Ask HN: What's up with junior developer salaries? (UK)
I'm an aspiring web developer, and I've been spending a lot of time looking for my first job in the industry. For an industry which supposedly has a big shortage of skills, I'm surprised by how low-paid a lot of the jobs are (I'm in the UK by the way). I'm talking about salaries of £15k - £25k, which seem to be fairly typical. And these are not no-skill "trainee" positions, they often come with a long list of requirements, typically knowledge of 5 or 6 different technologies, a portfolio of work and sometimes even 1-2 years industry experience.
By comparison, a graduate with zero relevant experience (or even without a relevant degree) can get a job with one of the big IT consultancies / professional services firms and command a salary in excess of £30k.
I'm really curious about the economics of all this. What's keeping junior developer salaries so low? Is the shortage of tech talent just a media fabrication? If not, wouldn't you expect salaries to keep pace with other industries competing for the same people?
41 comments
[ 2.8 ms ] story [ 93.0 ms ] threadIt also hugely depends on the field where you'll be working, financial institutions are well known to offer better wages (but it's mostly a very stressing environment).
I've done exactly 7 interviews for related positions in London and the lowest payed was 45k, highest 60k.
I personally know NOONE in central london ever working for less than 45k. Doesn't really matter if you are a C# dev, Java one, PHP, Ruby or pure frontend. Actually, my closest friends use to work in banking and they make A LOT more than what i just mentioned (70-90k, yet they are definitely seniors).
1) A job specification is a wish list. I'd love to employ someone who can code like a pro in 17 different languages. And only wants £15k. But I know I'm going to have to settle.
2) Your job desire is a wish list. You want a 15% pension, a BYOD budget, and be paid to go for conferences. You'll have to compromise somewhere.
3) There is a shortage - but companies don't always behave with economic rationality. If half the web developers in the UK died from Ebola, I'm still not sure I could convince my finance director to alter the yearly budget.
My advice to you would be to seek out a graduate training course (if you are a grad). If not, check out some other training schemes like Talentum http://www.telefonicaando2careers.com/gb/explore-our-opportu... (full disclosure, my employer runs that one).
I would also advise you to prove yourself at an interview and then simply ask for more money than they originally offered. Doesn't always work - but if you're worth it, you'll get paid.
Finally - and this probably isn't what you want to hear - suck it up. Spend a year getting paid a shitty wage and then - hey presto - you now have 12 months of experience, a portfolio, and references which you can use to get a better job.
HTH.
Regarding your point 1), are you saying it's ok to apply for a job without having every skill on the "required" list? I feel like it could lead to a really awkward interview.
Worst case scenario, you just won't get called for interview. More often than not, however, I've written a job spec for the perfect candidate. I know I'm going to have to settle.
You're about right on salaries in the UK. Its a strange market here, its very hard to find good staff and generally companies want far too much experience for a Junior role.
We take on new recruits with little to no experience in the field and train them from 6-18 months. We've taken designers and turned them into very good ruby developers as well as no experience to full-stack devs.
It really depends on the company though, look for a company who is focused on training. The salary should also increase in 6 months at a minimum and there should be a clear path to earning a decent salary.
We start at around 16-18K and have reviews every 3 months. The goals are set by the employees (we track this using a free product we made called Meta Trails check it out!) and as long as they say they've hit there targets its a 20% raise. Heres what it looks like in real life:
Starting 18K
3 Months: 21.6K
6 Months: 26K
9 Months: 21K
12 Months: 37K
After a year we move to a normal review period of 1 year. The reason we do this is we put a lot of time / money into training and our results are fantastic. I'd like to see more companies hiring Jr developers.
We are actually looking for another developer to join the team drop me an email josh[at]seriousfox.co.uk
What are your requirements for a junior developer?
Meta trails is a companion to tools like Codeacademy or Team Treehouse. What we've found is its really hard to answer questions like 'Do you know CSS' its much easier to ask smaller questions like can you postion an element on a page, can you style typography correctly. By asking these smaller questions you can gauge where you are and whats missing.
Meta Trails asks you those questions, its more of a tool than a platform.
Not saying this is what joshcrowder do, not to mention UK and France are probably very different in mentality and all, but I would make sure that what they say is true. 12 months of experience is good, 12 months of irrelevant shitty projects when you didn't learn a single thing not so much.
* Graduated in 2012 and took a job in the South East (not London) - £25,000
* Left after 18 months because high cost of living and salary increases were below inflation (small company with money problems). Moved to North West and took a job earning - £30,000
* Left that job and took a cut down to £27,000 because I wanted to work with rails and it's hard to find rails positions here in the North West
I could probably be earning more money but getting professional rails experience is higher on my list.
It's hard looking at US salaries and not seeing jobs offered anywhere near those rates here in the UK. I guess if you want to earn over £50k a year before you're 30 in the UK you have to be a contractor.
I would posit that you also have very good sales skills or are working in an in-demand niche (mobile?). I would've loved to be there after 2 years' experience; alas learning to big myself up took a bit longer!
After starting out doing Ruby on Rails, I moved to backend development focusing on Devops/PaaS — not super-niche but definitely more in-demand than Ruby on Rails, which that's one of the reasons I switched (as well as enjoying it more). Furthermore it's has the advantage of being a Hot New Thing™, which means you gain seniority much faster — in Ruby on Rails it might take 4-5 years to be considered 'senior'. In a much newer technology (like Angular for example), you might only need a year.
Since then I've built up a network of connections and beefed up my skillset (spending more time with js frameworks such as Angular) and since received offers in the £65-70k mark. These were always "senior tech lead" positions, but they never seemed like real management jobs and I'd still spend the majority of the time writing software.
In the end I've jumped to contracting because the money is 2-3 times that of permanent roles and it was just too tempting. But the roles are there, especially in London - Ruby devs included.
London is its own micro-world. In the same way SV != USA, London != UK. Perhaps moreso here, seeing as the country is smaller.
If you are looking for a high starting salary, the financial industry is the way to go in London. Should be 6 figures by the time I am 30.
Good luck!
Source: a long string of CS graduate friends who went to work for investment banks and quit within 5 years. At parties they used to compare how sh*t their employer was, not salaries & bonuses :)
I cannot imagine lasting very long at it. Plenty of 60-70+hr weeks and a large amount of stress. Although I do think the experience will serve me well for job interviews in different sectors.
I suppose the problem is that there's no reason for companies to pay more, because they will always manage to hire someone with such a low salary. I can't speak for all developers, but a lot of experienced developers that I know will go to a few interviews a year, and if they are offered better money elsewhere they'll ask for a pay rise or leave. When you're a junior developer that luxury isn't really available to you.
The UK vastly and systemically undervalues it's intellectual capital - especially in tech and entrepreneurial pursuits.
If you are young and ambitious, you can either stay and fight against the current, or find a route to a country that is more meritocratic/skewed in your favour.
I moved to NYC and the situation I am in simply does not exist in the UK. The UK is a great place to live in many ways, but tech salaries are not one of it's strong points.
As for startups, if you think developer salaries in the UK are bad (which compared with the cost of living they certainly are) you should see some of the non-developer salaries and experience requirements at startups and small agencies. Not to mention how demanding such companies can be about candidates to work unpaid for a month or three. The combination of SV aspirations and cost of living (in London at least), plenty of unemployed professionals and a decided lack of investor-overoptimism isn't a great one for the junior employee.