How I Changed Job in 2026

I’m a Senior PHP Developer. At my previous job, I was also a team lead/tech lead on top of that, while my official position was systems architect. After 10 years in e-commerce within one company, I decided to move on and finally change jobs, and ideally switch domains too.

The market isn’t exactly friendly right now, at least for economic reasons, so I’ll share how it went for me.

I prepared my resume and posted it in September, initially targeting architect roles, and I set my desired salary right away with a healthy buffer above my current one.

Recruiters reached out on their own. I declined a couple of openings myself, interviewed for a couple more, one in banking and one in telecom. I did fine in system design in both, but failed one technical interview specifically on architecture questions (so if you’re aiming for that path, read people like Richardson, interviewers love terminology).

In the end, I decided to stop pursuing architect roles, partly because those vacancies didn’t involve coding at all. It’s more like analyst++ even if a dev background is welcomed.

I hid the resume, reopened it in November under my direct specialty as a developer, and in December applied to all suitable openings right away. The list was quite narrow: I didn’t apply to everything, only where the salary range looked right and the tech stack was roughly mine.

Active search

That gave me 18 applications total: some in nearby countries, some via agencies. I specifically focused on Symfony since that’s where most of my experience is. If a cover letter wasn’t required, I didn’t write one. Results:

• ignored applications: 7
• template rejections (possibly because of expected salary, as some vacancies didn’t list a range): 7
• promised to get back and never did: 2
• after I switched jobs and hid the resume, 3 more HRs still reached out with offers

I’ll go into two cases in more detail:

Company 1: gambling/betting, Cyprus, company name under NDA, I don’t even know it myself, although it should be obvious:

• Dec 4: applied (via recruitment agency)
• Dec 4: text (!) screening with HR
• Dec 15: asked for feedback
• Dec 16: positive feedback, technical interview scheduled
• Dec 18: technical interview
• Dec 22: asked for feedback
• Dec 24: asked again, was told they were preparing an offer
• Dec 30: got the offer. The vacancy originally listed compensation in foreign currency, but the offer was employment in Russia via an intermediary company, salary in rubles. I declined, because by then I had already accepted another offer.

Company 2: fintech, my current employer:

• Dec 4: applied
• Dec 5: they contacted me, interview scheduled
• Dec 8: HR interview with live coding (!) - had to write SQL queries
• Dec 12: technical interview, also with live coding, also queries plus tasks, but no algorithms section
• Dec 17: interview with CTO, where among other things they asked what gets passed into Symfony Kernel constructor during initialization (who even opened index.php in Symfony more than once?)
• Dec 19: offer, I took a week to think because I was waiting for an offer from the first company
• Dec 24: company founder reached out, we talked, and de facto he convinced me not to go with the first company because of the questionable domain
• Dec 26: accepted the offer
• Jan 26: started the new job (worked two weeks after long New Year holidays, so it got delayed)

Conclusion

Impressions from the new job are positive:

• daily standups are 5-10 minutes instead of two 30-minute dailies plus random calls throughout the day
• being in a developer role, not a lead role, lets me focus on code and hands-on tasks
• new domain, new tech; in e-commerce I had already explored everything available, so I saw no growth path there
• and now I have a Mac

So, why did I write all this.

First: despite all the crises, the market is still alive and you can still find something, even though new vacancies appear less often than before and overall enthusiasm has dropped. No idea how juniors are doing in this climate.

Second: while preparing for interviews, I studied from reference materials I assembled myself specifically for my specialization: Senior PHP Developer (Symfony). I put all collected info into an interactive page where the knowledge required and commonly tested for this role is structured by category: from everyone’s favorite SOLID and OOP to nuances of PHP CoP implementation and lazy loading in Doctrine. There’s even a training mode, though I didn’t polish it much.

You can try it out on the site: https://positroid.tech/interview/

Source code is open: https://github.com/positron48/interview-cards

P.S. The site works stably inside Russia only with a VPN; I may still move it to another data center. OVH was blocked completely.