Low pay in IT

neocon

neocon

neocon

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Joined
24 Aug 2006
Posts
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I'm working as an IT developer and have been at the company for nearly 2 years. Skills are c#, asp.net, SQL, JavaScript.

There were 3 devs and a manager, and one person always had to do support which I hate. I'm a junior dev and the other 2 are senior. I'm almost certain the seniors get 40k+, but I only get 31k.

One senior recently quit and they are not replacing him. He was useless and got put on support almost every week. During this time I was working on asp.net projects. I think he was disgruntled.

Anyway I feel undervalued and want to leave. I can't get out of there fast enough. What can I day to get a raise?
 
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What industry sector are your company in? Is the work demanding? Long hours? Stressful environment?

The biggest change you can make is to change company and change sector.

For example, I work in finance - I've just hired two junior .Net/C# developers @ the £55-60k mark. Senior developers here can earn in excess of £100k, plus bonus.

The salary comes at a price though, obviously.
 
Mr^B said:
What industry sector are your company in? Is the work demanding? Long hours? Stressful environment?

The biggest change you can make is to change company and change sector.

For example, I work in finance - I've just hired two junior .Net/C# developers @ the £55-60k mark. Senior developers here can earn in excess of £100k, plus bonus.

The salary comes at a price though, obviously.
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Which part of finance is that if you don't mind me asking? Insurance or banking? Is that in central London?
 
Company is in the recruitment sector. I only need to do 40hrs per week. I had been doing quite a lot of unpaid overtime , 5 hrs a week, for several months to get an app and website finished. I stopped when I realised that there was no acknowledgement.

I'm demoralized by managers that arrive late and leave early. There is a person responsible for testing (manages a tester who knows nothing about testing) and they can't even write a select in SQL.

I'll look for something in the city.
 
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It's a long time since I worked for them, but I can recommend Selex (ex BAE Systems) in Luton, MBDA in Stevenage, and Computacenter in Welwyn Garden City as great places to work.
 
neocon said:
I'll look for something in the city.
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Do you have any relevant domain knowledge?

There will be some roles out there that are purely technical or where the hiring manager is happy with a junior dev who can learn bits of the business side on the job. Other roles that won't be open to you at the moment will require quite specific knowledge/experience and may well pay more.

If you don't get any luck at a bank then one way of getting experience is to join a consultancy firm that works with banks.

If you don't have any finance experience you could gain some relevant knowledge before applying. For example, for commercial banks, you could go through the syllabus for the ACI dealing certificate and the ACI operations certificate - that will introduce you to basic finance and a bit about how banking works. (you can find pdfs, covering the material for both online).

For other types of roles maybe related to trading/execution you could go to the various exchange websites - Eurex and the CME have plenty of education material - get yourself familiar with how the products/markets work and also perhaps go through the technical docs if you're interested. Maybe take a look at open source software, connectivity - FIX protocol etc..

It depends what sorts of dev roles you end up targeting and what you're interested in really but if you can do your homework on whatever area you focus on then it could really help you with some interviews.

Something like this could also be useful for you too initially:

https://www.amazon.co.uk/Guide-Using-Financial-Pages-Guides/dp/0273727877
 
FishThrower said:
Which part of finance is that if you don't mind me asking? Insurance or banking? Is that in central London?
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Hedge Fund. City and West End offices.

Just out of interest, what is the "price"?

Long hours? Weekends? 1-strike rules? Morality?
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Long hours? Not especially, I don't expect people working for me to do more than the contracted 37.5 hours.

Weekends? I think I've done one Saturday in the past 2 years. From home.

1-strike? Managing out people who aren't performing well is quite difficult. The only 1-strike rules are for gross misconduct which you'll find in any other organisation.

Morality? Hmm, dunno - we didn't take any handouts or lose any client money post 2008 (when many others were bailed out) and we took the brunt of the cost of client redemptions in salary freezes, no bonuses, etc. plus the fact that we didn't invest heavily in, nor did we take huge short positions in credit derivatives. The morality of helping rich people/institutions get richer...I don't know, it doesn't really matter to me.

The price is in the amount of fairly complex business knowledge you need to acquire, the complexity of the systems we build and the fact that they need to be utterly bullet-proof in production. We're constantly under pressure to deliver change yet maintain stability, and sometimes some of the people you have to deal with can be rather brusque in their interactions with you. It's also quite cut-throat in many respects.
 
Mr^B said:
What industry sector are your company in? Is the work demanding? Long hours? Stressful environment?

The biggest change you can make is to change company and change sector.

For example, I work in finance - I've just hired two junior .Net/C# developers @ the £55-60k mark. Senior developers here can earn in excess of £100k, plus bonus.

The salary comes at a price though, obviously.
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Hello :p. Can you trust any more info? C/C++/C# here, 6 years xp plus 1 as scrum master looking to sell my soul to the devil to make bank.
 
If you want to maximise your earnings then the City is the way to go, no doubt about it. It's pretty awful work though, and you'll end up dealing with some complete penises.

But for a few years to bank some cash, can't knock it really. As long as you have the balls to walk away from the money before the last dregs of your soul is consumed :P

Decent senior programmers will bank six figure salaries, day rates heading towards 4 figures. Properly good people though. One of the guys I worked with at RBS on a contract had written quite a few of the O'Reilly books on Java stuff.
 
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Mr^B said:
Morality? Hmm, dunno - we didn't take any handouts or lose any client money post 2008 (when many others were bailed out)
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AFAIK you wouldn't have been offered any in the first place, short of some serious systematic risk being posed by your positions(LTCM type situation) the general public/government aren't going to care much if a hedge fund/CTA goes belly up.
 
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