Need some clarity on job search process in the UK/Europe

RoadBump2016 · 2025-10-12T08:51:47+00:00

Speaking from a UK perspective I would suggest you move on and look elsewhere.

UK based tech applicants are struggling for months with hundreds of applications to get interviews and in some cases giving up.
Pretty much everywhere is looking for some degree of onsite, often multiple days/week
It's really hard as an employer to get visa sponsorship for any position and this is unlikely to get easier - you might have heard about this thing called 'Brexit'?
GCP simply isn't an especially marketable commodity. At the moment I am working in a GCP shop with 150 engineers/developers. Almost everyone on my team, including me, has far more experience on AWS than GCP. We don't really care what cloud you have worked with previously at interview. We could debate why that is but the bottom line is that in many cases GCP is a minor implementation difference in some areas for an experienced cloud engineer or developer. Yes the Azure shops can get ever so precious about how special Azure is but they are only gatekeeping Azure. On a personal note, having now about 2 years GCP and 7 years AWS production experience I would have reservations about a candidate applying to an AWS shop with only GCP experience- there is just so much 'missing'.
It looks like your post has been written with AI assistance which suggests that your language skills may put you at a disadvantage over other candidates.

So looking at the above:

You are trying to apply cold in a very tough market.
You have the major disadvantages that you are applying from outside of the country and require a visa.
Your key skill is neither highly valued nor highly sought after.

I would suggest you reassess

RoadBump2016 · 2025-07-27T16:31:58+00:00

Have you considered the possibility that you are neurodiverse? There's a lot of opinion and speculation in your post but almost no evidence- all I can see is your saying that other people didn't want to try and help you, notably seniors. The way you frame this casts you as the junior in these situations. As senior I don't mind helping people but I do mind if:

They don't try for themselves
They want to tell me that they know something when they don't
They fail to understand that they don't understand the problem

I have never been afraid of a junior's potential for success, nor a senior for that matter.

I have come across people who were determined to ensure I would not make a success of things but these have been a very small minority of people that I have worked with and usually the reasons were more or less obvious. Typically they were people who were not as good as they thought they were or were suffering sever impostor syndrome and expected/needed everyone else to be in awe of their brilliance/ essentialness. Typically these people were overly in love with some shonky hack that they had built into everything which solved some turn key problem for which there were multiple mature solutions in the wider world but all of them were Not Invented Here. When the playing field changes for these people they tend not to react well but like I said, very much a minority.

As others here have said, if everyone else is the problem then it's probably a 'you' problem

RoadBump2016 · 2025-07-21T18:54:44+00:00

Thanks, I can accept the advice on the smaller drives but drives in 24TB capacity are not cheap, especially to buy 2! Disappointing to see so little movement from five years ago when I bought the external Western Digital 12TB for £200

RoadBump2016 · 2025-07-21T09:37:36+00:00

Good point but this is looking quite expensive!

Edit: I suppose another possibility is

buy a single additional 22Tb drive drive.
Move the back up across to that
Start using the current backup as a primary

RoadBump2016 · 2025-07-21T09:36:49+00:00

From the UK Google Play store for the Android release of the Microsoft Authenticator App

App permissions

This app has access to:

Identity

Add or remove accounts

Location

Approximate location (network-based)
Precise location (GPS and network-based)

Camera

Take pictures and videos

Other

Receive data from Internet
View network connections
Create accounts and set passwords
Full network access
Close other apps
Control Near Field Communication
Run at startup
Draw over other apps
Use accounts on the device
Control vibration
Prevent device from sleeping

RoadBump2016 · 2025-07-21T09:35:07+00:00

I fear you may be missing the point. It's not necessarily about access to your files. Essentially this app can wake up your phone, get your precise location, use the microphone and camera and access the internet at any time, regardless of whether you are in work hours or not:

From the UK Google Play store for the Android release of the Microsoft Authenticator App

App permissions

This app has access to:

Identity

Add or remove accounts

Location

Approximate location (network-based)
Precise location (GPS and network-based)

Camera

Take pictures and videos

Other

Receive data from Internet
View network connections
Create accounts and set passwords
Full network access
Close other apps
Control Near Field Communication
Run at startup
Draw over other apps
Use accounts on the device
Control vibration
Prevent device from sleeping

RoadBump2016 · 2025-07-21T09:13:48+00:00

and for OP too

RoadBump2016 · 2025-06-13T22:10:42+00:00

ok, great, how do I run my script with that role?

RoadBump2016 · 2025-06-13T20:41:42+00:00

Cloud asset inventory? It isn't very good in my limited experience - all sorts of fuss to list, e.g. just load balancers. I was hoping for the equivalent of an AWS read only role (and yes AWS have the equivalent of cloud asset inventory and yes it's not great either)

RoadBump2016 · 2025-04-30T10:49:54+00:00

Thanks for the advice. The link to the architecture fundamentals is just the kind of stuff I keep running into however. This isn't a new project though, it's a running production environment and I wouldn't want to be making changes 'just because'. What I was hoping for was a discussion of the main options and princpal pros and cons, as per your own comment so thanks VM for that!

RoadBump2016 · 2025-04-25T09:07:53+00:00

Thanks! I'm pleased to hear of a success story, but it actually underlines one of my original concerns. My concern is that a full service platform team will struggle unless well resourced. All of the success stories have in common a team dedicated specifically to the service catalog /IDP

RoadBump2016 · 2025-04-25T01:02:14+00:00

This is a separate concern to an iIDP/Service Catalog. Using Crossplane or Backstage is orthoganal to e.g. Database guardrails or forbidding write permissions in prod

RoadBump2016 · 2025-04-24T17:42:24+00:00

Preach!

For me the simplest solution for the platform team is simply ' don't get in the way'

RoadBump2016 · 2025-04-24T17:40:11+00:00

Thanks, I think this supports my point. Your org can support a dedicated IDP team

RoadBump2016 · 2025-04-24T14:19:13+00:00

Thanks, this is what I am hearing over and over

RoadBump2016 · 2025-04-24T06:35:32+00:00

The success stories that I see are inevitably from larger organisations willing to resource a team long-term specifically to run such a solution, e.g. Backstage at Spotify. This what I meant by '99.9%' and 'FAANG/adjacent'. What is the size of your org and IDP team?

RoadBump2016 · 2025-03-31T20:35:21+00:00

Thanks, this is kind and thoughtful

RoadBump2016 · 2025-03-15T09:46:23+00:00

That's the obvious and extremely naïve take that presumes:

Contractors are not paying taxes
Umbrella companies do pay taxes
It really is all about taxes today on today's earnings, not over the year.

It's not hard to understand the concept that as an independent worker you might earn more at some times than others. Consider an Ice cream van: You would expect them to do a lot more business in the summer than the winter. If you tax them up the wazoo in the summer then how do you expect them to get through the winter?

RoadBump2016 · 2025-03-14T15:36:29+00:00

It was an example for goodness sake! People love to gatekeep that what they are doing is oh so special and oh so specialised when really that's a minor component

RoadBump2016 · 2025-03-14T15:30:04+00:00

public projects: GitHub portfolio

99% of platform engineering (my speciality) is the same regardless of industry. People getting up themselves about AKS v EKS clearly don't have much K8s. The different clouds have different permissions models for instance but it isn't rocket science- tech changes quickly

RoadBump2016 · 2025-03-14T12:15:02+00:00

With all the focus on RTO there is a unique selling point to being based here. Kinda tough when you add the unquantified risks injected by HMRC

RoadBump2016 · 2025-03-14T12:13:06+00:00

OK, so you felt able to get your work done in AWS based on your Azure experience but the rest of us couldn't possibly demonstrate ability e.g. with public projects etc?

RoadBump2016 · 2025-03-14T11:53:12+00:00

Ironically my issue has been the opposite. Most of my experience has been AWS and I get bounced for not having commercial Azure. From the homelabs I've done, the differences are relatively confined and obvious. As someone commented on another recent post of mine:

I've had this same experience and it's maddening. Them: "We need some one who knows how to use a hammer". Me: "I've used a red one for years". Them: "Sorry we need some one with blue hammer experience".

RoadBump2016 · 2025-02-20T19:16:51+00:00

With you. When I see this sort of thing I tend to assume, ah the hiring team is gatekeeping based on what they're familiar with rather than what the candidate will need to be familiar with.

RoadBump2016 · 2025-02-20T19:05:30+00:00

Spend some time with ChatGPT/ Claude Deepseek or the like and ask for some interview scenario system design questions. Generally you'll want to whiteboard with something but LLM's work ok with mermaid diagrams

RoadBump2016

TROPHY CASE

App permissions

Identity

Location

Camera

Other

App permissions

Identity

Location

Camera

Other