OP - Without a work visa or other right to work in the UK already established, you're not gonna have a good time. Tech vacancies are dropping in the UK and QA vacancies are one of the hardest hit. Couple that with the fact that QA salary is one of the lowest in the UK tech sector. If you also have to factor in an employer who is willing to sponsor you, then the odds of you securing something decent are almost non-existent.
My sibling has spent a year looking for a dev job in the UK without success. Bear in mind that even with a work visa, employers are so conservative that they don't want to touch anyone with an unusual work situation. There is also an anti-immigrant vibe, a general economic slump and a lot of their tech ecosystem sounds like a kabuki show.
Despite the lack of encouragement, I'm thankful for your comment. I won't take any salary, but I'm willing to take a bit of a paycut. Do you have any advice, outside of working a senior position in the US for a few years, for making myself more sponsorable for employers? Certs, niches, ect?
The most valuable thing to employers is decent experience with a reputable employer in the US. If you're serious about the move, learn as much as you can about the various visa options. The UK government website is surprisingly excellent for this stuff: https://www.gov.uk/browse/visas-immigration/work-visas
>That’s why more people are showcasing their work through portfolios. And that’s what recruiters actually look for.
Not sure where this assumption is coming from. Most recruiters are looking for consistent work experience with reputable companies. Sure portfolios help but it's not even remotely on the same spectrum.
>I dont know how people are coming up with such juicy and vanity metrics but mostly are noise.
It's really not noise at all. If you actually use these ATS platforms from the hiring side, you'll see first hand how they've all doubled down on AI filtering. Candidates are directly experiencing increased difficulty in getting past the initial screening stages.
> Most recruiters are looking for consistent work experience with reputable companies.
I guess you are missing the whole startup world, talents less than 5 years into the industry and hackers who grind many side projects and Generalists
Maybe what you say is relevant to SMBs and enterprise hiring. Most ATS are designed for SMBs and enterprise hiring.
I guess then Startups looking for Generalists has to mostly fallback to Google forms and HR emails for hiring.
The startup world has been my exclusive focus for almost twenty years now so I stand by my position. Granted if you have fewer than five years of experience then it's harder to demonstrate value on a CV and that's certainly where a portfolio of work helps however your question was framed much more broadly.
Growing companies from ~10 to ~200+ has been my bread and butter for almost 20yrs now. A few relatively universal observations:
1. As sloaken said, your documentation of processes and procedures is NOT adequate. This applies to everything. From your code commit process to how to book vacation days. Document everything early. Notion is your friend.
2. Like it or not, your work culture is going to change. New people obviously means new personalities but it also means new ways of working, some good, some bad. It really is worth spending some time with the first 15 people that helped get your company to where it is today and define some operating principles (otherwise known as 'company values'). This blog post (not mine) is an incredible insight into why this stuff actually matters at your stage of growth: https://lowercaseopinions.com/post/useful-values
3. Hiring gets expensive and laborious. You're reaching a point where it just isn't practical for you to be involved in every hiring decision. That being said, don't let go of it until you are confident that everyone involved in hiring for your company is aligned on what 'good' looks like both in terms of candidates and hiring process.
4. More people means more individual questions, problems, and ultimately admin. More people getting paid means more payroll issues and questions and adjustments. More people interacting with each other means more disagreements, arguments, and issues. Someone needs to be able to handle all of these issues. Usually the challenges are distributed across different teams but again, without some rigour around how you want your company to approach these issues means that different managers/teams will take different approaches which in turn will amplify the problems rather than solve them.
5. Reconsider the financial impact of hiring experienced people. Bringing in strong leaders early can enormously mitigate the operational costs of scaling. Hiring a highly experienced person at your stage will have a big impact on your budget but long-term, that investment will pay dividends both in terms of the quality of work but also in sharing the burden of handling these scaling challenges.
on point 5, that person may be highly experienced, but its important to know that this highly experienced person must be a good fit for your company size. Often times we assume that hiring an L8 at faang is perfect for a startup and thats usually not the case: they know how to play the big company game, not how to take you from 15 to 100 employees.
>Often times we assume that hiring an L8 at faang is perfect for a startup and thats usually not the case
Agreed. In my experience that's almost always a bad idea if that L8 hasn't previously had first-hand experience of working at a very early stage company and understands the enormous difference between the two environments.
>In the process, they may bypass the valuable experience of struggling through early tasks and learning from their mistakes. Students, I worry, could simply become an intermediary between the raw idea and the AI’s output.
Even if all AI progress grinds to a permanent halt today, there's already enough utility in its current capability to force these questions. As a result, how we train and educate graduates and young people needs to change.
I have no doubt you need to have actual experience to be able to ensure AI output is at a production standard but if we accept that reality, then a shift in how we educate and train young people could make an enormous difference in ensuring employers still see value in hiring people with no real commercial work experience.
>the carve-out only protects people inside the US. Speaking as someone based in Europe, that's a detail that doesn't go unnoticed.
I'm not sure an American company prioritising the privacy of American people is worth questioning. As a European, Anthropic are very low on the list of companies I worry about in terms of the progressive eradication of my privacy.
Agreed. That said, Anthropic's original pitch was about embedding safety at the foundational level of the 'model' (acknowledging that a model is more than just its weights).
If the safeguard against mass surveillance is strictly tied to geolocation (US vs. non-US), it can't be an intrinsic property of the model. It has to be enforced at the API or contractual level. This means international users are left out of those core, embedded protections. Unless Anthropic is planning to deploy multiple, differently-aligned foundation models based on customer geography or industry, the safety harness isn't really in the model anymore.
If your thought process is "someone should make X..." then your next thought should be "I should try and make X...".
Go give it a go and as a minimum, you'll learn something about why it doesn't already exist yet and in the best case scenario, you'll create something that lots of people find useful!
There's a lot of references in the report to companies "reporting difficulties in filling vacancies" with no clarity on what constitutes 'difficulties'.
Also, the data notes that 83% of the companies surveyed were small enterprises (with 10-49 employees or self-employed persons). It's no surprise that these companies find it more difficult as they tend to be more budget-conscious, meaning they struggle to compete with bigger company salary levels.
Thank you for the feedback. Yes, I’ll be adding a “Who’s Hiring” section. “Wants remote” is one of the questions people answer when they post in the "Who Wants to Be Hired" thread.
>it seems as though a 17-year-old in a tech role would be unable to access a corporate network if it was protected by a VPN.
That's not what the law states. The actual law states ...by prohibiting the provision to children in the United Kingdom of VPN services which can facilitate evasion of OSA age-gating processes so a corporate network protected by a VPN doesn't fall foul of the regulation.
>Given that children can generally work from 13
Not in the UK they can't. Children can work part-time at 14 however they can only start full-time work once they’ve turned 16.
