The title says it all. This is a life update. It has been a little while since last time I wrote something. It’s great sunny day outside. Just went back home after a walk and decided to complete this story which had been drafted not recently…Plus, it’s holidays here in UK, I want to spend some time to look back what I have done since the past year.
Left Grab, bye SG
In a past couple of articles, I was writing about joining Grab (Southeast Asia’s leading superapp) and what I have learn along the way. Grab’s a great company culturally. I was truly grateful to have chance working with so many talented colleagues and extremely supportive managers (2 of them). It has been a great experience working at Grab and tbh I learned a lot of things what I’ll be carrying with me through my career. I had great opportunity to grow professionally and have real life impact. I was leading numerous number of projects and, with support from my manager, I got promoted with the highest performance rating (top 5%) after a little bit over 1 year, and I was still working toward so much more.
Since it sounds like an ideal company to work for. It must be questionable why I left. Rationally, the decision of leaving SG had been there even before moving to SG and joining Grab. I originally planned to leave after 3 years as I prioritise the exposure to different working cultures and living in different countries. Perhaps, the pandemic just made the decision come earlier. Honestly, 2020/2021 was tough with all those lockdowns/partial lockdowns and travel restriction. It was impossible to travel home what I had done very often pre-covid. Working from home (wfh) turned to be a norm. There were no more interaction or activities in the office, what left was only you and the work (and those conference calls are not fun at all).
I had a mixed opinion about wfh. It was really hard at first, but surprisingly, after a while, I got used to it. I saved a ton of time commuting, and started liking the flexibility to work at my own place, and don’t even mind dressing up. That was also the turning point, I had more time to think of what I really wanted and all led to a single simple answer… to leave “Yes, let’s move out of SG”.
I made up my mind and started preparing for the interviews (studied hard, and it was once in awhile I committed to something seriously), which I’ll be writing in another article about my preparation, my experience and strategies I used for interviewing at multiple big tech companies.
After rounds and rounds of interviews, I eventually received offers from some top firms (3 FAANG and other big teches). And then after talks and talks, calls and calls, I made my decision to…
Go London, join Snap
After considering every single bit of details, I decided to join Snap and relocated to London. For the first time, I really negotiated something and I felt like it’s an extremely important life skill to have. I wished some one had told me that 4 years ago when I had my first job. There were many things I’ve picked up during this process that will greatly benefit me in the future.
There are tons of resources on internet you can find. But “Ten Rules for Negotiating a Job Offer” seems to be one of the most popular that many people have suggested.
I signed the offer back in Aug, 2021 and actually started in mid-Feb, 2022 (7 months later, I know). It had been really long time not going back home, so I tried to delay the start date to after Lunar New Year (yup, a typical Asian dude) to spend valuable time with family before going far from home again. Fortunately, Snap was totally ok with that decision. In the meanwhile, I was working remotely and handing over my work and ownership to other teammates at Grab.
Why London?… I don’t think I have a concrete answer for that. Apart from going for Snap, just that I’ve never been in Europe before. Maybe just go and see how it looks. I had other offers in other European countries also, but London appears to be the most attractive one to me (from what i saw on youtube of course). Moving to London is an entirely new experience. I’m still super new here and there are still a lot of things to learn, to experience. The city is very lively, I like it, and after visiting other cities, I like it even more...which is quite hard to explain why. I don’t know, it’s just the feeling I have for the city. The weather is amazing (I like it cool here). Sometime it’s quite cloudy… or too cloudy most of the time, and I guess it’s a common narrative when people talk about the UK. The funny thing is I heard people complaining about the traffic all the time. But if you’ve ever been in Asia, especially Southeast Asia where I’m coming from, this is really good already (try googling traffic jam in Ho Chi Minh or Jakarta during peak hours). The only thing that bothers me is some one talks very loudly in public transport. Maybe the solution is to have the headphone on.
About Snap, I’ve just been here for about 2 months, it’s too early to comment on anything (I will…soon). It has been good so far. The work and the scope seem to be interesting. I was fortunate enough to work on the first project fairly soon, pushed out the very first engineering design doc, and had a design review meeting after a month of joining. It was an appreciable opportunity to learn about the engineering culture, get feedback on the design from other engineers in the org, see different perspectives, get to know more about the current system and important metrics. All of those contribute to the same goal is to improve the design and to build the feature that users will love.
I still prefer working from home majority of time. As said, I actually enjoyed it and Snap is very flexible on that matter.
I try to go to the office once a week and keep it as a habit. It’s fun to be in the office some time, to build the connection with colleagues, participate in some events, and maybe enjoy the perks in the office. And honestly, I knew so much more about the company by talking to people.
Overall, I’m excited about the journey. There are still a lot more to work on, many challenges to embrace. I’ll try to get the most out of the time I spend working here.
So, here it comes to the end of my rant. Thanks for your patience. I will come back with another article which is more technical.
