Ask HN: Career advice for a new grad
I've been agonizing over a decision between two offers.
The first one is from a company in Ottawa (Canada), doing systems programming (C/C++) with an above-average salary (for a new grad). The second one is from a company in London (UK), with ~ £40k salary. I'd be working with a more "modern" stack (think Python/JS/Ruby/Go/etc).
Following is a somewhat unstructured collection of thoughts.
Location: London >> Ottawa. I'd be looking at a ~40-60min commute (by bus) in Ottawa. For London, public transit and cycling infrastructure seem good. I'm more familiar with Ottawa as I've done an internship there, while my impression of London is based solely on a short visit. Generally though, London seems to be a more exciting (but expensive) place to live.
Type of work: The first offer seems more interesting as I would love to work on performance-type problems.
People/team: When interviewing with the first company, I met with two people from my would-be team (including the manager), and with multiple senior engineers from other teams. The company has a high proportion of senior engineers. For the second company, I got to meet a larger portion of the team. There were a couple instances during the interview and several post-interview phone calls where I thought "man, I'd really love to work with this person".
Immigration: For the sake of future stability, it is important for me to get permanent residency regardless of where I end up. Based on my research, getting a PR in Canada is much faster compared to getting an ILR in the UK.
Some of the questions on my mind are:
- Would it be irresponsible to give up the PR in Canada and move away?
- Would I later regret not moving to London in my early twenties?
- What's more important: work or people?
- How important is compensation for the first job out of college?
Would really appreciate any help/input/advice, especially from people later in their careers who have had to make similar choices.
9 comments
[ 3.7 ms ] story [ 24.2 ms ] threadLondon is huge, so is the market. So is the competition :-)
I have never been to Ottawa. I have moved to London 7 years ago, feel free to ask more questions if you have some.
To rent a whole flat for yourself will cost you 1k+ PCM (that's flat, you need to remember about council tax and TV tax and utilities, so probably closer to 1150+ PCM), you will be better to go for a room (did I mention it all depends if you are single? and you meet new people too)
Taxes here depend on your formal situation with the company. If you go PAYE then you'll probably see about ~30k of what you earn. Go and look at pay calculators. But once you get your permanent stay your option might look better. Also you mentioned 40k is a starting point, so you'll end up on better wage once your probation/review is done. Maybe your employer would go for paying your flat and travel expenses which would work better than doing this for yourself.
I would try to evaluate which option (Canada or UK) look better from your pocket perspective and then would look into tech and future perspective. Python seems to be quite on top at the moment, though C++ is not too bad neither :-) so not simple choices here!
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Just spotted you edited your question.
Q- Would it be irresponsible to give up the PR in Canada and move away?
A- I don't know :-) What's the PR in Canada?
Q- Would I later regret not moving to London in my early twenties?
A- older you get more difficult it becomes.
Q- What's more important: work or people?
A- growth. And that might mean either work, or people, or both, or neither - depending what's your end goal.
Q- How important is compensation for the first job out of college?
A- you would not (probably) consider moving if you was not offered a job, would you? Compensation is important but at some point you get to the glass ceiling and you need to think about other options. You need to value yourself, does not matter what point in your life you are at.
Think what you want to be doing in 1/3/5 years from now. That might give you the right perspective.
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Oh and commute - it is not unusual to see people commuting 60+ minutes (one way). You need to target the area near your office or near the fast tube (some are faster than the other). I live in suburbs and it takes me only 30 minutes to commute :-) it used to take 70 minutes when I was in zone 3 (but I was on slow line).
Also as far as I'm aware it's about 5 years before you get permanent residency in UK. So this would be long term plans and you might decide to go back once you are fed up of being here :-)
Having said that, the "modern" stack is definitely safer. The C++ market is great for really awesome, technical people, but there's not that many offers for people who are average. With modern tech it's the other way around - it is generally easier to use so there's less need for awesome people (which can make it boring if you are very talented), but it's very safe (in terms of job security) for average people. Also, in the C/C++ world you'll be competing against guys who've been building up their domain knowledge for 20-30 years...
My story is that I went with the safe side and my salary and working conditions are excellent now. The jobs themselves are completely uninspiring though. On the other hand, I'm not sure if I had the mental firepower to be a really great c++ programmer (say, senior engine programmer at a game company), as I get tired rather easily. So, even now (10+ years into my career), I'm not sure if I made the right call.
Re: London, it's huge, feels old/dirty (when I touch a building's wall, I wonder how many hundreds of people and dogs have pissed on that spot in the past), crowded and absurdly expensive. On the other hand, it is great for job hopping, so it might be wise to stay there in the formative years of your career.
I've not lived in London, but grew up in Montreal and lived in Toronto. I've been fortunate enough to visit many US and European metropolitan areas. In saying all that, I really find Ottawa to be a nice-sized small city. It's a government town for sure, but there is also a lot of Aero & Defence (where I ended up) as well as high tech (Shopify, Apple, Amazon, QNX/Ford's new self driving car centre). It's big enough to have pro sports teams, but small enough that you can be in the country in 20 minutes if you want to. No 16 lanes of highway anywhere in sight, either.
At the end of the day though, try not to worry about it too much. As others have said in this thread, the first job will define a path in life, but so will the second job, or that next person you talk to on the bus, it's all a big random walk. You are fortunate to have two interesting opportunities in front of you, so have fun and good luck.
Thank you for adding some perspective. It seems whatever choice I end up making, my brain will find a way to rationalize it post-factum.