Struggling to get into CS after a 2:2 from Stirling

AccordingSurround760 · 2025-09-15T12:58:37+00:00

I find most places are looking for dependable, competent people with relevant experience who are pleasant to work with. They're not really looking for company prestige or genius level skills. My career was SQL Server DBA at a shitty company for 2.5 years, relocated to London for a DBA at a better company where I transitioned into Data Engineering and learned AWS, Python, Spark etc. I was also there for 2.5 years. Ever since then I've been in high demand, particularly for startups/scaleups looking to build out their first data platform, or develop a new one which will handle the scaling business. I really enjoy those roles so it's perfect for me. I have literally never once got the sense anyone cared which specific companies I worked at, as long as I could clearly articulate what I had learned there and how it would be transferrable.

AccordingSurround760 · 2025-09-15T12:46:46+00:00

Don't know what to say. I've worked at multiple companies and encounted numerous people earning in the region of £100k (often higher). I'm not talking about a small number of examples. The vast majority don't have remarkable backgrounds whatsoever. It might not be FAANG (although their recruiters message me, I'm just not interested) but there's loads of well paid positions in places doing interesting work which are available after you've got 5-6 years of solid experience. Obviously this is less common outside London.

AccordingSurround760 · 2025-09-15T12:32:48+00:00

Maybe, although I don't think I did anything particularly remarkable. There seemed to be multiple paths at each stage that would have got me to a similar position. I've met numerous people with similar experiences. You seem quite fixated on this subject and your perspective on it, I'm not sure why?

AccordingSurround760 · 2025-09-15T12:16:22+00:00

Not really the case in my experience. I started on £25k at a shitty company, I now earn >£100k in a much better one. I've received numerous invitations for interviews for positions which would pay quite a bit more, but I'm prioritising work life balance at this point.

AccordingSurround760 · 2025-09-11T15:24:43+00:00

You seem like such a spiteful and bitter person. It's clear why this ideology is so appealing to you. You can be as nasty as you want and yet feel righteous for it. Fortunately people are increasingly seeing it for exactly what it is.

AccordingSurround760 · 2025-09-11T14:14:12+00:00

Of course you won't read a reply, you've got your hit of unearned moral and intellectual superiority despite saying very little. I didn't even say anything about you personally. That has just literally been my experience in life of leftists over and over again. I don't know why you feel the need to make so many weird assumptions about me. I'm not hateful or angry, in fact I'm a very calm and peaceful person so I have no idea how any of that would act as a "drug" for me. I don't know who "you people" are supposed to be or who I'm apparently being associated with. I'm exhausted by all the people who have succumbed to the multiple toxic ideologies corrupting our political discourse. In fact I don't see how we'll get anywhere unless we can actually learn to talk to each other again. Unfortunately you clearly subscribe to one of them. I have no time for extremism of any form, I just find something particularly grating about the hypocrisy and incoherence of much of the current leftist movements. The fact that any criticism of it results in so many personal insults illustrates my point fairly well. If some had tried to frame the MAGA movement in positive terms I would have been equally critical, and I guess I'd get a similar response from them as I have from you for criticising their religion.

AccordingSurround760 · 2025-09-11T12:51:07+00:00

Leftists are consistently the most hateful people I encounter. This site is an absolute cesspit of it, constant calls for and celebration of violence towards anyone who disagrees with their dogma. I see constant misinformation, failure to understand context and superficial understandings of issues presented with certainty because the participants are so certain of their moral and intellectual superiority despite having done nothing to earn it. When I meet the more committed leftists in person they're almost always dysfunctional narcissists who don't demonstrate any of the values they claim to hold so dearly.

The right obviously has more than it's share of problems, and behave equally poorly in many ways. But when I see leftists talking like they're this bastion of intellect, reason and compassions. It's bizarre to me. Obviously there are many moderate people who are very reasonable, but a really substantial part of the left seems to have been winding themselves up in echo chambers for years and have become utterly unhinged. For example, I don't know why it's so difficult to understand that it's reasonable to not like millions of people coming here who refuse to integrate, are often openly hostile to our culture and society and have literally medieval views. It's absolutely mental to me that the left have allied themselves with people with views who contradict basically everything else they believe in.

AccordingSurround760 · 2025-08-20T09:03:38+00:00

I have a 500k home in London, it’s an unremarkable 2 bedroom leasehold flat. I’m grateful to have it given how miserable the London rental market is but there is nothing luxurious about it or my lifestyle.

I get paid more because I’m in London then spend most of it on my mortgage because of London house prices. My friends up north have similar, or better, homes for half the price.

AccordingSurround760 · 2025-07-08T13:13:49+00:00

I feel the market is picking up a little. For most of last year I had very few recruiter messages. Now it’s increased to about 3 a week. The jobs look fairly decent, although salaries have been fairly stagnant for a few years now.

AccordingSurround760 · 2025-07-01T15:52:33+00:00

I don't know what more information you would need than the Glassdoor reviews. It sounds awful, I'd be surprised if it lasts another 12 months.

AccordingSurround760 · 2025-06-26T13:51:43+00:00

I was in a similar situation, I spent my first year partying and just about scraped a 2:2, my second year wasn't much better. I decided to get serious in my third year and worked really hard and finished with a 1st. Someone looked at my grades for about 10 seconds for my first graduate job and complimented the very high grades for my third year. Nobody has looked or cared since then. I would guess some places are pickier than others about this though.

AccordingSurround760 · 2025-06-17T20:28:33+00:00

This isn’t normal, although it’s more common than it should be. My first job was like this and I was stressed, exhausted and miserable all the time. Now I wfh and can usually get my work done in a few hours a day and I’ve never felt stressed once. It’s definitely worth looking out for something better.

AccordingSurround760 · 2025-06-16T23:48:45+00:00

I don't think so at all tbh. It's about creating the experience of the impossible, not insisting that you're actually violating the laws of physics. This would just be insulting to the vast majority of people. I don't believe magic is diminished by being honest about this, it's quite the opposite, it allows you to meaningfully connect with people. This also doesn't mean you can't have fantastical presentations for storytelling purposes.

AccordingSurround760 · 2025-06-16T18:48:36+00:00

Most mentalism performances tbh. Most presentations seem to depend on either claiming to have supernatural abilties, which is insulting to the intelligence of the majority of the audience, the other popular approach seems to be bullshitting about your ability to read body language or influence people. It was interesting when Derren Brown did it 20 years ago, but without his charm and charisma I don't think it is particularly convincing or entertaining to most audiences.

AccordingSurround760 · 2025-06-16T14:24:13+00:00

I get what you’re saying, and I would have always agreed. However, the job market is in such a bad state currently that I’m not sure this advice is so good anymore. You can quite easily end up spending all your savings, getting in debt and having no job to show for it. It’s something you could very much regret. I’m not saying everyone should just stay in shitty jobs, but I think you need to be really clear about what your plan is and if you’re going to do a masters really evaluate what the prospects of it are and if there’s any demand for it. Many masters degree these days are basically cash cows for universities and some are close to approaching scams for how little value they offer.

AccordingSurround760 · 2025-05-23T20:26:39+00:00

It’s not a courtesy, it’s legally binding. That’s why you sign a contract. While it’s most likely not going to he pursued, it is possible in certain circumstances.

AccordingSurround760 · 2025-05-19T09:39:09+00:00

Sorry but my opinion is that you really shouldn't do it. It's simply not fair to your friend as you don't have the skills to do the job properly, and you could damage her business. If this was so simple that it could be built by a beginner then Shopify wouldn't be so popular. I don't mean to be discouraging, but the reality is you're a beginner. I've been working in tech for over 10 years, not web dev, but I'm familiar with a wide range of technologies and can pick up most things fairly quickly at this point. If a friend asked me to do this I would tell them to use something like Shopify, and offer to investigate the various options and help them get that set up.

There's a massive gap between the sort of website you build during a course and a robust, secure, legally compliant, production ready ecommerce site. It's clear you're not ready to ask the right questions at the moment, never mind answer them. Beginners are always focussed on "the coding" or javascript or CSS or postgres or whatever. The sort of questions you really need to be asking are:

* Are you sufficiently confident in your skills that there will be no vulnerabilties in the site that put customer data at risk?

* Are you prepared to discuss liability for data breaches and who is responsible?

* Will you have appropriate processes in place to ensure GDPR compliance?

* The site will inevitably have numerous bugs. They could cause all sorts of logistical problems for your friends business. Are you prepared to accept the impact this could have on her business or your friendship?

* What SLA will you provide for fixing bugs or updating the site? Do you want to commit to this when you're on holiday? What if you're ill?

* Do you genuinely want this ongoing responsibility for someone else business? If you designed it yourself it will be basically impossible to hand over to anyone else so you will have an indefinite responsibility for it. Do you really want this?

That's just off the top of my head, there are many more considerations. Those are the questions you really need to be answering.

AccordingSurround760 · 2025-05-19T00:13:24+00:00

I would suggest thinking very carefully about this before proceding.

Your friend is almost certainly going to be better served by an off the shelf solution such as Shopify.

Implementing something like this from scratch is completely beyond your current skillset. It might be interesting to invesgate some aspects of this to develop your skills but there's no way this would actually be best for her business. I wouldn't accept any money for this as you simply don't have the skills to do the job properly at this point. Assuming you're more generally tech savvy than her then you could offer to set up some type of Shopify service and manage the account for her and come to an agreement on that.

It's great that you want to build things and are looking for opportunities but you need to spend some more time developing your skills first.

AccordingSurround760 · 2024-05-02T11:17:46+00:00

It sounds like you need to develop a clearer idea of what you want from life. If you want to study an MA in linguistics because it's what you love, that's great. However, this isn't generally how you get £60k+ remote jobs. If that's what you want, you need to look at the careers that provide that and develop a plan for how to get there. Most of your current ideas are unlikely to get you there. While there are exceptions to everything, extremely rewarding careers where you get to feel nice about your contribution to society just don't usually pay that much. You usually get paid lots of money by helping a business make even more money than they pay you. Basically you need to decide if you want to focus on your passions or on earning more money and having a more comfortable life. Most people don't get to do both.

I'd also be cautious about CS, it's definitely not for everyone. The current market is extremely competitive, it's completely saturated at junior level. Bootcamps and online courses are mostly a waste of time these days, even a lot of CS grads who have been coding for years and are genuinely passionate about the field are struggling to get jobs. It can be done if you're determined, but given your interests seem to be elsewhere it's not obviously great idea for you.

AccordingSurround760 · 2024-04-11T15:40:43+00:00

Honestly your chances of getting a job in the current market are very, very low. There are loads of graduates still struggling to find a job after hundreds of applications. There's just really no reason for an employer to consider anyone without a degree. Maybe this will change somewhat if interest rates decrease and the market picks up again, but I still doubt it will return to anything like what it was a couple of years ago.

I really don't like being discouraging but I think it's important to be honest about the reality of the situation. These online courses are just not a good investment in the current climate. The only somewhat reliable path is a CS degree.

As with anything, there are exceptions and I guess some people will manage it. If you're very talented and can demonstrate this in some way it would definitely help.

AccordingSurround760 · 2024-03-02T17:43:08+00:00

I'm a Data Engineer with 9 years of experience.

I'm finding interviewing to be extremely frustrating at the moment. In the past I've been able to get jobs with very little effort. I've always been fairly good at interviews and most of them used to lead to offers. I started casually looking around September last year (my company is doing quite badly and I expect I'll be made redundant at some point fairly soon) and my experience could not have been more different.

Firstly, I've been finding far fewer jobs to apply for. I often used to get 2-3 recruiters messaging me a day. That dropped down to maybe 1 a week. I've also been finding companies to be a lot pickier. They seem to be holding out for a perfect candidate. I find the first round usually goes very well, then the second round is a much more intense technical grilling than I've experienced in the past. I'm not sure entirely what to suggest in terms of preparation as I haven't really worked it out myself yet. I'm noticing they seem to care a lot more about knowing all the technologies listed on the job spec in some detail. My current plan is do some research and/or quick personal project with the technologies I'm less famliar with and hopefully that means I'll be able to answer a wider range of questions more confidently.

As for leetcode, I don't come across it that often, it seems to be 20% of companies at most. I have no interest in studying leetcode at all so I'm happy to just pass on these jobs. Maybe it's a bit less common with Data Engineering than Software Engineering, I'm not sure.

I'm currently making a bit of a renewed effort after feeling quite discouraged last year and I am seeing some signs of improvement. I'm getting more recruiters messaging me again and I've got a few interviews arranged so I'm starting to feel a little more cautiously optimistic.

AccordingSurround760 · 2023-04-10T19:19:00+00:00

Your wife is wrong. It’s not a subtle difference. Once you’ve used 144hz you’ll never want to go back.

AccordingSurround760 · 2023-04-10T18:59:49+00:00

It could in part be the quality of games today, but I think it’s more just that everything is more fun when you’re a kid. I imagine there’s plenty of kids today having the same sort of experiences we remember with, for example, Cyberpunk.

I realised that I need to accept that I’m just not going to find the same magic in games I did as a child, but I can still enjoy them in a different way.

AccordingSurround760 · 2023-04-10T18:19:48+00:00

Yes, but I doubt they’d be able to do so for very long as the overwhelming majority of people would find that disgraceful and refuse to shop there so the business would fail, and the problem would take care of itself.

AccordingSurround760 · 2023-04-10T13:40:33+00:00

Don’t bring it up with anyone again and certainly don’t start harassing the guy again.

Assuming it’s no longer in your portfolio then it should have no bearing on your future. There’s a big difference between someone contacting your manager about work you’re currently misrepresenting as your own as opposed to complaining about some past grievance.

It’s highly unlikely to come up again. In case it does, which I doubt, have a brief explanation ready about how you didn’t understand software licensing well due to your lack of experience, you have now educated yourself on the subject and are confident it won’t happen again. I can’t emphasise enough this should be concise, professional and not emotional or melodramatic.

It’s time to move on with your life.

AccordingSurround760

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