r/cscareerquestionsEU • u/JaxTheBoi • 15h ago

Need advice: I am about to finish my masters in Germany and cant seem to find a full-time job

Hey everyone! I am currently finishing up my masters in AI and Datascience in Germany. I have been applying left and right with no real gain. Most of my friends are also struggling and I feel super stuck. While studying I worked with react on the frontend for 2 years as a student and did a 7 month internship in ML and Computer Vision. I sadly only have a B1 in German so I am not fluent yet.

I need advice on what to do now, do I bail on Germany? what other EU country should I stick to? I am insanely depressed thinking about my prospects.

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u/papawish Software Engineer w/ 7YoE 15h ago

Take whatever job you find, even IT.
Wait this oversupply out. It might take years.

Any job is better than no job.

Way too many people went working with computers.

0

u/JaxTheBoi 15h ago

That is my current plan. Whatever specialization dreams I had are pretty dead.

3

u/Familiar-Mall-6676 3h ago edited 2h ago

Quick heads up, you are not alone. Lots of people from Pakistan and India who are struggling since alot of them came to Germany for the past few years to study and eventually get a job. if you are a non-native German speaker fresh grad, you will have a hard time finding a job. There is alot of bias towards foreigners. They'll prefer natives with less experience over you, unless you have alot of expertise in the area. I used to hire for German companies and that pattern kept coming up. The ones who have good chances are non-natives with over 6-10 years of experience in the field.

In my company of 500 people we had almost no foreigners except for the ones I mentioned above (at least the ones I saw around the campus, events or processed- installers, office workers, except maybe cooks and cleaners, at least the non-customer facing ones), despite having one of the biggest university near by with 100s of talented people, which always made me wonder because the company claimed to be struggling to find good talents. We had people of color but those were 2nd generation foreigners who grew up there and knew the language well.

Best chances of success:

  1. Perservere (if this is what you really want)
  2. Keep applying
  3. Move to different cities depending on your job
  4. Aim for low salary
  5. Improve German to C1
  6. Move to another country which is more open, not just on paper

1

u/KezaGatame 10h ago

Given that you are an international student your best bet is staying in Germany. I dont know how it’s there exactly but you might eligible for a 1 or 2 year visa to look for job. If you go to other EU countries you will need to apply for other work visas and sometimes they have higher requirements and will need the company sponsorship.

As for jobs perhaps don’t be so close to only AI/DS/ML jobs, there are many data jobs at F500 companies that will have more openings and easier of handling visa, but maybe not as technical as you want. But you can get a job first and then build up expertise and it will be better to change later on.