My experience of moving to London. Planning, searching for vacancies, failures. (Part 1)

Another series of articles about moving abroad and social security in FAANG (and not only). This is not a guide on how to move, but rather a story about my personal experience, the problems I encountered, and sometimes some advice for those who are also planning to move.

Background. Background and motivation

Hello everyone, my name is Denis and I’m a developer. Like many, I did not get into IT right away. I spent the first 4 years of my working youth as an employee of one of the basic enterprises of the Physicotechnical Institute. After graduation, I realized that this is not at all what I would like to do. At the same time, I had absolutely no idea what I wanted to do. I knew how to program a little in Delphi, so I decided to try to find a job in IT.

On the second attempt, I received an offer for a small consulting to support legacy CRM (siebel). Now I understand that maybe it was not the best career start, but at that time I was not in a position to choose much. After a month of work, I realized that “this is mine.” Despite not the most interesting project and tasks, after working at a Soviet-type enterprise, it was a parallel world. I spent three years in that company, and managed to participate in most of the projects that it was involved in. Also retrained from a CRM consultant to a front-end developer. However, during this time, the initial enthusiasm gradually gave way to a sense of stagnation. I decided that I wanted to work in the backend, and most likely in some other company. As a result, I moved to Sberbank as a Java developer.

Motivation and desire to do something returned again. The salary was better, the level of development was higher, the projects were bigger. Some of the guys I worked with were really great people. Unfortunately, after a year and a half, the feeling of stagnation began to return again. I understood that as a technical specialist I still had to grow and grow. At the same time, all the projects that I saw around me seemed like another shifting of Jasons from place to place.

As a result, I began to look at the labor market again. As I scrolled through the vacancies, I began to have the idea of ​​​​immigration. I started looking at youtube stories of people who left, what they do and how they live there. I understood that this should be treated with a certain amount of skepticism, because few people want to share bad experiences. Nevertheless, I began to light up the idea of ​​immigration more and more.

The doubts that I had

Unfortunately, one desire to move is not enough. I needed a plan, but every time I tried to formulate it, I had a whole range of different doubts.

Am I good enough

I didn’t have a comp sci education or serious success at school programming competitions. My developer skills are based on coursera lectures, books, and day-to-day experiences I’ve had at work. My English was also average – I could read and listen well, but my spoken English was extremely weak.

Moving abroad is difficult and incomprehensible

I didn’t know which country I would like to live in, what kind of visas there are, how long it would take to process them. I had an abstract idea, but every time I tried to structure it all, there was too much information.

And if it doesn’t work?

I estimated that the preparation would take me about a year (solving the litcode in the evenings, English, etc.). If I had not received an offer, then a year of effort would have been wasted.

What if it works?

At that time, I had never been abroad. I did not know what it was like to live in a country where no one speaks your native language and there is not a single person you know. My life in Moscow was extremely comfortable, and I had no confidence that I would be better in another place.

Making a move plan

A country

I doubted between the UK, the EU and the States. I won’t describe in detail for all countries, I’ll tell you that in the end I settled on London, because:

  • All Most speak English (in Europe, you would most likely have to learn another language)

  • There are many international companies on the market

  • Salaries do not compare with the States, but live comfortably

  • Convenient to travel to Europe

  • On a Tier 2 Skilled worker visa, you can change jobs. There are technical difficulties, but if you really want to change employers, then there should be no problems. (This is much more difficult in the states)

  • You can get a residence permit after 5 years and a passport for 6 years

  • Large community of expats from all over the world. It is very easy to find company and friends.

Job Search

I started by narrowing down the list of potential companies where I would like to work. I immediately dismissed outsourcing and startups and decided to focus on large IT companies and fintech. The main reason was:

  • Salary is (usually) above market

  • There is a chance to work on something really interesting

  • The relocation of employees is on stream, there should be no problems with visas

  • There is less chance that the company will suddenly go bankrupt and I will lose my job (in 2022 it turned out that there are nuances)

I started looking for jobs on Linkedin. The problem was that there were a lot of vacancies. Even now, there are 12k vacancies for the position of Software Engineer in London. I had no idea how to choose something from this huge list.

I decided to go the other way, and tried to build myself a list of potential companies using platforms where people write feedback about interviews. These were mainly GlassDoor and Leetcode. I watched:

  • What does the company do

  • What kind of salary offers do they make

  • No big negativity in the comments

  • Do they have vacancies in London (either through linkedin or off site)

  • Do they have a license for my UK visa

As a result, I made myself a pool of ~20 companies, and started sending resumes

Summary

When translating the summary into English, I began to doubt whether it would fit the content. I watched a few videos from recruiters on how to write a CV, and also looked at Linkedin, what developers from all sorts of Googles and Amazons write in their resumes, and made my resume according to their model.

The main changes I made:

  • I shortened my resume to one page. It will most likely be read diagonally anyway, and all the detailed descriptions that I did 5 years ago when I was a junior will most likely be just visual garbage.

  • I focused on describing the business impact, not technology. I took out technologies in a separate subsection Skills, where I listed everything that I was familiar with.

  • I removed all phrases like “My team did”, and described only what I did and what the result was.

Responses and first calls

The success rate according to the responses turned out to be so-so. Of the ~20 CVs submitted, I only received a response from two FAANG companies. They also wrote to me from Revolut with an offer to interview for a vacancy in London, to which I also agreed. After a short correspondence with recruiters, I was assigned the first calls.

All recruiters used the default phrase that “this is not an interview”, but just to get to know each other. In fact, this is the same interview as all the others. Instead of technical skills, the recruiter wants to make sure you

  • Speak English fluently

  • Adequate

  • You understand which company and for which vacancy you are interviewing

  • Have basic technical skills

Before this stage, I would advise you to prepare:

  • A short story about yourself (about your professional experience) for a couple of minutes

  • Tell us about the projects you have been involved in

  • A clear explanation of why you want to work in their company

I will also add that for some reason, recruiters constantly tried to call through a regular mobile connection. The sound quality was so terrible that I constantly had to ask every word again (especially with my not very confident English). It is better to immediately tell them to call only through instant messengers / zooms.

First interview

I scheduled my first interview with Revolut ~2 months before my faang interviews. At that time, it looked less attractive to me compared to other companies. I considered this interview more like a test of my skills before faang. As a result, out of the promised 4 interviews, I had only one, which ended in complete failure.

Something went wrong

  • After talking with the recruiter, I still did not understand what the interview would be about. I was asked to set up a development environment, and was told a general statement, like “we will evaluate your programming skills”. I entered the interview with a very vague idea of ​​what I would be asked about.

  • It turned out to be more difficult to pass an interview in English than I expected. It’s one thing to talk about free topics with a tutor, or tell recruiters prepared stories. When I started to worry at the interview, all my knowledge of English instantly evaporated, and I spent most of my efforts trying to remember the right words.

  • In general, the tone of the interview seemed to me extremely unfriendly. I won’t speculate on why that is, but overall my experience was in line with a lot of the negative reviews I’ve seen online about the company.

Despite the fact that I did not consider Revolut as the main company where I want to get into, getting a refusal was still unpleasant.

As a result of the interview, I made two conclusions for myself:

  • I am not good at testing my code. This was the main reason for the refusal, which they wrote to me in feedback. On the whole, I think it was justified. Litcode does not motivate to write tests when solving problems. If there is no self-discipline to do it, it seems to me that most people just give up on it (like me).

  • I needed to practice speaking more in English. This is also about self-discipline – at that time I already tried to do this when solving problems, but I did not take it seriously enough. As a result, I decided to take part of the lessons with the tutor to a similar practice, where I would tell him the solution of the problem out loud and program, and he would ask me questions.

I had two months ahead of my next interviews, and in general, I received useful feedback. How I prepared for the interview at FAANG, and what happened in the end, I will tell in the next article.

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