Hello!

I received an offer for a company in Amsterdam.

I would work in the ML env for a small company, never been in NL in my life. Currently I work as an AI engineer, mostly in the Agentic AI env, so I would go back to a topic I really like. I have around 4 YoE, despite being really 2.5/3 in ML.

They told me the pay is around 75k (5.3k x 12 x 8% x 10%).

Against my current net pay of ~2.4k in Italy, I am wondering if it would be enough. They didn't specify the amount of bonus if any, probably they will formalise tomorrow. I can apply for 30% ruling.

I have read that the situation in Amsterdam for housing is pretty harsh, so I am a bit hesitant that I would save less than current (I have around 200 euro expenses and that's it).

Do you think it is a good amount? Should I push for more given my background and YoE?

Hello,

Just a vent.

I relocated to Germany around 6 years ago. Switched titles, started from the ordinary SWE position to lead, principal, staff level roles.

And in the end I grew from 68k (2020) -> 75k -> 78k (2022) -> 95k (2022) and stuck for a long time, dropped to bare minimum 1500 euro net / month for 3 months, unemployed for 8 months during period of 2024-2025, rebuilt myself up to 80k in 2025, 95k again in the beginning of 2026 and finally reached 100k.

And I feel... empty.

3 major steps in my career up to principal / director / staff lavel, German from 0 to B2. New german passport.

Berlin. Rent is expensive, groceries are expensive. There are more junkies in a city, more homeless and crazy scary people, more graffity.

Big brands are leaving the city and closing stores like Galleries Lafayett, Maje, Sandro e.t.c.

My initial salary was 68k which is around 84k in current money.

84 -> 100k for 6 years of my life and 3 major career steps feels unfair.

AfD is on the rise. Economy stagnates.

And yes, I think about relocation more and more. We pay already high taxes, but it doesn't feel fair to people who dedicated life and a soul to the profession they love.

I would try my best to relocate to Switzerland or other countries for better opportunities.

I heard from Polish and danish guys they told like their companies are full booked, they got projects left and right....

and they got paid quite well..

As the title says

So I have an interview coming up, the live coding round and I was wondering if anyone here gave it already and how was the experience? Also I was told that I might have to move to another country so I was wondering if anyone knew anything about that?

Working and looking for a job in France?

Hey guys,

21 year old Irish man here, looking to go work and live abroad in France ideally in the Paris/bordeaux/lyon/marseille areas…

Only issue is im finding it really hard to find good websites and places in/around Ireland to be applying for jobs in France, perhaps it’s silly to look here for a job there but i have experience in retail, hospitality, management, food preparation and serving, key holding responsibilities.

Does anyone know/know any websites or companies perhaps that can help me out with my search..

I’m currently studying french via Duolingo and will also be beginnning actual french classes but people also say that the best way to learn is just go with learning the basics and learn as you go.

Any help is really appreciated and thanks in advance…

Hey everyone,

I have been contacted by a Revolut headhunter for a position as a Back-end engineer for their Graduate Programme, I took all interviews and passed.

I am feeling uneasy though, as I currently have a job I like in my home country.

The job I currently have is not that well paying, but I have a great relationship with my colleagues, have a good WLB and a indefinite contract.

Revolut's offer would require me to relocate to another country I do not know, and for a 1-year long contract. They pay is really good (50.5K euros + 30% benefit, VS 35.5K euros + 1.3K euros benefit) but I am feeling a lot of distress for this jump into the unknown.

Is there anyone currently working with Revolut that can answer some questions? Like what would the WLB be? I saw online posts of people saying that you could be laid off after a few months, and that would NOT be great after having relocated to a new country.

Do you have any feedback on the programme?

Every country is in southern Europe.

Thank you.

I graduated 3.5 years ago into the bad tech job market and decided since I cant find a job I will make apps and try to monetize them, but im finally starting to lose motivation. Everytime i open my code editor now i feel like im procrastinating not working. It feels as if i turned on my xbox to game and after working 8 hours I feel like I acomplished zero and wasted a day of my life. Is this a worry that after almost 8 years I will have not earned one cent from programming and will never earn one cent. How do you guys stay motivated?

I am a 22 yr old Indian student who is doing my masters in Leibniz University (Informatik) since April 2026. I have 1.6yrs of experience as an Associate Software Engineer and i have been applying to companies in DE, NL, DE, and in Nordic countries (all rejected except for some which says "under evaluation").

Is there any experienced people that i can reach out for suggestions and tips abt job application in EU and I would appreciate honest opinions from Europeans and people who have made a similar move.

My goal is to build a long-term career in Europe and eventually settle here.

Hi everyone,

I recently accepted my first job in Germany as a Telecommunications Engineer with a consulting company and will start next month. My contract is full-time and unlimited (unbefristet), with a 6-month probation period.

I have been considered for two customer projects. One is currently ongoing, while the second one is currently on hold. If I choose the ongoing project, I would still need to have an interview with the client before being assigned to it.

The company explained to me that, as a consultant, my work is mainly tied to customer projects. If I am not assigned to a project, there may not be much work for me to do.

My salary is paid by the consulting company regardless, but I'm now wondering: what happens if I don't get assigned to a project during the probation period? Could this become a reason for them to let me go during the Probezeit?

I found this job after 14 months of struggling to find a position, so I'm honestly scared of ending up back in that situation again.

I accepted the offer because I really liked the company and the role, but now I'm having second thoughts and wondering whether I should have thought more carefully about the project-based nature of consulting.

For people working in consulting in Germany: Is this normal? Should I be concerned, or am I overthinking it?

I see companies with fewer than 10 developers advertising that they build AI and automation solutions to help other companies.

And after paying dev's salary and everything they earn 1m in profits.

As the title says

Hi there does anyone know a way for me to work remote in any area? I’m pretty adaptable and I have experience in igaming and marketing, I lost my previous job and I really need to find one quick

Hi everyone,

I'm trying to figure out the smartest career move over the next 6–12 months to increase my salary and make up for the career transition I deliberately took.

Background

I'm a engineer by education. My first ~3 years of experience were as a Delivery Manager at a fintech, where I developed strong PM, stakeholder and delivery skills, but essentially did no coding.

6 months ago, I moved into a Product Engineer role at a very early-stage startup, taking a ~22% pay cut:

• Previous salary: €32k
• Current salary: €25k
• ~1.5 years professional development experience
• ~1 year personal coding/projects
• MERN + AI/agentic development

Since joining, I've been working on AI agents/automation, system architecture, and taking features from product idea → architecture → code → review → delivery, including customer interaction and SDLC automation.

So I'm becoming a hybrid of engineering, product and delivery rather than a traditional developer.

I'd ideally like to reach ~€35k within the next 6–12 months, while keeping remote flexibility. €32k is the minimum I'd consider a successful recovery.

I see 3 possible paths

A. AI / Agentic / Automation Engineer

Go all-in on engineering and target more traditional/corporate AI engineering roles.

Hardest transition, since I'll only have ~2 years of professional engineering experience, but potentially the highest long-term ceiling.

B. 0→1 Product Engineer

Double down on my hybrid profile: someone who can take a problem from customer/product idea → architecture → implementation → delivery.

This seems particularly suited to startups/scaleups with small teams, but I'm unsure whether companies actually value/hire for this profile or just see "2 years of dev experience" and consider me junior.

C. Technical Product / Delivery

Return to Technical PM / Technical Delivery / Technical Project Management, but with much stronger technical credibility and actual involvement in the SDLC.

This is clearly the easiest transition given my background, but risks taking me back toward the type of role I left because I wanted to build things.

What would you do?

If your goal were €35k+ within 6–12 months, which path would you bet on?

C = easiest transition → B = medium → A = hardest

But is that also the right order in terms of probability of landing a €35k+ role?

I'm particularly interested in:

• Is ~2 years of engineering experience enough to target €35k AI/Agentic roles?
• Is the 0→1 Product Engineer profile actually valuable/marketable?
• Would my PM + engineering background make C more valuable than starting over as an engineer?
• Would you prioritize getting the salary increase now, or spend another 1–2 years building engineering depth for a higher long-term ceiling?

I feel like the best-paying roles with better benefits are often in niches where the combination of skills is relatively rare. That's one reason I'm leaning towards B: instead of competing with other developers purely on technical depth, I could leverage the combination of engineering + product + delivery + customer-facing skills + AI.

Does that make sense as a career strategy, or am I overestimating the value of being a generalist?

I'd really appreciate opinions from people who hire for these kinds of roles or have made a similar transition.

Disclaimer: I used AI to help organize and structure my thoughts here because I tend to ramble when writing. The situation, experience and opinions are my own.

I sometimes see their posts while I was scrolling Linkedin and they wrote like

>I have read XYZ programming books and built XYZ app

>here is the link go check it.

Ngl I was in the same boat like them.

I got fired when I had only 1 yoe and It took me 5 months luckily to get a new job again.

Hopefully they find a new job soon.

--

Not sure if it has to do with ageism as well...

However I keep hearing "Who you know is better what you know" when it comes to find a job

I'm an embedded systems dev with 9 y.o. Here in Germany the vast majority (85%?) of embedded jobs seem to be either explicitly only in German or at least require German B1/B2. I guess embedded / hardware being a more slow, traditional company field is to blame for that. This means that at any given time there are only 1-2 suitable-ish job postings in my area each month.

I'm pretty unhappy with my current employer and am passively looking at my options. The original plan is to be applying to those English-only positions but I'm seriously starting to consider taking a work break for focused German study and then be able to apply for the whole range of jobs in the embedded space, not only the English-based ones. The Goethe Institute estimates that 6 months of full-ish time German study would put me at B1/B2 level in half a year.

Has anyone done anything like that? Any thoughts / nuggets of wisdom?

For context, I have around 10 years of experience in software engineering and I’m currently looking mostly at Senior/Staff-level roles in Germany/Europe. My background is mainly backend/platform/infrastructure, with some engineering leadership and more recently AI adoption/strategy work.
I’ve been interviewing for the last few months and I’m noticing a weird pattern.
I’m not really getting rejected. I just keep ending up in limbo.

The clearest example is one company where I originally interviewed for a Staff/L6 position. I went through the process and was told I had passed, but shortly afterwards they changed their hiring plan and cancelled the role.

A few weeks later they came back to me for another position. I interviewed again, including additional interviews because the role was slightly different. Passed those too.
Then the hiring manager changed his mind about what he wanted to hire.
So now they’re apparently trying to find another position for me somewhere else in the company.

I had another process recently for a staff AI/engineering role where, after speaking with the team, it felt like they hadn’t fully figured out whether they wanted an engineer, an AI strategist, or someone doing organisational transformation.
The interviewers and I basically went into the conversation with different ideas of what the job was.

And I’m currently halfway through another process that seems to be going well, but at this point I’ve learned not to read much into that.

I’m curious if other people interviewing at Senior/Staff+ level in Europe are seeing the same thing.

Are companies starting hiring processes before the headcount/scope/org structure is actually settled?

And for hiring managers here: is this just more common at Staff+ because these roles are less clearly defined and easier to cancel or reshape?

The other thing I’m struggling with is how to treat these situations as a candidate. If a company says “you passed, we like you, we’re trying to find another role for you”, do you actually give that any weight?

The part I’m less sure about is how seriously to take it when a company says “you passed, we like you, we’re trying to find another role for you.”
In your experience, does that usually turn into something, or is it mostly a polite way of keeping a candidate around while plans are still unclear?

Interested to hear if others are having similar experiences, especially in Germany / the EU.

For those who have worked with Polish developers or teams, what do you think actually makes Poland work well as a nearshore location?

I’m less interested in rankings or salary comparisons and more curious about the everyday side of it.

How have you found communication, reliability, ownership and collaboration with Polish teams? And if you’ve also worked with teams in countries like Romania, Bulgaria or Ukraine, did you notice any meaningful differences?

Would be good to hear what your experience has actually been like.

I have 7+ YOE and I can not get a single interview outside of my town. I have no problem getting interviews where I live (Budapest), but it seems to me like noone is interested in hiring foreign talent.

At the same time, there is a way, but I don't know what is the way. My company has hundreds of people who got relocated to here from another country.

Before you ask why I don't ask them, I do. But it's hard to find the time to chat with someone long enough to discuss this information in a professional environment.

I recently moved out of a 3 year research position for the industry. Given that it gets harder and harder to land a job in the industry, I decided to pivot outside the safety net of the research centre. Ultimately, after many ghosts, failed screening and final rounds, I got an offer after 5 rounds at a pre revenue startup, with a severely low offer, that got me questioning my competencies completely.

3 months in, the ride has been much more fast paced than I expected. When I onboarded, I was asked to start contributing from week 2, and was pointed out to an ocean of outdated Confluence pages, full of AI generated content (all words and zero talking). Not enough time to get knowledgeable about the codebase, nor the product itself.

I'm full of anxiety, imposter syndrome and constantly stressed. The development team is small (5 guys). The fellow developers, apart from the head, have been absorbed by internships through their degrees.

The two guys use Claude for everything, from programming to documentation. I am tired of seeing em dashes (—) everywhere. PRs are long, with tons of modifications and thousands of changed lines. I am told to not spend more than an hour at each PR. Yet, with so many changes, I find it completely overwhelming. One guy uses Claude for code reviews, which end with long, AI comments that are full of complex, nitpicky issues that are, to my knowledge, unlikely to be spotted and formatted within such a small timeframe (no way you spot a potential memory leak or that complex dataframe operation will result in errors in a hour, without consulting an LLM, all written in perfect English with em-dashes). The other day, I was given to review a 40 page document, which was full of AI slop. Yet, I provide feedback and correct things, especially in the theoretical side, that AI can't catch and it slips through into the product without the development team noticing (no specialization degrees after all). It's either me who spots something due to my education and research experience (e.g. this change in your code causes data leakage) or I get asked for my input and how to guide things (even though we have a team leader).

The rest of developers work overtime constatly and on weekends to keep up with the sprints and everything. It just feels that I cannot keep up on knowing what gets written, merged and documented. The pressure on sprints and delivery feels very real. Instead of taking the time on an implementation, the vibe is "we gave this 5 story points, it must be done by tomorrow". The founders bombard everyone with papers to read to stay up to date with the competition, and also actively say to spend our free time providing ideas and brainstorming for next directions.

Then Claude does the work, nobody has time to review it properly, gets merged into the development branch, and then who cares, move on to the next story until you find implementation errors. This whole thing with AI is resulting in zero ownership and accountability. How can someone deliver thousands of lines of code in two days, when he can't even write a line without it or remember what the solution in his own PR was? The founders are completely aware of all this situation, as well as the team leader.

In my mind I have the following choices:

- Given the market situation, swallow the pill, work normal hours just by doing the minimum work needed (Im not paid high enough to work extra hours and weekends) and pivot when needed

- Grind 100% on it so that I can negotiate a better salary in the future within the company, or pivot somewhere else when a better offer comes

I am grateful to any career advice on more experience people on how I can get the most out of this situation. I am just a guy looking for some work life balance, without having to work all day and night for peanuts. This feels so unexpected compared to my previous employment, and I cannot understand whether it's me who's at fault, the company's culture and practices or just how the market works atm.

I’m a 28-year-old Japanese cloud engineer with 3 years of experience and B2 English. I’m exploring job opportunities in Poland, Germany, and the Netherlands. Which country offers the best environment for cloud engineers? Is my experience level competitive for these markets?

I'm 26, a non-EU citizen living in the EU. I've been working in hospitality for 7 years. I speak German (B2) and English fluently.

I want to switch into IT and build skills for long-term, stable remote work. Since I'm a non-EU citizen, I need a career that is location-independent and not tied to a specific office or country.

I'm currently deciding what to study and would appreciate advice on:

• What field should I focus on? IT support? Helpdesk? Web development? Cybersecurity?
• Should I go to vocational school, university, or do online courses/certifications?
• Is a formal degree necessary in Europe for entry-level IT roles, or is experience and certifications enough?
• What entry-level IT roles are best for someone making a career switch?

I'm just starting to learn and would appreciate any guidance on how to get started.

Thank you.