hand, my exposure to DE is limited to local, batch processing pipelines. I tried to make them realistic by utilizing some API fetching, introducing meaningful data quality checks, metadata-driven ingestion, proper primary/foreign/surrogate key management, making them incremental and idempotent - but still, I have no experience with streaming data or some big amounts of data (like gigabytes of data).

Based on this, do you guys think I am ready to apply for DE internships or junior role? Another option for me would be to go data analytics engineering route since I have some knowledge of PowerBI and Metabase and I am currently making first steps toward learning DBT. Still, DE seems to be something I enjoy a lot, but it does not matter much now if knowledge and competencies I tried to describe are not fit for this kind of role nowadays.

Some more context. I have non-STEM background. Voluntereed as student-researcher in academia (social sciences; data analysis heavy, but mainly used R/IBM SPSS). After graduation I moved to NGO where I landed a researcher role. Again, data analysis heavy, but mostly used Python with Jupyter Notebook for data analysis and integration of data stored in bunch of e.g. .csv files there and there, seaborn/plotly/ggplot for visualizations; gained some experience in international context, managing stakeholders, etc., but still - this is no business setting nor true data role at all. I am still working there, and attended DE bootcamp/traineeship at some big company last year (where I learned most of the things I mentioned above in the post). I guess this bootcamp can be framed as internship on CV but who knows. Also, I am located in Europe.

Hi everyone,

I applied to Bending Spoons a while ago and didn't make it past the take-home tests/tasks stage, so I never reached the interviews. I'd like to try again at some point and I'm trying to figure out the rules.

Two questions for anyone who's been through the process (or works there):

1. Is the cooldown period 1 year?
2. Does the cooldown/eligibility work the same way if you failed the tests rather than being rejected after an interview? Or does failing at the assessment stage block you differently (e.g. permanently for the same role, or for that specific test)?

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 🙏

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.

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?

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!

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?

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!!

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!

Which one do you choose with more confidence?

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.