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Some things which have worked for me (Scandinavian working elsewhere, senior dev): - Re. keywords, trim the CV according to the job you want. I've worked with PHP, PL/SQL, VBA and other technologies I'd rather never touch again. I simply don't mention them in the CV, and if it ever comes up in the interview I clearly say "I don't want to work with that." If they press me on it, that's a big red flag. - Rather than simply saying "no" to a rebuild, how about looking into the pain points and improving them, step by step? If it's slow, do a bit of profiling and fix the low-hanging fruit. If it's incomprehensible, run a formatter and a linter and fix everything which you can conceivably fix, then run a complexity checker and discombobulate a couple of the biggest clusters. If it's unreliable or ossified, add tests until it's stable and refactorable. - Shitty hiring practices can be a sign of a disorganised or dysfunctional company. I'd simply take it as a red flag and be ready to drop the opportunity if it's too bad. - Meaningful work is out there, but it's usually not paid the best. That said, do you really need the very best paid job you can find to have a comfortable life? You're already in a well-paid segment, even with the salary stagnation. I've found lots of meaning by working in research (really badly paid, but such stimulating colleagues & cameraderie) and currently in a place where I'm working almost full time on open source software, including third party dependencies. |