Another story about migration to the EU

Greetings, dear reader. Recently, I have been increasingly witnessing on Habré stories about successful migration to the EU (and even one to Russia). Once such a trend, I would like to tell you my story. I will try to omit all the emotional components, on the contrary - I will try to give the most useful information that may be useful.

Before going under the cat, two remarks:
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1. This story is about a system engineer. I am not sure that the developer will be useful.
2. If you are bored with stories about a career, then do not waste your time, there are more interesting posts on Habré.

Suppose we are not familiar with you, my dear reader, but I am pleased that you are interested in my experience.

I will omit the details of my age, the details of higher education and career in Russian companies - there is no point in chewing everything.

In short:

1. In the IT industry since 2010, he started as an intern in IT support.
2. Passed official training RedHat 6, Oracle 11.2 and MS SQL Server 2008R2. All other technologies and systems are mastered independently.
3. He worked in the classic ITIL and in Agile / DevOps environment.

Also leave behind the reasons for finding a new job. Everyone understands what a crisis in the Russian Federation these days, and even if it were not for my wife, I would not even risk it.

Now to what I used for job search.

Where to looking for

monster.com , indeed.com , linkedin.com , glassdoor.com and even hh.ru are some of the most popular job search sites abroad.

First of all, I translated my resume into English and posted it on the Monster. Oddly enough, the invitations to the interview fell the next day. Looking at the time of receiving letters (they all came from 7-8 pm in Moscow), I realized that more active recruiters are mostly from the western hemisphere.

After a brief reading and quick correspondence, the following became clear:

1. Most recruiters send letters to a large number of applicants at the same time.
2. This explains the fact that it is highly likely to receive an invitation for an interview for a position, the requirements for which are obviously higher than your capabilities.
3. Most of the invitations were for temporary contract positions (six months, a year)
4. Companies do not provide relocation and visa assistance.
5. Standard problems of not understanding the difference between a specialty and a culture (to be honest, I am contorted from the name “DevOps engineer”) are not foreign to the western employer.

Having received several invitations for an interview for the position of DevOps or a system engineer, where the requirements indicated 10 years of experience (I had 5 at the time), I was puzzled for a long time, after which I consulted with a friend who had experience in hiring western companies. It turns out that the employer initially puts the highest possible bar of requirements and, if it does not succeed in finding the right candidate, then gradually goes down the hierarchy of experience.

Nevertheless, I did not agree to any interview for a simple reason - not one of the potential employers was ready to pay for a visa, a flight and a “lift”. To save a huge, taking into account the devaluation, the amount of money to go on a dubious journey, where it is not a fact that the case will burn out ... Undue risk for me. However, I would suggest to try risky and, most importantly, VERY experienced professionals with official certificates. Senior salaries are pretty high.

Ideal for myself as a springboard for searches, I considered stackoverflow.com/jobs . Some employers offer visa support and relocation (and they can be filtered out very easily). Having posted his resume there, he began to send responses to almost all offices whose offices were located in England, France and the Netherlands. Most of them refused, citing a lack of experience with this or that technology, one office invited for an interview, but the salary was too low to live in London (I was there 2 weeks on a business trip and I have a certain insight on the cost of living). Finally, the bell rang from the Dutch number.

Interview.

With a recruiter

The interviewer said that he had read my response and wanted to learn more about my experience. There were ordinary questions about education (for whom he studied, degree, about what a diploma and what is the average score), experience (what kind of company, what did he do, what projects), why he left his previous job, why now I am looking for a job, how much I want money and etc. After receiving all the answers, the recruiter said that he would transfer all the records to the hiring manager and would soon give feedback and, possibly, schedule an interview with the hiring manager. I was surprised (what about techies?), But the next day I received a letter from the recruiter, where he offered dates for the first technical interview with two engineers of the company. He clarified that this is an introductory technical interview, in which there will be no violence, only curiosity (what specific technologies and what applied). Well, OK. After reviewing the reviews and salaries on glassdoor, refreshing knowledge of Ansible and prepared for the next meeting.

First technical

The interview was on Skype, two engineers sat across from me, introduced themselves and started asking about projects. The interview was absolutely simple and represented the following format - the engineer looks at the resume and says: “I see that you have experience in Ansible. What did you do to them? And what features of Oracle did you use? ”. No questions in the style of “how to patch KDE2 under FreeBSD” or “what happens when the user opens the browser and drives foo.bar into the search”. Already not bad. After the guys asked what they have questions. I asked what technologies they work with, what are the main problems in the work between the teams, how many Scrum teams, how many people are in a team. On this the guys took their leave, they like everything, happily and so far. Later, a recruiter knocked on Skype and said that the first stage had been completed and that further steps should be waited in the mail.

The second is technical.

A week later came the second letter from the recruiter. I have over skill (I responded to a system engineer) and they offer me to try my hand at the position of the leading engineer for Linux. I agreed and we agreed on a second technical interview. It promised to be more difficult and I had 4 days to thoroughly prepare. During the first days, I quickly ran through the outlines of my courses, practiced on LinuxAcademy and looked for what questions mostly asked on a technical interview. Found the top 30 questions on Linux interviews from IT giants. (Amazon, Google, Microsoft, RedHat, etc.) Mom.

I will not lie, I was very nervous about this interview, because day X was near, and I had no room for error.

On the appointed day, I again received a call to Skype, two other engineers were already sitting in front of me (From the Scrum team I was supposed to arrange).

The guys quickly walked through my experience and one of them asked what part of IT is causing me particular difficulty. I answered honestly: networks (yes, yes, I'm the guy who confuses L3 and L4 and cannot remember the TCP handshake sequence) and programming (of all the languages ​​I was given only Bash and SQL). The first question is if I need to change our current RADIUS server to something open source, how will I solve this problem. Super.

I said that the first thing I google. The decision will be chosen based on popularity, support, size and activity of the community and a list of supported glands. Then I will create some lab with switches, access points and so on. and test it.

Then a question followed, and what should be done on the side of RADIUS itself. I said I need to configure kerberos. Probably.

The remaining questions were quite simple: how to create a user without using useradd, which PID 1 process and how to solve the problem chmod -x / usr / bin / chmod

When the future colleagues had no questions left, the further conversation took place in the same format as in the first interview.

Office visit, final interview

A week later, the head hunter solemnly declared that I had passed the technical stage, and if it was still interesting for me to work with them, then I was invited to the company's office for the final stage. The company paid for the flight, hotel and tickets from the airport to the city. I only had to pay a visa. I had a tour of the office, made an appointment with the Product Owner and Scrum Master, the members of the future team, the manager.

It was a great surprise that:

1. Scrum Master was one of the engineers with whom I spoke.
2. The hiring manager said that his decision does not play a big role, and that her main and only task: to ensure that everything suits me in terms of work, as well as to conduct annual performance reviews
3. Mr. RADIUS, when I asked him about the correctness of my answer, in general, my answer was rejected. To my words that I, it turns out, did not pass a technical interview, he answered that it is more important for them how a person behaves in a stressful situation when he is to work with something that he sees for the first time at all and that engineering thinking is more important jagged books.
4. One of the most important selection criteria is the so-called team fit - an empirical dimension, as far as you fit a particular team. That is, in the choice between a professional who is unlikely to make friends with the team and a sociable middling - the team will choose the second option.

At the end of the day I was given an offer, which I signed on the same day.

findings

Dear reader. If you decide to get on a tractor once and go to the countries of western Europe, here are my tips:

1. See vacancies on stackoverflow and HH - there is more chance to find positions with relocation.
2. Do not neglect positions with relocation and / or visa support. This initially indicates that the employer is set to hire a foreigner.
3. Before you call the numbers, carefully study the cost of living (the cost of rent, taxes, food, transportation, entertainment, etc.)
4. Do not try to seem smarter than you really are. In my case, thinking was more important than knowledge.
5. That does not negate the fact that more knowledge - more money.
6. Carefully read the contract. If the company pays for your move, it is more likely to ask you to stay.
7. Learn English.

PS If readers will be interested, I could also write about the process of obtaining a visa and arrangement at a new place.