Ask HN: Failing interviews for mid-level SWE in UK, advice please
A software developer with seven years of experience is seeking advice after struggling to secure mid-level positions in the UK. Despite applying for nearly 100 roles and attending several interviews, the individual has faced challenges, including technical issues during interviews. They are looking for suggestions to improve their chances of success and are actively revising their skills and knowledge in software development.
- ▪The developer has a background in ASP.NET full stack software development and has worked in various roles over the past seven years.
- ▪Since May 2025, they have applied for almost 100 jobs and have had eight interviews, with two progressing to the second stage.
- ▪They are currently revising key concepts in C# and data structures to enhance their interview performance.
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Record
| Original publisher | Ycombinator |
| Canonical URL | https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48226107 |
| Publication time | Thu, 21 May 2026 17:19:03 +0000 |
| Retrieval time | 2026-05-21T17:31:35.371Z |
| Last seen | 2026-05-21T17:31:38.700Z |
| Headline source | Publisher (no WeSearch rewrite) |
| Excerpt source | publisher body |
| Excerpt method | First ~120 words (~800 chars) of extracted publisher body, fair-use limited. |
| Summary | WeSearch · cerebras-chat (WeSearch summarizer) |
| Summary source text | contentText |
| Citation coverage | Summary is a WeSearch-generated derivative; primary citation is the original publisher URL. |
| Cluster | R9g_QMGRqd18 |
| Cluster logic | Grouped by semantic title/content similarity across sources within a rolling window. Same-publisher template collisions are excluded from coverage comparison. |
| Ranking reason | Story pages are not engagement-ranked. Hub feeds use recency, with optional source-diversified chronological ordering (cap consecutive stories per source). No personalized ranking. |
| Publisher visit | Yes — open original |
| Substitutes article? | No — link-out required for full text |
Rights status (four layers)
WeSearch handling by dimension
| Indexing | May the item be indexed (stored, ranked, made findable)? | Allowed |
| Snippet | May a short excerpt of the publisher's text be shown? | Allowed |
| AI summary | May WeSearch generate its own short summary of the article? | Limited |
| Retrieval / RAG | May the content be exposed for third-party retrieval-augmented generation? | Not asserted |
| Model training | May the content be used to train AI models? | Not asserted |
| Commercial reuse | May the content be reused commercially? | Not permitted |
Basis: Derived from the published RSS/Atom feed. Contact: [email protected]. Reviewed: 2026-07-24.
Opening excerpt (first ~120 words) tap to expand
I've a background mostly in ASP.NET full stack software development. I'm very hands on, like to tinker at different things and can learn fast.*Employment History*My employment history is like this: Placement year 2018, worked for the full term + summer, graduated 2020, did backend dev in Python at Company A for 7 months, then full stack ASP.NET at company B for 2.5 years, then co-founded my own company and was the sole developer on our software platform, did all the cloud infra in Azure too. That lasted for another 2.5 or so years. This gives me approx. 7 years of professional software development experience.In May 2025 the company wasn't in a strong financial position, and I started to hunt for jobs. We limped along while I polished it for a launch in September 2025.
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Excerpt limited to ~120 words for fair-use compliance. The full article is at Ycombinator.