This article is more than 1 year old
From Manchester to Microsoft – missing mum :-(
'SYS Brit Noseflashes' mailing list welcomes migrants to Redmond
The eXpat files Welcome to another eXpat Files, in which Reg readers tell of leaving home and hearth for career upgrades only available elsewhere.
This time around we're chatting to 26-year-old Dai Rees, who moved on from “a small commuter town south of Manchester” that he won't name “to spite my former headmaster, who actively discouraged my 'disruptive' interests in computing (or 'ICT' as his kind are known to call it)”.
Dai's moved to Seattle, Washington, where he works for a certain technology company that made Redmond its home.
The Register: What do you do and with what technologies?
Chakra itself is a C++11 project, but for tooling we use C#, PowerShell and whatever other technologies get results quickly, so we have a few bash scripts lying around too. For source control, we use an unhealthy mixture of Source Depot (Perforce), Local TFS, VSO, and git (via VSO). Collaboration has moved away from Sharepoint (on my team at least) and towards Sharepoint-hosted shared OneNote notebooks. Personally, I’d prefer we all used a git-based Markdown CMS.
The Register: Why did you decide to move?
I had been an expatriate before: as a child I lived in the Philippines for a few years, so I had already experienced the life and had developed a taste for it. Accepting the job was, as the Americans say, a “no-brainer”: I would get to re-live the expat experience, I wouldn’t be losing any connections (thanks to Skype™), I had zero friends from Secondary School (fancy that!) and my friends from sixth form and university had moved all over the UK, so I wouldn’t get to see them anyway. And the pay is considerably more than anything I would get in the UK outside of The City. Microsoft also has a Master’s degree tuition reimbursement programme, so I was instantly sold.
The Register: How did you get the gig?
The Register: Pay: up or down?
However, they do describe their salaries growing much faster than mine, I expect that right now, four years after graduating, that I’m probably earning around twice what they would be by now, compared to rather more times at the beginning.
The Register: How do workplaces differ between the UK and USA?