201–210 of 420 posts
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http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Red_brick_university One of 6 particular universities. A similar term in the USA would be something like Ivy League: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ivy_League
The analogy to the Ivy League is the Russell Group.
is £50k enough to live in London on your own? (i.e. a one br flat)
Of course it is. If you are single you can live comfortably in zone 1 for that, even in Kensington. All-in rent for about £1k. I'm confused by the replies saying you can't. There's people living happily near me earning a lot less than that.
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London cost of living isn't so bad. Public transport is cheap and abundant, competition keeps prices down for restaurants and shops, and there are a lot of free events to keep you busy. The main expense is in the accomodation, which most people in their 20s combat by sharing houses in undesirable areas. (This is a problem UK wide though as they have managed to keep our housing bubble inflated unlike in the US.) Londo…
Public transport in London is anything but cheap. It is simply the most expensive urban public transport system I know of in terms of cost of monthly passes (or travelcards). Currently a monthly travelcard in zones 1-2 is £116.80 ($177.30). In comparison, a similar monthly pass in New York costs $112, $74 in San Francisco, $167 in Tokyo, $84.50 in Paris, $99.95 in Berlin, $100 in Chicago, $67.96 in Melbourne and so o…
The software industry here in London is really badly paid, for salaried jobs outside finance at least. I know plenty of developers who started at £20-25k as graduates from decent universities and whose salary has slowly risen to 40k over quite a few years. PhD graduates making £35-45k too.
It's the legacy of the old class system rearing its ugly head. No matter how well educated, and from what prestigious colleges, (software) engineering is blue-collar work and will never be as well paid as the "graduate management fast-track" type with a sociology degree from a "red brick". Finance isn't highly paid for software work, it's fairly paid, by world standards, only because they contrary to popular belief,…
Martelsham is the place where Tommy flowers used to work its the equivalent of ATT labs.
The software industry here in London is really badly paid, for salaried jobs outside finance at least. I know plenty of developers who started at £20-25k as graduates from decent universities and whose salary has slowly risen to 40k over quite a few years. PhD graduates making £35-45k too.
That almost makes German/Dutch wages seem good... (average wage for a just-graduated developer is around 35000 euros in both countries).
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Public transport in London is anything but cheap. It is simply the most expensive urban public transport system I know of in terms of cost of monthly passes (or travelcards). Currently a monthly travelcard in zones 1-2 is £116.80 ($177.30). In comparison, a similar monthly pass in New York costs $112, $74 in San Francisco, $167 in Tokyo, $84.50 in Paris, $99.95 in Berlin, $100 in Chicago, $67.96 in Melbourne and so o…
Buses in London are a lot cheaper, it's £1.40 a trip, but the trips can be much longer than the relative speediness of the tube.
I also see a lot of contracts around 400GBP a day in London for front end folks, thats around the 100K mark per year.
Could you help point a stranger towards these contracts? Cheers.
The software industry here in London is really badly paid, for salaried jobs outside finance at least. I know plenty of developers who started at £20-25k as graduates from decent universities and whose salary has slowly risen to 40k over quite a few years. PhD graduates making £35-45k too.
£40k is not badly paid. It's significantly less than SV sure, but it's a lot more than the average UK salary.
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Is the 2.1 number you refer to a GPA? What's it out of?
UK degrees are classified into four classes: 1st, upper and lower 2nd, and 3rd. A first corresponds to about an average of 70%, 2.1 60%, etc.
Sample size=1, I've found that the "idols" of the developer community in London work for gov.uk or the BBC. I respect both very much, but you can't optimize for "soft" values and cash at the same time. It's a bit tautological, but if you want to make a lot of money, you have to go do that. You can't optimize for a fun, "meaningful" (hugely subjective, obviously) job with short hours and expect the money to just come…
Still has classic ASP deployed, VB6 COM is the backend, "extreme waterfall" is the process and integration via CSV files (using ' as a quote char of course!) over FTP is the mutt's nuts. Add to that a security policy which involves a large brush, a fucking huge rug and a copy of the production SQL Server 2000 database on every laptop.
The system build is the "secure windows XP build" which is XP SP1 with no patches other than to put the company logo on the background, some bastardised IEAK'd up IE7 build, content filters which understand HTTP like Manwell from Fawlty Towers understands English.
The price of muttering Linux, Python or even Windows greater than XP in the office is to be whipped by lengths of state of the art 10base2 with BNC plugs on the end until you submit that there is only Windows.
Management is entirely powered by crack dust and "champers". And the architect to monkey ratio is at least 10:1. The architects don't even know what the hell an HRESULT is.
A good day is when SourceSafe doesn't try and fuck you.
Fortunately we only have to integrate with them...
Stay away. You have been warned.