How many emails does it take to hire a software engineer from abroad?
... it's 220 of email messages, at least for someone from Russia to get hired by a company in Czech Republic. In this case, the company is called Red Hat and the software engineer - that is me.
The timeline
I sent 104 email messages in total, and received 116 in return. The whole process took 5 months start to end, as shown on this timeline:
Timeline of mail message exchanges
Events
➊ 2016-09-01 First interview
➋ 2016-09-19 Offer
➌ 2016-12-15 Applied for long term Czech visa
➍ 2016-12-16 Applied for short term (sic!) Czech visa
➎ 2017-01-13 Short term visa is issued
➏ 2017-01-27 Flight S7 857 Novosibirsk - Prague
➐ 2017-02-01 Day one at Red Hat office in Brno
The emails
Soon I found that getting hired for a position abroad involves writing a lot of emails. You write to recruiter, recruiter writes to you, you write to the person who recommended you. You get an offer and you start writing emails to relocation agency that gets you a visa.
The long-term visa is the biggest time waster, which can be even noticed in the flow of emails. The gap in November was a period, when we had all papers ready and we waited for approval from the Czech government.
Somewhat later there is another flow of emails when I started searching for a flat and I exchanged emails with the reality agents.
The third surge of emails is when I found that I cannot get the short term visa on time and I had to notify everyone about the change of my start date.
In the end, I wrote an email of resignation at my current work place (one small email, a giant leap in terms of your geographic coordinates). Then I packed my stuff for real, and 5 month from start, here I am at Red Hat office in Brno, Czech Republic.
The statistics
This is how many letters were exchanged with each of the parties:
Mail message count
How did all that start
That was by accident, of course. The story of me relocating to Brno started in September 2016, when one evening I sat at computer screen, as usual, lazily scrolling https://dirty.ru. And then among the gifs with funny kittens I found a job posting from a Red hatter. It was a short one telling something like 'It's Red Hat calling, c'mon send me your CVs'. I wanted to give it a try and I sent mine. Which, as I understand now, was the easiest part of all.
Notes
- Email statistics in this article is collected with a little help of
IMAP SEARCH[1] - Listening to this brilliantly cynical version [4] of 'With a Little Help From My Friends" also helped a lot.
- [4], in turn, makes fun on usage of [5]
- One more thing: if you liked [4], you'll also like [6]