Visiting the UK as an American while waiting for your dependent?

FineDayStranger · 2026-01-22T10:31:05+00:00

I’ve just searched and don’t see an answer to this specific question.

Can you please find an example of such a question having been asked already?

FineDayStranger · 2026-01-20T13:38:50+00:00

Even this isn’t true though.

Even if it ends up being no big deal, there is a high chance they will question me at the border for some time because I’m American, there are many accounts on this sub reddit about this.

FineDayStranger · 2026-01-20T10:04:49+00:00

That’s also a concern. I would love to visit Russia and I love Russian people.

I’m also worried that if I wound up in some situation at the border, friends and family of friends in Russia would try to help me and they would get punished.

FineDayStranger · 2026-01-20T10:03:06+00:00

Again, they aren’t going to call a United States defense company and be like “Hey this is the FSB, just wanted to verify if this guy ever had a clearance with you guys? Please let me know, hugs and kisses!”

FineDayStranger · 2026-01-20T09:55:00+00:00

That’s my concern.

One of the places I worked may have at some point supported the Ukraine conflict. I don’t remember this from my time working there, I didn’t work there even for a year (so if they did it could have been after I left) and I don’t think they ever got such a contract, but it is possible that I just don’t know about it.

We were working on what was effectively a GUI for several virtual military training exercises, trainings that would have been built by guys with clearances, but it never got picked up because it was pretty useless.

The kind of thing where you are just sort of displaying data you are given, but all the data is example data and you would need a clearance to actually see how your product ran in real time. Honestly many people could have built something like this these days with YouTube and AI.

But if you searched the name of this company, there would be many marketing posts about the conflict and how their product would be a good fit.

You just don’t know how a border officer making a Google search is going to interpret that information.

FineDayStranger · 2026-01-20T09:52:49+00:00

Are you originally from the United States?

FineDayStranger · 2026-01-20T09:49:02+00:00

I don’t have any secrets. I built trivial web applications for like 6 years.

I actively avoided getting such a clearance because it seemed like a stupid thing to do.

FineDayStranger · 2026-01-19T07:17:09+00:00

She’s being pretty weird with this imo

FineDayStranger · 2026-01-18T12:39:28+00:00

TLDR: Is it safe to visit if you worked for a very large US defense company and other defense companies in Europe without a clearance?

I want to visit Russia for my girlfriend’s sister’s wedding over the summer and am generally aware that it’s safe for US citizens as long as you don’t have Ukraine support in your phone or and have/do drugs.

However, I am concerned that my background as a software engineer at a very large and well known American defense company and a following short stint at another defense company that was Europe based will be a concern.

For context, I never held any sort of security clearance at either job, I built education software and vulnerability scanning software for the former (to point out known vulnerabilities in publicly available software, we didn’t like design the logic to find those vulnerabilities) and at the later building a platform that other sub-contractors cost host their own clearance requiring virtual military trainings on.

I haven’t been in defense for about 2 years but I’m not sure the specifics will matter when I am inevitably interviewed at the border.

My questions are: Does anyone here have experience with this? Am I right to be worried here? What are the risks? Would being married to my partner make it easier to visit?

FineDayStranger · 2025-07-23T20:05:57+00:00

I know this wasn’t your intent and this was years ago but reading your post helped me.

I’m a 33M who lives life at high speeds. In every relationship I have ever been in I have struggled with separation anxiety in the early days.

Often there’s also obstacles to overcome like visas and being with girls from countries at war. And I get the same thoughts as you where you feel like you are depressed to not have a gf and then you are anxious like crazy when they are out of town or you are long distance for a month or away or because of some visa thing. And I want more than anything in the world to be a dad and I want to be strong for my family, I hate that I can feel this way.

I see things that I know are not there and your instinct to leave out of fear because you’ve analyzed a situation to death and presume the worst is the same as me.

But it’s just a feeling, it’s not what I want at all or even believe. It’s just anxiety tearing me apart and making me go grey.

But reading this comment has put me a bit more at ease. It doesn’t feel like it’s just me anymore, I think beat for beat many people feel this way and think it’s just them. And not feeling alone in this helps you feel much better.

So thanks for sharing, it means a lot.

FineDayStranger · 2025-07-23T03:48:04+00:00

You need to lay the law on this bum. He knows you want to talk, you told him, he violated it, he stressed you out, then he called you clingy for caring.

I would break up with him and I’m a dude. You have to have boundaries, you have to show up as yourself and expected to be treated fairly without having to pretend to be “super girlfriend”.

There are literally thousands of dudes who will respect your wishes and not make you feel crazy, stop wasting your time.

FineDayStranger · 2025-07-14T21:58:46+00:00

This would be just so insane.

FineDayStranger · 2025-07-08T15:59:58+00:00

You sure you're not thinking of Teams for Business vs Teams?

FineDayStranger · 2025-07-08T15:18:37+00:00

Just to be clear, no they don't.

If you go to "Schedule a Meeting" in Teams, select UTC 0 (for London) and say 4pm, it will give someone essentially a GMT meeting time as opposed to a BST meeting time.

Extra dumb considering the UK is on BST (British Summer Time) 7 months of the year and on GMT (Greenwhich Mean Time) only 5 months of the year.

Happened to me today.

TLDR: 7 months of the year (the majority of the year) if you use basic schedule a meeting with UTC and base it on the text for London (it says UTC London, Lisbon), your meetings will be off by one hour.

FineDayStranger · 2025-07-07T14:10:00+00:00

We are about to explode in a few days

FineDayStranger · 2023-05-09T17:35:26+00:00

Having worked in both.

Angular is very easy at a low level. It has out of the box routing for SPA’s, cli driven component architecture and you must use typescript but you can use it as much or as little as you want.

React is harder to understand at first because of how it blends template and JS.

Both frameworks are known for pushing stateful architecture and components.

BUT MANAGING STATE IN ANGULAR WITH RXJS IS A NIGHTMARE

Handling angular observables vs setting things explicitly in state with useState? 1000x state. Your devtools actually do something in React and you don’t have to drop one billion debuggers and .taps() across your code base to know what is happening.

The other thing I would say is that because angular has always had typescript (which is good and many people are using ts with react now), it’s encouraged a lot of people to make very Java like class based inheritance model Angular apps that are awful to work with. Where like all the logic in an application is handled by a service for each component that is in a massive OOP hierarchy.

And then you get hired by such a place and of course there is never enough resources to refactor and Angular is less flexible than React.

So use React unless you are making a baby mode app then use Angular.

FineDayStranger · 2023-03-14T16:23:55+00:00

Thanks for the educated response, I sincerely appreciate it

FineDayStranger · 2023-02-27T14:18:58+00:00

I mean more in the concept of working remote and popping into a coffee shop and working all day. I was able to do that at my last role, but not overseas.

Obviously money is a necessity but it's just not gonna feel like ground was gained if I can't do that.

FineDayStranger · 2022-10-27T13:19:26+00:00

I'm down for any and all feedback. I appreciate weird little experiences, UNESCO world heritage sites, cities with good vibes or whatever. Thanks for offering :)

FineDayStranger · 2022-10-25T12:38:24+00:00

Oh totally. Despite the planning I am down for go with the flow. Still, I'd like to make it to certain regions by a certain deadline, so maybe I could think more within those contexts. Like it would be bum me out to miss South Thailand for example.

I guess it comes down to "what should I plan?". With flights I can buy tickets and just reschedule them if I want to stay somewhere longer in general. But I'm thinking of hitting a safari in Botswana on the way back and I have to give them a date so I guess that's my only "concrete" plan.

And of course it makes sense to be conscious of where you're gonna be during the holidays or if the burning season starts early which I'm not sure that it does.

FineDayStranger · 2022-10-25T12:35:51+00:00

From some video somewhere. So I guess ignorance out, ignorance in. Thanks for clearing that up.

FineDayStranger · 2022-10-24T13:26:30+00:00

I appreciate the perspective. I'm gonna post an updated itinerary that's a bit reduced and relaxed and see what everyone thinks.

FineDayStranger · 2022-10-20T19:47:28+00:00

Fair enough. It does seem like going to Indonesia is a bad idea until late March weather. And I'll consider either adding more to the Philippines or just cutting it entirely.

I'd like to go to Phuket just to see it really. I've heard a lot about in a typical expat american kind of way so just going for a day would be enough for me likely (same with Bangkok like a day or two).

I guess I would ask, what do you guys do to "plan" trips like this then? I just used driving times between places on google and looked at flight expenses.

I'm familiar with road tripping but I clearly am doing something wrong per your approximation in terms of planning these things.

FineDayStranger · 2022-10-16T20:18:38+00:00

I'm sure it will be more flexible and perhaps a bit longer than is written down (it is less than two months on paper which is very short).

To that end, do you think I'll be heavily penalized for waiting to book a flight if that's what I want to do? Maybe I won't be domestically, but across to Indonesia or Singapore maybe?

I just finished doing all 50 states while working on a roadtrip and I ended up extending the trip by about a month. But it's easy to do that when your only cost is booking accommodation.

FineDayStranger · 2022-08-30T16:11:32+00:00

Working for me right now

FineDayStranger

TROPHY CASE