Ask HN: Struggling to find a job in Ireland as a Ukrainian refugee, why?
I’m a Ukrainian refugee currently residing in Dublin. Do front-end for living, have 2.5+ years of solid experience in various projects, all Angular (hate react and don’t trust Vue). Looking for a job in Ireland. Easily go through interviews, reach final stages and then I hear something like ‘We need someone with at least 3 YOE’, ‘Your experience is not quite aligned with our expectations’, etc. I‘m not familiar with hiring processes in Ireland and in whole Europe, could it be that they just don‘t say me a real reason?
My gut feeling is that they are afraid that I’m going back once the war is over. I clearly address this with the fact that anyway I never liked my country and people and planned to move to US in two years. Maybe they are not familiar with this new thing Temporary Protection Directive which entitles me to work in Europe at least for one year. I tell them that I won’t ask them to sponsor my visa in future.
I can happily provide any further details on demand. Any advice?
17 comments
[ 3.0 ms ] story [ 48.2 ms ] threadReact is sort of the one used all over, it takes a bit more risk to use Angular, Vue or Svelte and those would predominantly be in startups. The issue is it is actually hard to hire people with Vue and Angular so React is the one chosen.
Do you mention when applying you could work with React?
I hate React because it’s a library, not an opinionated framework. I don’t want to choose a library for basic stuff over and over again and care if it was a good decision and will it be maintained in the next few months. And it doesn’t include TypeScript out of the box what leads to a handful of untyped projects on which I have zero willingness to work on. Even with types, from my experience culture of ‘type as much as you can’ is much stronger amongst Angular devs rather than React ones.
Besides, saying you were planning to move to the US may not be very reassuring to an employer in Ireland since now they may worry that you'll just leave them for the US (unless you're specifically applying for short term/one-year roles).
Maybe you can indicate your reliability and desire to stay in Ireland in a different way? Good luck!
edit: typo
yeah, dont call us we will call you
• corruption
• poverty
• litter and unjustified aggression with grumpiness all over the streets
• Ukrainians not caring about our own country in general, e.g. all government-sponsored workers doing shitty job and doing it way too long
• road rage and disrespect to driving rules and others on roads, e.g. someone on a pricier car usually doesn’t give a shit to someone driving a cheaper one
also I will never forgive government who, when I tried go to school for the second time, asked me to compensate all the money they paid for my first try. I dropped out the first time because I had no means to live and then they ask 20 year old to give them back $1.3k (really big money for a young Ukrainian) only because I wanted to get a degree. For context: both times my exam grades entitled me for free education. Where is support for ones who’s willing to get a degree? How was I supposed to pay this money? Parents stopped giving me money since I was 15, so that wasn’t an option. Anyway back then I was already working as a software engineer and managed to get a debt to pay this amount, then I dropped out for the second time. The law says that I must compensate money for this try too, but no one ever reached me about this so I never payed them back. You can call me infantile for being offended at government but that’s what I feel
my heart is completely with victims of this idiotic war, but it’s unfair to be blinded by the events and forget everything in my opinion
thanks everyone for you thoughts! That was really eye-opening. Starting from today I’m learning React and filtering what I say on interviews. Now your pieces of advice seems so obvious, I should definitely ask earlier. Have a wonderful rest of the weekend!
edit: list formatting