Hey everyone,

My apprenticeship is wrapping up and I've learned a ton. I'd already been programming on my own for almost 7 years before it, so at this point I'd say I have solid technical depth. I've been able to dig into pretty much everything: programming (my strongest area), infrastructure, and even some project management.

This isn't just a job for me. It's something I genuinely care about and I'm passionate about the work.

A bit about me: I'm from Switzerland, turning 20, and fluent in both English and German.

The problem: after a few searches, most jobs here ask for 3+, 5+, even 7+ years of experience, and these aren't even labeled "senior." So far I've been filtered out by HR for having "no experience." Has anyone been in the same spot? I'd love to hear how you handled it.

A few specific questions:

• Is fully remote realistic in this situation?
• Does anyone know companies that don't just filter on years of experience?
• Are unsolicited applications worth the effort here?

Thanks!

What is the focus in 2026 for those who have gotten a job recently? Is it DSA? System design? React/TS deep dive? Is it live coding(like building something or solving DSA)?

Any input is valuable. Please mention company size to have an idea if there a differences between the sizes of the company on how they interview.

Whenever I talk to people about their search it splits into two camps: the 'I have 8 specific companies I want and I watch them' people, and the 'I apply to whatever LinkedIn surfaces' people.

Which are you? If you're in the first camp; how are you actually keeping track of 8 different career pages without it eating your evenings?

I am in the targeted approach camp since I have a specific focus on healthcare software companies, but it is annoying to keep 20 tabs open.

.

My 3rd year just ended and honestly, I feel completely lost.

I'm in a Full Stack specialization, and college has covered a lot of technologies over the years, but I don't feel confident in any of them. Most of the time I studied just enough to pass exams, and now I'm realizing that I never really learned how to build things on my own.

If I'm being honest, it feels like I know nothing beyond basic programs and tutorials.

Now internships are coming up, and I'm starting to panic a little because I know I need real skills, not just exam knowledge.

Some seniors have told me to start learning JavaScript and React seriously, but before I commit to anything, I wanted to ask people who are already in the industry or have been in a similar situation.

Has anyone here been this far into their degree and still felt completely behind? What did you do to turn things around?

Any advice would be appreciated.

Posting this because a friend just got an offer from one of the agencies I used to work at and asked what I thought, and 5 years in I struggled to give him a clean answer.

I joined when I was 26, the salary was 1.5x what I'd been making in consumer apps, the work seemed interesting, and the clients were big European fashion and retail names you'd surely recognize.

In my 4th year, I was sitting in client pre-sales meetings as the senior eng voice, and I spent enough of them to notice how much the platform-pick conversation depended on which vendor paid the firm best in commissions.

Once I started seeing it I couldn't unsee it, and the longer I sat in those meetings the more obvious that bias became.

What killed it for me was a project where we knew the platform we'd sold was a bad fit for the brand's scale, 8 months in the founder asked me in a 1 on 1 whether she'd made the right pick, I gave her the company line, and a few weeks later I was applying for in-house roles.

Now I work in-house at one of those brands, and my recommendations sit outside the commission system, which changes what technical decisions I get to make.

What I'll tell my friend is to take it with eyes open, because the people are thoughtful but the firm's incentives quietly shape the advice you give in ways that might take years to notice.

If you moved in-house after agency life, was the salary cut worth it for the autonomy you got back?

Just got an offer from Revolut. Role is 100% focused on the Greek market but requires relocating to Madrid and working remotely from Madrid. I'm currently located in Greece.

Has anyone navigated this? How strict is Revolut about your presence in Madrid in this case? Any flexibility to work from Greece?

Worth asking HR before signing or red flag?

As title says. Sorry if this doesn't really fit with this sub, but I don't really got anyone else to ask.

Graduated in 2024 from a Russell Group university, couldn't find a job for the life of me. Kept getting rejected left and right, had my applications ignored right away each time. One time I even had a recruiter personally call me to say that I'm rejected and how they didn't even bother to look at my CV, which was a bit funny but also kinda hurt.

Used to cry and stress so badly to the point of getting physically ill, thinking I got no chance to enter the industry and how I had wasted my university years on a CS degree, but here I am now. A graduate Software Dev Engineer at Amazon, due to start my first ever job really really soon, and I'm absolutely terrified out of my mind.

I want to say I have no idea how I made it, but that'd be a lie - I do know how. Worked my ass off day and night to do well in the interview loop, prayed to any God out there to help me, and it actually worked. But I am SO scared now, since it's actually real and it's actually happening. After all of these years and all of this doubt, and in FAANG (MAANG?) no less.

I've heard of the term impostor syndrome before, experienced it just a bit, but not to this point. It's hitting me so hard, to the point where I'm a bit convinced that I took the "fake it til you make it" phrase too literally and did fake all of my knowledge and technical abilities in the interviews. How do I deal with this feeling? I'm terrified this is just a mistake and that I just somehow managed to slip through, even though I'm full aware that is not the case. Christ above, I have no idea what I'm gonna do.

I’m trying to understand how CS students find thesis projects that actually match their skills, CV, and interests.

How do you search today, and what is the most frustrating part of finding a project that fits you?

Hi everyone,

I passed the screening call, and now have an upcoming interview with the hiring manager (multiple stages, ofc). This upcoming interview is scheduled for 45 minutes. I understand there is no real prep required, and this interview will be focusing on my career experience and skills but I still want to be as fully prepared as possible.

Has anyone here gone through a similar with Swift? Their careers site has very little information, and given how large the company is, I was really shocked there is hardly anything online - so far Glassdoor is the only useful albeit very limited resource to shed any light, hopefully this helps future candidates.

• What kind of questions should I expect (technical vs. behavioral)?
• How detailed do the case study/investigation scenario questions get?
• Any tips on how to structure my answers so they align with what Swift are looking for?

I would really appreciate any insights or experiences you could share. Thanks in advance!

UK based.

Best,

I have been doing backend development for years, but at each company I was also managing the deployment and the DevOps part, this includes:

- managing the cloud infra with clickops (azure/hetzner/ovh/aws), simple one time configurations

- sshing into the servers

- being the guy who's called each time prod was down

after a while, I got to learn other tools, so now I'm doing everything in IaC (terraform), no more clickops, also doing the ci/cd, monitoring, trying to add better observability, trying to cut the costs..

even if my job is officially "Backend Engineer", I'm spending a lot of time in the infra.

I like it a lot actually, I'm a fan of Linux since many many years, have 4 servers that I manage for my own projects, so having to handle those production ready systems made me learn a lot :)

now about the question: I find Cloud/DevOps/SysAdmin/Infra (don't know which one to chose there) really valuable in the long term as a career, but I'm still advertising myself as a backend dev/engi. -> how should I position myself in the market?

"Backend / Devops" ? -> how can I be both? sounds like a devaluation or greedy.

"Backend / Cloud " -> Maybe?

I mean about the terms, I often find them confusing too. There is a value in just having one expertise on linkedin for example, since you are seen as the "backend guy" rather than the "guy who knows multiple stuff but may not know them that well"

Dear people who work at google. I seek your guidance

I never thought that Team Matching phase would be more difficult than the interviews but here we are. I have a preference towards Zurich, but I'm not sure about the possibility of being accepted there since my recruiter repeatedly mentioned that its "Competitive"

Would you be kind to share how many L4 positions are open at Zurich, London or any EU office?

Also, how many months can one remain in TM? Realistically when do the recruiters basically jump on the next hot candidate and leave you in the dust like a mid-life crisis dad who exchanges the happy ending of his family for a massage?

For some context: I’m from a European country, but not one with top-tier education (not UK, Switzerland, France, or anything like that). I’m just finishing my bachelor’s degree in computer science at the top university in my country, which is around top 200 worldwide.

I’m deciding between doing my master’s at my current university or at a different one that is slightly worse (around top 400 worldwide) and not really as well known as my current one. My goal is to intern at one of the top quant firms next summer as an SWE, but I’m afraid this might lower my chances a bit.

I already have some internship experience, and by the end of summer I’ll have had 2 FAANG internships plus 2 quant SWE internships (not top-tier ones, though). I’m wondering whether choosing the “worse” university will lower my chances of getting interviews in any way. Do recruiters care about this if it is not a top-tier university like ETH or ICL, especially when I already have some experience?

It is not like the other university is bad or anything. I know at least a few people there who got internships or new grad offers this year from companies like js/citadel/hrt, but it is definitely not as respected as my current one.

Thanks

Hi everyone!

I’m planning to apply for roles in Madrid and am aiming for the September/October hiring window. I’m hoping to get a reality check on my current strategy.

For context, I have two major hurdles: I do not speak conversational Spanish yet, and I will require initial authorization. However, I am a dual US/Mexican citizen.

Professionally, I have 5 years of experience as a Full-Stack/Backend developer, primarily working with Java, Python, and TypeScript within the SaaS industry.

To avoid redundancy, I’ve already done some initial research to understand the realities of the Spanish tech job market:

• Salaries are significantly lower compared to the US and other EU hubs.
• The volume of available jobs is smaller and highly competitive.
• I am specifically targeting the September/October window because it seems to be the most optimal for availability/recruiting timelines.

My main questions are:

• Since I hold a Mexican passport, I am eligible for Spain’s 2-year pathway. Does mentioning this upfront make companies more willing to support an international hire?
• Should I mainly target multinational companies that are already known to hire non-EU candidates? Or is it still worth my time taking a chance on medium-sized local companies and startups?
• Realistically, how tough is this specific combination (English-only, Non-EU applicant, 5 YOE SaaS) in Madrid right now?

Thanks in advance for any insights or advice!

Received an offer for a Senior DevOps Engineer role in London. Salary offer is 75K + 16% yearly bonus (based on individual and company performance).

I feel like is a little low compared to average similar salaries in London. (Starting at 80).

I was told at the start that 80 was the figure to expect, however after the first technical interview, was told ‘due to lack of specific experience’ they would expect 75K’.

The interview was rather gruelling, in total it contained 6 interviews and 3 of those were technical.

However after receiving the verbal offer, I was told by the recruiter that they use a ‘compensation’ tool to get the compensation figure per salary and there’s really no room to move up.

I feel disheartened, especially as the process was so long. Should I email a counter-offer to the recruiter next week? She’s also set some time with me to informally meet their team for coffee next week and I can do that before accepting the offer.

I’m a mid level engineer with 3.5 yoe working in Germany. I have some friends who work in the US and are making over 150k $ in low COL cities right after their master’s degree from pretty average universities. I was interviewing for Google Munich and they were offering me 140k € for an L4 position. Sadly I wasn’t able to get an offer. Are there any other companies that pay comparable? I feel really behind.

Hey everyone,

I’m a junior software developer working full-time in a large enterprise project (since April). Before that, I spent ~6 months in the same project as an intern mainly helping the testing team with Selenium automation.

After being hired full-time, my role is officially something like 50% testing / 50% development. The issue is: since April, I have written basically 0 product code.

What I mostly do:

• Automation testing (Java/Selenium)
• defect reporting
• internal tooling
• prototypes/PoCs/testing tooling

I’ve had maybe 3 pair programming sessions with a developer working on a story, but I haven’t received actual dev stories myself.

Context that might matter:

• The team has 13 people including me
• The other 12 have been on the project for ~5 years since the beginning
• Everyone seems to already have fixed responsibilities / domains / “their” services
• Business analysts already work closely with specific developers
• It’s a pretty stable and successful enterprise project

I genuinely want to become a backend developer (Java/Spring), and management knows this. My PM is supportive and knows I want to move more into development, but nothing concrete has happened so far.

I’m unsure whether:

1. this is a normal onboarding/ramp-up period in a large enterprise project and I should be patient, or
2. I’m slowly getting boxed into a QA/test automation role.

I feel a bit excluded from development sometimes (e.g. not invited to certain dev-related meetings), but I’m also aware that maybe I’m just new and the team is highly established.

Would you consider this normal after ~2 months full-time in a legacy/enterprise environment? How much initiative should I take before considering a different team/company?

Would appreciate honest perspectives from people who’ve been in similar situations.

POLIMI (Engineering of Computing Systems) VS Sapienza (Applied Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence) for international Indian student for CS major.

edit1: bachelors 2027-30

Is the division between FTE and contractors noticable? Is any career progression possible (conversion to FTE or role). I heard one or contractors is a tech lead

I have a 2.8 GPA, am sick of lab work and biology classes. I always liked math and problem solving so I think CS may be a better fit.

Folks, can you share the questions that were asked during behavioural round? Any tips or material would also be highly appreciated. I have an upcoming interview. What do they expect to see? Is it actually gonna be one hour of non-stop questioning about my past experiences?

Hi fellas,

How do you manage your studying (if you do any) while having a full time job?
I am currently learning/studying towards AWS Certification and I am cooked.
My brain is cooked at the end of the work day, but then it fries even more after doing some mock tests and/or learning/reading.

For comparison if you're going to the gym you hit different muscle groups each day so that on the day of muscle group X the muscle group Y has room to heal/rest/etc.
In the terms of IT/CS it's always about melting your brain since this is the only tool we use while working.

I am not talking about shallow learning like "oh now I know there is a new CLI tool, nice", I mean in-depth learning on some hard topics for days/weeks.

Where do you get your motivation, energy to learn further?
How do you manage learning new stuff?
Do you just power through?
Do you feel okay? (I am not)

Hello everyone!

I posted a while ago about whether I should stay at Apple in London or take a hedge fund offer. I ended up taking the hedge fund role, so this is a follow-up now that I’ve had some time to experience the move: https://www.reddit.com/r/cscareerquestionsEU/comments/1jm72rs/apple_nyc_vs_hedge_fund_ldn

I previously worked at Apple in a backend role. I stayed on the same team and got promoted to senior relatively quickly, but over time became somewhat disenchanted with the team/org environment.

Part of it was the London satellite-office vibe. It didn’t always feel close to the centre of gravity or as central/product-adjacent as I wanted. I also didn’t always feel the team/org had the level of momentum, ambition, or energy I had expected from Apple.

I then moved to a high-paying hedge fund/finance role in London. The comp jump was very significant, the benefits and office setup are much better, and the technical work is serious. But I’m starting to feel tired of finance and keep wondering whether I’d be more fulfilled at a public-facing, product-led company again.

I’m now wondering whether finance was mainly a compensation correction / money chapter, rather than my actual end goal. I keep thinking about eventually going back to Apple, but only for the right team; ideally more central, closer to product impact, and possibly US-based.

For people who’ve worked in both big tech and hedge funds:

• Did finance end up feeling like an end goal, or mainly a money chapter?
• For those who moved between finance and product-led companies, did the company vision/product actually affect your motivation, or was the experience mostly determined by team/org quality?
• How do you distinguish genuine long-term misfit from nostalgia for a previous company/environment?
• Would you optimise for money for a few more years, or try to correct direction sooner?

One thing I keep coming back to is that when I look at the longer-term path in finance and the roles a few years ahead of me, I’m not sure I see a version of myself I’m excited to become.

Am I over-romanticising big tech/Apple, or is this a reasonable signal that finance may not be my long-term fit?

I recently started at a new Azure cloud consulting company as an Senior Cloud Engineer. The company itself seems fine so far, but my first client assignment feels misaligned.

Before joining, I expected work closer to Azure Integration Services, DevOps and architecture. In practice, the assignment is mostly Azure Data Factory, ETL/data engineering, complex data flows and maintenance.

On top of that, there is budget pressure from the project side. I’ve been told I’m using too many hours and should deliver faster, while I’m already putting in serious effort. Part of the issue is that the work does not fully match my strongest skillset.

I’m still in probation and I’m considering three options:

1. Finish the current assignment professionally and ask my employer for a better-aligned client/project.
2. Escalate earlier that this assignment is not a good fit.
3. Start looking externally again.

How would you handle this without burning bridges? At what point is a first assignment just “not ideal but manageable”, and at what point is it a serious signal that the role/company fit is wrong?

The recruiter mentioned there’ll be a phone screen followed by 3 virtual on-site rounds if I pass. I don’t have any details on what to expect in each round though?

Has anyone recently been through the process and can shed some light?

Hey all!

I'm a recent grad. I am an EU citizen but lived abroad my whole life, and I'm planning to move back. I've completed my info sys degree from a good univeristy, and I'm looking to job hunt! Problem is, I'm not sure what I like. Should I apply for everything and explore as I do? Where do I even apply? I've been using indeed and glassdoor, anything else I should be doing? I also make it a point to apply through company site instead of through linkedin for example.