How I was looking for a job in Singapore

And I know that if tomorrow I leave for America or Singapore, then in a month or two I will definitely find a job in QA, since English allows. © Dorial

It was this phrase from an article published in the corporate blog of my last employer in the Russian Federation that prompted me to write my own. I thought about the same when I realized that I needed to look for a job in Singapore. Everything was not quite what I want to talk about in this article.

Foreword

Once, on a dark October morning, my girlfriend (now wife) got an offer for a PhD position at NTU in Singapore. We decided that the offer was worth it, and we had long thought about emigration. “Developers are needed everywhere” - I thought, and started looking for work, thinking that “in a month or two” I would find a good option and we will move together. True, there was a small problem: at that time, all my commercial development experience was 8 months in Sberbank, and my main achievement was that I became one of the strongest table tennis players in our building.

I was optimistic and did not attach much importance to this. He began to gradually look for suitable vacancies and respond to them.

Time passed, the departure of the girl approached, and I never received a single answer.
In the meantime, Agile-transformation began in the green bank, the move was made, and the teams were reoriented to a new project. I began to learn the world of development much faster and even received a small, but native area of ​​responsibility, but when I looked through vacancies I understood perfectly well that I was still very far from meeting the requirements. The girl left, and I decided that I needed to develop more intensively and look for ways to grow in Moscow.

Once I received the first response: a call from Singapore from one of the companies hr. He said that he would be happy to help me, but I have too little experience. Even getting such feedback was useful because belief in yourself was fading. After that, I decided that since the experience is not enough, you need to find a way to recruit it as intensively as possible, in connection I decided to change jobs.

Job Search in Moscow

I got my first job relatively quickly: asked a friend to send a resume from the inside, received an invitation for an interview, passed it and received an offer without departing from the cash register. I think there were several reasons for this development:

• Despite the fact that I was swimming in Java, and had no idea what was going on in the development besides the code, I had a diploma about completing a sports college, and I asked for very little money. Less than they could pay, so the offer surprised me pleasantly;
• the interview was at the end of December, they hired me for the new year, maybe there was a budget to plan;
• there was a position in the department that needs to be closed. After all, if it is not closed, the next time she goes to another department.

The second job search turned out to be slightly more difficult than the first. I looked at a few vacancies, chose a few of the ones that I liked most about the stack (I wanted to actively use the features of Java 8, Spring, Hibernate) and responded to them. Pretty soon received a call from the recruiter, talked, received an invitation for an interview and a couple of days later I had an offer. The interview left only positive impressions: I was interviewed by the team leader - the immediate supervisor, with whom it was very easy and pleasant to communicate. Looking ahead, this interview was one of the most enjoyable: not only my knowledge was assessed, but also the train of thought, and all questions were directly related to the technologies used on the project.

In addition, I had a reason to go to this company. A year before, when I was looking for my first job in the development, I was selected by a program for graduates and young professionals conducted by this bank. I got to the final interview, where I found out that they are not looking for a developer, but for a person in support, and even offer less money than I asked at that time. Of course, I went to the security department, but the thought of returning to the developer remained. It's hard to say why. I guess I liked the cozy office.

Preparing for the next step

In the next few months, I practically didn’t find a job in Singapore,
unless responded to ten vacancies a week. The change of work turned out to be the right decision: at a new place, I was finally given tasks and waited for their implementation, I learned a lot of new things and developed faster than before. Quite often I could not afford to engage in self-education in the evening after work, because during working hours I did and I knew enough.

Also, I really liked the people in the new team. In Sberbank, I also worked with good guys, but many of them seemed to go out. Here I felt that everyone loves his work and invests in it. I even thought that it might be worth returning the girl and stay in Moscow.

We made great products, I had a great relationship with the team, I felt that I was valued and trusted.

The flow of recruiters on LinkedIn grew up in the meantime, after a while I got used to interest in me. I even decided to try my hand and learn the assessment from the side: I was offered to try to qualify for Senior Java Developer in Commerz Systems (Prague). Of course, the word "Senior" confused me, but the recruiter advised not to pay attention to it.

I passed the test, talked to hr, passed two technical interviews (by the way, quite simple) and received an offer. For some time, the girl and I thought about whether or not we should move to Prague, but still did not dare to take such a step. But getting an offer had a positive effect on my faith in my own strength.

Quite often, recruiters wrote with offers from Europe. I decided that even if I didn’t move there, it was a great opportunity to find out what people want, practice interviewing and, which is also important, get the opportunity to practice English for free, sometimes even with native speakers.

I continued to respond to vacancies in Singapore, and still did not receive a response. Then I decided to add Singapore recruiters and try to find out how it turns out that people in Europe are interested in me, but not in Singapore.

There are two important problems:

• I need a visa to work in Singapore - Employment Pass. This visa is not so easy to get, because the Ministry of Manpower is constantly tightening the screws and not everyone is ready to issue it. Many companies even do not take it. In addition, the company should have a quota for such a visa. There is also a minimum salary threshold for obtaining such a visa, depending on education and work experience. For me, this is 5000 SGD (~ 3800 USD).
• Recruiters want me to be in Singapore already. Apparently, it is more pleasant for them to talk in person, and no one will pay for the interview, at least for a person with my experience.
  Having learned about it, I decided that it was possible to go a different way, namely to find a distant work.

Udalenka and moving

The search for possible options on the Internet returned me three options: Upwork, Toptal and Crossover.

• On Upwork, I could not quickly find long-term offers. I completed a couple of small orders, but I didn’t want to spend time searching for them.
• Toptal: I sent a request, received a link to codility or something similar, somehow decided.
  The next step was an online interview in the following format: the interviewer gives you two tasks, 15 minutes each, with screen sharing turned on. Need to solve and explain. To whom as, but for me it is a terrible stress. As a result, the first time I failed, and the next attempt can be made only after six months. The next time I went through this stage, but after that I was given the task of making a mini-project in two weeks. By the time I redid a bunch of test tasks, and I began to draw sentences, so I stopped to consider this option.
• Crossover: looking at the job list, I decided to move to the position of Java Software Engineer.
  He passed the selection process, which was quite simple, then they put my resume on the internal Marketplace, and it remained to find a suitable team. I had three interviews: the first interviewer wanted me to write unit tests (in the sense that this would be my whole job) - no, thanks. The second one was very surprised that at that time we did without microservices and that I did not know how to work with AWS. And the third, it seemed, was pleasant enough and promised interesting work and fast growth. On it, I decided to stop.
  Having received confidence that I would have some kind of work and money, I decided that it was time to fulfill the dream. I finished work on the project, which we successfully brought to the prod, said goodbye to the team, went to our parents' homeland, packed a suitcase and went to Singapore.

Job Search in Singapore

"How did I go to Singapore?" - you may ask. The fact is that since my wife is a Student Pass holder, I am entitled to a Long-term Social Visit Pass, which does not allow me anything but to be legally in Singapore for two years. I arrived on a tourist visa, we collected the necessary package of documents, after which I was extended the opportunity to be in Singapore for two months and told to wait.

After working a month at Crossover, I realized that this work is harmful to my career.

First, I had to work 40 hours a week, and this is absolutely not the same as working in the office for the same 40 hours. Quite often, it was simply impossible to find something to do, because I was blocked, but time must still be written off. It is impossible to officially read something useful during working hours, you need to work, but it seems that the manager had more important things to do than to examine each screenshot from my computer. Secondly, all my work was to fix the bugs "from the fence to lunchtime." It was all useless and, in some sense, humiliating, especially in the context of what I was doing before, and how highly I evaluated my capabilities. I decided to finish it and focus on my own training and searching for office work in Singapore.

Crossover Commentary.

Thank you for your story. It is a pity that your experience with us turned out to be negative, but it also seemed strange to us. With your permission, we would like, if not to rectify the situation, then at least to help our new applicants not find themselves in it.

I had to work 40 hours a week, and this is absolutely not the same as working in the office the same 40 hours
')
- This is true, and it is not a bug. Crossover is not an office, but a full-fledged remote work with hourly pay and appropriate accounting of hours worked. To simplify, we indicate in the vacancies the total amount for the month, but, of course, we do not hide the level of returns that we expect from the applicant - these and other aspects of the work are discussed in detail during employment, virtually eliminating the possibility of surprises for existing employees.

Quite often, it was simply impossible to find out what to do, because I was blocked, but time would still have to be written off. It’s officially impossible to read something useful during working hours, you need to work, but it seems the manager had more important things to do.

- It is the manager who responds to the emerging block when the external reason does not allow the user to continue working (there are no new tasks set in place of ended ones, the necessary information from a third party is expected) One of their key tasks is to be in touch for the prompt elimination of blockers for employees.

Secondly, all my work was reduced to fixing bugs "from the fence to lunchtime." It was all useless and, in a sense, humiliating, especially in the context of what I was doing before, and how highly I evaluated my capabilities.

- Apparently, you really got into the team that deals with the correction of defects. What, as it turns out, the hiring manager for some reason did not tell you, although he had to present in detail the content of your future work - as with any other job placement.

To avoid this, it is better not to be afraid to take the initiative: ask your questions and solve your problems - find out everything about the project, position, your responsibilities, development possibilities, technologies and methodologies used in the team, interaction nuances and much more. So you will form the correct expectations of the position necessary to accept or reject the offer as consciously as possible.

Director of Crossover in Russia, Vladimir vme Eronin
VP of Technical Product Management Aurea Software Maxim Maximvinnikov Vinnikov

Having sounded all LinkedIn about my desire to find a job, I continued to respond to vacancies, besides I was looking for suitable options for Monster. As it turned out later, almost all of my feedback brought no exhaust. All real interviews with companies came to me from recruiters, who independently came to me. So even at Habré recruiters and do not like, it is thanks to them I found work in two cases out of three (Crossover will not be considered a job).

At the time of my active communication with local companies, my resume had less than two years of work experience. Therefore, I had an important task to show that years of experience are not all.

It all started with what I wrote a recruiter from the French equivalent of EPAM called GFI. We had a wonderful talk with her, I convinced her that I was not bad, and my resume should be sent to where she can. Thanks to him, I got the opportunity to come for an interview at Credit Agricole CIB.

The next recruiter who gave me access to the interview was an Australian.
He said that with my experience it would be difficult to find a job, again due to problems with the Ministry of Manpower. However, he will definitely find options for me. By that time, I gradually got used to the sweet speeches of recruiters and did not attach any importance to this, but after two weeks he returned to me with two options: HonestBee (analogue of the Delivery Club) and Standard Chartered Bank.

And the last recruiter, thanks to whom I got the opportunity to interview, became a Singaporean.

Two options came from him too: Scantist (security - a startup) and HomeAway (similar to booking.com).

There were also two companies that came to me after my responses: one on LinkedIn (FundYourselfNow), and the other on Stackoverflow (LeadIQ). In the next paragraph I’ll cover all the interviews in detail.

I note that in addition to these wonderful people, I had to communicate with a huge number of recruiters, mediocrity. Mostly these were, of course, Indians. They do not think at all whether it is convenient for you to communicate with them or not, they just call when they want. They understand absolutely nothing in your experience, and almost always they are even too lazy to fill in the label they prefer to send you to fill.

Some features of local recruiting are unpleasantly surprising: it is completely natural to ask about salary at the previous place (some continue to elicit, if you don’t want to speak), nationality, race.

Interviews and job offers

I'll tell you about the most memorable companies with whom I had to communicate. Perhaps the section will seem boring, since it consists mostly not of useful information about how different people conduct interviews, but about my perception of them.

Leadiq

• After the response, the founder of the startup contacted me and scheduled an interview in which they talked for life;
• Got a test task - write a simple web application;
• Technical interview in the office: I was given 7 tasks that had to be solved on the board and discussed in the process. Since they write on Scala, on which I only recently started trying to write, I decided on Java and if I knew, then on Scala too. Solved 6 problems, one did not have enough time. It seemed to go well, but they decided not to mess with me anymore.
  Well, it did not hurt, I was very uncomfortable to go to them.

FundYourselfNow

Perhaps the company that left one of the most unpleasant experiences.

• After the response, I wrote in LinkedIn and offered to hold an interview on Saturday at 8 am.
  To my reasonable suggestion to start at 9 I was told: "your resume says that you can work under pressure. Maybe you will tense up and get up to 8?". "Bold and rude" - I thought, but agreed.
• A Singaporean-hr and a Ukrainian developer spoke to me on the phone. I can not remember exactly what they said, but I remember that it became more and more disgusting to communicate with each word. The culmination was what hr told the developer: "look in the chat, I sent you a message there". Then they put me in front of the fact that the interview was over. I did not understand, but the unpleasant taste of communicating with them was becoming stronger.

• After that, they wrote again, assigning a technical interview at 9 am Sunday. I agreed. It was interesting to me because I was promised that we would discuss CS fundamental skills (theory, data structures, patterns, recursions, stack / queue, hashset / hashmap / hashtable, tree / binary tree, heap, graph), sorting , search algorithms, divide-and-conquer, dynamic programming / memoization and traversals (BFS, DFS) together with permutations algorithms ", which intrigued me. For an interview, I received the task to write a check whether the word is a palindrome. Of course, it was easy, I wrote a solution in a couple of minutes. Then suddenly it turned out that the developer understands the palindrome differently.

  
  

  For example, he offers to ignore all characters that are not in the alphabet. That is, "?:;% No. B ()" is a palindrome. Hour we tormented him, decided something. At the end I asked: "What skills did we test?"

  
  

  He replied that it was important for them to see how I write code, and stuff like that. He suggested that I solve the problem further on my own and send him a solution. I sent, he found fault with absolutely insignificant trifles, and finally told me that they could offer me to pass the selection further to the Junior position. Thank you but no.

  
  

Homeway

They did not send any test items, immediately called for an interview. The interviewer was pleasantly surprised: intelligent, experienced and at the same time young, pleasant Hindu. I have not met such people yet. He talked about his teams, I talked about my project, talked about Spring, discussed some unusual issues (how would I design a DB connection pool) and trivial ones (expand a single-linked list). A couple of days later I received an invitation to the next interview. The problem was that by that time I already had an offer, and I had to make a decision. I had been living without a salary for 2 months and was worried that getting the Employment Pass was delayed, so I decided not to risk it: I accepted the offer and refused HomeAway. Honestly speaking, I regret a little, because the company has left exceptionally pleasant impressions.

Honestbee

• telephone interview: communication with the recruiter, then several technical questions: how the Internet works, N + 1 problem;
• 3 tasks on codility / hakerrank: many practice this, so for those who want to find work abroad, I advise you to practice.
• Interview in the office: the company is developing microservices on Go / RoR, so there was almost no talk about Java. Mostly the guys checked how I can explain. It was necessary to design the API and database for a specific task, discussed multithreading, microservice architecture and many other different issues. Perhaps one of the best interviews in my life: the engineers themselves were pleasant (Filipino and Vietnamese; Filipinos in general are perhaps the most pleasant of Asians), the questions were interesting, and I was good. According to the results, the recruiter said that they are very pleased with me and want to give a lot of money (most likely, he invented himself), but we must pass another interview with the CTO.
• Second interview: they say that the decision whether to take a person or not is made in the first n seconds. I think this is not far from the truth. When the three interviewers entered, I immediately understood that the answer would be no. These were two Indian developers and CTO. If the previous interview was held in a friendly atmosphere and looked like a friend chat, then it was more like an unpleasant exam. The interlocutors sat with stone faces, it was very uncomfortable. In addition, it is important to note that Hindu English is sometimes quite different from British or American. One of the engineers was completely impossible to understand. In general, I otmuchalsya somehow, something said, something is not, and I understood everything. In the feedback, they reported that I, you see, "answered in monosyllables." Well, okay.

Standard chartered

Immediately called to the office. Communicated with a potential manager - evangelist Spring. We talked about the project in which they are involved, about the project I was doing in the previous place, talked about Spring internals, not forgetting BeanPostProcessors (thanks to Wife Borisov). Maneger said that everything is fine and soon I will get an answer, after which there will be a technical interview with the engineer. Since I travel there across Singapore (I live at NTU in the west, and I have an office in Changi Business Park in the east), I offered to host it now. He, without thinking twice, agreed and led the engineer. We designed a web service, discussed multithreading, talked about life and were satisfied with each other. Unfortunately, it turned out that even though they liked me, they could not take me, since they had ended the quota for the Employment Pass. Perhaps it was the place where I most wanted to work.

Credit Agricole CIB

Selection to this company has turned out the longest. The first step was to communicate with the recruiter from the agency - check for a fool. She realized that I can speak in English, and, perhaps, I know something, so she suggested that I take a test from the agency. The test consisted of 12 very simple questions-problems, of which I decided 11. I was upset, and she was delighted and said,
that this is a terrific result, and I am the first to write it this way. Oh well.

The following 2 stages were held at the office of Credit Agricole CIB. At first they gave me a test and an hour to solve it. They said that if I wrote well, there would be an interview, if not - no offense. I wrote the test, so much so that the joyful woman hr told me that I was the first who could pass such a difficult test. I replied that it is rather simple, but I didn’t like some of the questions and I would change them. It seems that the problem of weak candidates is really relevant. Next was the interview. Honestly, 4 months have passed since that day and I hardly remember the questions, but it seems there was nothing supernatural: they talked about what I was doing, discussed the possibilities of Java 8, talked a little about SQL and solved logical problems. After the interview, I was told that they liked me, but they were forced to take an internal candidate, but they would recommend me to another team.

When I came to the second interview, I got the impression that they had forgotten about me. I waited 20 minutes and was about to leave, as they came for me. This was due, apparently, to the fact that the person himself found out at the last moment that he should interview me. I think it played into my hands: rather quickly, we found out that I know more than him, and I shared the whole interview with my experience and talked about how everything was arranged on the project in the previous team. Then he called the manager, we talked about who I see myself after 5 years and went their separate ways. That same evening, I received a message in LinkedIn from the manager of the manager that they would make me an offer, and in another 3 weeks he would offer himself.

Scantist

This is a startup headed by a professor from NTU.
The interview turned out to be very unusual for me. There was no testing of my knowledge, we discussed who does what and what goals, he boasted about his funding, I learned that I would need to code in Python (which I didn’t really want), and talked a little about money. At that time I had no idea how much Credit Agricole could give, so I asked for 7,000 SGD (~ 5,300 USD). Of course, he wanted less, so he offered to wait for the offer and see if he could bargain. It seemed to me that
he is not interested in me, but just looking for people, and he didn’t want to work at NTU (this is such a Singapur zakadye).

And then it turned out that he did not want to bargain.

Unbelievable, but true: it’s important not only what you know, but how you talk about it. And it is absolutely not necessary to speak English as a British, it is enough to be able to express your thoughts. It is much more important to build a conversation with the interviewer and be confident in yourself.

Summary

Of course, you can find a job in Singapore. But if you are not an extremely valuable specialist, you will have to work hard.

Most likely, the search will have to be carried out in Singapore.

Is it worth it? For me, the answer is definitely, yes. The wife is near, the weather is beautiful, the salary is high, the taxes are low, and life can be modest enough. To achieve this goal, nothing special is needed: just motivation and hard work. Dare!

UPD: In the section describing my experience in remote work, a comment from Crossover was added.