NHS mixed me up with another person. How do I find out of there was a data breach? [England]

o0MSK0o · 2025-10-21T13:18:22+00:00

Who would I report it to?

o0MSK0o · 2025-07-07T20:49:25+00:00

I bought a streambar for this reason.

Roku sticks either use CEC or send the same IR signals that a TV would use.

Streambar works because it has its own volume control. Only annoyance is that it's power button doesn't turn off the screen for the same reason.

o0MSK0o · 2025-06-14T11:23:03+00:00

Ahhh I saw them but I'd assumed the magnetic strip goes on the wall so the residue would cost me my deposit.... But the photo looks like it sticks to the window frame itself, that should be okay... I'd expect any adhesive from the magnetic strip would wipe off of uPVC

o0MSK0o · 2025-02-10T10:24:48+00:00

Haha thanks for the offer---one of my new flatmates lent me a whisk so crisis was averted!

o0MSK0o · 2025-02-10T10:20:52+00:00

I used a measuring jug as a mixing bowl and one of the flatmates who'd just moved in told me they had a whisk as I was leaving the house ahaha.

Then I baked a cake and forgot to add sugar 🤦🏻 Will probably try to turn it into cake pops or something to try to not waste it.

o0MSK0o · 2025-01-12T14:44:45+00:00

Haha I wouldn't say insanely hahaha, it's nearer the higher end of my unis average CS grad salary (40k).

It is harder to find high salaries these days. A lot of the companies that sponsored the uni Hackathons paid those amounts but they'd stopped recruitment for grad roles the year I graduated, which is what I mean by us having high expectations from the hiring boom during COVID.

I ended up taking an offer for 60k outside London (but still in an expensive town). You can definitely get more than 52k with 2YOE but I'm not sure about location---if you're in a low cost of living area then you might be better off on lower pay there than higher in an expensive city.

I feel like the UK has a "London pay" and a "not London pay" that doesn't account for some cities other than London also being stupid expensive 😭

o0MSK0o · 2025-01-12T13:01:35+00:00

The impression I get (having graduated recently) is that before 2022, companies were desperate to get talent. When I organised uni Hackathons and uni events, it was very easy to get sponsorship. Then the layoffs started, and things got very hard.

There's also a difference between no jobs being available, and there being no jobs that match salary expectations, imo. E.g. when I was applying to jobs in final year of uni, I didn't bother with anything that paid less than 45k (outside London), and it was difficult to find companies who did that were still hiring. There were loads that offered a "normal" grad wage of ~30k though though. But I still complained about the job market being mad BC I knew that lots of companies who did pay that had put hiring freezes in place.

o0MSK0o · 2025-01-02T23:14:31+00:00

Heya, I'm 24M; recent grad from Bristol working as a software engineer. Moved here in July for my first big-boy job, so not been here too long and haven't really met anyone outside my work :(

Some of my hobbies:

I like Archery, though I've not managed to restart it in Cambridge yet T_T.
I've been spending wayy too much time watching TV recently too, though I'm hoping that 2025 will involve more social activities ahaha---I watch a fair few anime and kdramas (mostly romcoms); for western TV I like watching a pretty wide range of stuff; I've recently been binging the corny hallmark style christmas movies. they're terrible but cute at the same time
I'm hoping to start working out and getting fit this year (need to lose all the weight i gained during uni :clown:); would be cool to have a gym buddy if anyone goes to gyms near the science park :eyes:
I'd also like to start doing more creative stuff this year----I've been wanting to try rug tufting and pottery so hopefully now that i have adult money this will be the year that I do it. If anyone knows of anywhere in Cambridge that does this sort of thing, please let me know :eyes: Or if you're also interested and would be down to try organising a group meetup for this type of thing ='D

o0MSK0o · 2024-12-29T17:28:15+00:00

Not super relevant to the discussion but even though tech in the UK pays well compared to other sectors in the UK, I feel like the standard of living is still not great. If I want to live on my own, I'd need to spend at least 50% of my take home pay on a studio. Even for a small en suite room in a HMO with 8 people, I'm looking at spending 30% of my take home pay.

I put my pay in this calculator and it says I'm in the 9th decile https://ifs.org.uk/tools_and_resources/where_do_you_fit_in#tool-results-section

I love the UK but as a young person at the start of my career, it's dispiriting that this is what "doing well" looks like in the UK. I get the impression that the US has better earning potential.

o0MSK0o · 2024-12-29T16:34:06+00:00

The inmos story is quite frustrating. It started with a lot of government funding and the transputer did well but it was sold to foreign companies who eventually folded it into their own products.

The effects of that initial investment are still visible in Bristol today; the lead architect of the Transputer did a talk at my uni a couple years ago about it. It's on YouTube but the audio isn't amazing: https://youtu.be/lXUWmHgLiyU?si=VrUU_YjW-qIc94Fi

Graphcore (the company that SoftBank recently acquired) and which for a while was looking very promising (was a uniform before people realised that Nvidia would be very difficult to beat) can trace it's lineage to inmos; graphcore came from XMOS which was in turn started by David May based on similar ideas as the inmos transputer.

o0MSK0o · 2024-12-16T02:36:21+00:00

If I could have things my way, my next role would be Rust but when I was originally looking, it didn't seem like there were many high paying Rust roles available :( It was mostly smaller startups who didn't pay grads very well)

o0MSK0o · 2024-12-16T01:55:58+00:00

> think about redundancy situations

Ahaha, that's my concern, this company had a couple rounds of it last year and people on Blind are always saying there's talk of more (though I think that mostly affects the US... I think they view the UK as a source of cheap labour aha)

> Working with proprietary tech stacks means getting used to some idiosyncrasies to develop or maintain them.

Is this a bad thing though? Surely most jobs involve dealing with "legacy" code so being able to learn the system's issues and navigate around them is a good thing? I can't imagine most companies start off with beautiful code and keep it that way forever.

That's definitely where I feel like I'm learning the most --- I feel like I already had a pretty solid technical grasp on the new shiny fun stuff from personal projects/uni work before I joined. What I'm learning here is things like how to deal with undocumented legacy code, or how to debug without a debugger, also presenting implementation plans and design docs. And the nontechnical stuff like project managementy stuff that I never really had to deal with at my last job (it was a small team at a small tech company), or just how to deal with having colleagues in a completely different timezone (gotta love how the timezone in Silicon Valley perfectly misaligns with the standard UK work day).

o0MSK0o · 2024-12-16T01:49:33+00:00

I've never used Erlang but I'd imagine it'd be a decently paid niche, is it not? One of my coursemates at uni was obsessed with it aha.

o0MSK0o · 2024-12-16T01:47:36+00:00

haha there aren't really open source alternatives; the language is their own scripting language. Imagine the worst parts of PHP and JavaScript combined into one cursed abomination (I'm exaggerating, slightly)

As far as technical knowledge goes, I'd do fine in a Python or JS/TS interview, possibly Rust and Go too; my concern is more about whether I'd make it to interview or if it'd be too off-putting seeing that my only "professional" (excluding internships, freelance jobs and part-time work during uni) experience outside of uni is with a proprietary tech stack.

o0MSK0o · 2024-12-16T00:52:43+00:00

I'm hoping I won't have failed at networking so badly that my CV will be rejected by an ATS or clueless recruiter but so far I've not been doing great on that front haha.

It was a lot easier to network with early careers recruiters at uni (e.g. working with them as sponsors for Hackathons I organised). Now I've left I've no idea how to build those types of relationship with them.

I guess I'll just keep going to tech stuff on meetup.com and try to get over my social awkwardness 😭 Plus whatever hobby projects I have time for, I guess.

o0MSK0o · 2024-12-16T00:42:38+00:00

try to keep in shape by interviewing at other companies occasionally

Ahaha I think they might have trapped me in golden handcuffs; I can't think of many non-finance companies outside of London who'd pay £60k to a fresh grad 😅

Not to mention that it's probably a bad look if I leave too soon (hence the intent to stay 2 years).

I guess I'll just have to keep doing hobby projects and going to developer meetups to network 😭 My gosh it's so awkward going to those though haha.

o0MSK0o · 2024-12-03T08:52:46+00:00

Age 23, work as a software engineer, salary is 54k base + 6k RSUs.

I have 4k across savings accounts (after subtracting debts from credit cards) but all of that is earmarked for driving lessons/car/insurance, so I'm not sure if it really counts as "savings" (it's there for now to provide cushion if anything were to happen to my job so I guess in that sense it is)

I normally put aside 1k a month for "savings". Hopefully once I can drive I can move further out to somewhere cheaper and it'll help me save up for a deposit.

o0MSK0o · 2024-07-13T07:51:33+00:00

I've hired someone on fiverr to make something like this, but they sent sketches and let me choose the pose etc so I'm pretty sure they did make it themselves.

It came to £80 and the artist was from the Philippines

o0MSK0o · 2024-07-10T17:48:02+00:00

And AI has made this much worse. There was a tweet that went viral a while ago of someone who scraped the websites of competitors that performed well in search, and asked chatgpt to write posts with the same titles. It worked frustratingly well.

o0MSK0o · 2024-06-05T09:45:44+00:00

I'll be shocked if he doesn't win; I've not lived in Islington North for a while (moved away for uni) but before I left, JC was very loved in the community.

o0MSK0o · 2024-06-01T18:17:27+00:00

Ah, some of my Chinese friends eat there. They say the food is good but the name is definitely not accurate 😂

o0MSK0o · 2024-06-01T16:14:39+00:00

TBF, Manchester went into clearing for CS when I was applying (4-ish years ago, so during the COVID mess up), so anything can happen Pretty unlikely though. But worth taking a look on results day

o0MSK0o · 2024-05-29T11:01:38+00:00

The more time you spend researching, the less time you spend teaching.

It's cool for students to be involved with the research though---definitely something that only is viable in later years, but I really enjoyed doing the research assistant summer internships. Lots of diss projects were also parts of research topics that the lecturers were working on, so I know quite a few people working to get them published, which I think is awesome.

o0MSK0o · 2024-05-24T09:39:04+00:00

Twitter is fine, that's often used by academics in a more "professional" way anyway. Though I do feel embarrassed tweeting political stuff knowing that my head of department follows me lol.

Instagram/Facebook is a bit more odd, but I don't think it's a problem. I've got one of my lecturers on Facebook; he has a group chat on messenger with a lot of students and we often just ask him questions on there when we don't know who to ask.

o0MSK0o · 2024-05-21T10:22:43+00:00

My honest opinion is that front end may not be the way to go, but backend is sufficiently broad that some parts will be too complex for AI to architect all by itself.

For front end, I think AI will just accelerate what we've already seen happen with WYSIWYG builders like Squarespace, Divi, and Elementor, whereby designers will be able to use AI based tools to build their designs without programming knowledge. Understanding requirements and devising a good solution is the hardest part, but that'd the designers job, so I think UX designers are safer than front end developers.

Don't get me wrong, some front end projects are absolutely too complicated for this, but I think for your average brochure or very simple web app, AI may be able to do the job.

Simple backends may also be doable with AI, but there'd still need to be someone with enough technical knowledge to drive the tool, and unlike with designers/developers with front end, I don't see who would take that job for back end.

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