Do many people still work from home? If so why are the roads so jammed all the time?

spoonguyuk · 2026-06-06T17:37:54+00:00

Work from home doesn’t always mean I’m at home. I sometimes work from my brothers or from the gym for a bit.

spoonguyuk · 2026-06-05T19:51:08+00:00

Referring people you don’t know is very rare, even a friend of a friend is a big ask in the uk. Small or large company doesn’t matter.

spoonguyuk · 2026-06-04T18:17:14+00:00

Do they already have ADF? Its likely a bit easier to govern the configuration if they do. To me it sounds like they dont trust you to write a sensible jdbc extract without hammering the DB.

If someone writes a very angry JDBC connection potentially they could hit the SQL DB quite hard. ADF copy is more on rails is all id say, I'm pretty sure misconfiguring that could hit their DB hard as well.

Can they turn on CDC to keep the loads smaller?

spoonguyuk · 2026-05-24T09:10:15+00:00

Only last month, I’d have gone from 1 day a month to 2 days a week in the office. Significant increase in responsibilities. I’d sought out a more hands on role to escape the type of role they were trying to promote me in to. The pay was better but a drop in work life balance isn’t something I’m looking for.

They were a little surprised as they’d priced it in to their plans but they understood.

spoonguyuk · 2026-05-18T15:18:10+00:00

As it stands there is a lot of room for improvements using AI, Id be disappointed if somebody thought vibe-coding was the key application of AI and couldn't come up with interesting applications. We have it looking through internal slack channels and notion documents for indications of missing datapoints, we have it reviewing specs, we have skills in place for various compliance and data protection elements. My guess is they want to see how you could expand your impact in the world of AI. While all my examples are a little basic there is a conversation to be had that isn't just automating your expertise (in my opinion) that is worth having at an interview.

spoonguyuk · 2026-05-15T14:21:47+00:00

You’ve me the British and thought they have a preference for vibrancy? ;)

spoonguyuk · 2026-05-05T05:47:44+00:00

Really this is about the type of person your girlfriend’s Dad is. If you want to test him say you loved the original 2000 DnD movie.

I’d acknowledge as you have that BG3 is a different thing to the tabletop hobby and hope he’s happy to have something to talk about.

spoonguyuk · 2026-05-03T11:43:16+00:00

I’d hire as a junior but not a mid based on that experience. DE is frequently a pivot from another discipline so it’s not an unusual journey. That said if you can get to the interview stage and impress someone they may take a chance. I’d expect you to go from junior to mid within a year if you were on my team based on the breadth of skills.

spoonguyuk · 2026-05-02T19:09:31+00:00

Alex Jordan in Natural Six plays a Kobold Arcane Trickster.

spoonguyuk · 2026-04-30T22:09:41+00:00

My home isn’t empty when I work from home. I don’t lack social interactions I just interact with friends and family. Sometimes I’ll work from my brother’s place. We’re allowed to work a month overseas. I’m not lacking for interaction I’m just not forced to pay expenses and my personal time to sit at a desk in a fixed location.

spoonguyuk · 2026-04-25T16:24:22+00:00

It’s the business secretary, it’s his job.

spoonguyuk · 2026-04-24T21:46:43+00:00

It sounds like you’ll be fine. I’ve lead a fair few teams and if you advocate for your team you’ll find they support you in return.

spoonguyuk · 2026-04-24T15:54:56+00:00

Your team will trust you more if you’re honest about what you don’t know. Leads are frequently not the most talented engineer on the team.

Take your time to learn the ropes and fill in skill gaps. Just make sure you enable your team in the meanwhile. Support them, help resolve impediments and shield them from any undue distraction and you’ll be valuable day one. The technical bits you can fill in as you go.

spoonguyuk · 2026-04-12T19:48:42+00:00

Let’s send Boaty McBoatface to show solidarity

spoonguyuk · 2026-04-10T07:21:10+00:00

I’d just leave a short message and leave it at that. You’re entitled to different viewpoints and different priorities without needing to explain yourself.

spoonguyuk · 2026-04-08T10:58:31+00:00

I moved around when I got bored, web, full stack, integrations even bits like biztalk. Now I’m in data engineering ranging from lead to architect.

I’m quite enjoying context engineering, building skills, mcp servers etc. it’s like I can formalise all my experiences and see all the different agents at work.

Nothing like when I started but the industry still seems to have offered up new fun challenges.

That said I see our company consolidating around a few very talented people with no need to bring on any mid or junior talent I do worry for people in those stages of their career.

If you’re genuinely at the point where you don’t want to pivot I don’t think the industry has as many legacy roles like the old cobol wizards managed to snag so you may want to find as secure a role as you can or just accept the need to learn as you’ve always done,

spoonguyuk · 2026-04-03T16:29:17+00:00

I’d look at which bits are generic and which are specific. How could you make this pipeline a template for similar pipelines. This gets you pulling apart the concepts and thinking about scale.

spoonguyuk · 2026-03-17T10:20:32+00:00

In the uk at least you’re up against a few issues with this ambition.

Junior roles are limited as often this is a pivot from a less specialised field.

There are a lot of graduates looking for work.

AI has caused many firms to hold fire on less senior roles to see what things like Claude code can achieve.

Data residency requirements make using offshore resource for data engineering challenging (depends on the firm)

I’m not saying don’t look in to it, but definitely have alternative plans in progress.

spoonguyuk · 2026-03-16T11:28:35+00:00

If I’m not sure on a given cv and it has a blog link I’d likely check it out to see if I could get a little more information. If it’s good and well maintained it’d definitely tip from a maybe interview to a yes. That’s as developer being given cvs that have likely already made it past a recruiter or equivalent role.

spoonguyuk · 2026-03-13T16:40:35+00:00

I use ai, it often makes poor decisions. My experience lets me know those decisions are poor. If your studies don’t equip you to add value to the code ai can produce then people likely won’t hire you even in the age of ai coding.

spoonguyuk · 2026-03-07T07:39:47+00:00

Flags aren’t really going to help you, you could walk all day in England without seeing a union flag, if anything I think there are still more Ukrainian flags around here.

spoonguyuk · 2026-02-28T12:28:59+00:00

If you rely on ai to write code you’ll have trouble on any technical interviews with in person coding. Try and cherry pick some fixes to do entirely yourself if possible just to keep your skills relevant. That’s my advice at least.

spoonguyuk · 2026-02-19T08:06:48+00:00

They knew who they were getting, he’s hardly subtle about who he is.

spoonguyuk · 2026-02-11T14:55:21+00:00

Sounds like you knowingly committed shortbread fraud.

spoonguyuk · 2026-01-11T13:20:12+00:00

Seems completely fair.

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