The work is fun, the hours can be crazy or normal depending on where you are. Pay is definitely below other software sectors, especially in London. Less bad elsewhere in the country. Rockstar used to pay very good bonuses, so she may have been enthusiastic because of that.
I just went to jobsite.co.uk and put in "Java" and "city". The jobs on the first page are in the £30-£80k range, most in the middle of that.
After a few years, if you are any good, you'd be near the top of that range. After 10 years and a bit of luck, >£100k is feasible. We all know stories of people (mostly with maths or physics PhDs) who earn a lot more than that (as quants).
Having just graduated from BEng Computer Hardware and Software Engineering, straight through, no placement, being a lazy sod and not job hunting beyond sending one application off to HMGCC. I stuck my CV on Monster. Got frustrated with my phone constantly ringing. Got an email asking if i'd do a quick phone interview, an hour and a half later I'd been invited down for 2 days all expenses paid.
Went down, spoke to lots of people, ate lovely food, drank lovely beer, chatted to the directors and loads of staff. Went home and a week later had a phonecall saying they wanted to offer me the job but I wouldn't get the paperwork for a while...
While waiting for the paperwork I had a phonecall asking if I was up for a phone interview, I'd already somewhat made my mind up about accepting the previous job but I was curious and went along with it. Drilled the guy on the phone, ended up going to Cambridge a couple of days later. Spoke to some people, jumped through a few hoops and drew lots of things on whiteboards. (Incidentally they turned me down. Apparently when asked "If I was down the pub with your mates, what would be the first thing they would say if I asked them what you were like" an appropriate response is not "The first thing they would say is knobhead, because that's what they are like") On the plus side, I'm a very friendly person apparently
Long and short, I graduated, did nothing, a job found me and here I am now... New area of the country, new car blah, blah, blah.
In terms of salary, it depends vastly on what kind of programming you are doing... While my base salary is lower than the other jobs floating around, my benefits are much better and easily make up for any shortfall and then some. Add in to that many other things and career progression and stability, plus my salary will only be at this point for a short amount of time and I'm on to a winner...
Post Counts and Other Rewards, Rules, Folding@Home, Fans: Push vs Pull vs Push-Pull, Corsair PSU OEMs.
TAKTAK.co.ukOriginally Posted by razer121
Thanks a lot for everyone to contribute to this thread. Which describe the real face of SE job market , salary scale, taxes expenses and how we should expect salaries in future etc.if anyone get same question as me in university i recommand this thread definitly for them. Thanks alot guys. I learned a lot
if(lifeGivesYou == lemons){
makeLemonade()
}
Well most of the posts here have (unsurprisingly) been talking about the SW/London. I can offer the perspective as a hiring manager in the north west.
First point - C# .NET Software Dev roles are going up and up in wages, faster than you might think. I am on my 3rd hiring round this year, and each time i'v had to up the salary bands to get good quality developers. There are far far more .net developer jobs around than good developers - so as a result it's a candidates market at the moment.
Junior/Graduate jobs start at around 22 and go up to around 26
"normal" Developer/engineer jobs start at 26 and go to around 36
Seniors are around 34 up to 45k
Then you get in to team lead/dev manager territory which can range anywhere from 35-55k
After that the sky is the limit - mostly down to the size of company you work for and how much knowledge (leverage) you have.
Thats just a snapshot - and those numbers are 2k more than they were at the start of this year.
It's an excellent market to be in if you are any good - experience is important but much more so is your passion and willingness to learn. That matters much more to me than a degree or experience (in fact if you have a 2:2 or lower than your degree may actually hurt your chances)...as TheAnimus said - often what I am looking for is a "Hacker" - that type of person tends to work out really well in a software house setting - as long as the team is balanced enough
The big money at the moment is in contracting though - £500/day is not at all uncommon in the south (and thats outside of banking), £350-£400/day in the north west...not something I am personally interested in at this stage in my life but for many, if you have the confidence to do it then thats the best way to make a tonne of cash.
*ahem*
OTOH:
We appear to agree on the basic salary range for a standard role up here
As Spud says, when I've looked at applications in the last few years I've looked more for general programming aptitude than particular qualifications, professional memberships or even specific language experience. It's amazing how many people think that being able to drag pre-built controls around in Visual Studio makes them a .NET programmer...
I did say most
I should also make the point that in general i've seen a trend for VB.NET jobs to be paid slightly less than a C# position, Java to be roughly equivalent to C#.net, and Mobile to be climbing sky high at the moment..particularly if you are skilled at both Objective-C and Java.
I guess that's probably because there are comparatively more C# posts per C# dev so they have to pay higher to get the good ones? Seems the wrong way round to me - someone asked me to take a contract working on a VB.NET application and I'd be asking for an additional 10% "sucky language" fee
Mobile is definitely the growth area, although it'll be interesting to see how that falls out: currently the development streams are relatively disparate (for all there are several frameworks available to write portable code between mobile platforms), but I suspect we'll see more and more convergence between them (perhaps around HTML5) until the market gets saturated with mobile devs.
So basically . I get the idea C++ and python is completely out of date nowadays. But i wonder then why still universities teach Python and C++ . and also i heard the fact Google is using Python. but other than that here everyone is talking about C# and .NET . even thought they are not cross platform
if(lifeGivesYou == lemons){
makeLemonade()
}
Universities tend to be behind the curve a little, but teaching C and C++ is still invaluable for the concepts and good practice that it teaches you, especially given how many languages follow the traditional C/C++ syntax.
That and no matter how easy it is to develop with .NET, Python, Ruby etc..you won't match the raw performance/optimised code that you can achieve with C/C++ in the majority of cases.
Ruby in particular has started to be much more prevalent in enterprise settings with more and more software start ups going for that kind of development - but its not as common as the more traditional development languages/frameworks...still more hobbiest than enterprise/commercial imo.
Horses for courses. C++ teaches you how to handle memory properly (unlike JAVA's sucky garbage collection), isn't interpreted so is usually faster, and still allows you to use OO methodologies. I've never really dabbled in Python (more of a PERL person), but more and more people seem to be asking for it.
Ruby is taking off in a big way due to devops - Puppet, Chef etc.
With the mono project they're completely cross-platform. http://www.mono-project.com/Main_Page
A lot of universities teach in Java (it's what I learned at uni), which still has a fairly strong employment base and opportunities.
But my point is that generally I don't care what languages someone has experience in, I care how they think about the problems. A good developer should be able to learn any language and program well in it. A bad developer is likely to remain a bad developer no matter how many years of experience they have in a particular technology. And the actual syntactic differences between all the major programming languages used in industry are fairly minimal. So ultimately, it's more important to understand the principles and ideas behind a piece of code.
completely agree with you scaryjim. Apart from paradigyms most programs look very same. But I must say I love C++. It have marvolus features. Specially genaric programming and inline commands always amazed me more than any programming language.
if(lifeGivesYou == lemons){
makeLemonade()
}
Don't mistake "not trendy" for "out of date". When it comes to feeding my family, I want stable employment not the latest big thing.
There are plenty of platforms out there that don't have gigabytes of ram and where 'C' is still the preferred platform, and plenty of platforms where performance is everything and C++ is the preferred platform. If you can write in C++, you can manage in C as well (though you might not want to). Learn C++ and I don't think you will starve.
Interestingly, despite Android propping up its usage, Java seems to still be losing popularity. Objective C seems to have peaked, though I'm sure it could keep a roof over your head for some years yet. Heck, tiobe says that COBOL is currently ranked #19 and you can't call that trendy (though I gather there is indeed still good money in it).
http://www.tiobe.com/index.php/conte...pci/index.html
VB.Net devs are paid less because of the increased wear their knuckles make on the carpet when they walk.
But in all seriousness, many big companies that do a lot of in house software (commonly called LOB, Line Of Business) have teams doing all sorts of different technologies. These companies then evaluate the performance and cost of each discipline. VB.Net code isn't renowed for being 'good' so they often get a hard time of it, companies aren't willing to pay as much. It also traditionally (because of VB6 vs MFC) had a lower barrier to entry, it is considered a lower quality product. So they pay less.
Mobile is definitely a big driving force. The fact no one likes Objective-C has helped drive HTML and C# (via mono) onto more and more phones. Xarmin promise you can reuse the bulk of your C# code on any of the main phone platforms and the desktop. That's quite a prospect, who wouldn't pay more per dev for that.
So often you get little niche areas too, someone who's experianced the joys of Coherance for instance will be quite valuable. The right developer in some circumstances can save £M of infrastructure.
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Know I'm bumping old thread.. But...
I do hope you're talking about contractor rates, as I've yet to meet a developer of any kind on a salaried position of 100k... Perhaps if you work at Google and are some absolute 1 in a million genius.. Even most of the Technical Architects I've meet are at the 50-70k mark... I work at a blue chip IT company as a Management Consultant, previous worked in another very large IT consultancy, I'd say most Programme Managers or grade before Partner level are bringing in 100-130k base. They'd have to be very good to pull that in also.
However in contracting I've seen TAs and in particular Oracle DBAs earn silly money, even I'd likes be on a day rate of 550-600 doing what I do... Then again, I prefer my cozy salary.
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