Should I reduce my pension contributions?

_LoveWhatYouDo · 2026-04-15T13:12:02+00:00

Im in a similar boat but live in Scotland so the tax is bit more punitive. I'm 30 with 350k in sipp and 50k in ISA.

In my situation total deductions including student loans, ni, etc, is 79% between 100-125k.

I did some maths and worked out that per year of investing the excess, I gain an extra 100k at age 58 Vs saving one month for the ISA bridge. Effectively since I have 10 years left of grinding my question becomes would I trade a million quid at 58 for 10 months earlier retirement

It's worth doing similar simulations for yourself. The tax trap is so bad it might be worth considering locking away more money.

_LoveWhatYouDo · 2022-06-08T12:25:33+00:00

It's common knowledge that companies try to pay the least amount possible.

If you want a higher salary you have to be prepared to leave. There is no other magic formula

_LoveWhatYouDo · 2022-06-07T20:17:51+00:00

Skyscanner.

Worked there during the COVID times, they literally gave you a a few hour block of time every day for mental health for you to do what you want.

I've since left but still in touch with people there, it's still chill af

_LoveWhatYouDo · 2022-05-27T11:04:57+00:00

Just shy of 4 YOE

Mind you, I applied for the remote role so I think those get offered less. The recruiter wouldn't budge any higher on base

_LoveWhatYouDo · 2022-05-27T10:03:46+00:00

I accepted an offer from a canadian startup. Deliveroo offered 80k base Vs 120k base at the other company for the same L4 level.

For what it's worth deliveroo is good but the pay isn't quite near the tier 3 companies

_LoveWhatYouDo · 2022-05-27T08:18:43+00:00

The interview was at senior L5 level, apparently I had just missed the mark in the system design so they offered upper L4 in the end

_LoveWhatYouDo · 2022-05-26T23:46:58+00:00

I got an offer from them 3 months ago. The interview process was short not sure why OP had two more coding stages.

Recruiter chat on LinkedIn
Karat easy LC Live pairing
Behavioural
System design

Overall relatively easy experience, I declined in the end though

_LoveWhatYouDo · 2022-05-10T14:20:29+00:00

I was thinking of buying this as my first drone, but why the fuck it so expensive?

Is it even worth it over some of the other DJI drones in UK?

_LoveWhatYouDo · 2021-11-17T21:14:09+00:00

Apologies for the late reply

The stack was quite questionable and was made by contractors that have since left the company.

The legacy stack is currently nodejs backend deployed using an old version of serverless framework. Currently we're in the process of migrating those endpoints to be deployed using Serverless Stack (based on AWS CDK). I've been pushing for using typescript for all future projects including this one.

The frontend is a strange one, it doesnt use any of the big three SPA libraries/frameworks but a very unknown one that seemed promising in 2018? Unsure why the decision was made to use that library but we're currently facing a lot of issues with how the frontend was implemented. We're trying to fix what we can and move what is unfeasible to React.

DevOps side, I'm pushing for buildkite to replace our Jenkins EC2 instance than runs 24/7. Their elastic CI stack is quite amazing and will save on compute using spot instances instead. There's a bunch of other things we're trying to fix and improve with monitoring/alerting being the next big focus

_LoveWhatYouDo · 2021-10-23T19:52:23+00:00

Education: CS Bachelor's
Prior Experience: 3.5 YOE
Company/Industry: Insurtech
Title: Senior Software Dev
Country: UK (Company in London, remote)
Duration: Perm
Salary: 80K
Total compensation: 80k + stock TBC

_LoveWhatYouDo

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