We recently spoke to Arash, one of the first Imagine Fellows from Afghanistan who has received a job offer from Vertrical, a company in Germany.

Arash, tell us about yourself, who are you?

I am an Afghan citizen born in Saudi Arabia and moved to Afghanistan at the age of 15 years old. I finished my high school in Kabul and my bachelor's degree at the Kabul Polytechnic University. I was a Database Developer in Kabul, Afghanistan.

• Years of work experience: 3 years
• Stack: Nodejs, MongoDB, PostgreSQL, Ruby on Rails, ExpressJs
• Studies: Bachelor of Information Technology

What’s your background?

Here’s my full version, dive in! I was born in Saudi Arabia and moved to Afghanistan at the age of 15 years old. I finished my high school in Kabul and my bachelor's degree at the Kabul Polytechnic University.

Ever since I was done with High school, my goal was to move to a first-world country where there is absolute equality in society, no difference or discrimination among people based on their ethnicity or origin.

A country where one could foresee that he/she is settled and a permanent resident/citizen. A place where instead of focusing on going to a better place, one could focus on benefiting humanity.

My application with Imagine Foundation started in 2018 upon my university graduation.

At first, I was a little bit skeptical and thought of it as a maybe kind of opportunity. I had a short introductory interview with one of Imagine’s team members, in which we discussed my experience in IT and software development in precise, after which I was told that I still needed some hands-on professional experience to be considered in the European job market. This was true, my experience at the time was around 1 year working as a Database Developer at the Kabul Police HQ. I didn’t know much about software development nor did I have any completed projects of any sort. During this time, I was trying hard to gain as much experience as possible by either full-time or freelance opportunities both inside Afghanistan and abroad.

Getting hired in Afghanistan was very difficult for me, I couldn’t get a full-time job in Kabul after Kabul Police HQ. I was struggling for around two years, after which I moved back to Saudi Arabia on a student visa and decided to pursue my goal from there since it was a slightly better environment than Afghanistan. I started learning programming and web developing by reading books and online tutorials, after a year and a half in Saudi Arabia, I was finally hired by a tech company as a Software Developer, during my first two months, I was actively trying to learn as much as I could in regards to building and deploying a web application.

And then, when Kabul fell, I received an email from Johann from Imagine Foundation saying they’ve initiated a program specifically for Afghan talent in light of the horrible ongoing situation.

The program was called Talent-Airlift-Afghanistan. It was a specific program with a clear vision to extract and relocate Afghans with work experience and skills that are needed in Germany and Europe in general.

I applied and after a few days of my application, companies started contacting me by email.

They were saying they’re interested in having an interview to discuss my suitability for the role they have vacant at their companies.

At this point, my skepticism started to clear. I saw that there are truly people in the world that are keen to help other people in need if they could, so I decided to join them by attending all the interviews and answering as much as I could in the technical interviews.

How did you get hired at Vertrical?

I was first contacted by Nils, Vertrical’s CEO in Linkedin, encouraging me to apply for one of their vacant roles on the company’s career page (check it out here). I did, and a few days later I was invited to an interview with Tim — Team Lead. On the day of the interview, I remember I was very positive and completely believing that it can work and that I’m on the right way.

The interview started with a brief introduction of the company and then questions about myself and relative to whether I could be a good company fit. After that, we moved into technical questions, both broad and deep knowledge kinds of questions. I remember I didn’t know the answer to a few, but that seemed to be acceptable as long as I showed how I was approaching the questions and a certain level of curiosity to learn and improve myself.

Two weeks later, Friday around noon, I got an email with a subject line ‘Your interviews with Vertrical’ saying that I was offered the position and that they’d be happy to have me on their team, and discussing the process for a visa.

I couldn’t believe it, I honestly could not believe it!

I went and asked Nils about whether it was true, and yes, he said, Yes, indeed we would very much like to offer you the position. I was thrilled, and I couldn’t wait to start the visa process with Localyze.

What’s 1 piece of advice you’d have for other aspiring TAA Fellows seeking a job in Germany?

I would say: believe in it and it will happen.

Put a lot of quality thought into your CV. I found this article by Imagine to be extremely useful. In interviews, show your human side and also portray yourself as a friend not only as an employee. And remember, don’t get stressed if you don’t know the answer to a question, work ethics, and a good personality goes a long way.

Can you share a tool that has helped you get the job?

This article by Team Imagine helped me a lot better understand how German companies hire, read it here. I read it 3x!

Can you share your CV?

Here is an anonymized version of my CV. You will see that if you are a software engineer, you probably have similar skills to me. If I can make it happen, you can too! I took out a bit of the formatting, and I’d strongly advise you to have a CV that has no more than one page.

That’s it. We hope you enjoyed the read. Now it’s time for action. As always, we are rooting for you.

Keep us posted.

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Meet Talent Acquisition Leads Mirela Stefan and Molly Barrett from Project A Ventures in Berlin. Project A is one of Berlin’s premier VC funds, attracting about 1000 applications per month.

Fernanda (Co-Founder & COO Imagine Foundation, Moderator): Hello everyone, today we have our second “Ask us Anything” Meeting. The topic today is recruitment in Berlin. We will try to answer questions like:

• how recruiters find talent in Berlin
• what you can do for getting prepared for interviews
• what you can do for catching the recruiter’s attention through your LinkedIn profile, to your CV for example.

So, we invited two experts to share their knowledge and their experience with us and they immediately accepted the invitation. So, thank you very much for that!

Mirela (Project A): You’re welcome!

Fernanda (Moderator): We have here Molly Barrett and Mirela Stefan, they are recruiters and they work for Project A Ventures. You provide talent acquisition solutions for more than 45 companies, right? So they have broad and deep experience. They work with several profiles and wide variety of requirements, so I think that they can give us overall idea about what companies look for in the German market. So, please introduce yourselves.

What exactly do you do at Project A?

Molly (Project A): I’m Molly, I’m a working student at Project A. I’ve been working there for about eight months and I’m getting masters in business psychology so I’m studying a lot of like HR talent acquisition. So, when I am at Project A, I’m doing a lot of recruiting and since we are in venture capital we can work with a lot of different companies, so basically it’s like a lot of different clients.

So you get a wide variety of what other companies want in recruiting and you have to adapter your skills to that. So, I’m doing recruiting, I’m managing the talent pool doing some event organization and basically some kind of like onboarding tactics.

Mirela: Hi, I’m Mirela, I’m actually from Romania but I’ve been living in Berlin for two years and a half. Now I’m at Project A for one year almost. In May it’s gonna be one year. We are doing talent acquisition there as well and yet helping basically recruiting for several roles, tech or non-tech.

In terms of tech I’ve been recruiting Ruby developers, front-end, back-end, with PHP, JAVA, some DevOps guys, infrastructure system admin and that’s it.

Yeah, I’ve been ready to put in some numbers because I know could be very interesting. Overall I think we are seven people in the talent acquisition team, and then in terms of number, I think I actually wrote it down we had so far 2,800 applications in 2019, so that’s for over three months. So that’s quite a lot, that’s more than 1,000 applications per month so we’ve seen a lot of CV’s I would say.

Fernanda (Moderator): That’s great! So, Molly, do you work with several profiles? Mirela you are more focused on the IT people, right?

Mirela: Not necessarily, I think it depends a bit on the situation, which is the demand and everything..

Fernanda (Moderator): Yeah, okay, okay. That’s great, because at Imagine we have a bootcamp for software engineers who live in many countries, especially Egypt, Afghanistan, Pakistan and who wants to get a job here in Germany, so we try to evaluate them, give them feedback on their readiness for job applications. We evaluate their soft skills and hard skills as well and try to advise them how they can prepare themselves to be successful here. So, we have this program more focused on the IT roles, but I believe to have a broader audience that may watch this video, so I believe that your advice can help everyone.

So, let’s start! As you mentioned you had a lot of applications in the last three months and my first question would be:

• How do you guys look for talent because we know that candidates they can apply for job positions through the companies websites or through Indeed.com, Xing.com, it’s also common here in Germany but active sourcing is also common between recruiters…
• So from your perspective which is most common? Active or passive searching?
• And thinking about active searching how relevant LinkedIn is for you for example?

Mirela: Ok, I’ll take this one. It’s relevant because it’s always nice when you post a job and you have applications and you just review them, but then sometimes it can happen that people don’t really apply or especially if there are more senior profiles…Of course if we don’t have a lot of applications, we have to go out there and search by ourselves, and then focusing a bit

on the tech side I would say that LinkedIn is the easiest platform for us because it’s basically the biggest database when it comes to professional CV’s and professional experience, so it’s very easy for us to access.

And normally for that we just do a search LinkedIn to find profiles. So as long as people have LinkedIn we can find them very easily.

If there are some small tricks normally because we use keywords when we search for those profiles, so as long as our keywords would match the profiles, it’s pretty easy for us to find and I guess it is the biggest database.

For tech roles we sometimes use StackOverflow and Github so those could also be relevant profiles, and not only having a profile but rather also being active so it always helps if you comment on StackOverflow or Git answers or like you know interact with other people, and also on the Github if you have projects. Because normally people can see what kind of languages you’ve been using in those projects and it can make the recruiter or the hiring manager understand your profile better. But, yeah, LinkedIn is definitely the easiest way to access that. I mean, once we don’t have a profile on LinkedIn, we have to go a bit further, but if you’re searching for a job I would definitely recommend having LinkedIn.

Fernanda (Moderator): Yeah, just to give you an idea about how different are job applications between different countries is, and in some countries people don’t use that much LinkedIn so we encourage our students to create a profile and to put more detail they can there, of course not too much. But, for example we say that it’s important describing their duties and also some project and specify which languages, frameworks, which technologies they use.

Mirela: Exactly, exactly.

A LinkedIn profile is more or less a CV as well so I think it shouldn’t be too little, and maybe just having the job title and that’s it. That’s also hard for me as a recruiter and if I’m looking at that profile and I just see back-end engineer, I have no idea if he knows Ruby, PHP, JAVA, so I’ll need a bit more details.

But then also having a very long LinkedIn with very long text doesn’t really help, because presently we are screening hundreds of CV’s per day so I won’t have time to read three pages.

Molly: Also, something that’s really important in the LinkedIn is to put in the About Me section that you’re looking for new experiences because it saves a lot of time and it really helps to have a better response rate on our end that we can maybe count on this person a little bit more to respond or to be looking for response.

Mirela: Yeah, yeah, indeed. There is a section in LinkedIn where you can set up that you’re looking for a job so that would be very helpful.

Molly: It’s actually a button you can press — do it!

Mirela: Yeah, you can also write, of course. I think at the beginning, exactly. I mean, that could also help if you’re looking to relocate, especially that can definitely help.

Fernanda (Moderator): Ok, great! My next question, I believe that it was already answered but you can complement. It would be when you are screening, how do you think that, well what makes you feel that that profile matches the position you have. You mentioned that you use some keywords for searching on LinkedIn, but maybe there’s something else that when you read some profile, you feel like this is the guy I’m looking for?

Mirela: Yeah, that depends a bit on the roles. I mean, I’m looking…Normally, to be honest, I’m doing a lot of direct sourcing from our senior profiles because then you’re lacking candidates applying actually. And of course it’s relevant that you actually have experience, so several years of experience.

And I also think that LinkedIn should be quite clean, so showing what you did like I mentioned also, showing the projects you worked on and what languages.

But it’s also very helpful if I don’t have only like the languages as keywords and skills, but not knowing in which project to use them because it may be that you just saw a PHP script and you put it there, or it can be that you coded PHP for the past few years, so that’s a difference and it’s very helpful for our end as well. So I mentioned the tech spec is definitely..uhm…yeah.

Fernanda (Moderator): Ok, great! Do you have any comment, Molly?

Molly: No, I don’t think so.

Fernanda (Moderator): I think that in that part there’s no much difference between tech roles and other kind of roles, right? It’s more or less the same thing.

Molly: Yea, I think on LinkedIn you should be able to comment search exactly what you’re applying for or if you want to be available to certain tech stack, you should be able to comment search at least a couple of things in your profile, that are easily accessible to recruiters because that’s also the command search function is, a good recruiter trick.

Mirela: Yeah, indeed. If you are looking maybe for a PHP developer, I mean you should have at least once PHP mentioned, or the framework that you used for that or for front-end as well.

And also what’s tricky from our is like when I’m looking for example for a front-end engineer is tricky that people can write javascript in different styles like it can be JS, it can be JavaScript in two words or one word so I always have to like think of how people would write that. So as a person looking for a job you can maybe try to put that in different forms in your profile so then you have more chances of being found.

Because maybe recruiters won’t check all options available, maybe they will check just JavaScript in one word but not JS and it’s the same.

Fernanda (Moderator): Okay, great! Thank you! Okay, let’s move now to the next stop. The next stop would be CV. How would you guys describe a perfect CV, an ideal CV?

Molly: I’ll take that one. So basically, there’s like a general aesthetic that you should follow, it should be at least one to two pages, max three, but we’re really not really looking….reading every single line, every single word so it should be fairly condensed. It should be in PDF format, Word documents. Anything that could be altered is just a general NO. And then about the content, you should have your spoken languages because some companies are looking for German speakers, English speakers, whatever…so that’s really important, especially in Berlin.

You really want to include the position that you’re working under, so your title, the company, the city or country of where you worked at that exact company and the duration.

So, month and year. Month is sometimes left out and it can sometimes be really confusing if you work there for the whole 2018 or you know, just one month.

So, that’s really important, I think the only thing about a bad CV would be personal information.

I know that the German way of setting up a CV is that you include a lot of personal information, which is like usually very related to your marital status, how many kids you have, your birthday, things like that. It’s illegal to discriminate against those things so I would just cut it out.

Also, have at least have three key tasks under the position that you are working at. Sometimes, people don’t include anything and that’s really difficult because you don’t actually know what you worked as so yeah, three key tasks, three key takeaways from what you did at that job, it’s really helpful.

Mirela: Also, it shouldn’t be too long with a lot of text, just like I said, people won’t have time to read more than one, two pages. It’s always easy if you have bullet points or it’s something physical to the human eye.

Fernanda (Moderator): Okay, okay, I’ve got it. What about education? What is relevant in terms of education, like only the bachelor and master degree or also short courses like Coursera, Udemy or any other certifications for example is quite common. When people take I don’t know six month course for getting a certification on something and then you quite there, this is relevant or not?

Mirela: I can take this? So in terms of education, especially in the tech roles, as a whole I would say it doesn’t matter that much because again it matters what you know. However, in Germany, it’s a bit tricky especially if people are relocating here because for the working permit and the visa and everything, you sometimes have to have a university degree. So, it makes things much more easy if you don’t relocate here to get a working permit, especially if you actually studied something similar to the work you’re applying for and if you didn’t of course, you don’t have to. But I would say, I would recommend you do that. Regarding certifications, it’s the same like if you have them, sure. But also, think that those are relevant certifications. For example I’ve been recruiting for DevOps role, and normally they would have AWS certification. So for that…that was not the must but the candidate should have known to work with AWS. So if they had a certification, it was definitely a plus because we new that they know about it. But there should be also serious certification, not just that you watched the video on YouTube. It doesn’t mean that you know that. So as long as it’s a relevant course, or certification, yeah, I would put that as well.

Fernanda (Moderator): Ok, cool. And, Molly, you mentioned something interesting which is about personal information. And I know that recruiters they have the concern about avoiding bias so I believe that if the person provides so much personal details, it ends up leading the recruiter to bias somehow, right?

Molly: Yeah, we’re actually just talking about this today because yeah, it shouldn’t hurt to put your family status, your marital status, but sometimes it’s just this subconscious bias that maybe the recruiter might have especially with relocation and visa.

So if somebody has a whole family that means that the company has to take care of the whole family visa process and that’s something that doesn’t need to be considered, that’s something that can be talked about in the first interview.

When you already have established a personal connection and you can see how serious this person is about moving and if they’re yeah.

Fernanda (Moderator): Yeah, this is more important. Like try to…to make sure that you will be shown as a good professional, as a reliable professional, and after that you take care of the details. Do you have any more comments about the LinkedIn…about CV, sorry?

Molly: I think that was…also I would stress like a cover letter as well in addition to a CV. If you have something that’s more complicated, such as a like a product manager to describe what a product you are working on if it’s not clear. Or for instance, if you are full stack engineer applying for front-end you can talk about, describe a little bit more in your CV about what front-end projects you had. Just anything that can be described from your CV that might help you.

I mean if your CV is very clear you don’t need a cover letter, but it depends if your role or application is a little bit ambiguous, it’s helpful.

Fernanda (Moderator): The positions you have usually they demand cover letter or only the CV?

Mirela:

No, so it just the CV is mandatory, but a cover letter is not.

Of course, the cover letter can help because I think if you pass a bit more background on the profile and like Molly says, like if it’s clear that you’ve been a Java developer for the last five years and you apply for a Java developer role then it’s clear. But then if you are full-stack and you maybe want to focus just on the front-end side, then maybe it’s always nice to kind of explain a bit thi change or why do you want to focus on that and give some sort of explanation. And I think the cover letter shouldn’t be again too long, I would even appreciate even two or three paragraphs like half a page, one page, but really on the point and explain why exactly you’re changing, why you’re interested in that but not really too long.

Fernanda (Moderator): So as I’ve understood, the cover letter would be highly recommended. Especially in the case of people who want to change..

Molly: If their CV doesn’t match the role so much, they have the opportunity of you know…when it doesn’t match the recruiter thinks why did you apply to this role and then sometimes actually when you’re reading the cover letter it then becomes very apparent…they’re doing a career change, they did have some experience in this, they want to get back into it…ok I didn’t realize.

Fernanda (Moderator): Ok, cool. Let’s talk about interviews. What are the most common questions you usually ask candidates?

Mirela: So actually I would start here by answering it depends because it depends on their role so it’s very hard to generalize. However one thing that I personally always ask is after I did my introduction in the company, introduction in the role, I always ask the candidates to introduce themselves shortly and that’s very important for me because it’s the idea as the first connection at him or her. So it is that they should know how to present themselves in a short way but still be quite on point and cover the most relevant things that they did so far.

Because in the end always we always…we normally have 30 minutes for an interview and then of course I’ve got my questions, have my introduction, so if the candidate takes 20 minutes just to present themselves, I won’t have time to ask my questions.

So that’s a very important to kind of have some sort of short introduction. Prepared, or you know…the candidate should think a bit about what he should say. It’s relevant and on point and still giving enough details. It depends on the seniority I would say on the roles because if it’s a more junior role…I would like…of course I don’t expect that person to know everything but rather I would test approach of how would they learn stuff and their motivation to learn and to grow and to develop. So it is more like that. If it’s a more senior role, then of course I would like really go and see what they did, what they know, what they are capable of.

And then again, it depends if it’s a very technical role, it’s a tech lead or it’s a team lead. Because again, if it’s a tech lead, I would expect someone to be very strong technically because normally a tech lead would require you to coach other engineers so I would expect you to be the expert in that but if you’re a team lead, normally you’re going to be leading people, so I don’t expect you to be that strong technically, just to have an overview of different technologies, but rather being able to manage people and don’t leave them, and work with them.

So it depends on the roles. So I would say it’s always important to think what is the role and also in the job description where it says what we’re looking for, how the profile should look like and also the questions would be shaped on that most of the time.

Fernanda (Moderator): So, do you have beforehand some questions prepared for focus on hard skills and also on soft skills depending on the role or you create the questions depending on the conversation, how it goes?

Mirela: We normally have some sort of guidelines, or some main questions, or some main point that we want to follow and it’s also that normally it’s a recruiter interview, we’re not going to go that technical, because that’s probably the next feature during the challenge. And then we just kind of try to understand the big picture of everything…and yeah, I would have the main questions that I would want to ask but then I always kind of you know shape my questions on the experience, because if they are talking about their interest in the project maybe I’m interested in that and I focus a bit more on questions on that topic.

So, I also try to kind of make it this open discussion in a way to kind of shape it on the experience with the candidate as well and not ask questions as a robot.

Fernanda (Moderator): Well, while you were talking, I was remembered some students who I interviewed during the bootcamp at Imagine and I remember that I had some candidate who are not so talkative, they are more introspective I would say and they do not talk about so much about themselves, when I asked them to introduce themselves and if they do not give me too much information, I sometimes used to ask more questions, be more like…specifically want to, I want to hear from him…Do you have this situations with more introspective candidates?

Molly: Yeah like more introverted quiet types, yes. And it’s not necessarily like a bad thing to be introverted but I think you have to challenge yourself to say something more than just like you know how are you, I’m good. You really have to sell yourself in the introduction because depending on how shy you are the person that you’re recruiting for the personality aspect is a big part of what they recruit for, so they want to see if you’re going to be a cultural fit to the company and that really sets the tone.

So to challenge yourself to think of something and it’s as easy as the weather…You know, if it’s dark out, if it’s raining, if it’s sunny, it’s just something to talk about and that’s something that everyone seems to have something to say about.

So, yeah, this is a good way to get people talkative and yeah, asking less yes or no questions, but more open ended questions…and just you know can you describe that further, kind of you know try to get people comfortable because actually once you set the tone, sometimes it makes people more comfortable and brings them out of their shell but then at the same time sometimes these people will stay in their shell. Kind of the entire time and it’s yeah, it’s hard to get them out but there’s nothing you can do.

Mirela: Yeah, and also related to that…So it’s a lot of effort in introduction because I know that sometimes people don’t know what to say if I would ask them to introduce themselves and what I like to ask a the person is to kind of walk through my own experience or through my own CV. So, normally I mean also as a candidate can’t be seen front of you during the interview because normally it’s the Skype or a phone interview and then you can just walk through your CV quickly and say OK, so after my graduation I started and I worked two years in this company and I did this project, then I moved to this company and I worked with these tools during these projects and now I could get this company doing this…

So, kind of walking a bit chronologically through your experience could be a good start. As a bonus, you also know what to say!

And I would say also is to think of different situations that you had, I mean normally as a recruiter and also as a hiring manager I would be asked…I would ask you, ok can you tell me more about a difficult situation, about a challenge, how did you approach it, what kind of tools did you use, and for that we’re actually looking for concrete examples, because it’s very easy to talk in general and saying o, when I have a difficult situation I just ask Google and then I solve it. But it’s much better if you give practical example, so prepare some examples about you know, challenges that you had, things that didn’t go so well, things that went very well maybe because you can use that in answering and just giving examples, complete examples.

Fernanda (Moderator): Nice, very nice advice. And you mentioned before that when you talk to junior candidate, it’s much more important not exactly what they know already but their willingness to learn and how they solve problems, how they look for solutions, so maybe this could be a kind of a strategy to show like their proficiency. For example, if you ask about something that the person doesn’t know exactly how to explain or if you ask the person if she remembers about a challenge or a problem in the past and the person didn’t exactly this kind of challenge, maybe they could try to think about something similar and how they approach the situation, and how was the process until they found a solution instead of giving you exactly…

Molly: Exactly!

Mirela: Exactly! So exactly as you mentioned for a junior role, I wouldn’t expect someone to tell me maybe an example from work because if they work for like six months, maybe they didn’t have that but anything from school, be from some other projects that they had. Maybe they had some other projects, they worked for some organizations or something and that can help.

Fernanda (Moderator): So a bit of proactivity also helps?

Mirela: Yeah.

Fernanda (Moderator): Ok, great, great. Let’s move on. What would be in your opinion something that people should absolutely avoid doing during interviews?

Mirela: I’ll take this one. There are not so many no-goes necessarily,

one thing that I think is important is that you shouldn’t interrupt. So, if I’m talking…I actually don’t like to interrupt, and I think also everyone…no one likes to be interrupted.

And then it should be in the end it’s an interview but it should be also a discussion between the recruiter and the candidate or the hiring manager and the candidate.

Because it is the idea that I’m presenting something about the company, the role and I’ll ask you some questions, you can also ask me some questions. And, it’s a discussion, I would expect respect and not being interrupted but then also I would expect the candidate would listen to me because actually unfortunately sometimes it happens that I’m talking about the role and what it requires when you’re looking for someone, how big is the team, how many people are in the organization and then again I’m asked exactly the same questions. How big is the organization? How’s the team? And it’s also a bit frustrating for me because they never listen to me. So I would also expect that. But other than that it is just a normal conversation where we have to listen and you answer and then you ask your questions as well.

Fernanda (Moderator): I think it’s important trying to establish a kind of relationship with the interviewer. Between the interviewer and the interviewee.

Mirela: Exactly, that’s very important.

Fernanda (Moderator): Like, pay attention, respect the time of the other to talk and maybe ask questions as well but of course not the questions you already answered but…

Mirela: Yeah, of course…Definitely. Because, also like, normally can be talking an introduction of the company and the role, but probably five minutes, because now I have to move forward so I can maybe just give some details. Then you as a candidate if you’re interested in something specific, so for sure, normally I always give at the end sometimes for the questions for the candidate in the case they have some.

Fernanda (Moderator): Ok. Great. My next question is more related to the duration of the selection process. You know that when people apply for a job and they really want to get that job to be successful, that they get quite anxious about it and sometimes the answer takes more time than they expected so they get a bit anxious and sometimes they approach us only on Linkedin, or by e-mail and ask — hey I finished my last test one week ago, do you think it’s a problem if I follow up my interviewer and ask for a result because they didn’t reply to me. So what do you think guys. On your opinion, this is problem, this is something that’s annoying you or it’s something that could show the candidates interest for the position?

Molly: Let me take this one. So, usually at the end of the interview process, either the interviewer or the candidate will develop some type of when are you going to get back to me question. So the interviewer, I usually go over it and it’s usually for us about seven business days. You know, sometimes it can be a little bit you know, maybe by the end of next week…but at least seven business days is our core, and that should be agreed upon in the interview I would say to avoid any confusion and if the recruiter doesn’t say it, the candidate can ask themself.

I think something that a lot of people don’t do is a follow-up interview e-mails like “thanks for the interview, I’m looking forward to your feedback next week”. So if the interviewer doesn’t get back to that candidate within the agreed-upon time, then I think it’s appropriate to send a follow-up e-mail. So, if it’s been longer than seven days, maybe wait one extra day just to know…maybe they’re like about to send me one and then you can ask — “hey, just you know..just following up…”. If you do it too early, you run the risk of getting lost in the e-mail box of the interviewer anyway because recruiting is a fairly quick process. So if we do have an update, we want to give it to you immediately, so we don’t then…then your e-mail just gets lost and we kind of forget. So, yeah, definitely. But don’t be too antsy, just wait a few days and someone will come back to you.

Fernanda (Moderator): Ok, great. So, again about the duration and the steps of the selection process. After finding talent on the company’s website or the LinkedIn, or other platform, after having the first interview, what are the common next steps in your experience?

Molly: So, usually the next steps really depends on the role and we are particularly different because we’re a venture capital and we work with different clients that aren’t necessarily at our office. So, most of the time, well, you know, the phone screen is by the TA. That’s usually the first step, then it will go to the hiring manager at our venture or it will go to the hiring manager…so the department head at our company and then depending on the seniority level..or yeah, usually most seniority level above working interns have a case study…

Mirela: Or some sort of practical exercise, especially for the tech roles, I think that’s quite common…that you have a case study to prepare at home or maybe like in real time with a hiring manager or with some people from the team, i’d say that’s quite common actually. And I also understood sometimes people would have…the candidates would have some tryout days with the future team, so that could be an option.

Molly: Normally, you have to…I mean if you’re super far away, sometimes an on site isn’t ideal, but for example if it is for a lead or sometimes even a senior role, or above that, an on site is usually pretty crucial…

Mirela: Yeah…It also depends on what country we are talking about and how realistic it is to invite someone from another country.

Fernanda (Moderator): Okay, well…for finishing our conversation before we go to the questions from the audience, what would you guys advise our students in order to better prepare for the interviews or for building a more powerful LinkedIn profile, or powerful CV. What would be your advice for them if you could advise one thing?

Mirela: I really like to say…maybe I have a bit more time I think. It’s not just the company choosing the candidate, but also the candidate choosing the company.

So, you shouldn’t just apply randomly to 20, 30, 40, 100 jobs and then wait for companies to get back to you, but really be selective yourself because at the end of the day you will be working for 40 hours with those people and that team for that company.

That’s more than you sleep probably so it’s quite important that you also choose, I think, that you like that, to enjoy that. So, be a bit more selective as a candidate in your research. It’s much better if you just apply to three companies and you really did your research in order to like the company, what they are doing…You know what to expect rom that, where to ask, what to focus on. And then, also, regarding the relocation part it’s also important if you do your own research on that because yeah, maybe the companies know some stuff but then in the end startups or smaller companies that don’t have the capacity to maybe support your relocation, support visa process, support working permit, so it’s always goo that you did some research by yourself if you need those things.

If you’re actually eligible to move and to work here, what you need, if you need a university degree because sometimes it can happen if you don’t have a university degree, you can get the working permit. So, it’s always good you do that research and also got the cost of living here, know what to expect here.

Just google living in Germany, living in Berlin, cost of life, working in Berlin and so on and then you’ll find a lot of websites that can help you and I guess try to see what is important to you as a candidate and what do you find important in the company. And, also, that’s how you normally note for a candidate it’s sometimes hard to ask questions in the interview, they don’t know what to ask and they feel that they have to ask, so, just in what would you like to know about that company, what’s important for you…

If you see yourself working in that place, how would you like it to be and then the questions are also gonna kind of pop up in your mind.

Fernanda (Moderator): I think the cultural fear, that everybody talks a lot about, I think it’s a two-way road.

Mirela: Exactly, exactly.

Fernanda (Moderator): You have to fit your values, your personal values and professional role should fit into the cultural…the company culture, but also the contrary. If we match both, then I think we would have a successful relationship, not only professionally, but also personally. And you, Molly, what would you advise our students to do?

Molly: Yeah, to go for what we said about, really just taking your time to

do the research about three companies that you like because in my opinion you should always be tailoring your CV’s to match the company.

So, at least double checking to see maybe your CV is relevant to two companies, but at the same time you’re going to read two job descriptions and they’re gonna have different qualifications and different company cultures. So, basically you want to sell yourself on whatever you identify most with. So, if you’re strongest in this tech language, you want to make sure that it reflects the CV or the job description of this company. If the company is international and you’re also like an expat, or you have international experience, like, make sure that’s visible in your CV that you worked somewhere else.

And basically, then, just like overall readiness of knowing your schedule, making sure that if you do get an interview and you know you’re like…Oh I have a coffee date with my buddy…

Interviews should be first priority because the longer you wait in that application process, the more somebody else who’s really good might come before you and oh, the job is closed.

And people are coming from abroad and in a different time zone.

We sometimes forget that people are not in the same time zone as we are so to know when you’re scheduling an interview, and usually the recruiter will mention the time zone but sometimes we also forget.

So, you know, to be mindful of not sending, oh yeah, I’m available at this time and that’s actually Berlin time, like 3am. So, just putting in your research which I really like what you said about the three companies because, yeah, if you’re applying to Berlin and somewhere else in the world, you know kind of like research of how many euros you want to earn per hour, your visa status, how your CV should be different in Germany vs Brazil or something. Yeah, just to do a little general knowledge…

Molly: Also, for this I think a trick would be to actually have an excel file on yourself when you apply and also people do that and it can be very helpful because then you can you know, write the company where you applied, the position, when did you apply if you got contacted and have an interview, and then maybe also when they promise to get back to you, and which are the next steps.

And then also if the recruiter forgets to tell you that, ask always and then you put the details into that excel file and then keep track. And then you also maybe don’t end up applying to the same job two or three times, it can be because they are also posting jobs on like different channels, so then maybe you find the job on our careers page or maybe you find a job on Linkedin. But if you didn’t do a lot of research it can be that it is the same job. And then you apply to both of them from different channels but normally the system would recognize that it’s the same application. So, yeah…

That’s also good kind…keep track of companies where you apply.

Fernanda (Moderator): That’s important, that’s important. So, it tells me that two things are most important for getting successful job application at least in the initial phase, in the recruitment phase. Information first, get information about the country you want to go in, also about the companies you are applying for and the strategy. Having kind of organization and try to have strategy as well like I said…Like having an excel sheet to follow each process, each company and so on. Okay, great! Thank you guys! Thank you very much! We have questions from the audience.

Start of Q&A

Audience: I can start. First of all thank you so much for helping us, for being here today. You are… I’m actually taking notes, so you’re helping my career as well, thanks. Molly, and then Fernanda, brought something that is being quite frequent in my last few Imagine graduation chats, which is the culture fit interview. And one interesting episode was when a guy was just rejected after a culture fit interview and he was a bit sad because he didn’t know where did I fail and so on, so he was asking for some insights on how to prepare for the next ones, and sending you this same question.

What would be some good insights on how to prepare for these that which is not so technical, also you have to show that you would well belong that space and stuff like that?

Molly: Yeah, so, I think a

cultural fit could mean a lot of things and sometimes it just means how the team is structured, so those people who happen to be in the team, what kind of personalities they have, but also what kind of company the company is.

So, like startups versus corporate, it has a very different cultural vibe and that usually structures about how your tasks will be.

So, a lot of people who come from corporate have one specific task that they focus on because there’s so many people and when they come to startups they’re a little frustrated that everything is a little bit disorganized and there’s just like a lot of room for change which is what the startup vibe is supposed to be about and it’s good. But some people aren’t used to that, so I think that you can really test this in an interview because some people actually come from corporate and they actually have more of a startup mentality, anyway. But, was that like the cultural fit or what type of cultural fit were you specifically…?

Audience: Yeah, um….Basically stuff like that. Like you are working in one kind of company or coming from different country and this things that pass through someone’s mind that say, ok am I good to work in a startup because I’ve worked for eight years in a bigger company or will it be okay if I apply for German company because I am from a South America, stuff like that…So the main idea is sometimes people are being unsure on how can they show that they would be a good addition to that team or company. So, yeah, I’m always thinking…I always…first of all to your research think about which company are you applying to. Do you think you are a good match and once you come to that conclusion, it’s easier to show why you were good match to the company. So, and your insights as well are quite awesome, so thanks!

Mirela: It is true, exactly like you said. You should basically do your research and see if you see yourself in that team. It’s not just the team choosing you, but you’re also choosing the team, because you’re going to end up working for them.

Audience: And with that answer you can also show other people why you should fit the team because you cut to that point.

Molly: Yeah, I remember you know, one place I interviewed for. They had something like a coffee machine, like they have really good coffee in Berlin, it’s really cool coffee machine, it’s not ours, and yeah, I worked with them because I was like oh I really like coffee, like you guys must be coffee people as well if you’ve got this really nice machine in the office. But also ike a good tip is that some companies are posting on social media and that’s usually where they’ll show their more playful side.

So, I mean if they don’t post on social media then they’re possibly more of a serious company, but yeah you can really see the tone of the company in that because…Yeah, Project A website, you can see the tone…

Mirela: And I would say also in the first call

that’s also a good question to kind of ask about that. Hey, how is it to work there, how flexible it is, do you go out for events, do you go for a drink after work, are you friends…

Just ask these kind of questions to kind of get the feeling of the culture and see if you fit there. And like you said, it’s much easier to argue your own personality. And I would say also because you mentioned this corporate and startup. Because especially in Berlin there are so many startups and if you’re coming to relocate here, it’s very easy to find jobs in the startups and that can be indeed different from a more corporate world and bigger companies.

So I think if you’re also open to that, because if you work with like 7 years in a very huge company where you just did your small thing, in the startup you have to cover the roles of tech people…everything. Come with your initiative and like just do stuff. So if you think you’re able to do that, if you want to do that,and then like I said it’s much more easier to kind of argue as well. And I would also include that in the application if that’s the case. If you have a corporate background and you’re applying for a startup, explain a bit why this changed.

Audience: Ok, nice, thank you.

Mirela: You’re welcome!

Audience: Thanks! I have actually two questions now. The first would be about expected salary. Sometimes it’s optional, sometimes it’s not. In my case if I’m going to glassdoor.com I can do a lot of research and I still have like such a range…where I go like, okay if I give a really big range I have absolutely no idea what the real value is. If I give a range that I just, that it’s just gonna get me to get kicked out of the application process. Can we have some insights about that?

Molly: Yeah, I mean, one short thing is that you should have like an idea of what you want but I think it’s really important to say how flexible you are. I mean some people just truly don’t want to earn less than X amount, but if you’re more like I really like this company, I want this ideally, this is what I researched, that as like the benchmark in Berlin, but I’m totally open to talk about it.

Because, sometimes, if you don’t mention that, sometimes we think how serious is this person. We might go with another person who has a more fitted salary expectation.

Mirela: And then I would say because I know that in terms of numbers vary quite different but it also depends on the company. So it depends, if it’s like a small company and they’re on the market for just two years, they just got first investment they don’t have money. So probably the budget would be quite low, so that’s the low end of the range. But then if you apply for the bigger companies, also the budgets are higher, so they can also go for a higher budget. In the end of the day it’s also the idea of thinking what do you need like if you’re moving here with family and you have to support the whole family, I guess it’s you might ask for a bit more.

And if it’s just you and it depends where it is, if it’s in Berlin, the living style is not so expensive. So think also what do you need to live properly and say like Molly said, how flexible you are with that. And you can also ask something that some candidates do, and they are like in the end ok. You can ask what case is that within the budget, do I fit there, how is it and just have an open discussion with the recruiter about that. Because, normally I also say sometimes if the salary expectations are way too high, I say our budgets are much lower than that. Are you open to discuss on that? Some are, some are not. It depends on each person. I would say to make that an open discussion with the recruiter in the first call.

Audience: But that would be actually a lot of questions sometimes. I don’t know how often it happens that it doesn’t even let you get to a discussion. Because once you get into a discussion I think it’s fine. Because, sometimes in for example, Glasdoor.de then a lot of the times you have the optional expected salary. Whether to fill it in or not because sometimes it’s optional but it’s a still no text, it’s just a number.

Mirela: I don’t like that. Exactly for this because it really needs people to put number but sometimes they just want to say I’m in this range but open to talk. Yeah, it actually gets tricky because also for us, we have very similar position sometimes but recruiting for different companies so we also have different budgets.

It’s good for us to kind of have an understanding because if you are asking two times our budget, you might be flexible but you’re not gonna accept half of your salary expectations.

Audience: And if it’s optional, just don’t fill it in?

Mirela: Yeah, you can put a range. I would say like, a range would be good. And then you can also think of your minimum range that you wouldn’t go lower than that.

Molly: Because if you don’t put it, you run the risk that the recruiter assumes and if you’ve had like X amount of positions, we couldn’t say like ok, they work in this many roles for this many years, they’re probably expecting this, so they’re probably not going to want this amount which also might not be exactly what you have in your mind.

Mirela: Or you can also do some testing and kind of put something very low for one job application, something very high for one job application.

Molly: This is where the excel sheet comes in handy.

Mirela: Exactly!

Audience: This is what I wanted to add in terms of what you think of maybe, oh I would like to discuss this in a further moment if I go on through the process.

Mirela: But then probably you’re gonna get the same question in the first call. Then you have to also say something.

So it’s also good to have a number in mind. Also, for yourself, not necessarily for the recruiter or the company, but for yourself because…in the end we also work for money.

Audience: Just don’t leave it blank. Right?

Molly: Yeah, I mean if you just put, I think it shows something about your personality. If you’re open to discussion, you’re usually looking more of a cultural fit for yourself in a company and not just for the money which is actually more like the startup vibe in general to have like a cultural fit, unfortunately it’s also like less money sometimes. So, yeah.

Mirela: I want to add one more thing because I know that they have a question. No, I would say here it actually also depends I guess on the other person, so on the company. Some of them are more strict in regards to that, and then if you put like 20.000 more than their budget, they would say no. Some are flexible because they can ask and yeah, it’s not the ideal situation but it also depends on the other person on how flexible they are and how strict they are. So that’s why it’s also very hard to generalize if it’s good to put something or or not, because it also depends on the recruiter who is reviewing your CV.

Audience: Yeah, follow-up question on the salary topic and actually thanks for also stressing that in the end it shouldn’t be too much about the money, so probably it’s good advice not to talk too much about the entire topic in the interview. Still, I haven’t heard any numbers,

so imagine like I’m a PHP developer with four years of work experience, full-time after college and I’m not applying for senior position, but for the mid-level back-end position for companies in your portfolio, what is an acceptable range?

Mirela: That could be a very high range unfortunately.

Molly: You have benchmarks, so I don’t know exactly how we figured out the benchmarks, but it’s something between Berlin average, Germany average possibly…

Mirela: We think for like…ok, maybe I should give some numbers. For medium back-end it think it’s about forty, forty five thousands, up to seventy gross salary per year (before tax) maybe if the company’s big. But that’s like for bigger companies. But then if it’s smaller, it depends also. It’s quite a big range.

Audience: What we’ve seen from fellows that got higher is that they are on average about fifty, but not like too much, so it’s between fifty and sixty. This is what we’ve seen for these people.

Mirela: Something that is also very hard to say, especially for the tech roles, because if you have like 5 years experience, at the end it depends on what you know. Because maybe you know as much as someone who has two years of experience because that person worked more intense in a way. So it’s not ideal to put this based on the number of years.

Audience: Thank you!

Fernanda (Moderator): Any more questions? Ok. Well, how people can check the open positions for the companies they work for..maybe?

Mirela: So I would say the easiest is our website, which is Project-A.com/careers or just google in Project A ventures and then basically there’s the career there. Or LinkedIn and some other platforms I guess. I know, it’s on Google, if you search Project A ventures jobs.

Fernanda (Moderator): I also invite you to apply for a bootcamp on Joinimagine.com, if you’re a software engineer and you want to get a job in Europe, Germany especially, please apply for our bootcamp. Thank you guys!

Mirela: Thank you as well!

Audience: Thank you all for your time and detailed advice. All the best.

Did you like this content? Follow us or, even better, apply to joinimagine.com. We are always looking for curious minds and courageous hearts. Are you in?

This post is part of a longer series. For more visit us here: https://medium.com/imagine-foundation

Meet Ahmed

Ahmed is not your typical software engineer. He’s not a computer scientist by training. You’d probably never guess what he studied: Zoology.

Ahmed got into software engineering only in 3rd year of college. Then during his 9 month of mandatory military service in Egypt, he spent his free time working on basic websites, learning the basics of .NET and PHP. He then went on to start his first job as a software developer for desktop systems, working mainly with .NET.

Ahmed in 2013: No fancy tech stack. No big name company. Yet. But a very solid foundation.

Ahmed then switched to work at a different company building web applications. It is here, in this environment, that he became a full stack web developer. Working on large applications, building scalable websites and restful APIs for corporate clients, he deepened his tech stack. Here he got deeply into Python/Django, PHP5.6 with Cakephp. His learning did not stop there: He got the opportunity to mentor younger tech colleagues, and introduced agile at his company.

Ahmed in 2016: Deep experience with large scale PHP systems. But limited international experience.”

Fast forward another 2 years.

Ahmed took an offer to work as lead backend developer for the Egypt team at Shopbox, a Scandinavian Point of Sale commerce solution. Working here presented him with another huge learning opportunity. Through daily interactions with teams in Europe, Ahmed became fluent in all aspects of “tech English”. His responsibilities now included learning skills in high demand by any European tech team, namely:

• Leading the backend team with scrum development methodology
• Developing and maintaining the application backend restful api
• Writing unit and functional testing
• Code review and CI/CD deployment
• Monitoring and maintaining our cloud architecture (AWS)

Ahmed in 2018: A well-rounded software engineer experienced with micro services, AWS & code reviews, CI/CD, scrum

With skills like these Ahmed easily checks all boxes for tech recruiters in Germany. Note the emphasis on ways of working, not only technology: Code reviews. CI/CD deployment. Unit testing. Functional testing. Scrum.

Admittedly, all of this in hindsight looks impressive. But make no mistake. Ahmed is a humble guy.

He does not think of himself as a rock star developer. He later told me “I don’t think I am that good.” But he also wanted to explore his potential. He said:

“I wanted to see what I can do with my skills. That’s why I’m applying for jobs in Germany.”

Starting job applications: Mixed results

Before joining the Imagine program, Ahmed started applying on his own. He sent out many applications, tens of them. Despite his skills, results were mixed. He got some invites for interviews. Sometimes he got into the coding challenge stage. But ultimately, in his words, “I skipped out in all stages of the process”.

Joining Imagine: “I did the work.”

Then he found us on social media. He was intrigued. A bootcamp for software engineers seeking work & life in Europe? Teaching the skills to more successfully apply for jobs in Germany? All for free, supported by firms & foundations & run by a 100% volunteer organization of people from 10 countries?

Ahmed applied for joining our program. We admitted him. He quickly advanced through our program, graduating as Imagine Fellow.

I asked him what he learned from working with us. This is what he said:

• “Before Imagine, I did not understand how is the process to get a job offer from Germany — your advice really helped.”
• “Imagine gave me a great detailed overview of how to present myself better in my CV and on my LinkedIn profile. Your advice gave me more interviews.”
• “Your video showing what it takes to be an engineer in Berlin was very helpful and inspiring.”
• “Your video on the cultural fit interview was really helpful for my final interview!”

I also asked him if he had one piece of advice for fellow job seekers. He said:

• “Read the ‘Dating for job seekers’ article. It’s very helpful. Then prepare a sheet for you with answers to the questions. This gave me some security.”
• “I made many changes to my CV and my LinkedIn. I did the work.”

See for yourself: Here is Ahmed’s CV now, here is his LinkedIn profile.

Success: “Thanks for everything. I got the job!”

After our program, Ahmed applied to Check24, a large e-commerce player in Germany. He passed an initial HR screening interview, then a technical interview with Tech Team Lead, followed by a “very challenging” coding challenge in PHP, finally an interview with the Director of the department.

The Tech Team Lead told Ahmed that he submitted one of the “most advanced solutions we received”. This was great to hear, given that he had put nearly a full weekend into preparing his answer.

The final interview with the Director was all about cultural fit.

Of course, Ahmed was nervous. But knew what to expect, and had a very good chat with Check24’s director of business. He “wanted to get to know me, why I wanted to work at Check24, why Germany, and asked me questions about the process of relocation. He wanted to see if I was ready for it.”

He was.

The end

With a compelling job offer in hand, Ahmed sent us this celebratory email.

That was Ahmed’s story. What will be yours? Join us.

— Your friends at Imagine. Apply now.

— This post is part of a longer series. Read more.

— Thanks to Ahmed, team Check24 and all volunteers at Imagine

— Special thanks to Fabian (sharpist.com) for his coaching on cultural fit

— Like what you read? Give us a few claps.

“I wanted to see what I can do.” was originally published in Imagine on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Meet your instructor. Leandro Lages

Leandro is an engineering manager. He holds a degree in Computer Science from Universidade Federal do Pará, where he studied until 2003. Originally from Brazil, Leandro came to Berlin in 2015. He built engineering teams for two Berlin-based unicorns, Delivery Hero * and GetYourGuide.

Leandro has worked as an instructor back in Brazil and has always enjoyed teaching. As an engineering manager at Delivery Hero, part of Leandro’s job is to ensure that all engineering team members grow & develop their skills. This includes mentoring them in their careers and teaching work habits that help them succeed from technology and a team culture perspective.

This is his story.

Course overview — click to jump to each section

1. My journey from Brazil to Europe
2. Getting ready for an engineering job in Europe
3. Deep dive: Backend
4. Deep dive: Frontend
5. Deep dive: Mobile
6. Deep dive: Data engineering
7. Deep dive: Data science
8. Deep dive: QA testing

1 | My journey

Hello, my name is Leandro. I work as an engineering manager at Delivery Hero here in Berlin. I’ve been living here in Berlin for three years and during these three years, I interviewed more than one hundred people. I’ve been working with technology for almost twenty years. I started in 2000 on e-commerce in Brazil, and since then I’ve been developing my engineering skills and now on a different track, which is as a Manager.

I started my career in Brazil as a developer where I learned new technologies. I started with PHP3, and since then PHP4, PHP5 and now 7. There, it’s a completely different market. Even at that time, 2001–2007, was a different moment. We didn’t have any startups yet, we are like more .com boom. And, yeah, there in Brazil I was close to the community, mainly I’m from the north of Brazil and there I was like managing a meetup group where we talked about different technologies for web technologies. At that time, front-end and back-end were not separated, so you needed to manage front-end JavaScript, to CSS, HTML and also back-end language, in this case PHP. Also, that time I played a little with ASP, which is like the first version of Microsoft for web on top of VB script. And yeah, that’s a little bit about me.

After ten years working in the north of Brazil, I decided to move to Sao Paulo in the south of Brazil. It was an internal move, so for me was very challenging. The first time living alone, at that time I was single so it was a completely different experience for me. It’s exactly where I started like my financial independence. And it was exactly the same time we started having startups around the world. 2007, 2008, and there I worked in a company for three years but after that, I moved to a fantastic startup in Brazil where I worked for 5, 6 years and it’s where I started as a senior developer and I started going to a tech lead position in Brazil. Since it was a small startup we built a platform for marketing, called SiteApps. It was a behavior targeting tool so it allows us to create different audiences on the website.

And there I started having a different passion which is entrepreneurship and developing a product. So, I tried to combine both my engineering product skills and after working 5 years, since it was an international startup, even in Brazil we could start speaking English and for me, it was like very, very good chance to learn about startups. After 5–6 years we were focused on the long tail (results in the future) but since the company changed the strategy a bit, we decided to shut down a startup and focus on different projects in the company. The company was not just that startup, the startup was a project inside the company, so we focus on the corporate and short-head (short-term results).

It was exactly at this time that I decided to, I wanna try something different. I already had that experience in Sao Paulo in the startup scene, so I make myself stronger in the sense that I learned English, I was more confident about my English and I decided to have an international experience.

I was trying to choose different countries for that experience. I decided that Berlin would be the best place for me.

Why? The Visa is easier and the city has a very good work-life balance. I wouldn’t like to move to another crowded city like Sao Paulo where we had traffic jams and if you don’t take care of yourself, the life quality balance would be not as amazing as in another city like Berlin. So Berlin, it’s fantastic during summer. We have very good public transport. It’s a new startup scene, also around the world. So, I decided to, I had some connections that I could do some interview process and yeah, I came here for my first company as a senior software developer.

Back to Brazil in that company I was almost playing as a CTO, I was taking care of product entrepreneurship aspects and also technical aspects and leading the team. And I was afraid honest to continue that role outside, so I decided to go as a senior software engineer, also because the last two years in that company I was a little bit far from technology, and you know that technology changes a lot and I decided to move for Berlin as a senior software developer.

There, in this startup where I was, I was like in a team of 4 people, we didn’t have a manager. So as the most experienced I started somehow being also the manager. We are like hiring a perfect manager, so I was also trying to make the product together with engineering, so after 3 months there I became a tech lead. It was a more natural transition because it’s how I was working in the company. And, yes, after 2 years working there, I became a technical lead at the company. And the technical lead at that company, it was 75% technical aspect, architectural decisions, and 25% managing people.

So after 2 years, I started looking for different challenges because I liked to improve my soft skills, and managing people and as a senior software engineer, you have two paths to go. One is more managing people, orstrategizing the product. It’s also technology in lower scale and you can also go to a technical path which is 75% technology and of course you need to have soft skills to lead and have a good communication with your team members.

I decided to change and I move it to GetYourGuide to work as an engineering manager. Here, in Europe engineering managers, although you have both technical and people management and strategy path I decided to also try to learn new things.

I personally believe that as human beings we have to challenge ourselves.

And it was completely out of my comfort zone leading people, but for me at least this is how I learned, it’s how I put myself in situations that I don’t like or make me off of my comfort zone, but I have to be very very open to face new challenges. It’s not easy, most of the times you can have some defeats, you can failure but the most interesting thing is how you can get up and learn from those failures. And this is exactly how you grow. And yeah, this is me and a little bit about my experience here in Berlin, and looking forward to share more about that. Thanks!

2 | Getting ready for an engineering job in Europe

Well, let’s talk a little bit about the engineering lifestyle. Engineering habits, how can we survive in this world that changes all that time.

As an engineer there are some basics that you need to master. One of them is algorithms.

I know that most of those algorithms, data structures we learned during university. It seems that we don’t apply them so much which might be true at some scale but this is where you can also learn easily other technologies and how can you understand one day that if you have a very, very huge technical challenge, those are some basics that you as a software engineer needs to know.

And to be honest, it’s part of a lot of hiring processes in Europe and all around the world. At some level, some companies of course, they are stronger in algorithms than others because probably their business model requires that you need some more stronger algorithms. Some others, they just like, they put a low level algorithms tests just to make sure that you are there to learn.

Apart from that, the basics which are algorithms and data structures I believe that you need to focus on some technologies and some architectural patterns. So basically you need to know some. Uncle Bob, some authors and some references on the topic, so Martin Fowler, Uncle Bob, they are software engineers that are very strong in the community. They basically define patterns and how you create clean code and clean architecture and this is also need to be something that you need to always be, have a very good basis on top of that.

Design patterns, SOLID principles are hot topics that all software engineers they should know.

Apart from that, I also believe that we also have that situation about any specific language, if I should learn one framework or not, I believe that yes, you should be like know frameworks but

you need to understand what you have behind those frameworks, how they get there, what problem they solve.

For me at least, when I started developing in 2001, 2002, at that time we mixed up CSS, HTML, SQL queries on the same file so we didn’t have so many references for that so after some time, the MVC pattern arrived and I decided to create my own framework on top of that. To create my own framework it was very nice, made me a little bit stronger and understand what are the problems they solve but after that Zend framework other frameworks arrived and it was very interesting because I said I cannot compete with them but I learned what I need to learn when I started to build them. So I learned design, software design.

This is very important, how you design your software and a framework allows you to separate the concerns between different classes and objects so take a look at object-oriented programming and now we have also functional programming in some languages. It is both them have different patterns, and you as an engineer there is one thing that you need to know.

There is no silver bullet, there is on technology that you want to solve all the problems. That’s why it’s very, very important for you to know some theory, to understand what happens behind that. Don’t be trained on just one framework.

This is exactly why I believe some, some people fail. Because sometimes they are too focused on one specific framework. So they go to a company which has Spring/Bolt for example for Java or Zend framework or Symphony, the can not go easily for another framework and sometimes you just, because of that you are just being at this trade in the framework.

Yes, it’s very good to know the framework to be very expert on them but don’t forget to be an expert in what problem they solve. This is usually why people fail in interviews.

Also, the hiring process… It’s very interesting to talk about that. Here in Germany you have a lot of different startups.

You have startups which are at the beginning of their career in their moment, and you have a startups which are like with funding and they are in a growth moment. This is usually very different how they hire. And also, it’s also very, very important that you as an engineer, you need to understand in which kind of environment you want to be.

Usually startups which they are at the beginning of their career, they are more keen to have risks on hiring process.

So basically they facilitate a little bit the hiring processes so you basically do some algorithms, some culture questions just to align and just to know which are the things you already did. So at that time they are not so focused on quality of the work, they are more focused on getting things done because this is why the difference why they will survive or not and those companies I already worked in some of them. And of course, my code, the design of my code was not that great at that time. But this is exactly where you learn things, right. So you can not learn and start doing good things when you start learning. When I was in startups back to Brazil, these kinds of things I start like my coding style being not so much well designed. So that’s fantastic.

After the company grows, you grow together with the company so this is where you start learning new things and this is exactly the opportunity to have to go to that company and to learn more in a high-scale moment or if you feel like more confident, you go to another company which is a little bit higher.

A little bit bigger, and there the process is a little bit different. So usually this companies, they are… they don’t want to take risks in the hiring process, so they have very strong technical challenges, so you usually… they don’t like people usually who are focused on one framework only. Sometimes they require that, but during the hiring process they don’t focus on the framework.

Usually, even if your company, you have like a framework well defined. They are not only opened for those kind of talents, because talents today…it’s the most important thing how fast you learn, what you can bring to the company. And also, thos companies focus on soft skills.

So companies that are in a growth moment, usually they also require soft skills from you. How usually you deal with your peers, how do you like to share your learnings, how do you like to mentor people, how are you also able to be mentored by someone and learn from them. So, soft skills are very important.

Mainly, here in companies like that where you have too many people and it’s growing all the time, you need to have communication skills. You need to know how to give feedback, how to be assertive when you ask questions, so this is also a very good skill set that you need to be aware of. And there is a lot of literature on that. There is 16 personalities website where you can find what is your personality, what are the points that you need to understand more.

I think also Medium is a very, very good platform. So topics like leadership, you have the topic of leadership in business in startups. Those topics are amazing. I also recommend those topics from leadership also for engineers because it’s how you grow. Also, Medium for startups, the technology topics there are very important, mainly the ones for the architecture and design that I mentioned previously. Some hot topics like apart from the MVC architecture which is somehow… was an architecture that was used for CRUD’s or for back office systems, now we have Hexagonal architecture, domain-driven design which are architectures that are trends now-days.

So there are a lot of YouTube channels where you can learn about microservices, domain-driven design, how you can like grow the structure of the company today to allow autonomous teams and how they can work together with product managers and this exactly good thing to learn about.

Links I recommend:

• https://www.youtube.com/user/GotoConferences
• https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCGCbB8TPtYMQmJwYVogcPjg
• https://medium.com/orbs-network/tagged/development
• https://medium.com/tech-tajawal
• https://firstround.com/review/The-anatomy-of-the-perfect-technical-interview-from-a-former-Amazon-VP/

3 | Deep dive: Backend

Let’s talk about back-end technologies and the market here in Berlin.

So, I believe that usually engineers, of course we will always have a preferable language, mine is PHP for example but one of the gaps that I see is like using PHP as a silver bullet for everything else. There are some specifics of the language and how the language runs in a web server, that it’s different in other languages. Like how it’s memory consumption, and how you have the global variables in different ways, how a request is handled in PHP rather than Node.JS or Python. I believe that to cover those gaps, one of the things that you need to learn as a back-end engineer is always keep an eye on all the technologies that are around. Try to take one path project for example, or even, even better instead of path project, use what I mentioned in a previous video — data structures. Try to implement data structures, like stacks, queues and sorting algorithms, and everything that you learned in the university in all those different languages.

Here in Berlin, the back-end languages most popular in the startups at least are PHP, Python, Ruby, using also Ruby on Rails and Node.JS, and also some companies, they are playing with Go language. So, also you have a strong market for Java, SCALA and also Kotlin.

Kotlin although it’s used mostly in mobile apps, it’s also a language that can be used in back-end, even front-end. You can use a Kotlin. So this is usually how the market is, I think one thing you need to know about those languages and it’s also a good opportunity for you, it’s go to meetups also in your city. Try to learn from other meetups. Some meetups publish videos online on YouTube so also in Berlin you can also see the topics if you go to the Meetup.org, the url that you have, you can also find some back-end meetups that you have here in Berlin and how they are like dealing with some trending topics like microservices, domain-driven design, hexagonal architecture.

So as I also mentioned before, master some frameworks that’s good, but know how they work. And the ability to learn different things is what makes a great candidate, different from a good candidate. But don’t worry, you’re people in the beginning of the career. They can and they are very keen to learn so take your time to learn different back-end technologies.

Focus on one technology, master, create a pet project, create data structures and algorithms to make you learn, it will also prepare you for probably interviews that you might face. The ability to combine the theory with practice is essential when working with back-end technologies here in Berlin.

Links I recommend:

• https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCGypYIGHl6r3m3duW_5lO_g
• https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC3PGn-hQdbtRiqxZK9XBGqQ
• https://engineering.videoblocks.com/web-architecture-101-a3224e126947
• https://medium.com/topic/programming

That’s it!

4 | Deep dive: Frontend

And what about JavaScript? How is the front-end scenario here in Berlin?

This is an observation that I’ve been making here in Berlin, I’ve been doing. Basically going to meetups, during the hiring processes of front-end engineers.

One thing that I observed a lot to this date is this fight between frameworks. Vue.JS, React, Angular which framework should I learn. My advice is yes, learn all of those frameworks but essentially, be good in JavaScript.

Plain Vanilla JavaScript, companies don’t use it but this is how you are going to write good and great software, how you’re going to design your solution. That part is even better than learning the framework itself. The framework, what you need to know about them is when to use what they are… the stronger points of each framework and what are the drawbacks and which use case you probably would use those frameworks. The community behind the framework is important. Yes, it’s important but understanding the caveats of those things is the most important thing.

So, don’t go and be “I’m a React developer!”, or “I’m a Vue.js developer!”, think about “I’m a JavaScript developer!”

Learn the language itself, how you can also apply the data structures concepts, how you can also implement data structure and algorithms on JavaScript and pure JavaScript and that would be what also will allow you to play a bit on Node.js side. Today we talked a lot about isomorphism in applications, so the same codes that you run in the back-ends you can also run in the front-end because we have single page applications, and all these concepts that JavaScript frameworks are bringing together. So, to know that, you need to have a very strong basis on JavaScript itself.

And yes, learn those frameworks but don’t be dependent on them. Use them in your favour. Think everything that you can do with them, also create a pet project, define some initial project that you can do and also in GitHub there is a concept called Awesome JS so you can search for…I’ll put the link below but you can search for Awesome JavaScript, Awesome Reacts, Awesome Vue.JS, so usually those links have the concepts of in a nutshell everything you need to know about Vue, React, JavaScript and those are very good checklists and concepts that it would help you to strive in your career.

Links I recommend:

• https://medium.com/topic/javascript
• https://medium.com/front-end-weekly
• https://engineering.videoblocks.com/web-architecture-101-a3224e126947

That’s it!

5 | Deep dive: Mobile

Yeah, let’s talk about mobile development also here in Berlin.

Yes, mobile development is also trend here in Berlin. One observation that I also can see here in the market is between Android ecosystem and also iOS ecosystem. And one of the things that I’ve been observing here and this is

something that you also need to be aware of in this career is the movement on the Android side from Java to Kotlin as a language and also on the iOS side from Objective C to Swift.

And, yeah, you can ask me should I learn Java or should I learn Kotlin, and should I learn Objective C or should I learn Swift. It’s always good to know everything of course, at least the main points of the language.

But if you want to begin your career on the Android side, I would say go and focus on Kotlin itself. It’s a language that also runs of top JVM and it’s a language that it’s more used today. It can also be used for back-end and front-end and other things.

If you go for Android development, try to learn Kotlin.

And the same for iOs.

Objective C is difficult to read, it’s a different language that you are used to, but I believe that Swift is a language that is easier to read

So I would also focus on iOS. Another point is not focus on the language. Many first startups here in Berlin even if it’s startups at the beginning of the career or also startups which are in a growth moment, bot of them,

you also need to understand the product and UX design.

So, those topics, UX design and Product and entrepreneurship are topics that you need to combine with your engineering skills and also read about them and combine them with the engineering skills for Kotlin and Swift and this is a good target for your career. That’s it!

6 | Deep dive: Data engineering

Let’s talk now about data engineering and the market in Berlin.

Data engineers, it’s probably one of the main roles that we have here that are quite new for a startups. Before, I imagine that just corporate companies or big companies, they were leveraging the usage of data engineering and they were not…the focus was not so great.

So, basically what I’ve observed here in Berlin is basically two paths here. You can play as a data engineer for product and you can play as an engineer for platform.

So when you play for platform itself, you focus more on infrastructure and you need to be very, very skilled in a lot of different topics like MapReduce and how you make the data available, how can you define the analytics pipeline and structures. For people who want to go for data engineering on the infrastructure and platform side, I believe that you also need to understand how also both of the big cloud companies work and how their infrastructure works on top of that. AWS and also Google. I will put the links for below for how Google and AWS run and they have the products there.

So you can do those kinds of technologies, I believe it’s good to have some kind of specialization so you can go there and make sure that you are an expert on those topics. So for those kind of Google and AWS path that you want to take, I believe that having certificates are a good way to also leverage you knowledge.

If you go more for the data product side, this is usually where you have to have good analytics and also the entrepreneurship skills to define how can you leverage the data, how can you collect the data and combine them with business. Also, on the data product side, this is usually where you have search and recommendation so there is also a way to be search relevance engineer, how we can leverage search and also you can go and be an expert on that topic. So you need to learn ElasticSearch, Solr and other databases that are very good for product side.

So you also need to be very strong in data modeling, so you need to be very strong in SQL and other databases like Cassandra, how can you model different databases from entity relationship to NoSQL databases so yeah, if you’re going that direction, for sure you can play on the product side, not only on the infrastructure side.

So, basically those are the two paths that I see as an engineer manager and also where I can see the companies here in Berlin and the direction they are going to. That’s it!

7 | Deep dive: Data science

Let’s talk about the data science world here in Berlin.

This is also a very similar to data engineer, it’s a topic that exists for long time. During the 90s, we had a lot of theory on top and also companies applying machine learning and data science, but now the startups are leveraging the power of the tools we have.

From the machine learning side, it’s also you need to have very strong mathematics and statistics backgrounds. And also you need to leverage some programming languages like R or Scala and also Python.

Those languages, they have libraries that you can easily plug in some machine learning algorithms and models. And also for the data science point of view. It’s also important to know how Google and AWS, similar to the data engineers, are leveraging their infrastructure and make app scale, how you can use Google cloud and AWS services on top of machine learning.

You can see for example Alexa. Usually behind that, you have a very strong API’s on machine learning that you can also leverage in your product. So focus on your mathematics.

Also machine learning engineers and data science, there is not such a huge difference between them. So usually data science and machine learning engineers are in some companies under the same departments. So usually, who is data science although there is a strong focus on mathematics and building models. They somehow also develop and place on some data engineering side. And it’s the same for the data engineer. The information is there and that’s…

today we have so many resources to learn, so usually also data scientists…they don’t go only for the mathematician approach, they are also hands-on and leverage the technologies (cloud solutions) that we have in Google and AWS.

I put a link here as a reference to know a little bit more about machine learning and data science. The interesting thing is usually startups which are in a growth moments which are huge number here in Berlin. They are fighting for a very good data scientists. So, focus on blog posts and also conferences on top of that. Be in trends with technology and also how Google and AWS recent technologies…has two times now, are using those technologies.

And read a lot. Read a lot and the difference between machine learning, data science and regular back-end or engineers is how you’re going to leverage that for the customer.

Discover how can you take all this theory and apply it to a real world problem. And that’s where also as a data science you need to play a very good role, focus only on the customer and to leverage those technologies.

That’s it!

8 | Deep dive: QA testing

Finally quality assurance.

QA engineering is a very interesting topic. Today we live in a world that is changing a lot. Some companies they don’t even have QA engineers more in the company. And some still do.

The role of the QA engineer is changing.

Of course we still have companies where the manual approach is still there. You have your testing scenarios and all your mocked tests and manual tests that you have but the focus is changing to automation. And sometimes, software engineers need to also build those automations.

So you have also, you need to be very strong on behaviour driven design and unit test, functional tests, moq tests, and all kinds of tests that you have but most important one is also about security.

Some QA engineers, they are also working on security of the applications. And some companies where security are very important, mainly FinTax, they also look for QA engineers who have strong focus on security.

So, yes, you can try to play and hijack some websites around to test and also learn a lot on top of that.

I’ve put some links and references of engineers that I know here in Berlin and they have like blog post and they talk about that. So, as I said, it’s an interesting topic,

I believe that personally QA engineers have their space, but I also think that QA engineer should not only be focused on tools itself. They need to think a little bit more about products as a whole.

Touching topics like security and also customers and why not also play as back-end engineers or even front-end engineers if needed. So, yeah, that’s my opinion about QA engineers and also how the market is working here in Berlin.

Thank you!

That’s it. We hope you enjoyed the read. Now it’s time for action. As always, we are rooting for you. Keep us posted.

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Meet Mahmoud, Imagine Fellow #14 (incl. 2022 update)

Last week I woke up to this email:

Hi Johann, I have got an offer to work in Berlin with FinCompare. I want to thank you & Imagine. You have been of great help to me!

Wow. I knew Mahmoud quite well. He’s a software engineer from Egypt who had joined our Imagine boot camp just a few weeks prior. Still in bed, I replied:

Wow, congrats. This is absolutely amazing! :) So happy for you! Tell me when to pick u up at the airport in Berlin!!

A couple of hours later, we talked. But let’s back up for a moment. Who is Mahmoud?

• Bachelor in Engineering (Systems & Computer Sciences), Mansoura University.
• Not an all-star student. But a few interesting side projects, e.g. as a graduation project, he built a morphological search engine using Python, Django and scrapy.
• Worked for 5 years in a startup and in a software house in Egypt, mainly with Python and a bit with Go.
• Also remote work for startups in Spain and Germany, learning cloud-based services (AWS) and microservice architectures (Docker).

Mahmoud is a great engineer, but he’s not the next Elon Musk (good for him!). You don’t need to be Elon if you want to work and live in Europe. Instead, be like Mahmoud.

At Imagine, we see many people like Mahmoud.

• A Bachelor's from one of the big schools in Egypt — not the best grades.
• A couple of side projects, mainly during studies.
• 3–9 years of full-time work experience, often with leading software houses like eSpace, Cube, Inova in Egypt, or places like Ejada in Saudi.
• Some experience working with people from outside of Egypt, may it be Saudi, or India, or Europe, or US/Canada
• Conversational English, but by no means perfect. Just enough to have a good conversation.
• Above all, a curiosity to learn and the drive to invest the time needed to get results — at work and in life.

Let’s get back to my chat with Mahmoud. That’s what he said:

I was trying to find a job in Germany for over a year. I got rejected in all stages of the process.

You helped me a lot with marketing myself, improving my CV and linkedin. I just fixed them, and then companies pretty much immediately started contacting me and inviting me to interviews!

Note: This was quite surprising. Just when he entered our program we asked him: Is there one thing you want to learn from us? Back then, he said: I want to get better prepared for the technical interviews. Sounds reasonable. But it’s a common bias among engineers to overly focus on technical skills.

Like every student, we gave Mahmoud our full 360° readiness assessment (example). There he learned that his English and his engineering skills were fine: Instead, we told him to dramatically improve his CV and Linkedin. So he did. Here is his new CV.

Becoming an Imagine Fellow

When it was graduation time, we invited Mahmoud to join our cohort of Imagine Fellows. We put his profile in front of our network of German recruiters, and we also gave him a personal letter of recommendation. And more. Did this make a difference? Here is his take:

A lot! I was now more trusted and more respected than before. People said “you are an experienced engineer, you’ll figure this out” when I didn’t know the answer to a tricky question. Before that, they would’ve just kicked me out. Now I have a job in Berlin!!

That’s it. Where is Mahmoud now? He’s currently preparing his visa application. He will arrive in Berlin by mid-January. We will greet him at the airport and give him a lift into his soon-to-be new hometown: Berlin.

Update 2022: Mahmoud & his wife are still happily living in Berlin, and we’re excited to count him among our Imagine Community friends.

— Your friends at Imagine. Apply now.

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“I’ve got a job in Berlin” was originally published in Imagine on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

A conversation with data scientist Mohamed from careem.com. Hosted by Egyptian Techies in Berlin & Imagine Foundation e.V.

Johann: Hi, Mohamed. Great to have you here. Who are you, and what do you do?

Mohamed: Hi! I’ve been working in Germany for 2 years now. I’ve been been working for one year at GoEuro as a data scientist in ranking search results. And now, I’ve been working for 1 year with Careem.com, a ride-sharing company. I’m mostly involved with dynamic pricing and machine learning.

Johann: [Joking] So, you’re increasing the price of my rides?

Mohamed: Well, I am trying to make your ride available. High prices are better than “not available”, don’t you think?

Johann: Of course, cool. Can you also comment on the key languages, technologies and frameworks that you are using at Careem as a data scientist?

Mohamed: Yeah, so mainly we are using Jupyter Notebook. Let’s focus first on targets. The target is to develop a brochure and analyzing the data.

The most important part is your communication ability.

So you have to create a model and have to express to stakeholders like product managers, engineers, why should we use this model, trends in the data, how for example will the price increase/decrease, how this affects the customer. All these analyses have to be embedded in the code.

We use Python or R as a main programming for machine learning. In addition we use a bunch of Apache SPARK for data retrieval and for scaling the machine learning model.

So let’s say that the first part is creating the model using Python / R and the second part is this scaling where we are using Apache Spark, also which has Scala programming, but you can also have a nice Python interface.

To sum up, for the programming skills, it’s Python, R, SQL, Scala, Apache SPARK for the programming and engineering part.

Regarding the machine learning part, I think good knowledge of different classification techniques, statistical analysis, the broad knowledge, not the deep mathematical knowledge.

Johann: Thanks for your super detailed answer. Next question. There is a lot of confusion out there in the world about the role of the data scientist. How much modeling do you do, how much data engineering you do, what are the typical data science roles at Careem?

Mohamed: Yeah, that’s a very good question. Actually I don’t have the perfect answer but I will answer from my perspective. It’s based on statistical analysis and machine learning which is a quite old, but because of the booming availability of data it’s quite booming.

So data science is split in two roles. And every company says data science is machine learning / product. Let’s say that data science is / analysis is focused more on analyzing. Typically you work in a cross-functional team. So for example, let’s say that I have a pricing team, they give analysis on what if we increase the price, how would this affect the demand, how are we going to personalize the pricing, to customize solution to each cluster of customers. So let’s say this is the first part, focusing on analyzing the data and presenting the conclusions and supporting statistical consistency, etc.

And the other part is data science / machine learning which is more closely working with back-end engineers, so after all analysis we come up with a fantastic algorithm. So, we focus more on the scalability of machine learning algorithms, how are we going to collect data, how automations are processed. These are the two main things, plus the data engineer which provides the muscle to scale the algorithm for example to trillions or millions of records and so that for example when you search for something, you instantly see the answer related to your search.

Johann: Thanks. What recommendation do you have for people who want to understand the frontier of applied data science?

Mohamed: My recommendation is something that I did myself: Side projects. Technologies like Apache Spark are not that mature. They have a lot of gaps where you can contribute code, there are a lot of open issues where you can help fixing a problem.

From a data science perspective, I think Kaggle is a great resource where you can get a flavour about machine learning.

There are competitions that are issued by companies, we posted a fraction of their data set and they want people to compete.

So I think side projects are a good tool for increasing your level from junior to senior in the minimal amount of time.

Johann: Mohamed, thanks for your time and detailed advice. Thank you very much.

—

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A special thanks to our partner Egyptian Techies in Berlin for their contributions to this article.

This post is part of a longer series. For more visit us here: https://medium.com/imagine-foundation

101 advice for data scientists was originally published in Imagine on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

A conversation with backend engineer Khaled from goeuro.com and Leandro, engineering manager at GetYourGuide.com. Hosted by Egyptian Techies in Berlin & Imagine Foundation e.V.

Johann: Welcome Khaled and Leandro. Great to have you here. Who are you, and what do you do?

Khaled: My name is Khaled. I work at GoEuro.com, a travel company. I’m a software engineer.

Leandro: My name is Leandro, I work as an engineering manager at GetYourGuide, it’s an online travel agency. We sell activities and tours around the world.

Johann: What are the skills required, skills, technologies, languages, tools to find and do a great job here in Germany?

Khaled: So, I work in back-end and also encounter some front-end but I can only speak of the back-end. So, back-end-wise, the most common thing is JAVA and there are some projects that work with Node.js.

So ideally you know Java. This is starting from Java 8 all through Java 11, we work with everything and the mindset will be that I only develop software but I also know how to operate it as part of the DevOps. So we can start from requirements part to running your project to deployment on AWS or a Google Cloud, and maintain it. Make sure that you know the types of deployments, the canary, the blue-green and how to roll out features.

From the language perspective, knowing a functional programming language like Scala, Closure, Kotlin even are quite nice and knowing some languages like Java, that’s widely known.

And also languages similar to, or frameworks like Node or JavaScript for back-end that’s also very useful.

Johann: How about Go or Ruby?

Khaled: Go is also getting very popular but it’s mostly heading towards the DevOps part because most of the people use it to bootstrap and also write some kind of factors. It’s really nice and even in GoEuro, by trying to go toward Go I will bet, however most of our services are written in Java and some other small services in Scala and some other frameworks that relate to Scala.

Also, knowing scripting like Python or Bash is very handy if you want to accomplish certain tasks or do some batch processing.

Also, if you have an edge for something like ElasticSearch or Apache Solr that have a really big demand in Berlin.

If you know ElasticSearch pretty well, you can land in various teams that are trying to create a better search and better recommendation systems, so if you are aware of information retrieval systems like Solr cloud, Solr, ElasticSearch, you are very attractive.

Johann: So, Leandro, you’re next. You’re an engineering manager. Anything that you’re expecting people to know to thrive in big engineering teams?

Leandro: I think from engineering point of view, we need developers and engineers to know exactly about design patterns, how we apply SOLID principles, and basically in GetYourGuide, everything that was said here is also relevant for front-ends. The only point that I would like to add is:

There are still a lot of companies that use PHP as the main language. Many use Symphony 4 as a framework. and it’s not because it’s PHP that you can’t develop good code, you can also apply SOLID principles, you can also Dockerize your application.

Also some other topics like Domain Driven Design, which takes care of everything that’s been said here on the problem space which is like have this mindset of end-to end so you understand the problem you’re trying to solve, to better create the architecture. This is a very interesting thing, don’t only focus on the framework. Also try to focus on the end-to-end because this is what drags your choice on architecture.

Johann: Great! And we keep on hearing about microservices architecture, Docker, etc. Can you stress the importance of that?

Leandro: Yes, sure. The main purpose for me is as you also pointed out, as your codebase grows — your company also grows. And sometimes we do changes in our organizations and don’t do changes in our code.

Microservice is not like “one solution fits all”. Microservices needs to be done carefully because it comes with other complexities. It’s impossible to have a an application that has a well defined modules where you can use the SOLID principles to do that.

The main point with microservices is to know these standards and how to apply them and the drawbacks of that solution.

So read about microservices and always try for each article that says microservices are good, know there are other that say microservices are not good. Everything depends on the problem you are trying to solve. At GetYourGuide specifically we are preparing a different structure that allows the teams to create the services and decide if they want if it’s a micro or it’s a API basis solution, engineers need to decide the pros and cons of all solutions.

Johann: Good, thanks for your time and detailed advice. Thank you very much.

—

A special thanks to our partner Egyptian Techies in Berlin for their contributions to this article.

This post is part of a longer series. For more visit us here: https://medium.com/imagine-foundation

101 advice for backend engineers was originally published in Imagine on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

The following is an excerpt from a conversation between mobile engineer Mohamed from vivy.com and Johann, Founder & CEO of Imagine. This event was hosted by Egyptian Techies in Berlin & Imagine Foundation e.V.

Johann: Welcome Mohamed. Great to have you here. Who are you, and what do you do?

Mohamed: Hi, I’m Mohamed, I’m a software engineer, I’m an android developer. I work for a company called Vivy.com. We build a secure health management assistant.

Johann: Awesome! What are the skills required, skills, technologies, languages, tools to find and do a great job here in Germany?

Mohamed: I mean, in the end, there are some foundations which all the front end developers share. I’m talking about them from the mobile perspective. These are basic skills on how to manage a big codebase. Because most of us work in small companies at some point and they saw how weak the code can grow. For small apps, it’s really tempting to, like, take shortcuts just to get things done, but after some time it grows massively.

So, the main skill I see in the mobile technology or any mobile development is to be able to manage large codebases which has some principles and software writing skills.

You need to have SOLID principles, how to write clean code, how to write your code in a way that follows design patterns that solves future problems that may come into place and of course to stay up-to-date with the technology.

This means you have to look at the latest technology in the market, the community, you have to participate in conferences. If you don’t have the luxury to participate in conferences you can watch some talks. This way you will increase your knowledge and you will gradually become a better developer.

Johann: What technologies or languages would you advise aspiring mobile developers should know?

Mohamed: Well, the market here I see in Germany doesn’t go toward cross-platforms. Even though it’s tempting and there are some really nice frameworks, but cross platforms has not matured yet. In fact, a lot of big names are moving away from it, such as AirBNB and some parts of Facebook, they all reverted back to native. So all the markets are going toward the native languages.

So Android is mainly going towards Kotlin. iOS is all about Swift now. I mean, nobody’s using Objective-C anymore.

For Android its mostly Kotlin, and Kotlin’s trending. I see also a lot of people, a lot of companies are moving 100% to Kotlin. It’s become like really mature and you can use well it in production.

Johann: Mohamed, I know you are an active believer in lifelong learning. Can you give an example of how you learn?

Mohamed: Yes. I used to learn and listen to specific podcasts. In particular, a podcast called Fragmented. It’s an Android podcast. And there are some newsletters for Android, like Android Weekly. The good thing about the newsletter is that the most experienced people look at their blogs and they talk and they group it all together in one newsletter. It’s really beautiful to find such information all gathered in one place.

Johann: Thanks. Another question relating to experience. How many years of experience should an android mobile developer have to move to Germany and what are the desirable skills they should have?

Mohamed: Well, how many years of experience is really dependent on the type of experience. I see young developers, by young I mean 2 years experience in Android, but some of them have experience in Java, some of them have like worked with back-end before. But just 2 years of experience is enough, just make sure that the developer has worked with the relevant technologies and business cases. If you work for 2 years in a service company that only writes content without any logic or without any business growth, it doesn’t really count as experience.

So make sure your current job is adding relevant software engineering experience to your career.

And for the desirable skills make sure you use Kotlin, you are familiar with functional programming, make sure to use RX java for example, and Reactive overall concept. Make sure you know design patterns, lean architecture, best practices like SOLID principles, make sure to read Clean Code book.

Johann: Good, thanks for your time and detailed advice, Mohamed. Thank you very much.

—

A special thanks to our partner Egyptian Techies in Berlin for their contributions to this article.

This post is part of a longer series. For more visit us here: https://medium.com/imagine-foundation

101 advice for mobile engineers was originally published in Imagine on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Dive into our conversation with Fabian, co-founder at Sharpist.org and previously partner mgmt. & operations at GetYourGuide.
Hosted by Imagine Foundation (apply: joinimagine.com)

Johann (CEO & Founder, Imagine): Hi Fabi! My understanding is that you are the ‘master’ of cultural fit interviews. In your role, you’ve been leading many of them. How many did you do in your life so far?

Fabian: That’s a good question! I’d say more than 100 cultural fit interviews!

Johann: Wow! That’s why we’re talking to you today. Many people we work with have this one question: “what’s this ominous culture fit interview? what is it like and what do I have to do to survive it?” So shall we start with a very brief overview of the interview process and where does the cultural fit interview come in?

Fabian: Yeah, regarding the overall process: What we did at GetYourGuide, and now at Sharpist, is to start with a few very low barrier types of interview phone screens to see if we and the candidate have the same basic understanding of the role. Once this is checked, then you want to test people’s technical skills in several interviews. These interviews are also an opportunity to get to know the different team members and the process in which the team works.

The cultural fit interview comes in the very end. Here the team will ask “do I really believe that this person will add value to our team and do we feel like we want to work with this person day in, day out?”

Johann: Awesome, let’s dive into the cultural fit interview. What do you know about the candidates when they arrive “at your doorstep” for the cultural fit interview?

Ok, all the top companies use different tools to share information about the applicant throughout the process. At the start, I would typically know the types of questions that have been asked before, the candidate’s answers and his/her strengths and weaknesses as they are assessed by the other interviewers. In addition, I would obviously look at the CV of the person and write down a few questions that I found find noteworthy. I do not necessarily look for suspicious or bad things, just for things, you know, where there’s an unexplained gap in the CV. Not necessarily even problems, just things that are not standard. I would make a mark and just follow up to understand what happened. I am looking for some basic clear reasoning from the candidate. Not more, not less.

Johann: Thanks. Next, can you paint us a picture of a successful candidate? Like: how do people behave like who make it successfully through the culture fit interview with you?

Fabian: In a nutshell, good candidates help me develop a good understanding of the person’s motivation. That’s always very helpful. Example: When someone’s able to very clearly tell me “why I should we hire you” and the “why you are the right one for this job?”.

Tip: You come across with a clear, concise answer, and ideally even in a fun, relatable way, yeah that’s a good sign.

To achieve that I always try to put the applicant into a position where there is some degree of comfort. The spirit is one of a normal conversation rather than a formal interview. For candidates, this means:

this is not just a one-way conversation but also an opportunity to ask questions and get a feeling for me as a person and the company I represent. So: just relax (if you can, haha) and enjoy the ride.

Johann: Thank you! Can you tell us a secret and give us a typical question that you are typically asking?

Fabian: Sure. To start off, I would always ask “Can you give me a brief summary of what you’ve done before?” Here I am not looking for the summary of the bullets in the CV but rather for a coherent story as to why people moved between positions. There’s no right or wrong answer, it comes down to credibly explaining your journey.

Really good candidates show an ability to self-reflect.

Johann: Interesting, so when I hear this right: Important are self-reflection, communication clarity, establishing a good relationship, opening up and allowing you to get a feeling for the person behind the CV. What about tech? Do you talk about technical engineering details at all?

Fabian: I will never ask in depth (I am also not an engineer). But I sometimes ask for things that are a) related to the area of expertise of the applicant and b) where I don’t necessarily have a perfect technical understanding.

I want to know: “is this person able to communicate technical details to a broader audience?”

For example, I would ask a backend engineer “can you explain to an elderly person on the street ‘what is object-oriented programming?’” Explaining stuff to a technical peer is one thing but then explaining it to a random person in the street is another thing.

Johann: great! As a final question, some parting advice. Can you give us one do and one don’t? Something not to do and something absolutely to do in the cultural fit interview?

Fabian: First, the screw up: Don’t try to invent things that you haven’t done. There’s a good reason why you are invited to this interview. At this stage, companies believe in you. There’s no reason why you should invent anything that’s you have not done.

Don’t invent any stories. It always comes out. You always act somehow weird if things are not exactly like you have experienced them. Don’t do it.

Second, the positives: Be confident about the things you’ve done. Everybody has lived a very unique life. Companies appreciate that.

Always ask questions. Not just for the sake of doing so, but once you have done your homework, try to ask questions that really help you assess whether this is a firm you want to work for.

It’s a unique opportunity you have. Take advantage of it.

Johann: Thank you all for your time and detailed advice, Fabian. All the best.

Did you like this content? Follow us or, even better, apply to joinimagine.com. We are always looking for curious minds and courageous hearts. Are you in?

A special thanks to Fabian Niedballa for his time and expertise. This content was part of a longer video session. To see the video, click here: https://youtu.be/q1u-kcXr8eQ

This post is part of a longer series. For more visit us here: https://medium.com/imagine-foundation

Surviving the cultural fit interview was originally published in Imagine on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

The following is an excerpt from a conversation between Ahmed, frontend engineer at Zalando.de and Johann, Founder & CEO of Imagine. This event was hosted by Egyptian Techies in Berlin & Imagine Foundation e.V.

Johann: Welcome Ahmed and great to have you here. Who are you, and what do you do?

Ahmed: Hi. I’m Ahmed and I’m a software engineer at a company here called Zalando. We’re working in fashion.

Johann: What are the skills required, skills, technologies, languages, tools to find and do a great job here in Germany?

Ahmed: Yeah, where can I start from? Right now the ecosystem for frontend is growing and evolving so fast…

My first advice for front end is learn how to write JavaScript, that’s it. Everyone knows, everyone thinks he knows how to write JavaScript, I still think that I know how to write JavaScript but… No one knows.

So the first advice is to deep dive into JavaScript itself. Don’t focus on CSS and HTML because we have a misconception in some non-European companies that front-end development is UI development, and these are two different things.

front-end development is not UI development. these are two different things.

UI development can be done by a designer. Experienced designers can do UI front-end development, but front-end development is kind of real development. You deal with building API’s, understanding RESTful API’s, understanding HTTP responses and stuff like this. It goes way beyond design and developing the UI.

Here’s a list of skills and stuff and the technical side that you guys need to master in order first to pass the interviews and in order to pass your first 6 months in your company and shine.

Johann: Go ahead!

Ahmed: So, Javascript is very, very important. If you are experienced in ES6, this is a big plus. Another thing in front-end development is critical path rendering. I believe most front-end developers know about it, but you have to be prepared for this, you have to be able to answer questions like one is blocking, which one is not, like CSS is blocking or not, Javascript files are blocking or not, these kinds of questions. Next: Basic or medium Node.js knowledge like for example, we need to deal with authentication as a front-end web developer, not as a back-end developer, and also package management and bundles, stuff like this. Like now we a lot of bundlers that help you to ship your application. You might need to learn at least one of them and understand your needs and which one fits in your needs.

Going further into the testing, any one of us can talk about testing for years, but please, yes exactly, please, please, please give a very careful and very much attention to testing, specifically unit and function testing.

Integration testing, end-to-end testing for front-end is super important. Things like Docker right now is a requirement for my company. As a front-end developer I have to use Docker. I have to ship my application into it.

Functional programming is also trending, if you know some functional programming this will help you. By functional programming, we mean simple functional programming, not really, really functional programming, Haskellor something like this. I’m trying to be brief here, but these are the things I personally touch in my daily work.

Reactive programming is a big big plus. If you know RX.js it’s very good. You can use RX.js with Angular, or even Node.js. Try to do pair programming a lot with your pairs because it’s required here in Germany to explain and express your ideas and to do pair programming with your colleagues. Maybe in your native language, in your home country, you can talk with your native language but you have to practice to talk with people who are from a different culture and try to ship and deliver the idea that you have to them through code or just through articulating your idea.

Next: Static code analysis. This is a thing I’ve never touched before I came to Germany and then I figured out that it’s super important and that it helped a lot in standardizing the way the team writes code. GraphQL is a plus, server-side rendering is a plus if you know about it and in the end, monitoring and communication skills. You have to focus on communication skills and maybe you can take another question regarding this. Try to practice on Codility for front-end development, for simple algorithms, stuff like this will also help you to reach the level of passing the interviews.

Johann: Any other tips on learning and growing? Resources online?

Ahmed: I have several tips. Whenever you have a problem and you want to understand something, try to read about it and then try to watch a video about it. Just exchange reading and watching videos towards one thing that you tried to learn gives you a different perspective of how do you learn it. So, if you’re a video person, try to read, if you’re a video person try to read. This was super helpful for me.

Also, try to look into open sources. Try to find any open sources that you can at least participate in by answering questions or updating read-me and something like this, and one by one you will evolve in this. The very important point here is to see some code from people, to see how other people think, to see how they solve the problem. Whatever the complexity of the problem, try to take your time, even if you take like a week to understand how one function goes and something like this. Insist to understand the input and output of this function, try to understand it correctly and try to provide a better report or proposal to improve this function to improve this function from a tiny speck perspective or a space perspective, whatever.

Johann: Nice, thank you! Next question: What if I have the basics of front-end engineering, doing some Angular 1, and now I’m choosing between newer technologies. How can I decide?”

Ahmed: It doesn’t matter which framework you are using but eventually you are going to choose one of them. If you feel that you are 100, and really, really 100 in JavaScript and you really want to look into a specific framework and continue in this framework…I would recommend first to go further in the JavaScript. Web API’s… Go to Mozilla and read the Web API’s. Go to some front-end challenges and then choose. If you want to choose, I would say between React and Angular, and I was in this decision…It depends, right? It depends what is the problem that you are trying to solve, what is your level of dealing with bootstrapping an application. React application is harder to bootstrap than Angular, this is what I’ve heard from people because of bundling and stuff like this…The Angular canvas was a predefined command line that you can bootstrap your application. I personally would vote for React right now. But this is very, very opinionated. This doesn’t mean that you should not go with Angular. But in general, please don’t focus on a specific platform, focus what is behind these platforms. At the end these platforms are JavaScript. Sorry, frameworks not platforms… Please work harder in the JavaScript side. I believe you, Leandro, can also add to this.

[Side comment from Leandro, an engineering manager]: Let me jump in as well. A word about front-end. I’m part of some decisions we have here at the company and it’s funny because maybe two weeks ago we were like defining the architecture of our web traveler front-end which is a new project that we are starting, and there was this fight between Vue and React. And they get to ask my opinion about it. My answer was exactly like your answer. Why are you focusing on the framework itself? What is behind that? What is the best practice and how are you going to breed this to the front-end? And I told them it doesn’t matter. You can do good things…Like, focus on design patterns. Although I would say most engineers didn’t want React, so it was not consistent. The decision that was done in the past somehow and now we have more engineers in the company and somehow the view was already in progress. Let’s see, for React you need to use another proof of concept and other things. The focus is not the framework.

Ahmed: Yeah, exactly. For example, just understand what is the virtual DOM. You try to understand and why some libraries sell the virtual DOM in their core and how can you as a developer use a virtual DOM in a very simple implementation to understand what’s going on. Something like this is helpful to decide which framework.

Don’t limit yourself to a certain framework because maybe a job requires to learn Angular and React. It’s a plus but I don’t recommend to focus on one platform or a specific platform.

Learn both, learn JavaScript and you will learn any other framework.

Johann: Thanks. Any final words of advice?

Ahmed: Believe in yourself. All of us failed in interviews. We failed in a lot of interviews but we made it at one interview. So don’t judge yourself based on one interview, just keep doing it.

Johann: Ahmed, thanks for your time and detailed advice. Thank you very much.

—

A special thanks to our partner Egyptian Techies in Berlin for their contributions to this article.

This post is part of a longer series. For more visit us here: https://medium.com/imagine-foundation

101 advice for frontend engineers was originally published in Imagine on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.