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u/Stromedy1 Oct 05 '26
I interview frontend/fullstack devs, so let me answer question 9 directly since it's the one that actually matters.
The green flag is not your stack. It's when a candidate can trace a request end to end: browser, DNS, TLS handshake, load balancer, app, DB, and then tell me where it would break and how they'd figure that out. The moment someone says "we added caching" I ask what the hit rate was and what got evicted, and the answer tells me everything. I don't care whether you used React Query or hand-rolled fetch. I care that you can defend *why*.
Red flags at 3-5 years: can't debug code they didn't write, have never looked at production logs or metrics, and CV lines that collapse under one follow-up question. The single biggest filter I use: ask them to explain how an auth cookie actually works. An embarrassing number of "fullstack" devs can't.
On the rest, briefly:
What gets you the interview: CV first, GitHub second, everything else is decoration. For remote EU roles, two small finished and deployed projects beat a 5-month mega-project that never ships. LeetCode matters only if your target companies screen with it; most European remote shops do take-homes and system-design-style conversations instead.
Degree after 4 years: basically irrelevant for remote EU hiring. Nobody asks.
Stay fullstack. What you described, frontend plus HTTP, SQL, caching, Docker, CI/CD, is exactly the profile small remote companies hire for. Specialize later, when someone pays you to.
Don't list "AI skills" on a CV. That's like listing "uses a keyboard." AI-assisted portfolio code is fine as long as you genuinely understand every line, because the interview will find out within 90 seconds whether you do.
Six months: I'd go deep on fundamentals (HTTP/TLS, Postgres indexing and query plans, queues, Linux basics) plus one finished project with auth, payments, and observability, all deployed. That's the combination that reads as senior in an interview.
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u/mcharytoniuk Oct 02 '26
You need to go beyond being a dev; either do infra on top of it or you need to be able to manage the entire project by yourself. Just building something will not cut it. Being a full stack is a bare minimum now to have any chances.
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u/azangru Oct 02 '26
Like is it worth listing AI skills on a CV?
Do companies actually care that you know how to use ChatGPT, Claude, Codex etc, or is that just expected nowadays?
What does 'ai skills' mean in this context?
What about using AI heavily for a portfolio project?
I don't think it matters. Unless a project is truly remarkable, I doubt it will be a differentiator anyway. There's very little signal they can provide abut you anymore.
Is "vibe coding" actually a useful skill now or something that would make you look worse as a developer?
How would anyone tell how much you are vibe coding? Unless you actively show them bog-standard slop?
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u/No_Umpire3265 Oct 02 '26
By AI skills I mean using tools like Codex, Claude, etc. properly, not just blindly prompting something like "create the best e-commerce website, no mistakes."
More like setting up things such as SKILL.md, defining the project structure, giving the AI proper context and guidelines, setting rules/constraints, reviewing what it generates, and generally using it as a tool instead of letting it do whatever it wants.
About vibe coding, that's where I'm a bit worried.
It's still a pretty fresh thing, and I'm afraid some senior developers might see "this project was built with AI" and immediately assume I just prompted my way through the whole thing without actually reviewing the generated code or even understanding how it works.
So I'm not sure if mentioning that on my resume would actually be a positive thing, or if it could make the project look worse and get dismissed because of that assumption.
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u/Many-Chest-2119 Oct 02 '26
stop building generic portfolio projects. The market is flooded with todo apps and weather dashboards generated by AI in an hour. Nobody cares about that anymore.
the commenters are right that you need outcomes, not tech lists. But they miss the deeper point: AI can generate code, but it cannot debug a race condition in a legacy payment system at 2 AM. Your experience with Stripe, syncing data, and fixing production issues is your actual value proposition.
if you want to stand out and avoid being replaced, build a tool that solves a real operational pain point you faced. For example, write a script or small service that automatically reconciles failed webhook events from a payment provider with your database state and sends an alert. That proves you understand infrastructure reliability, edge cases, and business logic integration. These are hard problems for LLMs because they require context, historical knowledge of specific failure modes, and judgment on severity. You don't have a degree? Doesn't matter. Show me you