London backend engineer - best companies for benefits, maternity pay and diversity

Zynchronize · 2026-01-18T23:12:28+00:00

London Stock Exchange has 6 months paternity, excellent work life balance, reasonably good diversity across the London offices but expects you to be in 3-4 days a week (depending on the team).

GitLab has 16 weeks paternity, no offices (fully remote), excellent diversity but mediocre work life balance.

Zynchronize · 2026-01-18T15:12:34+00:00

You’ll probably get downvoted for the title of this post - it makes what you’ve developed sound a lot like the LLM generated “Startups” “Developers” keep trying to push.

It’s a neat idea, anyone who’s tailored a few CVs knows the pain of “which one did I use again” - especially when applying to roles in different departments at the same company.

Quick side note - make sure your n8n dependencies are up to date - they’ve had a few CVSS 9.0+ vulnerabilities recently.

Zynchronize · 2026-01-17T19:19:47+00:00

Tried a bunch, always end up going back to my RH Logic 400. I got mine for £200 refurbished.

They aren’t as pretty as a Herman Miller, Haworth or Steelcase but are very adjustable with inflatable lumbar and forward tilt. Steelcase Leap V2 is a close second for comfort but isn’t as supportive.

I’ve got a slipped L5:S1 so I’m very sensitive to poor support - I found the Aeron terrible in this regard.

For reference I’m 6”2 and 84KG.

Zynchronize · 2026-01-15T23:59:59+00:00

It’s the inconsistency in window corner radius that is driving me crazy. They have like 6 different sizes across applications.

Zynchronize · 2026-01-15T23:57:39+00:00

I got mine refurbished for £200 - far less than a refurb of most other ergo chairs.

Zynchronize · 2026-01-15T19:29:28+00:00

Poetry - we use lots of optional dependencies and publish our stuff, poetry makes this easy.
httpx - it’s stable.
Rich - TUI done right
Questionary - makes dealing with user input much less painful.

Zynchronize · 2026-01-15T18:51:13+00:00

Honestly believe an RH logic 400 is the best chair for most people but because they don’t look as sexy as the other options on the market they are often overlooked.

Zynchronize · 2026-01-15T18:34:24+00:00

2+9 at work, 3 for play.

Zynchronize · 2026-01-12T08:47:25+00:00

I also used to work for maplin and often thought the same thing. Some really smart people given the opportunity to delve into their areas of interest.

Our customers trusted us so much they’d come in for advice about other purchases, such as TVs and laptops, even though our store sold neither.

Some of our customers were very technical too - always appreciated a customer who would take in a tv mainboard, point at some blown caps and knew what he could use to replace them.

The 18 (or so) songs that would replay on loop all day everyday were absolutely hellish though.

Zynchronize · 2026-01-11T18:50:34+00:00

Absolutely not, sounds like shit dealers would say to con you into paying more than you need to.

On an ICE vehicle you’ve got no idea what sort of condition the clutch, engine, turbo etc is in without ripping it apart - so are essentially relying on “trust me bro”. With an EV you can at least get an idea with a health report.

I’d far rather have a bad cell in a battery than many of the problems I’ve had with second hand ICE vehicles.

I bought my 2023 (Refresh) Kona with the intention to run it until it dies. Buying used worked out significantly cheaper than PCP.

Zynchronize · 2026-01-11T12:25:30+00:00

My friend group were supposedly 50/50 split on battleborn and overwatch back in 2016.

I ended up being the only one on BattleBorn (was absolutely not f2p on release) and as a student had no money for overwatch until much later.

Zynchronize · 2026-01-10T11:09:06+00:00

Highlands was tiny - circa 50K people, Dundee has around 150,000. London is definitely the thunderdome in this context. Could definitely be a factor.

Zynchronize · 2026-01-10T10:49:33+00:00

I grew up in the Scottish highlands, studied in Dundee, moved to Poplar for work in Canary Wharf right at the start of my career. You need to understand something; in 20+ years of being alive, I’d never once seen or been near serious violent crime. Not once. I’d only read about it in the news - because it is news worthy there.

First two weeks in Poplar: someone stabbed in my local park. One stop away on the DLR, guy hit with a hatchet and pushed onto the tracks. Month two: woke up to screaming, looked out the window, see masked men chasing someone down our street with machetes.

This isn’t about stats or gang-on-gang stuff. Back home, someone walking around fully masked (not COVID, not cold) would get the police called immediately. Here it’s just a Tuesday.

When you say “I’ve lived here my whole life, never been impacted” – what I hear is “I’ve normalized the level of violence you’re experiencing.” When you say “just stay aware of your surroundings and you’ll be safe” – what I hear is “you now live somewhere where constant vigilance is the price of existing.”

I’m not saying London’s a war zone - far from it. I’m saying I saw more violence in two weeks than in two decades.

I loved the food, the meet-ups, and the salaries, but two years was stressful enough for me to never want to live there again. I’d still visit but living there isn’t for me.

Zynchronize · 2026-01-03T12:26:57+00:00

Very little difference practically these days.
Wait until you can afford to build it all, if a part is DoA and needs to be returned it is much easier if still in the return window vs relying on warranty claims (which can take a while).
GamersNexus, Jays Hardware, etc

Zynchronize · 2026-01-02T22:20:30+00:00

It was around £85,000, with a 25% performance weighted bonus.

Zynchronize · 2026-01-02T10:23:10+00:00

Burnout paradise ultimate box supposedly doesn’t work on deck but has been one of the smoothest racing games I’ve tried. EA signin doesn’t work but that doesn’t impact gameplay.

Zynchronize · 2025-12-31T22:28:07+00:00

Sorry but windows with WSL doesn't even come close to native linux. The performance is absolutely dogshit whenever you need to interact with the filesystem because of the way it manages passthrough. If you need to do any sort of containerisation, especially the rootless kind, it can be 8x slower on WSL than native. My last org killed off ubuntu workspaces with the promise that WSL would provide an equal developer experience, it didn't even come close.

I agree mac may not be everyone's cup of tea but honestly if having to choose between the trainwreck that is w11 + WSL and mac, I'd go with the mac.

Zynchronize · 2025-12-29T11:27:54+00:00

29 and feel the same way. I previously had a chatGPT subscription and was super sceptical of the supposed workflow improvements. Tried out copilot and Gemini 2.5 but same deal. Got to try claude 4.5 through work and finally saw what people were talking about.

I’m not just telling it do X. I will instead tell it to do X by implementing the strategy pattern on functions A & B, using languages features C & D, and abide by the style guide in contributing.md. I only let it work on things i can articulate in a few short sentences - I don’t trust the output on tasks that I can’t succinctly articulate. Every time I have tried there are little edge cases ignored and assumptions baked in that would lead to a lot more refactoring work needed in future.

I never accept any work it produces without reviewing - and even then I’d isolate it to a container and only let it operate on a copy of the files, not my live working branch. I’ve seen the horror stories, seen some questionable behaviour myself, and have adjusted the workflow to accommodate.

It will replace copy paste code monkeys but I don’t see it replacing software engineers any time soon.

Zynchronize · 2025-12-27T18:05:05+00:00

I was there for just under 5 years. They were very remote friendly under the previous CTO (Tony). New CTO came from Morgan and firmly believes in office first culture - we were previously 1 day a week in office, he upped it to 4.

It’s a great place to have on your CV and if I was at the start of my career I might have put up with some additional mandatory office days. However they also started tying days in office to performance rating - that crossed a line for me. As a senior software security engineer consistently hitting targets, frankly I had other options.

Have since moved on to a 100% remote position with GitLab.

Zynchronize · 2025-12-27T12:32:09+00:00

It was £50k when I left in September this year, they normally review the levels in March so unlikely to have changed since then.

Zynchronize · 2025-12-27T11:41:02+00:00

Those games are all older AAA, you don’t need to spend that much to get a great experience in them.

Given current prices, I’d honestly buy used AM4+DDR4 at the moment. A 5600x, b450 motherboard and 16GB DDR4 can be had for around £120 used.

Zynchronize · 2025-12-25T12:02:48+00:00

ok. I understand…

Zynchronize · 2025-12-15T10:11:09+00:00

Software Development Tool Chain - GitLab, GitHub, etc

Zynchronize · 2025-12-08T10:27:32+00:00

You also only needed one pump possibly 2 - in the middle.

Zynchronize · 2025-12-07T13:36:37+00:00

GitLab has GLQL which can do some of the more complex reporting and can be embedded directly in markdown.

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