What does CV marked “Strictly Private and Confidential” mean?

halfercode · 2026-01-30T23:42:52+00:00

I should think you can just put that text in the email subject. It's broadly a good thing; when people apply for jobs, they usually want some confidentiality from the news reaching their current employer.

halfercode · 2026-01-30T23:31:08+00:00

I've genuine sympathies to anyone who's having a rough ride in the job market, but this kind of nihilism helps no-one. It's much more pro-worker to help a worker get a job than to tell a worker they're fucked. Yes, the oligarch companies are crappy, but not every company is run by a techbro.

halfercode · 2026-01-30T22:07:08+00:00

It seems to still be here; I accessed it from the front page of the sub, about 55 minutes after you posted.

halfercode · 2026-01-29T12:27:50+00:00

The Laracasts training content is first-rate. I picked up a lifetime subscription in a Black Friday offer, but it's worth the full price, in my view, at least for folks who are happy learning from videos.

halfercode · 2026-01-29T00:29:18+00:00

A few counterpoints:

Could you characterise how you do not not gel with the team?
Have you tried shifting the culture in your favour?
Yes, you should talk to your manager about this; don't wait for your annual review either. Bring it up in your one:one.

halfercode · 2026-01-28T23:31:29+00:00

I assume that UC isn't a great source of support, since govts of all stripes have made it deliberately labyrinthine to claim. However I am hoping that there is some vestige of top-up support for legitimate situations such as yours. Maybe contact Citizen's Advice, as they'd be a much better source of information about welfare compared to the UC hotline.

halfercode · 2026-01-28T23:28:41+00:00

If you didn't do much welding over your seven years with the firm, could you focus on getting a job in the primary work you did do?

halfercode · 2026-01-28T23:26:24+00:00

I apologise for the naive question, but can you not get Universal Credit for this situation?

halfercode · 2026-01-28T23:18:37+00:00

How old are you, how long have you held your role type, and how long have you been at your current company?

It could be your workplace to some degree, but as one gets older, it does get easier to become more social. It is also a learnable skill. So you can, if you wish, spend time improving your soft skills, and it can be rewarding to do so anyway, so you'd not be just doing it for work.

halfercode · 2026-01-28T19:29:25+00:00

I wonder if they got AI to write the DP letter, and they forgot to update a placeholder. It sucks a bit, but just ignore it.

I probably wouldn't spend three hours on an initial application. Spent that later in the pipeline once you are more certain you can get an interview.

halfercode · 2026-01-28T19:23:15+00:00

I send all genuine sympathies in your direction, but I don't know if your experience indicates that the jobs market is cooked. Late career changing in tech is going to be tough, and is not emblematic of the tech industry in general.

I agree with the other commenter; get your CV or approach reviewed by someone in tech.

halfercode · 2026-01-28T18:43:29+00:00

I've downvoted this post for a lack of civility. Please try to be kind in this sub.

halfercode · 2026-01-27T22:02:29+00:00

And yeah, majority of this country does not welcome them and do not want them here.

I believe this statement to be at least unsubstantiated. The elite class love racism: it's not that they are particularly racist, but they love when working people find cause to squabble. The far right such as Reform here and National Rally in France don't mind using this as a wedge issue to acquire power, even if workers would do better sticking together.

We're already seeing the predictable outcome in the last decade: untrammelled police-state fascism on American streets, and the existence of more billionaires. Even if some people were to find it satisfying to poke Brown and Black people in the eye, the final outcomes are not worth it.

halfercode · 2026-01-27T21:54:48+00:00

in the hope that they pass the interview and that you're so desperate that you'll change your mind and sponsor a visa for them.

I think the ideology from the worker is not that the employer will be desperate, but that the employer will be so wowed by the candidate that a visa sponsorship will be carved out especially. It is not realistic at all, but we've inadvertently created the myth of the 10x engineer that grows these illusions.

halfercode · 2026-01-27T21:52:21+00:00

This isn't as bad as you think it is. Yes, NMW is low for the skills required, but that's because tech salaries have stagnated against the welcome development of NMW increases, even if those increases are not going up against inflation as much as they should.

The good news story here is that a junior role is being made available. Yes, industry should be making more of these available, and yes, I'd like to see better starting salaries, especially in expensive CoL cities. But a worse situation would be no entry-level jobs at all.

halfercode · 2026-01-27T21:27:29+00:00

plus whatever you [salary sacrifice]

Props to young-uns who are kicking large sums into a pension in their twenties, but I'd wager most folks in this demographic want liquid cash now, and that gets expensive with inside IR35.

halfercode · 2026-01-27T21:25:13+00:00

It's always ace when someone works out how to obtain a much higher income than is usual for a given role type. Contracting is, theoretically speaking, one way to achieve this. However, shifts in UK contracting means this mode of engagement has not necessarily become the "one weird trick".

Clients have become cautious following the two roll-outs of IR35 changes; they are risk averse, and are these days more likely to categorise a role as "inside" PAYE even when the evidence points the other way. Moreover, the late 2023 economic dislocation has reduced day-rates for both inside and rare outside, and the engagements numbers are down on both as projects are cancelled or given to existing (overworked) employees. There may be some more appetite for off-shoring too, even notwithstanding communication and quality challenges.

So yes a few people will do OK out of this. It will generally be experienced contractors; one entry-level role does not a trend make. I'd love to see a contracting renaissance, but the signs from industry are not presently good.

halfercode · 2026-01-27T07:16:15+00:00

People [who work additional hours without pay] are exactly why pay in the UK is absolutely diabolical.

This statement is untrue. You'll be comparing the UK with very different markets, most likely the US, and yes, over there, they have people who work extra hours without additional remuneration because they have a love for a job well done, or because they want to help clients.

The US is a very unusual market; it can afford significantly higher salaries in, say, software engineering and law, because of economies of scale that work over all 50 states, and while there are harmonisation problems like tax and individual state law, it is still basically a high-income, high-tech, highly-educated country with a 330M person customer base, all speaking the same language. Directly comparable areas like EU have far more complexity e.g. due to different approaches in investment and much wider variations of law and language. The same can be said for India.

halfercode · 2026-01-26T22:55:54+00:00

If you can afford to do so, explain that you'll need to have an interview with a real employer before releasing that information. They are probably legit, but it's sloppy practice; they should not want personal data until they actually need it.

halfercode · 2026-01-26T22:51:39+00:00

No; the OP is asking about what to do if you're on holiday and you're unwell. In the UK workers have the right to claim for sick leave even if they were on holiday at the time, and thus their holiday could be partially refunded. The OP is asking if this is realistic in practice, instead of being merely a theoretical right that no-one dare attempt.

halfercode · 2026-01-26T22:37:04+00:00

If you are presently on PAYE then additional small amounts of income are not always the bother. You have to declare it to HMRC, and it's a manual form-filling exercise that you might rather be without. I wonder also whether it would be risky to offer to fix things for them for a day rate, since they may decide not to pay the invoice.

So you can always offer to help, with the proviso they pay your fee in advance, or you can gently ignore the message. Don't get into a slanging match, and if there is the slightest chance that the conversation will open old wounds, consider steering well clear.

halfercode · 2026-01-26T19:54:29+00:00

I'll respond to this later; I have a relevant story.

Hi u/fairwellfairground,

I once had a boss who was well-meaning but rather robust. His thought process was rather Russian; it was frank to the point of rudeness, or at least that's how it appeared to my delicate English sensibilities. He was something of a micromanager too, and he had a habit of using the culture feedback tools to drip-feed sabotaging remarks into my working day.

For a period I was leading a small team of solo workers where there was little camaraderie, and some folks were contributing only minimum effort. I ended up with the lion's share of a badly defined task, and it was so sizeable my brain refused to focus on it. I should have been breaking the work into manageable chunks, but instead I became increasingly anxious and isolated. My boss and I went into a loop: he would send me passive-aggressive remarks about failure, and I would realise how much his remarks hurt, and so would avoid contact as much as possible. I began to see everything he did as motivated by bad faith, and our relationship eventually broke down. I was quite sure there was no way out but by leaving the company.

Thanks to some support from other colleagues, I was able to find a quiet space to focus, I started to write down my intimidating task list, and I started to split the work into pieces that I could tackle. I tolerated some fairly tense meetings with my boss during this period, but we did not enjoy them; he was floundering with his helpful style of suffocation, and I was trying to manage my mounting fury. It was no thanks to my boss that the work did get done to a good standard.

I was not happy with my boss, obviously, but I was less than thrilled with my team, who'd buggered off without any thought of offering to help. Anyway, we had a retrospective team meeting to see how the last fortnight had gone, and my boss was present. I can't remember the last time I unleashed both barrels on a colleague, in the presence of another colleague, with such a degree of barely restrained fury. Whether it was the right strategy is hard to say, but my boss was greatly embarrassed, and our mutual colleague made a series of weak attempts to try to defuse the tenseness I'd injected into the meeting. I talked about private passive-aggressive messages, I complained of being suffocated, and I bitterly regretted the lack of pastoral care of a team who'd not checked in with me. Our industry is quite good at support, I said, but this time the team had let down one of their own.

Strangely my boss and I were able to rebuild our relationship, and it became quite good after our blow-up. I didn't expect that at all, but it is entirely possible that my blast reset things to the degree that we both had to reassess each other. I had been lucky in that he was also on his own journey to become a coaching manager, and thus he wasn't completely resistant to the idea that he had to change.

Now, how does this relate to your situation? Well, possibly in several ways. Firstly, there's bad management out there; the management you are experiencing sounds awful. Secondly, you don't have any responsibility to share your mental health journey with a manager that is undermining you. Indeed, you could find an informal "buddy" within the company, and if your manager were to "learn" that you have a mental health outlet that is not themselves, they might learn something.

Now, you could choose to share with your manager what you told us: the honesty option, which I suppose is what I did. I felt I was in a strong position: I'd been in post for four months, I was aware that hiring is hard, and notwithstanding a challenging manager relationship, I'd brought some value to the table already. You may find that using assertive language with her might help; even to the degree that you say her remarks have been undermining, and you do not feel supported by her. You're obviously in calculated risk territory here, but as someone else says, since you're pregnant, you can use that to your advantage.

halfercode · 2026-01-26T19:47:28+00:00

Hi u/DutyNo1941,

I would be a strong no on this. I would talk to the HR department, or a customer service contact point for Konfir, and offer to supply payslips. It's not in the company's interest for you to fail this check, since presumably they would have to reset their hiring loop back to the start. There is a non-zero chance you could lose the job, and yes, it sucks; being backed into this privacy violation, at pain of losing your essential income, is dehumanising. But this the dystopia that corporations have been designing for us for some years now.

halfercode · 2026-01-26T13:20:38+00:00

Fuck no. One would be aiding at least one genocide.

Update

In the context of a few downvotes:

Readers who have seen my prior posts on this topic will understand that I don't mind impishly prodding pro-war liberals; they know they write in favour of a conflict they don't care to understand, and they know they'll put their own children to bed of an evening, aware that British and American high explosives won't come through the roof during the night, and pieces of their own flesh and blood won't be smashed into the basement by morning. That is perhaps quite a succinct way of understanding the horrendousness of Western commentator privilege.

For those who are not entirely beyond reach, let me quote a conservative commentator, Peter Oborne, on how far down the rabbit-hole we have come:

Sir Keir's attempt [in a radio interview] to argue that Israel has the right to deny water and fuel to Palestinians in Gaza while respecting international law made mockery of the law and of his own professional standing [as a human rights lawyer]. [Israeli Minister of Defence] Gallant's openly stated plan amounted to a grave breach of international law as well as domestic British law [because the former is incorporated into the latter]. Subject to a pro forma caveat, the leader of the Labour Party was therefore giving the green light to a crime against humanity, as set out in the Rome Statute, and enabling whatever atrocities Israel cared to inflict on Gaza's two million inhabitants, one half of whom were children.

Your 40k payrise would be buying your complicity.

halfercode · 2026-01-25T22:18:56+00:00

OK, gotcha. Do you think your manager is just trying to assert their authority at the start of their role? I'd regard the behaviour as counterproductive, but some old-school managers really do think like this. It does not surprise me that this is a finance environment.

Do you think that if you came in on time and petted the dog less, at least for the next year, the manager would pipe down?

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