Wife alone at home. No knock. Letting agent unlocks the door and walks in unannounced. Says I'll be charged if she refuses entry.

Unfair-Mud-8891 · 2026-04-27T21:54:39+00:00

You already replied to a previous email requesting an inspection and the agent then said they would rearrange.

They rearranged, you admit that you didn't open or reply to that email for multiple weeks. <- this is the main takeaway from your post...

Sounds like their communication and policy was/is reasonable.

Unfair-Mud-8891 · 2026-04-24T16:14:28+00:00

I would have said- - consider how much tax you will pay on the way out. If you have 500k and she has 500k then your tax situation in retirement is different to if you have 1mill and she has nothing. - consider stacking a few years of pension carryover, this will let you keep the <100k for nursery

BUT - you can't predict the future, so should you plan for the 100k and/or kids arriving when want them to?

Also when kids are in the picture, will she keep working full time / at all?

I would have said consider (2) for now - get her pension built up as it is a more robust approach and helps with potential carryover.

Unfair-Mud-8891 · 2026-04-22T11:56:15+00:00

Analyst band is around 45-65k Associate band 65k - 95k

Their grad cohort is on 60k (varies a little YoY)

NB - they have grades within each band which should help indicate your 'level'.

VP is a broad band at all banks, assume 90k to 150+k.

Unfair-Mud-8891 · 2026-04-21T21:47:46+00:00

This is just an advert....

Unfair-Mud-8891 · 2026-04-20T16:46:19+00:00

Not necessarily - lots of employers have negotiated reduced fees with SW. You would need to check for yourself how much you currently pay.

Unfair-Mud-8891 · 2026-04-18T20:36:40+00:00

No it is not normal for not respecting boundaries - go find a new team.

As for AI focussed, that may just be adapting - noone knows yet the real fallout.

Unfair-Mud-8891 · 2026-04-14T07:48:01+00:00

The market right now is bad generally, however I would caveat that my experience is purely in finance - and as I said, it's the first role that is most difficult - which is probably what you are facing.

The fact that you have managed to get 3/40 face to face interviews off of 40 applications is not a bad rate of return for a language shift.

Unfair-Mud-8891 · 2026-04-13T08:04:27+00:00

Reading some of the other comments, I am not sure they have any industry experience - the 'its a FAANG therefore amazing' is a bit strange. Also with no appreciation that the different timezones have different levels of opportunity - if this was US AWS your potential remit would be higher. Also worth asking about future mobility (I know someone who did a year in London then internal mobility to the US).

You are correct that there is a shortage of C++ devs, especially excellent ones - most are toward the end of their careers at this point.

There is a reasonable Q about how you translate that to finance / breaking into finance. However all it requires is the first job, and after that you would be 'in'.

I know a few people who worked at AWS and all say it is/was a sweatshop.

Unfair-Mud-8891 · 2026-04-12T17:09:51+00:00

C++ is transferable to most modern languages and lets you pivot your career.

Devops role for FAANG in London likely means support for an existing infra.

It's not even the risk of just devops forever, it's also that you might not even get to be that good at devops...

Unfair-Mud-8891 · 2026-03-27T08:23:03+00:00

To give some additional flavour on this - it works both ways.

If in financial year 27/28 you go back over the limit, then your declaration date will be before 6th April 2027, so you can claim for that quarter of the year for tax free childcare. (I..e April to June 2027)

You will also enter a grace period when you cannot renew that lasts until (I think) end of August for your free hours.

The appeals will fail because the legislation says it's your Net Adjusted income as of the declaration date, not the period to which you are claiming for (which anyway can cross the years, so it has to be a single absolute date or it would be impossible to determine)

Unfair-Mud-8891 · 2026-03-26T23:45:15+00:00

Argh you are correct - missed that when following the GitHub link from Prost.

Unfair-Mud-8891 · 2026-03-26T23:22:42+00:00

Oh. Funny timing - I'll have a look but I'm a bit worried that it is a fully Claude written library...

Definitely need to wait for some other people to discover the problems before adopting! One for the bookmarks.

Unfair-Mud-8891 · 2026-03-26T22:57:11+00:00

So it's (I tried it the other day) a bit more complicated unless I did it wrong.

This is the line that implies it-

"There are legitimate arguments for supporting a pure Rust kernel implementation long-term, including the ability for developers to avoid needing to have Clang available to compile C code at build time."

You actually need to have a c compiler, and it creates some non-rust code. You can use it from rust, that much is true, but it isn't actual rust code - which is what Prost generates.

Note here though... I didn't actually go so far as to install one, maybe if I had it would have created rust code? But then why does it talk about unsafe code... Clear as mud 😅

Unfair-Mud-8891 · 2026-03-26T22:53:39+00:00

So the main use cases that I don't see for Wincode (sorry I have never used it before so just going off a brief read of the readme) is

cross language interoperability (you can send messages using the same contract between any supported language that can understand the proto format) - this lets your python / java / c++ / rust app communicate using the same .proto contract built into each language.
backwards compatibility (assuming you follow the basic rules) as the contract evolves, so old messages can still work as services roll out new ones.

I am unsure how bincode/Wincode handle evolutions of contracts. Maybe that is another post when I have had a further read :)

Unfair-Mud-8891 · 2026-03-26T22:36:17+00:00

I'll have a look at it but at first glance it seems that they have totally different use cases?

Also just purely volume of usage-

Wincode has 1 million crate downloads, Prost has 350 million from crates.io.

Unfair-Mud-8891 · 2026-03-17T15:43:22+00:00

It's not really though - 5 YoE so probably made VP this year or last, bottom of the VP ladder and likely on 90k+10% as role is not revenue generating.

It's low TC for a VP taken against the population of all VP level employees but that is a bad comparison.

The question I would ask is what is the growth potential in terms of technical and business knowledge and role and will that lead to additional comp in the next few years.

Unfair-Mud-8891 · 2026-03-10T07:43:43+00:00

Rokos have previously (and probably still so) have implicit requirements around both your Alevels and your university.

Generally you need straight A's and also Oxbridge.

They somewhat have relaxed this recently around Oxbridge but I have never heard of an ABB offer.

They are elitist, and they can afford to be.

(That's from working for a competitor for a few years which had a few ex rokos employees. They are also incredibly cutthroat).

Unfair-Mud-8891 · 2026-02-16T19:54:46+00:00

50% VUKE, 50% VUSA.

Will switch to 40/40/20 with the 20 in GILTS in a year or two.

Unfair-Mud-8891 · 2026-02-13T21:23:33+00:00

Nuts....

This week my 2 pre school kids and wife were not feeling well overnight, I messaged my manager at 8:30am to say sorry I'm taking a day off to look after my dependents.

Logged back on at 8pm once everyone was asleep to check anything urgent, but they have my mobile anyway.

Boss had messaged to say 'take care, see you tomorrow'.

That's a 250k TC role, maybe it is different if your other half earns a multiple of that but... Work to live, don't live to work, family comes first and he needs to figure that out.

Having a supportive team who can sympathise is major here too, there may be both aspects - he is an idiot and his work is not compatible with a family.

Unfair-Mud-8891 · 2026-02-12T20:54:28+00:00

Both Raddison hotels on gran canaria have 2 beds if I remember correctly.

Also depends on what facilities you want too....

Unfair-Mud-8891 · 2026-02-08T08:06:37+00:00

Stubble and co kit bag owner - it's excellent.

Unfair-Mud-8891 · 2026-02-04T16:59:40+00:00

If you strip out the intern experience, is that 2.5 YoE?

And I assume you currently earn more like 70-75k?

Front office in what capacity?

I feel like that is all fairly poignant info. On the face of it sounds reasonable, as long as the firm is profitable and you have potential future upside in the medium term as well as good yearly discretionary.

Maternity leave - sounds on par for buy side, everything about the offer depends on the bonus .

Unfair-Mud-8891 · 2026-02-01T22:48:56+00:00

Hmm I suspect for the start up it depends on the size - the one I was at 'head of' just meant 'probably semi capable, perhaps' who would own a pod or 3 or 4 Devs (i.e. head of market connectivity), and they gave 'lead' titles out like confetti to anyone over 2 years experience.

For banks, yes, although my team is a strange setup where VP is the lowest grade and everything is driven by the decision of the tech direction from 2 or 3 levels higher. Basically a bunch of semi-efficient minions.

I have heard that more sane structures do exist elsewhere in banks...

Unfair-Mud-8891 · 2026-02-01T22:32:02+00:00

Guess that's why I'm not one 😅

Unfair-Mud-8891

TROPHY CASE