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Comment by Fifer82 | Hacker News Reader

Edinburgh Scotland:

Seeking Junior Developer 19k.

Must know all the CSS preprocessors, all CMS's, all modern frameworks, all of software engineering, all of the server side in all languages.... Ideally has experience of everything. Must have worked Agile.

Needless to say, 7 years into my actual Web Programming career and I am resigned to being stuck in a bad role. I don't have the confidence to apply to anything since your expected to be an expert in what they announce tomorrow in the next conference (and you had to do it in your own time) and if I do, the pay is garbage.

I personally blame Recruitment Agencies for not having a clue what is being asked for, setting a false market rate (maxium commission = race to the bottom), and making the barrier to entry or even sell yourself impossible.

In short, I hope this year to re-boot my career outside of computing as pretty much everyone I know makes more money than I do.

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I don't have much experience with the job market north of the border, but I'd say your situation would be atypical. I'm outside of London and have seen what you've described but the reality is that there is a shortage of people with the skills you've described in that theoretical role. I'd advise you line up 4-5 interviews and just go and see how they work out. With 7 years experience I'd expect you to be able to walk into a lot of positions without fuss which pay much much more than £19k.

Thank's for taking the time to reply Kiksy. I appreciate it as I am a lone developer and don't really have any real career advice. I just know that I never seem to match my experience to any roles and it has been a while.

I'm curious... It could be different in Scotland but i'm a tech recruiter in the US and every company I know gets paid a % of the base salary of successfully placed developers. Our fee is 20%-25%. So it's in my best interest to get you MORE money. You get a base salary of 100K and i get 25K. You get a base salary of 19K and I get less than 5K.

The only exception is contracting where we charge a bill rate to the client and pay the developer a rate but usually people don't mind when they are making $70+ an hour.

That helps but doesn't necessarily solve the problem. There is a similar situation in real estate. The broker's main financial incentive is to ensure the deal happens.

Keep in mind, if you're getting paid a commission only after a deal happens, would you want to make a deal that day for 5% of $1mil, or wrangle for months and risk the deal to close at $1.1mil?

Now sure, 200k vs 1mil is a big deal, but that kind of difference isn't that common. Typically a recruiter would prefer to get a higher salary for you, sure, but not if it entails far more work or risking the deal.

There is, of course, reputation to consider - a real estate agent who develops a reputation of closing deals far too quickly in order to get a quick payday may start to have trouble finding clients.

I know this sort of situation too well. Lots of companies in the UK seem to want web developers, but far fewer seem to realise that it'll cost more than it does to pay someone to stack shelves.

It's especially the case in regards to agencies, jobs referred by recruiters, etc. And a lot of companies even offer this in places like London, where the rent is far higher.

Also in Edinburgh, part time an on about £10k. Mixture of front end dev, Drupal 7, Ios and Android development. Mind me asking where you work? I'm on my ast semester of uni and 3-4 years experience so isn't too bad, but the recruitment spam is crazy.

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