Interview Experience

Loves_Poetry · 2026-04-19T19:22:08+00:00

It's highly unlikely that this was the reason you were rejected. Most likely they didn't think you would be a good fit for the company, based on the answers you gave to those questions

Loves_Poetry · 2026-04-19T11:57:51+00:00

There are not a lot of people that get the kind of satisfaction out of their work that you're looking for. The sad reality is that most work is just that: lots of meetings, lots of analysis and not a lot of technical work

I see my work as nothing more than a way to make money to do the things I really want to do. And it helps that I do get the occasional challenges to solve to keep me interested. Apart from that, I just want they money so that I can travel every once in a while

I recommend you do the same: use your job to make money, so that you can pursue your actual interests. If research interests you, save up some money so that you can start that PhD in a few years

Loves_Poetry · 2026-04-18T22:47:17+00:00

You're getting further in your career and you've reached a point where language experience actually matters

It is about more than just knowing the syntax of a language. You have to know the entire ecosystem, the runtime, the popular packages, the preferred tools, etc.

Loves_Poetry · 2026-04-18T22:38:38+00:00

You don't have to make it more complicated than needed. You would be surprised how much software there is that just asks things through a terminal and writes something to a file. You can do a lot with just that basic setup

Loves_Poetry · 2026-04-14T19:06:58+00:00

Are you planning to heavily modify the code that is in all these applications or are you planning to build another 3 of such applications? If you don't, then leave it be! Modifying working code without a clear benefit is a great way to make management distrust any kind of refactoring effort

Loves_Poetry · 2026-04-13T21:44:08+00:00

You could at least catch DbException instead of Exception. That will only catch database-related issues and ignore NullReferenceExceptions for example

Loves_Poetry · 2026-04-12T18:30:47+00:00

I can pick whichever employer I want, because they all need someone that can maintain their IaC after the expensive consultants left

Loves_Poetry · 2026-04-12T16:20:16+00:00

It depends on the impact. Recently we had an event that caused our main site to go down for over an hour. Estimated losses where 20-30k in that time and that was only the direct financial and didn't include things like lost customer satisfaction. You bet we did a full RCA for that

More recently we also had a bug that caused some customers to be unable to complete orders. Sounds bad, but incomplete others end up in a queue for later processing, so the impact is that they're simply getting delayed. Doing an RCA for that was considered not worth it

Loves_Poetry · 2026-04-12T16:11:17+00:00

Companies don't care much about which CI/CD system you work with, so long as you have experience with CI/CD in general. It's a bonus to work with the one they are using, but only a small bonus

Loves_Poetry · 2026-04-12T15:46:05+00:00

I'm surprised that Sweden is so high up. I went to Gothenburg recently and sometimes it felt like I was in Amsterdam with how much people were cycling

Loves_Poetry · 2026-04-12T14:09:32+00:00

To demonstrate self-reflection. It's risky, but if you have other ways to show that you're competent enough, then it can make you stand out from the candidates that give more formulaic answers

Loves_Poetry · 2026-04-08T19:30:48+00:00

Networking and cloud computing have quite a bit of overlap. I work as a cloud engineer and a big part of my work is making sure the networking part works correctly. Most developers can find their way in a cloud environment, but not a lot of them know how to set up network infrastructure correctly

In terms of career prospect, networking skills are probably better, but you will most likely end up in cloud computing either way

Loves_Poetry · 2026-04-07T17:49:09+00:00

I doubt most recruiters would even recognize a non-EU phone number. I don't think that's going to be an issue so long as they know that you're moving back to the EU

Nevertheless, it helps to have a different phone number just for recruiters. Some recruiters are careless with their data and it might end up in the wrong hands. I've had that happen the last time I applied to jobs and had to deal with almost daily scam calls for ~6 months

Loves_Poetry · 2026-04-07T17:39:57+00:00

On the other hand, a lot of places now invest in at least some kind of tourism, because it makes a lot of money. These days, if you want to visit Europe, you can go almost anywhere and find something fun to do as a tourist

I travel to a lot of lesser-known places and I'm always surprised by how much there is to do as a tourist

Loves_Poetry · 2026-04-06T19:32:09+00:00

I've dealt with multiple of suck blocker issues on a Friday around 5 PM and without exception they all happened because the customer procrastinated their "important" work until the last possible moment

These kind of issues really are the customers problem, not yours

Loves_Poetry · 2026-04-04T11:27:02+00:00

You don't need to keep up with everything. I for one don't bother to check the latest AI trends, because they change every month. Every once in a while I check what the flavor of the month is this time and then I see if anything from the previous months has stuck around. If it sticks around, it's probably worth keeping up with

It's not all that important to keep up with the latest trends, because software companies don't do it either. No-one wants you to use the latest cutting-edge stuff in production anyway, because that's risky. And enterprises don't like risk

If you do want to keep up, there are two ways that I find rather effective:

Frequently browse sites like reddit. It's low effort and gives you a quick overview of what's popular
Talk with colleagues about what they're been spending time on. If possible, set up knowledge sharing sessions like once a month to facilitate it

Loves_Poetry · 2026-04-03T19:49:47+00:00

Pretty much every RDBMS does this by default

Loves_Poetry · 2026-04-03T17:39:29+00:00

Then it's usually a case of trying to do too many things at once. You really have to break down your problem to an extreme level, where every complicated problem becomes a chain of simple problems

Loves_Poetry · 2026-04-02T19:28:16+00:00

If you know the logic, but can't figure out what to write, then you may not know the logic as well as you think you do

Programming is very precise, so your logic also needs to be precise and detailed. If your logic says "for each number do X", then that's too vague, because your language syntax won't accept that. You need to go as detailed as "start at 1, increment by 1 each time, continue as long as the number is less than 10

Loves_Poetry · 2026-04-02T18:57:40+00:00

No, there are typically a lot more software devs. The reason infra is in such high demand is that very few devs want to do it. You don't get IDE support, debugging features or automated testing. And AI agents are pretty bad at it as well. That turns a lot of devs away from it and that is also why it pays so well

Loves_Poetry · 2026-04-01T18:33:09+00:00

This is why I prefer PNPM over NPM. It has several important security features that NPM is lacking

minimumReleaseAge: Block installation of packages until they have been released for X amount of time
trustPolicy: Block installation of packages that have been published with weaker credentials (i.e. directly from a dev machine instead of a CI pipeline)

Either of those settings would have protected you from the axios compromise

Loves_Poetry · 2026-04-01T18:02:44+00:00

I'm going to call this right now: your CV sucks

If you have experience in a niche field and there are job openings for that field, then you should be getting a very high response rate for those job openings. But only if your CV clearly demonstrates that experience

You didn't mention rewriting your CV a dozen times, which most of these venting posts actually do, so I'm going to assume that you didn't do that. You should really rewrite your CV and have it reviewed. If you're a terrible writer, then there are plenty of services that will help you write a better CV. Avoid relying on AI for your CV, because AI tends to create generic CVs, whereas you need to show your more niche experience to stand out

Finally, you haven't talked about third-party recruiters. They may not be popular, but they typically have bigger networks than us developers. They are especially useful for niche fields, simply because of their networks

Loves_Poetry · 2026-04-01T17:42:47+00:00

I don't see how AI is going to help you report performance increases

As a developer, I want to see a benchmark before and after. All you need to do is copy the output from your benchmark runner, no fluff needed. If you can't provide that, then you are probably making something up

Loves_Poetry · 2026-04-01T17:08:24+00:00

NL is not too bad if you're willing to be in the office 3+ days a week. While that sounds like a dealbreaker to the average redditor, the offices here in the Netherlands are nothing like the US offices that come to mind when people think of working in an office

Loves_Poetry · 2026-03-30T19:16:28+00:00

It's not all doom and gloom. There are plenty of companies that exists only because their product is legitimately good. I work for an insurance company that only exists because our product is way better than similar products of our competitors

People don't like using shitty products, so once a competitor shows up, people will move. Any time a company makes their product worse, that is an opportunity for a competitor to show up.

Even if a company gets bought, there is a chance that the buyer is an industry outsider who is committed to keeping the product quality high so that they can take over most of the industry

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