A while ago I mentioned the two things that were making 2023 especially frustrating for me: waiting for Swedish permanent residency and trying to change jobs. The more I think about it, the more I feel this is exactly the kind of thing worth writing down. Problems that feel exhausting in the moment can look oddly entertaining later.

I’ve always liked the idea of parallel worlds. I have no idea whether anything like that really exists, but as a way of thinking, it’s fun. Every decision, every uncertain outcome, seems like it could split into another branch. In my head, life often looks like a timeline stretching from left to right. Whenever something uncertain happens, I automatically imagine a whole branching diagram starting from the present moment.

The outcome I want becomes the main line. Everything I don’t want turns into side branches. Job interviews are a perfect example. The ideal path is obvious: get invited to the next round, keep moving forward, eventually land the offer I actually want. That becomes the timeline’s main route. But since I’m not exactly an optimist, the waiting period is when all the ugly little branches start multiplying. Rejections, delays, ghosting, unexplained process changes—my brain happily generates all of them. And then I end up tormenting myself by wondering whether my particular parallel universe is about to wander off into one of those terrible branches.

What I hope for, every time, is simply that the next good piece of news arrives and pulls the whole timeline back onto the main track. That’s also what makes the process weirdly interesting. From the current point in time, life could still head down any branch. Only later, after the whole stretch has passed, can you look back and see what shape the timeline actually took. In that sense it feels a bit like Schrödinger’s cat: before you open the box, you genuinely do not know what is inside. That suspended state is part of what makes waiting so maddening—and so compelling—because expectation is still alive.

Anyway, enough of that. I mostly want to record what it has felt like to wait for the visa decision and to look for a new job while nothing has actually been decided yet. Maybe in a while it will be interesting to look back at this timeline from further down the road.

Waiting for Swedish permanent residency

My permanent residency application was submitted in early June 2023 by a third-party agency arranged through my current employer, Scania. The usual advantage of this setup is that these company-connected agents often have access to a fast track, which is supposed to help employees get decisions more quickly.

And yet here I am.

I still don’t know whether I’m genuinely unlucky—my visa-related matters have never gone smoothly—or whether the timing was just terrible because the application landed right before the Swedish summer holiday period. But by the time I was writing this, I had already been waiting almost three full months with no result at all.

Meanwhile I kept seeing people online casually sharing stories about getting approved through the “fast track” in one week. One week! It was impossible not to feel jealous. Back when I was doing my PhD, one of my classmates finished and started a postdoc. He submitted his own application in April and got approved in a month. Somehow my so-called fast track turned out to be painfully slow.

I had originally assumed that if the application went in during June, I would probably have a result by August at the latest. Then I could start planning a trip home for Christmas in advance. At this point, that optimism just feels embarrassing. I clearly overestimated Swedish efficiency.

Looking for a new job in a country where everything moves slowly

It’s not just the migration process either. I sometimes feel like every administrative process in Sweden is unbelievably slow.

At the beginning of August, I applied for a Stockholm-based job. The hiring manager’s team was in Cambridge, UK. The day after I submitted the application, the manager contacted me for an interview. From there, things moved surprisingly smoothly, and all the interview rounds up to that point were completed within two weeks.

HR told me there would be one final on-site interview in the Stockholm office, and that I should hear more the following week, starting 2023-08-21. So I waited. And waited. By Friday, still nothing. I emailed HR, and the answer was that the Swedish side of the process had been delayed and I should be patient.

Then another week passed with no update at all.

At some point you start wondering: what exactly can be delayed for that long? Are they seriously hiring or not? I genuinely liked this role, but the pace was absurd. It becomes very tempting to imagine that everyone in HR spends the day taking coffee breaks.

Good luck, please.

Timeline updates

These notes are mainly for my future self.

2023-08-31
I was fully prepared to complain that Sweden in August is basically silent and that no administrative institution is functioning normally. Then, on the very last day of the month, two positions I had interviewed for suddenly moved forward: Application Engineer (AE) @ MathWorks and Calculation Engineer (CE) @ AFRY.

For AE, I was told there would be one more HR round, which felt strange because I had already spoken with HR in mid-August. I emailed to ask what this additional meeting was for, and the answer was that it was a “quick catch-up for the next step.” Hopefully that means actual progress.

For CE, I had done the first interview on August 11 and was told I would hear back in a week. After a week of silence, I emailed the hiring manager. He said they were quite happy with me, but one of the interviewers had been sick, so I needed to wait another week before they could schedule the next step. Then, finally, I was invited to an on-site interview for Thursday, September 7.

2023-09-01
The extra AE HR round happened. It turned out not to be an interview at all; it really was just a catch-up. HR explained why the process had become so slow: July and August are vacation months in Sweden, work more or less stops, and once people return they are busy planning for the next year, so hiring slows down. Fair enough.

They also explained the format of the next on-site interview. HR still needed to speak with the hiring manager to decide whether I would move forward. At this stage I honestly had no idea what there was left to discuss, but apparently there was. I was told I should have news by Monday, 2023-09-04, at the latest. Fingers crossed.

2023-09-05
I spent the entire 4th waiting anxiously and got nothing. So I emailed HR again to ask whether there was any update. This morning they replied that the process had been pushed back slightly because of another candidate, and they would get back to me in a few days with a new update.

Honestly, it felt like a test of patience. I was already close to exploding from anxiety.

2023-09-07
The on-site CE interview had been scheduled for 9:30 in the morning. Then, late the night before, I received an email from the hiring manager saying that he himself was sick, the interview was cancelled, and they would reschedule once he recovered.

I was speechless. First nobody works during summer vacation, then once vacation is over everyone seems to fall ill one by one. How much longer are these interviews supposed to drag on? Also, I already knew it the moment I saw a serious work email arrive that late at night: it could not possibly be good news.

2023-09-08
In the afternoon I got an invitation for an on-site interview for another role: Development Engineer (DE) @ Scania.

This hiring manager had contacted me quite a while earlier saying they were interested in my profile and asking me to reply with more details about my experience. This time he said they had selected 9 people out of 165 applicants for office interviews.

Privately, I didn’t find this role that attractive. It seemed to focus mainly on materials testing, which sounded a bit dull to me, and any job tied closely to experiments usually means going into the office a lot. The office is extremely far away—about 50 km one way. My current role is also at Scania, but right now I only need to go in once a week, which is manageable. If it became more frequent, that would be hard for someone as lazy as me. More importantly, my current work is basically all computer-based. There is no real need to be on site; going in often feels like it’s mostly for visibility with the boss, which I find tedious.

When I applied, it was really more because my background fit and I figured I might as well try. I didn’t expect to pass the initial screening.

Thinking back, it’s funny how often the jobs I loved immediately—those roles where I thought, I want this so much, I could start tomorrow—simply disappeared into a black hole after I applied. On the other hand, the ones I felt lukewarm about but still thought I’d regret not applying for somehow turned into real interview processes. Maybe that’s just how things go. The AE and CE roles were similar: when I applied, I wasn’t especially attached either way, but both later progressed smoothly into interviews.

Even so, compared with this DE role, AE and CE still seemed much more interesting. And on a practical level, both were also much closer to home.

The DE interview was scheduled for the following week. At that point I was already wondering whether some new absurdity would happen again—like another interviewer getting sick. Please no.

2023-09-12
I travelled a long way in the morning to interview for the DE role at Scania. The manager first walked me around the workshop and gave me a general introduction to the work, and then we moved to a meeting room for the formal interview.

It was one of those interviews that is really more of a conversation. They ask about your background, talk through your field, and mostly try to figure out whether everyone could work together comfortably.

It went fine. The manager said they would choose 3 people out of the 9 first-round candidates to continue to an HR second round, and that they expected to have a result the following week.

By the end of it, though, I felt even more certain that I wasn’t especially interested in the role. The biggest reason was the distance. The manager said there was no hard rule about specific office days, but that for the work to function properly I would need to be on site at least three times a week. That would mean more than 300 km of commuting every week, which sounded miserable. On top of that, the work itself didn’t seem to offer much room for growth, and that didn’t align with my reason for looking elsewhere in the first place. So I wasn’t especially invested.

What was amusing was that right after this interview, I received another interview invitation for a different internal role at the same company: Data Engineer (DaE) @ Scania.

This one was part of a reskilling program. People who are selected receive training and then move into internal IT-related positions. When I first applied, I thought it was worth a try because it offered a chance to switch tracks and learn something new instead of staying in mechanical work forever.

The invitation came after both CV screening and an online test, so I took that as a sign that I had passed the first two stages fairly easily. The interview was scheduled for a week later, on 2023-09-18, and it would be another HR-style interview focusing on behavioral questions.

2023-09-14
At lunch I finally got an email from the CE hiring manager saying he had recovered and wanted to schedule the interview for Monday, 2023-09-18.

To be honest, this only happened because I had emailed him earlier that morning saying I hoped he would get well soon and asking whether the interview could be arranged earlier if possible. Only after that did he reply to say he was already better and propose a time. It really made me wonder whether, if I had not emailed, he would have just continued ignoring me.

So now I had two interviews on September 18. Hopefully both would go well.

At the same time, HR for the AE role finally answered the follow-up email I had sent on Monday. They explained, in a very vague way, why things had taken so long. What they said did not even fully match the explanation I had previously received from the hiring manager, so I never figured out what the actual issue was. At that point I didn’t even want to ask more questions. The important part was that they said I was still one of the candidates and should wait a bit longer, and that there should be an update next week.

Everything was just delay after delay after delay. The on-site interview had already been postponed by a month. I had liked this AE role quite a lot at first, and now I was starting to worry that by the time they finally moved, I might already miss the chance for one reason or another. Please, people, do something reasonable.

2023-09-18
In the morning, at 9:30, I went to the on-site interview for the CE role. Beforehand I had asked the hiring manager whether I needed to prepare anything, and was told, “There’s nothing really to prepare.”

Then the moment I arrived, I saw him holding a printed test sheet.

So that was a nice surprise.

At the very start of the interview, they asked me to work through the questions on my own first as a technical assessment. They were all basic mechanics questions. Finishing everything wasn’t the main point; what mattered was the discussion afterward.

In fairness, the questions were not difficult. They were fundamental concepts, and I had even reviewed this kind of material before when teaching undergraduates, so the written part itself went relatively smoothly. But during the discussion, when we got to some of the answers I had handled incorrectly, I still froze at moments. With two interviewers staring at me, my brain just stalled. Once they explained the right approach, I immediately realized how stupid and nervous I had been.

After that, we worked through some case-study discussion on a whiteboard, mostly around FEM-related problems. Then we talked about the day-to-day work for the role and when I might hear whether they wanted to make an offer.

Both interviewers said they were quite satisfied—whether that was just politeness, I have no idea. My own feeling was that although I had a few embarrassing moments during the technical section, the interview as a whole was still decent enough. I could only hope that one week later they would give me an offer.

Then in the afternoon I had the interview for the DaE role. HR and the manager were both there, and the questions were mostly standard behavioral ones.

Because this was a reskilling role—essentially the company identifying a strong internal demand in one area and then broadly recruiting current employees to train into those skills—they planned to select 14 people in the end and place them into departments that needed data engineers.

I also confirmed with the interviewers that everyone who reached this round had already passed CV screening and the online test, which meant this was the final round. After that, all I could do was wait for the decision. Since there were a lot of candidates, they said it would take several weeks before any results were announced.

So that’s where things stood: permanent residency still unresolved, job processes still dragging on, and me checking for updates while trying not to spiral into all the worst branches of the timeline. I kept hoping that, since it was my birthday month, maybe some good news would finally show up.