I'm a Data Engineer from South America with about 7y of experience and recently promoted to Senior, but I'm suffering from severe imposter syndrome.
Basically, I worked focusing on technological migrations, I started my career moving legacy systems (mainframes, Netezza, PowerCenter, etc) into Hadoop. For the last few years, I’ve been migrating those Hadoop clusters into the cloud (basically Databricks). My day-to-day is all about Spark performance tuning, SQL, and Python + Azure/Hadoop environments.
I was fairly comfortable and confident with my work but I recently talked to some sharp engineers and realized I have a huge gap when it comes to talk about concepts. I know how to implement the solution, but explaining the "fancy concept" directly from the documentation leaves me baffled.
I’m planning to move to Europe, I’m not really aiming for the 'European Silicon Valley' hyper-competitive tier like London or Amsterdam, I'm looking more into places with a good quality of life and solid tech scenes, like Spain.
With the advancement of AI, I feel that job openings are dwindling and companies are becoming much more demanding.
From what I've researched, interviews for mid-level/senior positions in Europe evaluate the "why" much more than the "how" (Ex: Systems Design). This paradigm shift is driving me crazy, because my biggest difficulty now is precisely speaking the "fancy" architectural terms, which seem to be exactly what's evaluated to get a job there nowadays. So, I wanted to ask you:
Is the European market really that rigid with Systems Design terminology currently, or is practical experience in migration still highly valued? How do you overcome this difficulty of knowing how to build complex things, but having trouble explaining them conceptually in an interview?
A Reality check can help me to move on