Ask HN: Failing interviews for mid-level SWE in UK, advice please
*Employment History*
My employment history is like this: Placement year 2018, worked for the full term + summer, graduated 2020, did backend dev in Python at Company A for 7 months, then full stack ASP.NET at company B for 2.5 years, then co-founded my own company and was the sole developer on our software platform, did all the cloud infra in Azure too. That lasted for another 2.5 or so years. This gives me approx. 7 years of professional software development experience.
In May 2025 the company wasn't in a strong financial position, and I started to hunt for jobs. We limped along while I polished it for a launch in September 2025. The site wasn't the success we were hoping. We closed it in February. Despite that, I did learn a lot and my web app development ability is much better as a result.
*Job applications*
Since May 2025, I've applied for almost 100 roles. I've concentrated on roles where I'm not likely to be filtered out, i.e. ASP.NET jobs. I've gotten 8 interviews, two of which went to a second stage.
The most recent interview didn't go brilliantly, my IDE crashed when I attempted a screen capture of it! That said, it was a take home coding exercise, and I explained my decisions, made improvements during the interview, talked them over with the interviewers. My decisions weren't in keeping with the interviewer's expectations, but I had good explanations for my decisions. It was reasonable for a small project, but sure, I'd have designed parts of it differently if it was for a big live web application.
*Help needed*
I would like suggestions to improve my chances of success. I do have a good CV and tailor it slightly for each application. I wrote it myself without using any AI tooling. In my spare time I've obtained several Azure certifications, including Associate Cloud Developer.
I've been reading a PDF "Cracking the Coding Interview". I'm also thinking to:
- revise data structures,
- revise C# design patterns,
- revise the classic C# gotchas about delegates and IEnnumerable vs IQueryable,
- maybe read the books C# in a Nutshell and ASP.NET in Action.
But I wonder how helpful these steps will be, as I've never actually been asked about these questions, but maybe knowing them will make me "talk engineer" rather than come across as "just a coder"?
Beyond this, I'm not sure what else to do. I've never been in such a dry spell before with software jobs.
My location is in Northern Ireland, I've been searching in Belfast mostly but would also be willing to work a remote job from the UK mainland.