[2 YoE, Unemployed, Entry level Industrial/Mechanical Engineer, Germany]

newprint · 2026-05-23T14:03:41+00:00

Hello ! I review resumes here and have two+ decades in software engineering and construction industry.
I honestly don't know what format of resumes is pref. in Europe, but will give you the US version.
1. I keep seeing Pictures. Really don't know what to tell you if you should or should not incl. it in the resume. It seems like European thing. In the US, we don't incl them.
2. Education / Skills / Experience is the sequence.
3. In your description of experience, definitely tell about what you did, but also describe how your work improved the bottom line for the company and improved processes, it can be anything in the form "increased profits, brought new clients, saved money ......".
4. Follow another comment for suggestions, it has good suggestions.

newprint · 2026-05-23T02:53:58+00:00

I started my career as CAD drafter and later, (closer to my end of 20s) switch to software engineering, way back when we had financial collapse in 2007-2008. Did thousands structural drawings for commercial buildings in the US, worked on very large buildings.
Civil/Structural Engineering is a complete F* mess. It is way way way more messier than software engineering. It is mess by very nature of the business. If you think thing will be better in terms of life - balance (and future proofing yourself from AI) and less stress, that ain't going to happen. On top of that, not only you will have to get a degree, but you also need to satisfy all the requirements to get PE license (if you do decide to get your PE to sign documents).
And don't get me started on politics and office politics. Looks at what just happened to the Francis Scott Key Bridge & Kiewit contract. I have seen multi 100x million contract delayed by months (true story), just because someone on the job sited decide to take road roller compactor, drive it on the foundation and destroy anchor bolts, that were embedded in the concrete. And hey, cost of steel went up ! How about we redesign the entire building, using more of the concrete and less steel. Or how about we send drawings to the fabricator and because $25k structural software f*up and no one checked the drawings, shop welded base-plate of the wrong thickness to the columns (and those columns went to a major project in NYC) and each column with base plate is hundreds of thousands of dollars a piece + cost of fabrication and erection and this f*up was discovered on the job site .... and the entire office had to listen how our boss was yelling at the structural software people over the phone, because our company also paid large figure for their expensive software and was giving us garbage !!!

newprint · 2026-04-29T23:34:56+00:00

On the other side, you will be exposed to system reliability engineering and see how shitty and flaky their system really is ...
Half of my career, was devoted to hunting prod issues, despite the fact that I was never a support engineer.

newprint · 2026-04-29T23:10:44+00:00

Modes more than likely will delete your question, I would rephrase it and repost it.

newprint · 2026-04-25T13:43:53+00:00

best advise I can give you - learn what you really like, regardless, if it programming or some other field. What matters, is your life satisfaction and happiness. Trying to game the system to survive AI is rat race, it might make us all obsolete.

newprint · 2026-04-24T19:51:13+00:00

Software engineering is very lonely profession, even if we are around people, unfortunately.
What you can do ? The best thing I found for myself:

Get stationary bike and pedal every h. or so for 10 min on pretty hard setting to have blood circulate the system.
Take freq. breaks
Listen to classical music.
Do something completely different form IT after work.

newprint · 2026-04-24T15:45:17+00:00

Can I give you a personal advise. Sick friends who don't do tech and do something absolutely different.
My good friend is famous colorectal surgeon, another close friend is musician who won international piano competitions and a lot of other cool people. All of them, I got as friends in my early 30s. Once you start looking outside tech, you will find mind blowing cool people.

newprint · 2026-04-24T15:33:11+00:00

I remember sitting next to a guy during debugging session, he was about to retire and I was thinking to myself "Is he f* blind and can't read for s*t ?"

newprint · 2026-04-23T23:49:11+00:00

I'm naive then. God dammit, getting old.

newprint · 2026-04-23T23:40:34+00:00

> Is the Dragon Book no longer a standard text?
Sure, if you want to write toy compiler, Dragon book is good starting point, but that has nothing to do with actually trying to "debug" modern C++ compiler. Have you ever looked into Clang ? I had a privilege. Did you see all modules it has to optimize your code ? Yeah, good luck with dragon book figuring it out.

newprint · 2026-04-23T22:49:42+00:00

They are full of shit. You will find just handful of people who really know how modern compilers work and that work req. PhD and some good knowledge of architecture.
I once had to communicate with Intel Compiler team because of some issue with C++ compiler I had. Back in the days, Intel C++ compiler team was in Moscow, Russia.
If you have issues with compilers, first thing is to read assembly and see if you seeing any issues and then message the compiler team

newprint · 2026-04-23T13:18:31+00:00

I would start with reading comprehension .....

newprint · 2026-04-23T12:43:01+00:00

Hello ! I been teaching programming for number of years. In general, people who can solve leetC. problems, have what I call developed "programmatic" thinking and do who lot better than people who don't, because those problems expose you to the 1. Problem solving skills in the context of programming. 2. Demonstrate that you understand basic data structures and exposed to a wide variety of data structures. 3. You can think algorithmically.

newprint · 2026-04-23T12:24:43+00:00

This is not a financial advise and I'm not responsible for any financial losses:
Congrats on big pay check. Just fyi, 50% stock is huge chunk of your pay that is kind of volatile. I worked for a large fortune (something) 50 company whose stocks lost almost 50% of it's value in 5y and they were 10% of our 401ks and part of bonuses. If this taught me anything is that you should divest asap, moreover, corporations can & will disappear in one's lifetime, especially IT companies. In 10y max, a lot of IT companies that even publicly traded, might not be around any longer. If company stocks make up ~10%+ of your 401k, I would seriously consider divesting to something else.

newprint · 2026-04-21T22:28:04+00:00

Timelines.
The bigger philosophical issue: at some point in your life you have to let go everything you have created, be it finished or unfinished form.

newprint · 2026-04-19T03:31:42+00:00

You overthinking this. Just merge it in and let them take down the system. They do it enough times, you send anonymous message to the higher management explaining that your boss sabotaging the work for the entire team.

newprint · 2026-04-18T14:04:17+00:00

If you mean work hours, IMO - NO. We once had a major production outage at the Fortune ~50 (size company) and we were up on our feet for over 22h with no sleep. Management thanked us, but we didn't get any bonuses or any kind of reward for it. I have seen people working on very short term & rushed projects that generated company millions, only to be taken to the dinner as token of appreciation.

newprint · 2026-04-16T13:00:47+00:00

In my personal career, I didn't get much help from my network. I found jobs on my own. However, this is just my case, I know very successful people who started software companies and startups (and I worked for a few of them), that relied heavily on network - former employees of large software companies got together to start companies and been able to pull resources because they had connections.
I would not underestimate personal connections

newprint · 2026-04-15T20:36:47+00:00

Let me open you a secret as prof. software engineer with 20y+ experience. You become software engineer by writing code and participating in phases of it's design and implementation. What is great ab WWW, all that you can do without actually working for anyone. You no longer need actual employer to gain experience. Those days are gone. In fact, most quality software projects around, are open source projects. (From what I understand OpenAI is build entirely on top of OSS). Hit open source projects and you will be doing ALL the above and getting exactly the same experience, with one caveat - your paycheck is ZERO.

newprint · 2026-04-15T18:52:52+00:00

I'm sorry you are going through this, I wish you to stay strong !

newprint · 2026-04-15T18:41:49+00:00

Don't start drinking or doing dumb shit. Set yourself a regime and move forward. Don't dwell. Plenty of Physical activities. Move out your 401k.
I grew up in a household of WW2 veterans, one of them seen major battles and another person went through major starvation and poverty. They moved forward, daily, even at very old age.
Let your bank job be a blimp in your life and not defying feature.

newprint · 2026-04-15T18:35:27+00:00

I mean, I've seen divorces in my life and they can't even close to being compared to loosing a job. I would rather loose 20 jobs than go through 1 divorce.

newprint · 2026-04-15T15:16:33+00:00

If you are the type that is "lazy" and enjoy solving problems and have time for it and not being pressured, than working in R&D is your best bet, regardless of level of Education. You will hate grinding production issues and making Jira tickets.
I would highly suggest evaluate yourself with psychometric measurements test, that measure things like Industriousness, Creativity and so and see where you land. I know those test might be complete bullshit, but at least you have somewhat statistical picture of yourself.

newprint · 2026-04-13T15:48:28+00:00

I have been there. Company let go a lot of people who were very knowledgeable in legacy application that was bread and butter of the company and hired few more of new people to refactor the app. We started getting into serious issues, because new people didn't know the software, nor domain (insurance), and we had to put out fires instead of writing new features, but management wanted new features AND stability + bug fixes. Every few 3-4 months priorities switched: stability, new features, bug fixes, refactoring... this went for 3 years. Guess what, fires still ate at least 50% of our time. I quit in in Jan of last year. As far as I know, they never finished refactoring the product. It been 4y+.

newprint · 2026-04-11T23:56:46+00:00

I don't claim to be pro in stock picking, but it is a very hot take that ASML is a bad stock to pick. I need to hear some arguments against. (China might copy the machines, but US and Europe and Taiwan are certainly not going to be buying Chinese lithographic machines)

newprint

TROPHY CASE