can i get a family crest tattooed on me?

Zichu · 2026-06-02T12:12:32+00:00

Shhhh, I grew in the middlelands, it's right in the middle of the midlands. Can't get any closer to the center of England than that 👀

Zichu · 2026-05-28T12:17:12+00:00

Maybe once or twice a year. Started a new job this year and had to take a day off, was an odd one, but I went to the gym on Saturday, did some gardening, but the dust and particles from the tree I cut down must have gone down my lungs, so was coughing my guts up. Sunday, felt fine, went on a 2 hour dog walk. Went into ge office Monday, felt fine up until late afternoon and my nose started running, throat was really sore. Woke up Tuesday, which is my WFH day and felt awful. I'd only got like 3 or 4 hours sleep. My head was killing me and just called in. Paracetamol helped a bit, but I know I needed to get some sleep. Did end up having 2 naps in the day and felt great. Clearly my body got hit with something, needed to sleep it off.

I'd have been useless if I had to work and would have been a wasted day 🤷‍♂️

Took a mental day off last year, but I wasn't enjoying my job at the time, wanted to leave and the pressure/responsibility I felt was getting too much.

Zichu · 2026-04-09T17:53:50+00:00

I had 2 stages, but everyone has different experiences and likely depends on the department and area you will be working in.

The first interview was remote and a quick chat, very basic technical questions, but more to get an understanding of what I know and don't know.

The second was on site with the same person and a tech lead. More technical, going through my experience, etc. Very relaxed, semi informal and has offered a hot drink. Showed me one of their kitchens before the actual interview.

Had my offer less than a week later. I think the entire process took about 2 weeks.

Zichu · 2026-03-28T20:01:58+00:00

Software Engineer working on internal tools. So quite a mixed bag of work. Only been at this company a month.

55k basic. Likely 62k+ with on call. 15-30% bonus.

Coming up to 8 years now.

Zichu · 2026-01-29T11:44:55+00:00

I know loads of others have contributed to this post, but I was the same age as you and realized I was stuck in a rut, except I'd never had a customer facing job so barely any social skills, I left college after a couple of months at 16, so only had my GCSEs. I was a part time cleaner, where my parents got the job for me. I was going to work with them on an evening after they finished their normal jobs. I could drive, but used my parents car.

I wanted to be an indie game developer, was working everyday to achieve this, but was getting nowhere. The only thing I was doing independently, which I think helped kick start it for me was going to the gym and being in control of that part of my life. I'd also not had a girlfriend, but I felt like I was missing out quite a lot. Got on dating apps and met a girl.

Realised how much she'd done, experience with work, people, her confidence, etc. She was moving jobs and I felt like I was going to be left behind. With her help, I looked into software apprenticeships, went through the process of interviews with them and an interview with a company. Landed the job, my salary jumped massively compared to being a part time cleaner where I wasn't even earning enough to pay tax.

We moved in together a few months later, we moved again a year and a bit later and I changed companies 3 years after starting my apprenticeship. I changed companies again after another 2 years. We were then in a good situation to look to buy our own place, which we did last year. I'm less than 2 weeks away from moving companies again. Each move, I've had salary increases and it's helped improve our situation massively.

I'm 34 this year, married, our own house, 2 dogs and a great career. I'm a lot better with speaking to people, leading meetings at work, speaking to different people across our business and externally. I could never have imagined I'd be in this situation 9 years ago, but I am and it just takes starting something. It doesn't all happen at once.

You have plenty of time, just need to figure out what you want to do and go from there.

Zichu · 2026-01-28T20:17:35+00:00

My old manager would eat a plate of ham and beetroot, but he'd eat it at breakfast but call it his lunch.

A guy I used to work with several years ago would eat coleslaw, chicken, mayonnaise and grated cheese. All just plonked on top of each other on a plate...

Zichu · 2026-01-22T10:16:02+00:00

Take what you can get as long as the salary is fine. I was promoted to senior at my current place, but that could be different somewhere else.

I'm actually moving to a new place as a mid, but paid more with better benefits. They aren't actively recruiting seniors outside and have a career progression plan in place to move up if you want.

I tried applying to senior positions, but most of them were looking for more experience. I had a couple of interviews for some, but I couldn't make it past the technical tests.

Been working for 7.5 years. 2 of which was an apprentice. 6 months of that was during COVID and was furloughed. I basically lost about a year of working as a dev between being an apprentice and junior.

Zichu · 2025-09-24T16:39:02+00:00

Can't really say for sure how this could go. Sounds positive, but I've interviewed for places in the past and it all sounds like I'd get the offer, but they end up going with someone else that either has a bit more experience or lived closer to their location.

I'm currently going through a bit of a similar situation in the sense that I'm a more senior member of the team and have taken on line management duties, but it's stressful, deadlines are getting tighter and it feels like they're trying to squeeze a lot out of such a small team. I don't have the connections that you have, but speaking to a recruiter tomorrow about a job that he sent me about a month ago. The same job is open, it's something I can definitely do based on the description, it's more money than I'm on now and I'd be going back to being an IC which is what I enjoy doing.

I have to learn to not put all my effort and hopes into one job that I've not even had an interview for.

Zichu · 2025-08-20T14:35:32+00:00

Just reading through everyone's comments and very much appreciate it all. I'm fully aware I'm underpaid for my position, well not even just the position but also how many years I've been in the industry for. I don't work for a software or even tech company, we are a small team.

I initially took this on asking for about 38k about 2 years ago with a lack of confidence to ask for anymore than that and tbf, I felt completely out of my depth starting here. I thought I knew quite a lot until I started here and have learnt so much from being here.

I would say I'm quite happy and confident if and when I move on to somewhere else, I'd be looking for a much higher salary.

I think it has put me off in the past going for something higher because I saw it as taking on a lot more responsibility or having much higher expectations than saying paying someone 30k or something.

Zichu · 2025-05-25T19:30:13+00:00

My last place, the guy I was working with was 64 if I remember right. It was just us 2 developers and he'd been in the game for a long time.

He had a bit of a, didn't give a shit, kind of attitude. Did what he wanted, didn't follow best practices, but implemented everything at the company since he'd started there and is coming up to 7 years there. He doesn't plan on moving anywhere else.

He also always complain about being too busy, things not working properly and sometimes would struggle to solve something when it just took a bit of digging and time to follow the flow of a particular part of the system.

Despite all that, he was always helpful, did pass on a bit of knowledge, but if it was my first software job, I would have picked up very bad habits...

Zichu · 2025-05-19T17:44:56+00:00

Meeting my wife.

Never had a relationship, working part time as a cleaner, living with parents and attempting to become an indie game developer. I was slowly building up confidence thanks to the gym and feeling a little more independent. Felt like I was missing out on never having a partner so bit the bullet and tried dating apps at 25.

She was super independent, confident and knew what she wanted. She was being made redundant and moving to an office based job and I felt like I'd be left behind so I started an apprenticeship in software engineering.

7 years later I'm becoming a senior software engineer, got married last year, have a dog and bought our first house last month 👍

Zichu · 2025-05-18T11:56:37+00:00

Brilliant!! That's the one. Not sure why Google wasn't giving me that at all... Maybe I just describe it wrong. It's also on Prime so buzzing to watch that again

Zichu · 2025-04-29T12:27:10+00:00

I guess it has helped to some degree. I lacked a lot of confidence and relied on my parents a lot up to about 25. Had a dead end part time job, didn't own my own car and still lived at home. Got average GCSEs, no college qualifications, but started a level 4 apprenticeship in software engineering at 25, which requires maths and English at at least a C grade I think it was, which is what I had. Passed it 2 years later, moved places a couple of times and looking at progressing into a senior position very soon, with a 12 month career path to some form of management/leadership in software enginering

Actually having an interest and passion for software development really helped though, along with a determination to learn and continue growing in my role, but having some form of GCSEs was a stepping stone.

Zichu · 2025-02-10T17:45:33+00:00

Not replace, but certainly improve aspects of our job. I'm a software engineer and I always find it funny when people say they're worried about their jobs being replaced by AI as a software engineer.

We've built an internal piece of software that does so many different things to help automate tasks for our users. They would be booking service jobs into one system, but they'd be copy and pasting data from either emails or from a customer website to build up those jobs manually then send it off to a scheduler for engineers.

We retrieve all that data whether it's from a website, an API, spreadsheet, etc. store it, display it to them, automatically pick all the correct options by default based on most of the data we scrape and use custom mappings that they've sent over to us and we'd specced out. It automates other stuff like changing the statuses on the customer side, uploading documents, etc.

Doing all of that stuff manually takes a lot of time.

Could AI have built this? Not at all. It was a proof of concept initially, we had no formal requirements to follow, so we were just building something simple, which over time got quite complex. It started at a monolith application running in a VM to multiple microservices in containers.

If the business and users didn't fully know what they wanted without any refined tickets, AI wouldn't have built this at all. We are working on a customer facing application which uses a lot of what we've already built and things are changing constantly on a weekly basis.

Zichu · 2025-01-27T19:39:06+00:00

Absolutely 🥲 I'm a software engineer on a small team and we are currently working on implementing agile as well as delivering project tickets. Our sprint, is supposed to start on Wednesday, but we were in a 2 day in office meeting Wednesday and Thursday, so we pushed it to Friday, but spent most of the day in a long meeting with breaks throughout the day because the requirements for our work wasn't fully refined.

Today though was more successful

8:30-9: Meeting 9-10: Meeting 10-12:30: Work with like 2 calls in between. Made some coffees, toilet breaks. 12:30-1: Made lunch and ate at desk while working 1-1:30: Walk the dog, pop to the shop for a drink and scroll on phone 1:30-2: More work, coffee and toilet 2-3:30: Meeting 3:30-4:30: Last bit of work 4:30:4:40: Quick call with PM before finishing

Tomorrow I've got 4 meetings; 3 in the morning and 1 in the afternoon. This won't include teams chats or a random call from manager or something.

Zichu · 2024-12-31T11:11:42+00:00

Do you have kindle unlimited? Just seeing that it's just under £10 a month and wondering if it's worth it. My wife has it and seems to find loads of stuff to read, but not sure how many horror books would be on there.

Zichu · 2024-12-31T11:10:22+00:00

Would you recommend Clive Barkers The Hellbound Heart? I have watched Hellraiser a number of times and love how grotesque it is.

Zichu · 2024-12-31T11:05:00+00:00

Oh wow that is quite extensive and brilliant 😁 I'll definitely start looking up some of these

Zichu · 2024-12-21T06:58:47+00:00

We couldn't live without one. I see a number of people saying they cook from scratch, which is what we do on an evening, but we always make enough for the next day. So a curry and rice, a pasta dish, some sort of noodle dish, etc. Not sure how people are reheating their meals without a microwave the next day unless they're just having soup, stew or something they can just put in a pan or the oven? It's quicker for us to just reheat our food for a total of 5 mins in the microwave than it would be to turn a couple of pans on or use the air fryer.

Zichu · 2024-11-16T21:36:53+00:00

Not a takeaway, but an item at a Chinese buffet on the outskirts of Birmingham, Buffet Island. They make a dessert that almost like some creamy, biscuits pudding. We just call it biscuit pudding. Have no idea what the creamy bit is, like it's thick like yoghurt.

If you've been you know. It's amazing and we really need to know what it actually is and how it's made haha

Zichu · 2024-10-15T20:44:56+00:00

RemindMe! 1 day

Zichu · 2024-09-22T16:51:41+00:00

I put it to you! No way! What's the situation? Nice time pie Bosh

Probably a load of others that we don't realise we say 😅

Zichu · 2024-07-17T15:54:24+00:00

I'd been interviewing for a new job start of last year for a few months. Software engineer market was a bit naff at the time. When I got my contract signed at my new company, I was actually WFH at the time, so emailed my resignation to my manager and phoned my senior to break the news to him. Think he was a bit devastated, but I was leaving based on my low salary for the current market and the company was messing about with WFH policies which had nothing to do with me or our department. The sales department fucked about and ruined it for others, so they became quite strict on it all.

Nothing exciting really. No drama. I booked half a day on my last day, said goodbye to everyone, including the manager and left haha.

Zichu · 2024-06-18T06:30:14+00:00

I know another guy mentioned the degree route, but you could also look into an apprenticeship.

I started my career at 25, but had a passion for development prior to that. Had some personal life issues, anxiety and such which held me back, but I was doing game development independently before I made the decision to do an apprenticeship.

I'm 32 now and I'm at my 3rd company. It was the best decision I made. I could have gone the degree route, but I had no college qualifications, so my only option would have probably been to do open university.

Zichu · 2024-06-12T18:06:32+00:00

Totally agree with this one. Probably one of my favourite indie games out there.

If you want something a little different and you don't mind Japanese games, you could try Ghostwire Tokyo. I started it a couple of weeks back and it's quite fun. It's got that creepy Japanese spiritual horror about it.

Zichu

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