I would like to share my thoughts on this, as I consider that my experience is comparable with meuk's. I've graduated this summer with a master's degree in security in an Eastern European country and I am currently looking for a job.

Before master's, I worked as a full stack developer (1 year) and for a data science startup (8 months) which did not get off the ground. It seems that managers ask about short stints even for junior positions and one manager asked me "so you weren't working for the past 2 years?". On sites like https://www.honeypot.io/, a platform representative told me that I should write in my profile why I left the jobs after such a short time.

Regarding job ads, most of them are for specific languages and frameworks (Java developer, Python developer, Spring Developer, Django Developer) and very few have a generic title such as Software Engineer. Companies like to cram both language nuts and bolts questions and CTCI questions in 1 hour.

During recent interviews, I have received questions such as: "In Java you have this try-catch-finally code, in what scenarios the finally block does not get executed?". "How do Python generators work under the hood?" "You have a Python class, when the __init__ method is called, does the object already exists?" "In Python, what is with statement and why it is used?"

Btw, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7lmCu8wz8ro is a great presentation about Python features.