Ask HN: Failing interviews for mid-level SWE in UK, advice please
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*Employment History*
My employment history is like this: Placement year 2018, worked for the full term + summer, graduated 2020, did backend dev in Python at Company A for 7 months, then full stack ASP.NET at company B for 2.5 years, then co-founded my own company and was the sole developer on our software platform, did all the cloud infra in Azure too. That lasted for another 2.5 or so years. This gives me approx. 7 years of professional software development experience.
In May 2025 the company wasn't in a strong financial position, and I started to hunt for jobs. We limped along while I polished it for a launch in September 2025. The site wasn't the success we were hoping. We closed it in February. Despite that, I did learn a lot and my web app development ability is much better as a result.
*Job applications*
Since May 2025, I've applied for almost 100 roles. I've concentrated on roles where I'm not likely to be filtered out, i.e. ASP.NET jobs. I've gotten 8 interviews, two of which went to a second stage.
The most recent interview didn't go brilliantly, my IDE crashed when I attempted a screen capture of it! That said, it was a take home coding exercise, and I explained my decisions, made improvements during the interview, talked them over with the interviewers. My decisions weren't in keeping with the interviewer's expectations, but I had good explanations for my decisions. It was reasonable for a small project, but sure, I'd have designed parts of it differently if it was for a big live web application.
*Help needed*
I would like suggestions to improve my chances of success. I do have a good CV and tailor it slightly for each application. I wrote it myself without using any AI tooling. In my spare time I've obtained several Azure certifications, including Associate Cloud Developer.
I've been reading a PDF "Cracking the Coding Interview". I'm also thinking to:
- revise data structures,
- revise C# design patterns,
- revise the classic C# gotchas about delegates and IEnnumerable vs IQueryable,
- maybe read the books C# in a Nutshell and ASP.NET in Action.
But I wonder how helpful these steps will be, as I've never actually been asked about these questions, but maybe knowing them will make me "talk engineer" rather than come across as "just a coder"?
Beyond this, I'm not sure what else to do. I've never been in such a dry spell before with software jobs.
My location is in Northern Ireland, I've been searching in Belfast mostly but would also be willing to work a remote job from the UK mainland.
Discussion (5 Comments)Read Original on HackerNews
Perhaps sharing your take home exercise might be a more useful avenue for feedback?
I’m not sure how large the market is for ASP.NET developers, but the skills you’ve learned so far are more transferable than you think. Try creating some projects with Django or Rails and spread your wings a bit. Don’t be a monoglot.
A portfolio helps, as well as a personal narrative. Being a solo developer for 2.5 years is good and bad depending on the audience. For example it means you don’t have much recent experience working with a team, and I imagine clunky Belfast ASP.NET companies are not exactly hotbeds of entrepreneurial spirit. Maybe look for smaller companies or startups?
Extremely personally, Azure certifications and such things are worthless, bordering on a negative signal depending on the context. But some people/companies may value them.
Saying you think reading “C# in a Nutshell” is a good idea is concerning because you say you’ve got 6+ years of ASP.NET experience. Was this not using C#? Revision is always good, but identifying why you’re not already comfortable with C# is a good starting point.
Build some solo projects with C#, not using ASP.NET, with some artificial constraints (speed, memory, etc). Then smash them. Could be as simple as parsing a 20GB CSV into memory: start dumb and slow then make it as fast as you possibly can. For me this beats a book on data structures.
Practically speaking, leading your employment experience with work you did as a student is inconsistent with how experienced professionals present themselves…you’ve been out of school nearly a decade.
At this point, the only things important about your education are meeting formal minimum requirements and your ability to leverage your classmates, teachers, and alumni resources into a job lead.
Talk to everyone you have ever worked beside, under, or over. Good luck.
;)