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Living and working in the UK for over a year now as a Software Engineer in a medium-sized company I see this article as a bit of a shock because every month I'm aware of available positions (including graduates) for developers that "want to get their hands dirty", i.e., working on core software tools like compilers and linkers and despite working closely with universities it's not easy to find new recruits willing to…
And yet as an employer (not in the UK though) I have a hard time finding talented developers.
I assume by talented you mean experienced. There is also the other talent of showing promise, but most companies don't bother with that and prefer the ones that the ones that come out the womb as objc rockstars.
They can have been given their powers by a cat-god in an acid-induced hallucination for all I care, as long as they can pass a technical interview.
Living and working in the UK for over a year now as a Software Engineer in a medium-sized company I see this article as a bit of a shock because every month I'm aware of available positions (including graduates) for developers that "want to get their hands dirty", i.e., working on core software tools like compilers and linkers and despite working closely with universities it's not easy to find new recruits willing to…
Well, low-level roles are harder to come by, for one, but they also tend not to pay terribly well; especially as they're competing against Finance in London, which does. Here's my top tip for attracting amazing candidates: pay them a lot of money. Simple as that.
There's only a handful of universities now which teach C to a decent level, and if a candidate doesn't know C already it's very hard to tell if they'll be able to conceptually handle pointers and indirect referencing. So there's actually a very small pool to recruit from compared to the number of vacancies.
If someone can't understand pointers, recursion, etc, then paying them extra money isn't going to make them understand.
I wonder if this is due to graduating people who can't code Fizzbuzz.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Well, low-level roles are harder to come by, for one, but they also tend not to pay terribly well; especially as they're competing against Finance in London, which does. Here's my top tip for attracting amazing candidates: pay them a lot of money. Simple as that.
Speaking as someone who used to hire low-level developers in the financial sector (i.e we could pay them an above average salary) I'd disagree. There's only a handful of universities now which teach C to a decent level, and if a candidate doesn't know C already it's very hard to tell if they'll be able to conceptually handle pointers and indirect referencing. So there's actually a very small pool to recruit from comp…
The problem for UK devs is that everything is so London centric. I bet there's lots of open positions there and lots of talented but unemployed (or underpaid) developers in Liverpool, Newcastle and Glasgow. I used to be one of them until I moved. I've seen attempts to try and create a UK equivalent of "Silicon Valley". Where do they put it? London!!
Having said that, Cambridge is sort of it's own little world of specialist IT outfits but it just doesn't have the scale to become much more than it already is, or to develop synergies with other industries.
Living and working in the UK for over a year now as a Software Engineer in a medium-sized company I see this article as a bit of a shock because every month I'm aware of available positions (including graduates) for developers that "want to get their hands dirty", i.e., working on core software tools like compilers and linkers and despite working closely with universities it's not easy to find new recruits willing to…
I want to work in low level dev and I'm struggling to find anything...
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I want to work in low level dev and I'm struggling to find anything...
Where have you applied so far ?
The reason being is that most places when they need an developer will hire someone with pretty much any background, and those that do care will usually take an engineer, math or physics grad as being equivalent to a comp sci grad.
On the other hand when a company goes to hire an engineer, they really can only hire an engineer as stipulated by law.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Speaking as someone who used to hire low-level developers in the financial sector (i.e we could pay them an above average salary) I'd disagree. There's only a handful of universities now which teach C to a decent level, and if a candidate doesn't know C already it's very hard to tell if they'll be able to conceptually handle pointers and indirect referencing. So there's actually a very small pool to recruit from comp…
A lot of finance companies have rejected me for placements for low A level grades despite high firsts in all my CS modules, solid extra curricular's etc...