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I run a design agency and generally only employ Juniors. You're about right on salaries in the UK. Its a strange market here, its very hard to find good staff
by joshcrowder 12y ago
I run a design agency and generally only employ Juniors.
You're about right on salaries in the UK. Its a strange market here, its very hard to find good staff and generally companies want far too much experience for a Junior role.
We take on new recruits with little to no experience in the field and train them from 6-18 months. We've taken designers and turned them into very good ruby developers as well as no experience to full-stack devs.
It really depends on the company though, look for a company who is focused on training. The salary should also increase in 6 months at a minimum and there should be a clear path to earning a decent salary.
We start at around 16-18K and have reviews every 3 months. The goals are set by the employees (we track this using a free product we made called Meta Trails check it out!) and as long as they say they've hit there targets its a 20% raise. Heres what it looks like in real life:
Starting 18K
3 Months: 21.6K
6 Months: 26K
9 Months: 21K
12 Months: 37K
After a year we move to a normal review period of 1 year. The reason we do this is we put a lot of time / money into training and our results are fantastic. I'd like to see more companies hiring Jr developers.
We are actually looking for another developer to join the team drop me an email josh[at]seriousfox.co.uk
- J-dawg 12y agoIt's a shame more employers don't share your approach! Out of interest, what's in it for you? Why not just hire an experienced dev for £37k and save yourself a year of training someone? What are your requirements for a junior developer?
- dan_b 12y agoSometimes experienced devs come with bad habits.
- stuaxo 12y agoWow, started in 2000 on 18k ... that people are getting less than that now astounds me.
- switch007 12y agoA LOT less. £18,000 in 2014 terms (RPI) is £27,659.
- kohanz 12y agoI assume you meant 9 Months: 31k?
- joshcrowder 12y agoYes correct!
- mavsman 12y agoI'm still looking into Meta Trails but can you speak to how it is better than web apps that are so common like Codecademy? With those, it seems like it's easy to just go through the motions and complete the tasks without actually learning anything. Is Meta Trails even close to those coding teachers or is it entirely different?
- joshcrowder 12y agoSorry for the late reply. Meta trails is a companion to tools like Codeacademy or Team Treehouse. What we've found is its really hard to answer questions like 'Do you know CSS' its much easier to ask smaller questions like can you postion an element on a page, can you style typography correctly. By asking these smaller questions you can gauge where you are and whats missing. Meta Trails asks you those questions, its more of a tool than a platform.
- Mimu 12y agoI live in France but often, when a company wants you for little money in exchange of formation, what they mean is you'll have access to google. Not saying this is what joshcrowder do, not to mention UK and France are probably very different in mentality and all, but I would make sure that what they say is true. 12 months of experience is good, 12 months of irrelevant shitty projects when you didn't learn a single thing not so much.