Accepting a low salary to start your career

awec · 25-06-2018 11:36AM

If these guys are top 0.1% of graduates and they are having a tough time getting a job in 2018 then this top 0.1% label seems somewhat inaccurate.

I have been involved in graduate hiring in recent years. If you are good you will walk into a job. Recruiters are irrelevant and if anyone can't get past an HR interview then there's a bit of an issue there. Too easy to blame the process.

beauf · 25-06-2018 01:13PM

Well its the Recruiters who are complaining they can't people, and people not on the ladder saying they can't get on it.

There is a disconnect somewhere.

Tar.Aldarion · 25-06-2018 01:19PM

Plenty of my friends have simply done 3 month coding courses and walked into developer jobs in the last few years within weeks of leaving. Nothing compared to my degree or masters. It is becoming a joke that everybody I know is now a dev, from chefs to journalists to biologists that I know, all did those conversion courses. That's how in demand it is. I can't remember a time where my company has not been hiring and the dev team is 4 times the size it was when I joined. If these people can't get a job it's because they are awkward penguins.

14ned · 25-06-2018 01:34PM

awec wrote: »

If these guys are top 0.1% of graduates and they are having a tough time getting a job in 2018 then this top 0.1% label seems somewhat inaccurate.

Recruiters and HR departments can't differentiate between candidates well. When selecting which students we're going to take for Google Summer of Code each year, we need to winnow around 150 applicants down to about five. We've had some problems with biases e.g. we tended to prefer those who write English well rather than those who can code, and we have taken a lot of criticism for almost always choosing men (the truth is that very few women apply, and we actually take far more of the total women applying than men).

But the big reason we tend to do well compared to normal recruitment is that we have professional software programmers at the very front of the evaluation, and we're far better at picking out the gold than HR departments or recruiters, because we know what to look for. I'd estimate we've had a 60-80% hit rate in terms of choosing superb students.

awec wrote: »

I have been involved in graduate hiring in recent years. If you are good you will walk into a job. Recruiters are irrelevant and if anyone can't get past an HR interview then there's a bit of an issue there. Too easy to blame the process.

After twenty years, I have a very dismal record of getting past recruiters and interviews. I know lots of very talented people who are the same. It is exactly attitudes such as yours which is why people think there is a skills shortage, when it fact it's a skills matching shortage. So companies such as yours end up hiring people from really far away, because if they are willing to relocate a few thousand miles, then surely they really want to work for you which in turn makes you take their application more seriously, as obviously the local talent just "don't have what it takes" to work for you.

And well, that's fine, it's your choice how and who you hire, and if you want to delude yourself that hiring processes aren't atrociously inaccurate, okay. But let me ask this: why do you think Google operates Summer of Code at a cost of many millions of dollars a year, giving away all that free money?

Niall

PMBC · 25-06-2018 01:38PM

Calculon1982 wrote: »

Fair enough. I'd been under the impression that the civil service was a good employer. Perhaps its time to look elsewhere.

This gives the lie to the line that all the Civil and Public Servants are on great salaries and great pensions.

14ned · 25-06-2018 01:43PM

PMBC wrote: »

This gives the lie to the line that all the Civil and Public Servants are on great salaries and great pensions.

I think the new contracts are not a patch on the old contracts, for sure. Also, civil service pay hasn't been keeping up with private pay this past decade, so it looks particularly bad right now with the economy leaping forwards at 4-5% a year.

All that said, civil service gives you some of the best work conditions around, especially if you're having babies or have small children. I would agree that the new pension is barely better than a private sector defined contribution pension nowadays though, there's no longer much point working for the government under the new contract if you want a good retirement.

Niall

25-06-2018 03:53PM

14ned wrote: »

............

After twenty years, I have a very dismal record of getting past recruiters and interviews..............

I've no doubt you are technically excellent etc etc but just from your posts on this topic I can perhaps see why you have a dismal record tbh.

It seems to be all about you all of the time

beauf · 25-06-2018 04:10PM

Recruitment is always about you.. all of the time...

On the one hand we say people can do a lightweight course and walk into a job.
On the other we say its a struggle to get good (skilled) people.
Other very experienced people say its easy to get a job and also others its hard to get past the process.

...seems all very much inter connected to me.....same issue through a different optics.

Twenty Grand · 25-06-2018 05:08PM

Tar.Aldarion wrote: »

If these people can't get a job it's because they are awkward penguins.

Interviews are all about how you come across to the interviewers. Do you have half a notion when you're talking about, are you a nice person, will you work well with others and fit in with your colleagues.

14ned · 25-06-2018 06:23PM

Augeo wrote: »

I've no doubt you are technically excellent etc etc but just from your posts on this topic I can perhaps see why you have a dismal record tbh.

My tone here was me being rushed to reply more than anything, meshed with a bit of irritation at some of the answers posted here. You'd know it well if I had a bone to pick: be very afraid of any sentence beginning with "Have you considered ..."

From my best guess, my dismal record with recruiters and HR is due because recruitment is always very narrow, and my CV is very broad. My full "kitchen sink" CV is nearly 40 A4 pages of nine point writing now. So I supply a two page condensed version, they then ask for "the proper CV". I try to tell them they really don't want it, I should write them a custom CV just for them, but they always insist on the full thing. So I send them the 40 page tomb, then they say they don't understand it. So, as always I end up writing them a custom CV specifically for their particular job spec, exactly as I suggested.

However, implicit in all this is that this is extra work for HR and recruiters over other candidates. They prefer to box tick in easy, well defined, narrow categories, and other candidates are just plain easier. Ultimately, the real problem here is that you need one CV for HR and recruiters, and a totally different CV for the technical folk. It's rare they will allow that though, and again that messes with their systems, where that isn't a problem with other candidates.

That's my best guess, but I don't know for sure.

It seems to be all about you all of the time

I'll agree that my replies were rushed and probably didn't come across well (I was waiting for build when replying, and I hate waiting for build, so I was probably in a sour mood), but I was providing evidence of my background to support my claims. Most of the feedback given here came from people hidden behind pseudonyms voicing their personal dreams of what they think things must be like based on what they think they've heard. I, on the other hand, have worked directly and closely with fresh graduates over multiple years. It's up to readers of this thread whose opinion they think is more valid.

Niall

AlmightyCushion · 25-06-2018 07:19PM

14ned wrote: »

From my best guess, my dismal record with recruiters and HR is due because recruitment is always very narrow, and my CV is very broad. My full "kitchen sink" CV is nearly 40 A4 pages of nine point writing now. So I supply a two page condensed version, they then ask for "the proper CV". I try to tell them they really don't want it, I should write them a custom CV just for them, but they always insist on the full thing. So I send them the 40 page tomb, then they say they don't understand it. So, as always I end up writing them a custom CV specifically for their particular job spec, exactly as I suggested.

No offence here you aren't doing yourself any favours. You run into the same problem over and over again and you don't do anything to change it. Why not submit the custom CV instead of going through this rigmarole every time?

Look at it from their point of view, they loads of candidate who has submitted a 2,3 or 4 page CVs that are reasonably detailed and have all or most of the information they require. Then they have you putting them through all that just to get a CV from you for a job that you're applying for. If I was recruiting someone and had to go through what you're describing above, I'd get the impression that you are difficult to deal with and it would certainly hurt your chances of getting the job. In fact, I'd consider someone less skilled and experienced over you if they were a lot easier to deal with. You're really hurting your chances here.

Surely, you could have a basic template CV, that has all the information that will stay the same for every job you apply for and then just copy and paste from the detailed CV all the stuff that is relevant to the job you're applying for. It's more time consuming that submitting the 2 page or the 40 page CV but less time consuming than the custom one you create anyway and a hell of a lot less time consuming than the process you describe.

beauf · 25-06-2018 08:53PM

When I was contracting I shrunk my CV from too many years of experience down to one line for most things, only to two where its directly relevant and left years of experience off completely. Got it down to one page. The idea being you can scan/read it in no more than a 5 sec scan. If they want more than that, I bring along the full version and portfolio.

Most contracts weren't really interested in any experience or skill/competency that wasn't an exact fit (tech skill + business domain knowledge) to what they were looking for. Many are only interested in what you worked on in the last 2 years. Even if they wanted you to have 10+ years of experience.

Perhaps thats not typical.

mloc123 · 26-06-2018 09:18AM

CV wise, nobody cares about what you did 5+ years ago... include a brief overview sure but it is no longer relevant IMO.

Detailed overview of most recent roles, brief overview of the rest... 40 page CV? I don't care enough about my own previous experience to write that up, why would I expect a recruiter or hiring manager to care.

14ned · 26-06-2018 09:34AM

AlmightyCushion wrote: »

No offence here you aren't doing yourself any favours. You run into the same problem over and over again and you don't do anything to change it. Why not submit the custom CV instead of going through this rigmarole every time?

That would be because "relevant experience" is distributed over two decades with multiyear gaps of apparently doing nothing in between. And that looks far worse than if you were doing something to keep your skills from going stale. So better to get them to bite the hook rather than get binned in the first cull.

As I mentioned, recruitment is always narrow. If they want a body to maintain their custom regular expression library, the ideal hire as far as recruitment and HR can conceptualise is somebody who has done nothing but maintain regular expression libraries during their entire career. They find it much harder to filter somebody who did parsers for a few years, symbolic execution for some other years, and graph optimisation for another few. None of those latter three appear to have anything to do with regular expressions, yet technical folk will see that immediately. HR and recruiters don't have the necessary technical depth. Yet almost certainly, without doubt, the latter hire is FAR superior to somebody who never broke out of doing just a regular expression library.

Anyway, to return to the original point, my advice is to build out your contacts network to skip the HR and recruitment layers entirely as soon as possible. Then you don't need a CV apart from a single page one. Indeed, up until last year which was a bad year for me, I hadn't updated my CV in over five years. No need: work found me.

(Funnily enough, the current contract I am working was posted without a job spec, so the recruiters had to shortlist based on pure C++ background with no idea about role. So they actually wanted a CV with the full kitchen sink, for once. Even more unusual, this particular client insisted on a third party audit of the backgrounds of applicants to verify their CV was true, so my kitchen sink which has URLs to proof of everything I've ever done sailed me through, whereas the other candidates really struggled, or so I've since been told, because the other candidates couldn't prove their work history)

Niall

Tar.Aldarion · 26-06-2018 10:35AM

Twenty Grand wrote: »

Interviews are all about how you come across to the interviewers. Do you have half a notion when you're talking about, are you a nice person, will you work well with others and fit in with your colleagues.

Yes exactly, the most important aspect of an interview for me is would they fit in with the team and be a well rounded, communicative person. The actual technical skills come further down the list.

AlmightyCushion wrote: »

No offence here you aren't doing yourself any favours. You run into the same problem over and over again and you don't do anything to change it. Why not submit the custom CV instead of going through this rigmarole every time?

Look at it from their point of view, they loads of candidate who has submitted a 2,3 or 4 page CVs that are reasonably detailed and have all or most of the information they require. Then they have you putting them through all that just to get a CV from you for a job that you're applying for. If I was recruiting someone and had to go through what you're describing above, I'd get the impression that you are difficult to deal with and it would certainly hurt your chances of getting the job. In fact, I'd consider someone less skilled and experienced over you if they were a lot easier to deal with. You're really hurting your chances here.

Surely, you could have a basic template CV, that has all the information that will stay the same for every job you apply for and then just copy and paste from the detailed CV all the stuff that is relevant to the job you're applying for. It's more time consuming that submitting the 2 page or the 40 page CV but less time consuming than the custom one you create anyway and a hell of a lot less time consuming than the process you describe.

Reminds me of a book I was reading recently that was comparing genius'. On one hand we had Oppenheimer who went on to play a pivotal role in the Manhattan Project, one of America's most important positions in anything went to him. What we generally don't hear is that he was a bit unhinged in university, suffered from mental illness and tried to kill his tutor with a poisoned apple. He was savvy and socially skilled enough to get off with a warning (not even probation) and not let trying to kill people affect his career.

He was then compared to somebody that had a much higher IQ, that was more of a "genius" that got kicked out of university because he couldn't even convince a professor to change what class he was going to, even though these people want to help students and he had a valid reason. He had no a low amount of the other forms of intelligence.

There is a vast difference in technical skill and being able to get by in the world, where that skill does not matter near as much as being able to navigate and curry things to your favour. The aforementioned 40 page tome should not even exist.

AlmightyCushion · 26-06-2018 11:01AM

14ned wrote: »

That would be because "relevant experience" is distributed over two decades with multiyear gaps of apparently doing nothing in between. And that looks far worse than if you were doing something to keep your skills from going stale. So better to get them to bite the hook rather than get binned in the first cull.

As I mentioned, recruitment is always narrow. If they want a body to maintain their custom regular expression library, the ideal hire as far as recruitment and HR can conceptualise is somebody who has done nothing but maintain regular expression libraries during their entire career. They find it much harder to filter somebody who did parsers for a few years, symbolic execution for some other years, and graph optimisation for another few. None of those latter three appear to have anything to do with regular expressions, yet technical folk will see that immediately. HR and recruiters don't have the necessary technical depth. Yet almost certainly, without doubt, the latter hire is FAR superior to somebody who never broke out of doing just a regular expression library.

Anyway, to return to the original point, my advice is to build out your contacts network to skip the HR and recruitment layers entirely as soon as possible. Then you don't need a CV apart from a single page one. Indeed, up until last year which was a bad year for me, I hadn't updated my CV in over five years. No need: work found me.

(Funnily enough, the current contract I am working was posted without a job spec, so the recruiters had to shortlist based on pure C++ background with no idea about role. So they actually wanted a CV with the full kitchen sink, for once. Even more unusual, this particular client insisted on a third party audit of the backgrounds of applicants to verify their CV was true, so my kitchen sink which has URLs to proof of everything I've ever done sailed me through, whereas the other candidates really struggled, or so I've since been told, because the other candidates couldn't prove their work history)

Niall

What do you mean by multi-year gaps of apparently doing nothing? You still keep your work/education/experience history but you just keep it brief apart from the most recent stuff. If they are looking for something specific then you can highlight it in your cover letter or at the top of your CV. E.G In my roles at company A and company B I spent significant time and became very proficient in doing blah blah blah. Blah blah blah being the keyword HR are looking for. Obviously you can flesh it out a bit more than that but you get the idea.

14ned · 26-06-2018 11:59AM

AlmightyCushion wrote: »

What do you mean by multi-year gaps of apparently doing nothing? You still keep your work/education/experience history but you just keep it brief apart from the most recent stuff. If they are looking for something specific then you can highlight it in your cover letter or at the top of your CV. E.G In my roles at company A and company B I spent significant time and became very proficient in doing blah blah blah. Blah blah blah being the keyword HR are looking for. Obviously you can flesh it out a bit more than that but you get the idea.

Well, sure, and that's exactly what my one or two page summary CV would do.

The original point I was making is that a work history not doing exactly one thing doesn't work well with the current processes that HR and recruiters have. They are configured to select people whose work experiences tick the boxes they have been given to tick. They are not configured to select people who don't exactly tick the boxes they have been given to tick, even if they would be a much better quality candidate. Thus, I would claim that if you think that you can't find people to fill the roles you need to fill, then you're doing recruitment wrong. You do not need to be importing vast number of people from Europe. You should be hiring Irish people locally by hiring smarter, not hiring from further away.

Google run Summer of Code to help ameliorate their poor hiring process. They know from internal metrics how inaccurate their recruitment is. So Summer of Code is worth the expense, because it helps identify promising early stage talent in the students, and also it identifies domain experts in various open source library technology, the ones who mentor the students. All of those are shortlisted every year for Google Recruitment, who then approach and try and persuade students and mentors to come work for Google.

Microsoft have decided to go one better again than Google. They were running extensive automated searches for approachable talent on LinkedIn and GitHub five years ago, and unsurprisingly they have now simply bought both companies outright, the better to mine their data. I hear they are planning to start hiring remote workers in large numbers soon based on their historical GitHub commits and history, and empirical proof of their ability to work well in globally distributed open source development teams.

There is a ton of talent out there. Just need to be able to perceive it.

Niall

srsly78 · 26-06-2018 02:29PM

14ned wrote: »

Even more unusual, this particular client insisted on a third party audit of the backgrounds of applicants to verify their CV was true, so my kitchen sink which has URLs to proof of everything I've ever done sailed me through, whereas the other candidates really struggled, or so I've since been told, because the other candidates couldn't prove their work history)

Niall

Oh come on, it's a standard background check - plenty of places do it. They just check your degree pretty much - and are not even competent at that. In my case they could not distinguish 'University of Dublin' from 'University College Dublin'.

And the check is only done after you start the job!

14ned · 26-06-2018 03:42PM

srsly78 wrote: »

Oh come on, it's a standard background check - plenty of places do it. They just check your degree pretty much - and are not even competent at that. In my case they could not distinguish 'University of Dublin' from 'University College Dublin'.

And the check is only done after you start the job!

Yeah the master services agreement with whomever they contract in to do this stuff switched over just as I was starting this contract. You're exactly right with the previous system, Graham who's been here a year had exactly your experience. For mine things took longer, I had some woman ring me up unexpectedly, and quizzing me on random items from my CV, most of which I couldn't remember anything about, and I was standing in a noisy shop at the time, really not helpful. She included the open source contributions, which was novel, I've never seen that happen before. At the time I was very annoyed about being blindsighted like that, plus I didn't like the feeling of being treated as a liar. But, it was literally the only contract around back then, so I sucked it down.

It's absolutely possible that I was flagged for some sort of special review. I did get the feeling from her that she thought my CV falsified. I remember struggling to keep my temper under control during the call

Niall

um7y1h83ge06nx · 26-06-2018 06:33PM

I always see my CV as merely a way to get an invite to an interview where the real details will get discussed. After 13 years in industry my CV is just about 2 and a half pages long and will be cutting back the detail in the older positions to ensure it doesn't exceed 3.

Franz Von Peppercorn · 26-06-2018 06:46PM

Twenty Grand wrote: »

Interviews are all about how you come across to the interviewers. Do you have half a notion when you're talking about, are you a nice person, will you work well with others and fit in with your colleagues.

In reality, in tech interviews that’s not so important. Although it depends in the employer.

beauf · 26-06-2018 07:05PM

That's true some are all about the tech skills others need some people skills with it.

S.M.B. · 26-06-2018 07:21PM

It's very important in the past 3 roles I've been in and positions I've hired for while in those roles.

An amazing developer won't be hired if it's felt they'll upset the team dynamics.

Franz Von Peppercorn · 26-06-2018 08:13PM

I know that large multinationals in Ireland dont spend too much time on soft skills on tech interviews, it’s not something that the tech teams themselves decide anyway.

purpleisafruit · 27-06-2018 06:23AM

My place, we do an initial screening call just to get a feel for the person, tech interview and then bring them onsite to make sure they aren't crazy. Team fit is probably just as important as tech skills for most companies.
Tech recruitment is failing though, especially when the recruiters don't know that somebody with Kubernetes skills will have a fairly solid grasp of Docker and container tech. I've heard from friends who were rejected by recruiters as they didn't have C# experience but had years of Java. Obviously there are differences between the 2 languages but in my mind solid OOP experience is transferable.
In my own case, I've been rejected for a job looking for AWS skills even though I had extensive Azure, GCP and OpenStack experience. Tech recruiters really need tech backgrounds

14ned · 27-06-2018 10:12AM

purpleisafruit wrote: »

Team fit is probably just as important as tech skills for most companies.

Team fit ought to be considered important by the candidate, as well. I've walked away from at least two offered roles because I had alarm bells ringing after the final set of interviews. For one role, I got the feeling that despite them saying I'd be placed in head office, I'd actually be placed in the (geographically much closer) office I was interviewed in where the senior manager was clearly a sociopath verging on psychopathy, and I just couldn't understand how it wasn't plainly obvious to his staff and why they hadn't all quit. So, despite a lot of money offered, I passed. The other role was more "meh", I got a firm offer but I found myself so unenthusiastic about working there after the interviews, I eventually decided it was probably best to pass.

the sword · 27-06-2018 10:26AM

Just on the main topic of this thread, I would live in the North and once accepted a graduate dev job being paid minimum wage (13k at the time), with the intention of “gaining experience”. The only experience I had gained was a negative one. I should have been smart enough to realise this company was not willing to pay a competitive wage for the job role, it was never going to work out.
Best of luck to all graduate job hunters, it’s a minefield sometimes.

Mumha · 27-06-2018 10:38AM

DevLit wrote: »

Hi All, OP here.

I appreciate all the replies and advice given here. I do understand its low, but I need a start. I'm going to take it for 6 months at least, and look for better money than. I'm seriously broke atm, so I'd rather have a low paying job, where I'm learning and gaining experience, than sitting at home waiting for something else.

The fact I had no experience probably worked against me. I felt like I had no leg to stand on. The job isn't in Dublin, but I live in Dublin.

I think you did the right thing. Sounds like you are being realistic, though with the market the way it is, you could have chanced your arm. I took a job in Dublin in 1989 on £12,300, coming up from Cork, and it was a struggle but worth it. By the time I left 2 years later, I was losing money, but I had the experience.

I would say to you (considering the market), soak in as much as you can, and leave as soon as you feel comfortable, or at the 6 month mark, whichever comes first.

I don't oversell what I do, but then I am confident in what I do know, and can stand over that in an interview.

Mumha · 27-06-2018 10:40AM

14ned wrote: »

Team fit ought to be considered important by the candidate, as well. I've walked away from at least two offered roles because I had alarm bells ringing after the final set of interviews. For one role, I got the feeling that despite them saying I'd be placed in head office, I'd actually be placed in the (geographically much closer) office I was interviewed in where the senior manager was clearly a sociopath verging on psychopathy, and I just couldn't understand how it wasn't plainly obvious to his staff and why they hadn't all quit. So, despite a lot of money offered, I passed. The other role was more "meh", I got a firm offer but I found myself so unenthusiastic about working there after the interviews, I eventually decided it was probably best to pass.

I suspect part of the problem is that it's a small company, so money maybe tight, but experience might be broader.

purpleisafruit · 27-06-2018 10:57AM

14ned wrote: »

Team fit ought to be considered important by the candidate, as well. I've walked away from at least two offered roles because I had alarm bells ringing after the final set of interviews. For one role, I got the feeling that despite them saying I'd be placed in head office, I'd actually be placed in the (geographically much closer) office I was interviewed in where the senior manager was clearly a sociopath verging on psychopathy, and I just couldn't understand how it wasn't plainly obvious to his staff and why they hadn't all quit. So, despite a lot of money offered, I passed. The other role was more "meh", I got a firm offer but I found myself so unenthusiastic about working there after the interviews, I eventually decided it was probably best to pass.

Yeah, I agree with you on that. I've turned down several jobs as I felt like I wouldn't get along with the manager. Not worth it working with people who are awkward to engage with

Accepting a low salary to start your career

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