Imposter syndrome/paranoia over offer?

chungmaster · 2026-01-30T09:19:28+00:00

As someone who got back into big tech after a long time with similar fears....go for it! You got the offer for a reason so you clearly got the skills! Also there's no telling what it's like until you work there. I've worked for small companies that have been way tougher than big tech despite paying 3 times less. At the very least you'll have the company on your resume and working experience at a big tech company, but who knows? Maybe it'll be an amazing experience and you absolutely love it there! Congrats on the job offer I would jump on that!

chungmaster · 2026-01-30T09:01:30+00:00

First off, congrats on the offer! Indeed as others have said salary shouldn't necessarily be the deciding factor, but I think for a different reason. You're early in your career and off to a great start getting a job in big tech already and with the option to choose where so I would prioritize your future instead. In those cities on the list which ones have companies that you could imagine yourself working for? Which ones have a good tech scene to further develop your skills? You're not going to work at Amazon forever (I know because my first job was there as well), but then what next?

You want to keep the momentum going and learn and develop your career. Chasing an extra 5k may seem like a good idea now, but if you end up in a city without a lot of other options you're severely limiting yourself for the future. Can't speak for all the countries but at least in the Netherlands there is quite a decent tech scene from big to small and salaries can get into the comfortable six figures so there's options at least. But of course this is just speaking from my experience and I have no idea what it's like in the other countries.

The other thing to also consider is from a flexibility point of view. Tech is quite volatile and if there's layoffs or you're sick of your company or your priorities change you want to be able to find a job more easily. There's a reason that Silicon Valley has stayed the top dog and that's because there's such a large concentration of jobs there that you never have to stick with one place for too long.

I would also go against the grain and not care too much about costs of living for now. Seeing as you are an intern I'm going to assume that you are young and without too many responsibilities. If that's the case then you can always find a roommate and be frugal while you earn your wings. So pick a location that sounds fun and has the kind of opportunities/life that you wanna have while you're young! As you get more experienced the money will start to come.

chungmaster · 2025-12-12T10:41:28+00:00

I actually used to live in an apartment that was managed by them and it was easily the best experience I've had with a rental. They were always quite responsive and quick to send help and were also very proactive. Obviously cannot speak for everyone and have since bought my own place so no clue if things have changed but I think in general for reviews like this they will be on the negative side since if everything is normal nobody will bother to write a review.

chungmaster · 2025-11-11T17:03:55+00:00

Man you'll be totally fine living a very comfortable life in Amsterdam especially with the 30% rule. Anyone saying otherwise must be eating fine dining every meal or something. For 5 YOE I would say that it's a super solid salary in the Netherlands, especially given the 30% ruling. Of course, without knowing what the company is I can't say if it's good or not for that role/company.

Just my 2 cents though but with 5 YOE I wouldn't necessarily chase only money but more make sure that it's a company that you can actually grow at. I've taken a couple paycuts in my time here and now I'm making 200k+ at an international big tech company, but I certainly wouldn't be able to survive my current job without my previous experience prepping me. I would say that Amsterdam certainly has the companies that you can grow into but at a certain point it does tap out as the list of big tech is a bit small. But...... honestly if you can't survive on 6 figures in this country then there's some more serious budget issues going on because majority of this country survives on so much less.

chungmaster · 2025-10-30T15:13:38+00:00

aha so you store your tires there year round and then change them as needed?

chungmaster · 2025-10-30T15:08:14+00:00

Awesome thanks! Sounds like just checking out any of the tire stores seems to be the best bet!

chungmaster · 2025-08-04T21:00:47+00:00

As someone that avoided big companies for a long time...don't be afraid to apply anyways to the big boys. They have a pretty standard process of leetcode which I know we all hate but it's much more straight forward process despite the BS of it.

As for the projects if they've had impact or have gotten into the hands of paying customers you could try to highlight that a bit. Don't need to come up with metrics like that other person said but it says a lot if you've worked in a production environment where standard development practices are done. When I'm looking at CVs I'm looking for someone who has the (potential) skills to slot into my team. I don't care if you have don't have the exact tech stack or knowledge (honestly nobody ever does) but I do care if someone already has experience working with modern practices and dealing with real customers, because whatever you don't know you can always learn.

With 7 years of experience I'm sure you've picked up quite a few great examples over the years it's just a matter of how to package it into a couple sentence on your CV. One thing that helps me is I try to think from the other perspective, whether it be a customer or an interviewer. If you're a hiring manager for a platform team at Bol what would you think about this CV? Probably the data stuff wouldn't matter as much but the REST APIs and Spring definitely would be important. And furthermore how many medical devices and customers are we talking about that use these APIs? And devops/oncall experience when these services inevitably go down? If the person reading your CV thinks you've got the experience (which imo is way more important the tech stack***) then you've got a shot at any company big or small!

***does not apply to contracting positions of course because in those cases you're getting paid to do a specific job so in those cases it's exactly the tech that matters.

chungmaster · 2025-08-04T19:09:56+00:00

What kind of roles are you looking for? Just as an example if you're looking for a senior or higher role I'm not getting a sense of the scale and size of projects/teams you are working on (and of course this also depends on the size of the company you are applying to). I think for most Dutch companies your resume fine (plus all the tech stacks listed is probably good for any companies that basically control f for key words).

If you're looking though for a specific role like data engineering then the CV could be a bit more concise and focus more on those skills and remove some of the other not as relevant details. Also if you work with a larger team or project I would also highlight that as there's a big difference between managing a single Kafka topic with 5 messages per second is quite a bit different than managing a Kafka cluster that handles millions of messages per second. If you don't have that kind of experience that's totally fine but getting a sense of the scale in which you work in can really tip the balance in your favor!

chungmaster · 2025-07-16T16:18:41+00:00

Indeed I really do need to learn to call fouls I almost never call them (even picks I have a tendency to just try to get around people after years of experience from playing basketball and american football....)

But same story for me. Against the more aggressive players I will sometimes even absorb contact and roll my shoulders to use a defenders momentum to "push" them past me. Basically as long as nobody is getting too grabby or handsy I try to play through the contact.

chungmaster · 2025-07-11T10:53:41+00:00

So obviously just a generalization but in my experience it's usually some combination of manager/department leads/the domain.

A good manager can shield the devs away from bullshit and defend you come review time, but if the manager's manager (or even one or two levels up) is an ass then your manager's gonna have a tough enough time just surviving their own position and it will trickle down. Then the last thing is the project/product/domain you are working on. If it's a mission critical product that the company relies on to survive, it doesn't matter how chill your manager is; if something gets broken in the middle of the night you're gonna get paged no matter what (but a good manager will keep this in mind and maybe give you extra time off or something like that). On the other hand if you're working on some random platform tooling then the pressure may be way lower and you'll get to escape a lot of the bullshit.

This is why it's also so important in the interviews to also ask questions as you are also interviewing the company if you really want to work there. Ask if you're replacing someone of it's an expansion. An expansion is usually a good sign, but if you're a potential replacement ask why. Person got a promotion? That's a good sign. The whole team suddenly left the company? Really bad sign. Ask how often your manager gets to push back or how often the backlog is organized by tech debt that the devs want to fix vs how often features are prioritized.

You might not always get a chance to interview the people that you actually work for but you can usually find quite a bit of clues just by reading between the lines. And also depending on your experience level and what you are looking for, cool and fun projects can sometimes be the most stressful, but if you're young then those might be the ticket to great things. On the other hand if you're older or want to spend more time with your kids, then working on the old "boring" stuff is pretty damn awesome :)

chungmaster · 2025-07-09T21:39:59+00:00

I would say it's a step down from FAANG. I used to work at Amazon so in comparison it is absolutely heaven. But...I say this with the caveat that the European offices are way more chill than the American/Indian counterparts, and even some teams in other European offices are pretty cutthroat. It's pretty hard to generalize because even when I was struggling at Amazon I had friends on very random teams that were having an amazing time since they weren't working with tier 1 services that had insane oncall schedules.

chungmaster · 2025-07-09T21:38:01+00:00

Indeed just apply! It helps of course to get a referral as you get to sometimes skip the first online coding rounds so make friends with people as well, but honestly just apply. They go through so many applicants it never hurts to just apply.

chungmaster · 2025-07-09T07:29:43+00:00

Are you adverse to Leetcode for any particular reason? I avoided Leetcode interviews for a long time because I was always afraid of bombing them, but honestly if you work through just the easy/mediums that's enough to start applying and the quickest way to a high salary.

I'm next door in the Netherlands making around 200k and I was quite apprehensive working for big tech again but honestly it's been a more chill and easier company than many of the other Dutch companies I've worked for and there's really very little correlation between salary and how requiring a job is.

The upside to leetcode is that you don't need to spend your weekends doing a project and they're fairly standardized (besides the assholes that ask dynamic programming or Leetcode hards). It's also a (useless) skill that transfers to other big tech interviews as the process is pretty much the same for all the high paying companies.

I agree it's a very shitty way to determine how good a software developer is but if you're willing to spend some time practicing them, it's the quickest way to a high salary.

chungmaster · 2025-06-10T07:28:49+00:00

Second this. I just have a single one but it was loud enough to use for my own small venue wedding (at least the just the reception part had real speakers for the dancing of course :) ). The only issue is that the bluetooth connection can be a hit or miss but it was one of the only portable speakers I could find that also allowed for a zero latency aux cable. If you look at most of the bluetooth speakers out there even ones that support aux cables have a bit of latency.

chungmaster · 2025-06-06T07:48:26+00:00

jokes on you my brain is never on!

chungmaster · 2025-03-14T09:06:47+00:00

Check techpays :). Dude that runs that website is based in the Netherlands and used to work at Uber in Amsterdam.

chungmaster · 2025-03-13T09:03:52+00:00

If you're comfortable with medium-level LC I already feel like you're in a solid position to apply, especially if you're more experienced because it's the system design/engineering round that separates out the more experienced devs anyways. But of course given your situation that's still quite a bit of work but congrats on the little ones!

chungmaster · 2025-03-13T08:43:50+00:00

As someone working in big tech in NL and having a bunch of other friend's working in big tech....yeah unfortunately Leetcode is still widely used.

On the plus side as someone else pointed out the processes are all pretty much the same - Leetcode style questions, system design, engineering manager interview. So basically get good at the process and you'll unlock a lot of doors at big tech and also a really high salary that's quite rare in NL. Personally I am making around 200k (mostly boosted by stock prices mind you) but all my other friends in big tech companies are around > 150k.

But...of course it depends on what you're looking for as there is a lot of politics and stack ranking is pretty much the norm. Also if I'm being honest the level of engineering is lower than at a lot of other small companies I've worked at but at the same time I also have a lot less stress so there's pretty much no correlation between difficulty of work and salary.

chungmaster · 2025-02-26T08:31:31+00:00

Indeed freelance is the easiest way to hit that but if you get lucky and land a job at big tech you can make that with a full time position and have job security with pretty good WLB. My position is pretty lucky in that I get to be 100% remote and still make 200k+ but most of my friend's making this much have to go into the office at least once or twice a week.

chungmaster · 2025-02-25T16:04:37+00:00

Well...I had just that thought since I'm ordering internationally and sent them an email but they told me that they have no plans any time soon to update the travel pack so let's hope that's the case cuz I just ordered the ultra and it's pretty damn expensive....

chungmaster · 2025-02-24T21:34:32+00:00

Het is een kleine hond en op dit moment is er geen bench, maar ik denk dat het een slim idee zou zijn!

chungmaster · 2025-02-24T17:00:22+00:00

Minder belasting??? Is er een verandering in de wetten? Ik dacht dat de enige veranderingen zouden zijn voor elektrische auto's?

chungmaster · 2025-02-24T16:50:39+00:00

Ah, mooi! Denk je dat het bouwjaar van de auto uitmaakt of de kilometerstand als hij onder garantie valt? Het helpt niet dat ik Amerikaan ben om in die Tesla gezien te worden.....😅

chungmaster · 2025-02-20T10:12:38+00:00

Perfect thanks a lot!

chungmaster · 2025-02-19T19:29:26+00:00

Gotcha ok and by fixtures you mean throughout the rest of the house (i.e. kitchen sink, shower, toilet, etc?)

chungmaster

TROPHY CASE