Zonino – A project to automatically find every job at a startup in London
zonino.co.uk
We built a system that scrapes the websites of a bunch of London startups and aggregates their jobs. None of that recruiter nonsense.
zonino.co.uk
PS: except for start-up Hedge Funds I guess :).
I am sure many HN Londoners will really appreciate.
That's around the level I'd expect a VP eng with domain experience (i.e scaling a high-growth consumer product, deep ecommerce experiences, etc.) to be able to make.
I'd recommend approaching startups who just raised a significant round (>$10m) as that's the point when many companies make key senior dev hires.
While it closes the gap with fintech, top devs at hedge funds can make £200-£300k (I have friends who are in this range) which it's hard for any tech startup to compete with.
FYI. AngelList are now operating in the UK and are ramping up. @andychung is their guy on the ground here.
Contracting rates, at £400 - £600 / day are more in line with the living costs.
But it's quite sad to see that living and property costs in London have become so insane that even senior software developers either have to contract or end up earning just about enough to pay the rent but not much more.
On the other side, a good seed round for an early stage startup in London is £200k. Maybe £300k if you're the hottest startup in town and work incredibly hard on your round. You're not going to be able to pay your employees very much at all with so little funding.
To me, the numbers just don't add up. I don't see how London can build a sustainable startup community. Or even tech community to be honest.
You haven't got a hope of being able to buy a decent family home in central London on that kind of salary.
If people can be bothered to commute just a little bit further out, you can in fact get a decent family home in Croydon for example, for 200k-300k. My 3 bedroom house with a garden cost use 208k when I bought it in 2004. The market has gone up, but it's still "only" valued at around 270k.
When we did buy, I was paid only a little bit out of that range, and it was only my income, and we lived very comfortably on my salary despite that mortgage. For years before that, I rented properties that cost me more per month even on salaries closer to the bottom of the 40k-60k range.
The issue, in my experience, is that younger people tends to want to live in areas that are more hip and closer to the centre, despite not having built up any equity, and if they can't, they often prefer to rent. And then years down the line they're still complaining that they can't afford to buy, when competing with people who spent the last decade living somewhere cheaper and building up equity that lets them put up higher total amounts and gives them access to cheaper mortgages.
Wow, at first I thought "Croydon? That's not even in London!", but as it turns out, apparently it's possible to go from Croydon Rail station to London Bridge in 14 minutes! From London Bridge, it's less 15 mins to Mayfair, City and Shoredich, so it's really quite close in terms of commute!
https://www.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachm...
Most recent data is £315,000 for the whole of London. Outer London is £276,000. In Croydon, for instance, it's £230,000. Still pretty rubbish, but probably ok if you're earning £40k and above, especially in combination with a partner's salary.
Right, so for a single person earning £35k going to a bank and getting 3.5 times earnings they'll have £105k to spend. How is a 200-300k property in a frankly awful outskirt of London (sorry) considered an acceptable situation?
The quicker the correction comes the better for everyone, this ongoing speculation/bubble of London property is disgusting.
Property prices are indeed high in London, but as a software developer you're earning significantly more than the average Londoner which is worth keeping in mind.
I had enough of places when the interview ends like "Well, you are our perfect candidate! But we cannot pay you atm. So if you want to work for us for free just for the next few months we'll surely give you all the salary arrears when we start to be on the wave"
No thanks, I do not live only of air and hopes.
Establishing harmony among competitive organisations can be difficult - but these are all tech/design companies so they should 'get it' to some degree, and it's not as if they are giving away secrets - a centralised, standardised portal would just make life much easier to engage with talent - especially if there's a standardised application form instead of a mess of different online/word versions all wanting the same information but in different order or structure - that drove me mad when I was job hunting a few months back; I suppose it indicates commitment making someone slog through 'yet another' document format, but spending 4+ hours on 4 different applications, with multiple cuts and pastes AND dealing with fill-in lines created using rows of underscores (aargh!) is soul destroying. There's also the implication that one should print, fill-in, scan to PDF and email back but..seriously!?
If anything needs 'disrupting' its online job applications - I know there are a few sites that handle such things, but most of the ones I have seen belong to specific sectors (public health, military etc.) or just one large company.
Wired Sussex is an example of progress in this respect:
Perhaps phase #2 could be to get all the target companies to agree you can host a standard application form that users could pre-populate and save to use as a template for specific job applications, tweaking things here and there as needed to highlight specific skills (or let users build a custom submission from pre-saved building blocks). It would really save a lot of time.
..anyway, good luck!
What we set out to try and do was to build something that didn't rely on companies posting their jobs. Free tech job boards are a dime a dozen. We wanted this to be an up to date account of the jobs that are available as a useful tool to job seekers. That said, you make a really good point about building a client API and I think that's the route we should go: Seed the site with scraped stuff but enable companies to upload their jobs, too.
I totally agree about applications being a nightmare. Some systems are starting to simplify this but it would be great if there was some standard for it. That's something we've talked about, too and we think would be useful. But this actually requires getting startups on board which will take time - but hopefully a few mavericks will want to join in!
Have you mined the HN who's hiring lists for London places? There are usually a fair number...
Too many "Startups" have been going for years and don't offer equity to new employees. So what's the point? Might as well have an SME tech companies site...
All joking aside we decided not to try to filter out jobs in other countries because knowing where a startup is hiring might actually be interesting or useful. We're hoping to improve how the site handles different locations soon.
Unless Ocado have moved their development operations since last time I checked, I believe the job is actually located in Hatfield which is not even in the M25
Whilst this might be a generalisation, most workers in London don't own a car, so public transportation is obviously a key deciding factor when taking into consideration the commute.
On a more serious note, what do other devs feel about working at startups themselves (freelance + perm)? The only I nearly got involved in was folded within 6 months. I'd have potentially been in a very bad situation as a result had I gone through with it.
[edit] I'd do piece meal work. Throw in hours along side my regular job but going full time without a decent golden parachute would worry me.
I think engineers are in a better position now that the London startup scene has matured as there is no stigma attached to being a part of a startup that didn't work out. I think a lot of employers value those experiences and the lessons learned!
At this point I'm unsure if I should start freelancing, attempt to create a business, work remotely, or find a job in or near London.
Anyone looking for a PHP/Python dev contract, shout me up!
Mobile doesn't show what you just searched for.
Also the description here is wrong:
Overall pretty good.