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Come to London

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30 pointskaokun46 comments

Hmmm. I'm not one of the people you're really looking for here, but I could take a stab at reasons why I haven't been beating a path to your door...

a) I haven't really heard of you. A few words here and there over the years, but how much do you get out there and tell the geek community you exist? I'm guessing it's specific to a few specific tech areas - which I haven't seen. b) You're in London, you talk about "working hard" and being in your "Clerkenwell office". I've worked round there before, but really? I want a company who's more about working smart - and not in one place all the time. How much do you really need to physically see me? Commuting, plus a little bit of a tiny hint of "macho hard work culture" (probably unfair, but...) is enough for me to take a place off my list. It's a sellers market, generally. c) Also... money. London is expensive. Everyone knows London is expensive (and they're right). You don't say anything about money - no hints, etc. My reaction (being picky) is that it probably isn't enough to make it worth my while (and also that you may try and make me the lowest offer you think you can - I'm assuming you don't have open pay scales). d) Effort. You talk about your tough hiring - multiple rounds, tests, a day working with you (you don't say whether you'll pay me for this...) Why would I do this? If I'm smart, capable, good at what I do, I probably know people who want to work with me already - why jump through these hoops for a possibly good job then?

These may be unfair points - I hope not, but perhaps - but finding good people right now is about attracting them, not throwing up barriers or making them work for it.

Thanks for your feedback kolektiv. Allow me to follow up on a few of your points:

a) If you have any advice on how to get our name out in the geek community then let me know. You are right that a lot of our community stuff is Perl or Geo focussed, but that's where our expertise is so that's where we can contribute the most. How well received would we be at a Python or Ruby event? Or are there more generic events we should be aware of?

b) When it comes to interns and more junior roles we really need to physically see you, every day, with face to face interaction. You just get more bandwidth and more effective communication that way.

Your point about working smart is 100% right. Internally we have 'work smart not hard' as one of our mantras, and that's not well reflected in the job ad at all. Thanks!

c) We don't say anything about money precisely because London is expensive and getting more so every year. One way to work smart is to write an intern job ad that we've hardly touched since 2006, despite the fact that intern salaries have increased consistently every year since then. We also like to be flexible based on people's experience - is it really worth putting on a job ad "£25K - 50K" when that's the range we're willing to consider for different candidates?

d) We're a small company of ~15 people with 4 engineers. That means if we hire you as our fifth engineer you're immediately making up 20% of the engineering team! You're damn right we want to make our interview process intense. I think it's fair to forewarn candidates about that.

Thanks again for your feedback. I hope you'll share some more, especially on point (a) about getting our name out there more.

a) If you have any advice on how to get our name out in the geek community then let me know.

Come speak about something interesting at HN London. 400-500 people a month in the heart of London. http://meetup.com/HNLondon

My contact info is in my HN profile if you're interested.

> is it really worth putting on a job ad "£25K - 50K" when that's the range we're willing to consider for different candidates?

Yes. It anchors your offering quite a bit. £25k is somewhat north of the UK mean income (not the London one, though), and especially as a foreigner allows me to get an idea on what my budget might look like. £50k is somewhat less what your competitors are paying for decent talent (no, not just finance, although it's a dumb career move to write off finance wholesale), so if I'm making £50k somewhere else and looking to level up, I know that I'll be wasting both yours and my time, on the other hand, if I'm making £30k, and my boss tells me it's a good salary, I know that that's a good chance I could make more.

Also, I plainly enjoy the honesty. "£Competitive" my ass.

Agreed 100% with this advice. A large range beats 'competitive' or 'Dependent on Experience" any day.

Great feedback, thanks mseebach.

http://www.lokku.com/jobs/intern.html

    > Is this for real?
    > Yes.

Uhm, ok. I mean, it looks good, but it's not like I needed to pinch myself afterwards.

Also:

    > You're in London 
    > That's where we are. We're not hiring remote workers.    
      We're looking forward to some intense and fast paced face-to-face 
      brainstorming sessions. You need to be in London.

There's a certain vibe of, you know, needing to be in London and not, say, Portugal in that phrasing.

You're right on that second point, that needs re-wording. With that in there it's surprising we've had so many people from Europe, the US, Canada, and even non-London-UK apply for and get internships with us :P

C. And worsening. I'm looking at moving in the opposite direction, from London to Spain/Portugal/France. I don't know why anyone who lives close enough to pop over to London for a break would want to live here. Unless they work in finance.

I am truly amazed by this, and I would argue that London is the best place to live in the world. I don't think popping over, or even coming for an extended multi-week visit, can compare with living here for months or years.

Even if, as it sounds, you've lived here for years and you've gotten a bit tired of it, surely you can agree that if somebody hasn't ever lived in London they would be crazy not to try it out? :-)

London's quite fun when you're young but on the whole it contains all that's bad about the UK and very little of the amazing stuff.

Reading your internships page (http://www.lokku.com/jobs/intern.html):

    > Will you pay for my travel to London?
    No.
    > Can you help me get a work permit?
    No. You need to be able to work in the UK.

The internship sounds really interesting, but maybe if you want more people applying from all over Europe, you should be a little more open about your relocation policy? (I understand that the cost of travel might not be prohibitively expensive intra-europe, but it kind of reads as "Can I apply if I'm not in London? No.")

I was interested in applying for an internship with them a few years ago. If I recall correctly, the pay was barely enough to cover the cost of living in London (if that), and it was a lot lower than the pay for any other developer internship I've come across, even some up north. If you'd have to relocate, you'd almost certainly have to pay out of pocket.

If they're not paying for travelling to interview in London, that's again worse than expected, since pretty much all companies, startups and corporations alike, do.

If you're from the EU you don't need a work permit.

I know, but I think it doesn't help with the "international-friendly" image that they want to display.

I think it's the EEA - which is the EU plus Iceland, Norway and Lichtenstein:

http://www.ukba.homeoffice.gov.uk/eucitizens/

Also includes Switzerland.

except for Romania and Bulgaria.

Doesn't being an EU citizen give you free right of work? (This is spoken as someone who's non-EU and is going to have all kinds of fun sorting out visas once I finish studying in the UK).

Travel TO London is probably not going to be half as expensive as travel IN London once they get there

Scarily thats true

  Single flight Krakow to London :130 Zloty or about 29 UKP
  One week travelcard zones 1-6 - 55 quid.

That's utterly insane

* http://www.ryanair.com/en/cheap-flights/krakow-to-london-sta... (Airport tax not included) * http://www.londontoolkit.com/briefing/travelcard.htm

Yes, London travel is pretty expensive, but: You don't need a travelcard unless you travel more than once back and forth every days - pay as you go is cheaper. Also, the price of a flight without the airport tax is irrelevant, as there is no way to not pay it (which is why it's so dishonest for Ryanair not to include it in the price). Finally, commuting by bike in London is completely feasible - cycling from Poland is a significantly more substantial undertaking :)

Yeah but the view is prettier. :-)

2) If you're an EU citizen, you can work in the UK (with a few exceptions, e.g. AFAIK Croatia citizens can't access the common jobs market for a certain period after Croatia has joined the EU). If you're not, it's a lot of paperwork to get a work permit, and usually not worth it.

1) EU travel is really cheap - London is one of the most frequented destinations for the low-cost airlines (EasyJet, RyanAir, WizzAir, ...), so it shouldn't be more than 200EUR return from just about anywhere in EU.

1) The corollary of that, of course, is that the company should be happy to pay the flight for the interview if the candidate sounds good after a phone conversation, if perhaps not for the relocation itself.

Is this not essentially a job ad disguised as a blog post?

Disguised ... ?

Several years ago I treated Lokku as the coolest place to work in London according to my criterias. It was the only one map-obsessed, small, open-source friendly, no-bullshit startup in a nice location. Unfortunately I was a Java guy and they were looking for Perl people.

I believe you cannot underestimate the impact it makes on London geo scene. Without Lokku, London will be a rather dull place from geospatial perspective.

If I were in the Uni now (I graduated in Hungary), I would definitely apply.

The language shouldn't matter for a good developer. From their web page: "Many of our past interns have been new to Perl."

I wasn't an intern and I wanted to go towards Java/Hadoop. Which was not required at Lokku at that time.

Will this internship make me filthy rich? No. If it's money you're after go work in the sub-basement of a bank on an obscure back end system that no one will care about. If you want the chance to work on critical projects used by millions of people, to have a voice in designing complex systems, to have your ideas be valued, and to learn an exceptional amount in a very short period of time then this is the place for you.

Come again? I don't care how successful these guys are- I hope whoever crafted this page isn't judging the communication portion of the interview. To whom is this kind of language supposed to appeal?

It's a bit of a straw man. In NYC at least, many of the hedge funds have more "startup" like environments than the startups do.

Personally I love it... to each his or her own :-) It's verbose but information-rich, no?

Sorry, but this entirely missed the point.

Developers, hell, almost all office workers, should think remote working first then worry about relocation.

The comments all through here are quite right - it is hard for anyone to move country, even talented, young, healthy, unattached interns.

In the future workers will be able to work with any company in the world. This will scare the hell out of all companies and they will improve the pay and conditions.

On the other hand, I strongly urge anyone with developer skills and no family ties to move to any major city in Europe and live and work for a few years. Just go. The job is far far less important than simply being there.

My EU friends claim the pay is never enough at London startups to make moving worth their while. Then they say something about the weather.

I believe the reason why Portuguese developers are not flooding UK (I don't completely agree, I see them coming more and more but slowly) is that any reasonably good developer in Portugal still can find work in consulting and state related IT firms. They work long hours and earn low, but enough to live comfortably there.

And by "earn low but enough to live comfortably there" you mean around 1000 eur/m, a little bit more but not that much if you are lucky. I wouldn't call it living comfortably if you're not living with your parents.

Another one is that people are too attached to stay in Portugal as well.

I am living abroad since 2003 (FR, CH, D), and still meet people that moved back, even with the crisis, or tell me that they can't imagine themselves living abroad.

But won't that opportunity be there after they spend 2-3 fun years in London?

That is my point exactly to them, but it seems tougher to leave family and friends when you live comfortably and still save some cash.

Here is a sample of excuses my Portuguese friends (SW Engineer related) gave me to not even consider job opportunities in London:

- can't leave my family now, I have a girlfriend and don't want to leave her

- my English is not good enough

- I don't like the weather there (sounds stupid, but I hear this one a lot)

Also right now in Portugal there is bullshit talk from employers that younger people should stay and help revamp the economy (by working extra hours for free) and the situation is so bad that in some areas like Design/Architecture people do internships for free and the interns keep being replaced with new ones after 3 months or so.

Why do you consider the climate to be a stupid reason? If your mood is, like many people, closely linked to the weather, if you love the sun, the sea and all the outdoor activities they bring, why wouldn't you stay? I can perfectly understand someone who chooses a less fulfilling professional life in order to see the sun every day. In fact many companies in the nicer parts of the world actively use the surrounding climate and geography as a recruitment argument.

Yep, those excuses seem familiar.

> Come to London

... and don't forget to bring your mobile phone - we'd like to get to know each other a little better:

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/technology/10177765/Travellers-mo...

This is a serious problem in its own right, but it's not really relevant to the post.

But is that really a reason not to come work in London for a few years? Is the situation any better in other EU countries?

The feeling is that yes, EU/Schengen borders are much less surprise-ridden than US/UK.

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