‘For the love of Pete, America, learn about decent chocolate’

eXpat Files If it's Sunday it must be time for another instalment of The eXpat Files, our weekly chat with a fellow reader who decided to move to another country in search of adventure, career advancement, and something else to do on weekends.

This week, meet Andre Ben Hamou, a Brit who moved to Los Angeles, and scored a gig at Riot Games. Yes, that Riot Games, the outfit responsible for League of Legends.

Over to you, Andre.

The Register: What kind of work do you do, and with which technologies?

Ben Hamou: I do a combination of people-development and engineering. On the engineering side, I work mainly in Java and Go (and a little Scala/Ruby). I'm currently involved in a bunch of work around containerised deployment (docker, clusters, orchestration and all that goodness). I’ve also had a chance to work on various systems decomposition problems (including some pretty traditional micro-service stuff) and helped to design and build one of the larger new features we’ve shipped in the past year.

The Register: Why did you decide to move to the US?

Ben Hamou: My wife and I always wanted to try living and working in America. We had a common list of things we wanted from the experience: access to creative industries, nice scenery, a beach or two, decent weather, a variety of good food and, above all, somewhere liberal (in the traditional rather than modern American-English sense). When an opportunity came up to work for a video gaming company in Southern California, it was basically unarguable.

The Register: How did you arrange your new gig?

Ben Hamou: I watched a video where one of the existing engineers ended with “and we’re hiring”, so scanned the job boards, couldn’t find a match and finally sent a recruiter an email along the lines of “this is what I’ve been doing, should we chat?”. My lesson here is that companies who take talent seriously are always more approachable than you’d think.

The Register: Pay: up or down?

Ben Hamou: Pretty much in line (particularly once we'd factored in the increase in cost of living).

The Register: How do workplaces differ between the UK and the USA?

Ben Hamou: It’s difficult to say based on my own experience. Riot Games is a unique place to work on pretty much any continent so I can’t say that I’m necessarily well placed to answer this one. What I will say is that the stereotypical, entrepreneurial energy the English associate with Americans has been very much in evidence during my time here. There is an overwhelmingly positive drive to deliver something of value every day and that energy propels me to work in the mornings.

There are tiny (perhaps inconsequential) differences I’ve noticed. On the whole, every place I’ve worked in the UK has had a cruder group sense of humour (at least when taken in aggregate). Don’t get me wrong, Americans know how to tell naughty jokes, they just seem to have a slightly differently tuned set of boundaries around them.

Expressions of religiosity also seem more common here. For me, working in the UK, religion basically never came up (except when exhorting that emacs users should be burned at the stake) ... so the difference is perceptible.

Oh and I couldn’t answer this question without mentioning that everyone is apparently an expert on road navigation here because it’s LA and ... well ... traffic is a terrible thing to be famous for but it does breed an astonishingly road-literate citizenry.

The Register: Will your expat gig be good for your career?

Ben Hamou: Absolutely. Though, I think, because of the company it allowed me to work for rather than the fact I’ve worked in the US.

The Register: What's cheaper in the US? What's more expensive?

Ben Hamou: Petrol’s so cheap here that it’s been demoted to ‘gas’. Food’s actually pretty good although the weekly shop always involves three supermarkets (who all specialise in offering a different section of the basket at a decent price).

Oddly expensive things: healthcare, childcare ... pretty much anything involving someone caring for something or someone else.

The Register: What would you miss about the US if you returned to the UK?

Ben Hamou: From the jaded perspective of someone who’s lived near a Californian beach for two years, my mental image of Blighty is that of an impassable grey swamp inundated with biblical floods and populated by people who wouldn’t know positivity if they were force fed a diet of Prozac and Donny Osmond videos. This is bollocks of course, but it neatly circumscribes what I fear we’d miss upon returning to the scepter'd isle.

In the spirit of balance: for the love of Christ, America, learn about decent chocolate and start either making it or mass-importing it.

The Register: What's your top tip to help new arrivals settle in in the US, and LA?

Ben Hamou: The guides (books and otherwise) for expats are surprisingly good. Also, join something like a British expats group on Facebook. There is simply no substitute for making friends with real humans who can tell you when you’re about to step off a cliff.

On that last point, judge your potential employer on how they think about this exact issue of acclimatization for you and your family. This isn’t mean to be a advert for working at Riot so I don’t want to wax lyrical. I’ll just say that they made me really appreciate the difference it makes when a company has enough collective empathy to have really thought about what you’ll need and how they can provide it.

The Register: What advice would you offer someone considering the same move?

Ben Hamou: If you trust the company to be there for you when things go awry, don’t hesitate. We didn’t [hesitate] and we couldn’t be happier.

The Register: And because this is the weekend edition, what do you do on weekends now that you couldn't do in the UK?

Ben Hamou: Head up into the mountains for a hike then down to the beach for a swim. Visit a crepe and boba tea fusion bar (yeah — I still don’t really know). Jump in the car and drive to a frozen yoghurt place at 2am then come back and choose from a bunch of stuff we actually want to watch on Netflix.

The eXPat Files is now weekly, so if you are an expat with a story to tell, or know someone we should chase, please let us know. ®