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I did 25+ interviews at 8 different tech companies for a data engineer position in 1 month.

Here is what I learned from this marathon and the current data market

Don't forget to stretch. [Digital Image] https://unsplash.com/@strong18philip
Don’t forget to stretch. [Digital Image] https://unsplash.com/@strong18philip

I got the opportunity to take a break and take time for my family and me. When I was ready to go back out there for work, I decided to do a marathon of interviews and gave me 2 months maximum for finding my next best opportunity. I made a shortlist of 8 companies, went through more than 25+ interviews in total, and got 3 offers on the table 🎉 . This marathon was only possible because all interviews were conducted remotely due to the global pandemic. This article will share my thoughts from this experience and give some insights into the current data job market (mostly EU/DE focus).

About the data engineer market 📊

Full remote option within the country with acceptable Timezone difference as a standard

While big tech companies like FAANG already made the move, I can clearly see that the trend pushes for a full remote option in all job offers.

There are different levels of remote flexibilities, but in general, the minimum is that the company will authorize you to work in the country where they have an office. They assume that you would work in a relatively close timezone to one of your direct teammates.

More Opportunity More Competition

A direct effect on the point above is that there are a lot more opportunities at the moment.

There is a bigger impact if your country has a "tech hub" city like Berlin, Paris, Barcelona. Tech companies now open their city frontier and sometimes open offices in coworking spaces to access local talent. That means that you are not forced to live in that actual tech hub city as long as you live in the corresponding country.

There are also 3rd party companies that help startups grow across the EU/UK by providing a local contract to future employees. These 3rd party services have offices in multiple countries and handle all the paperwork for the employer. As an employee, it’s totally transparent, and you should not have any tax concerns.

Data Engineer is bulling.

Even if we consider the previous points, the number of job ads for data engineers is crazy. Why is that so?

  • Many people realized that before doing fancy Machine learning stuff, you need to be mature on your data = you need data engineers. This statement became more mainstream as the job definition around data became more clear.
  • Data engineer has been scaling beyond the scope. They do more things than they used to be, and inevitably there’s more job for them. That being said, new job titles are emerging to define a specific area of the work, like analytics engineer or data platform engineer. These job titles may replace a bit over time the general "Data Engineer" title.

Equity program as a standard in EU for tech jobs

For some reason, it’s not really in the European culture to give equity programs as part of compensation.

While equity is more something common in the US tech job market, nowadays, I can feel, at least in the EU tech hub cities, it’s starting to be a standard in the offer, and it’s not only reserved for top job title only.

Equity is definitely something that is the most undervalued aspect of compensation in Europe. People are jealous about US salaries, but the biggest part of their compensation comes from equity when you look at the numbers.

However, it still not as much as in the US market, but hey, it’s an improvement.

If you are not familiar with equity programs or want to have a better vision of software engineer salaries in a tech company within the EU, check out this video from Pragmatic Engineer youtube channel!

About the marathon 🏃

Shortlisting the potential companies will smooth first rounds

You don’t want to spend too much time in interviews realizing that the company, in general, is not a good fit. I realize I could avoid such pain if I did my homework properly on the potential company I would like to work for. Here are a couple of questions I was trying to answer before even applying to the company. I would then check if the answers met my requirements.

  • How old is the company?
  • How healthy (financially speaking) is the company? Take a look at CrunchBase. It also gives you insight into funding rounds, etc.
  • What’s the company size? What’s the past growth?
  • What’s the company culture? Do they have a blog/podcast about it? What’s the opinion on glassdoor?
  • Are they active on Open Source projects? Is their GitHub organization active?

With this groundwork, I could easily target where I wanted to work and keep some questions in the backlog for the first rounds.

Doing interviews marathon is great

From time to time, I do random interviews to feel the market and evaluate myself. However, I’ve never done so many interviews in parallel in such a short period. Why? Because it’s a full-time job. Despite this, I think that taking a week off to start such a marathon is definitely worth it.

  • It’s easier to present yourself properly and tackle behavioral interviews. Believe me, after doing it 8 times in 1 week, you get better at it as long as you get feedback and improve. And most of the behavioral questions are pretty much similar.
  • You actually get more data points regarding your skillset, your level, and the salary market.
  • As you start the interviews simultaneously, you will hopefully land offers roughly at the same time. This gives you huge leverage at the end for salary negotiation.

Be open and honest about your marathon, right from the start

In the first rounds, I always mentioned that I was talking to other companies. There’s nothing wrong with that, even after a couple of interviews, as you really need all information in your hands (including an offer) to make the right decision.

Conclusion

Doing this marathon was the best thing I have ever done. I would highly recommend it if you are looking for a new opportunity rather than just overlooking job ads from time to time.

You will spend a lot of your time at that future company, so make sure it’s the right one and take enough data points to make a good decision!


Mehdi OUAZZA

Thanks for reading ! 🤗 🙌 If you enjoyed this, follow me on Medium and LinkedIn for more!


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