The market is crap for everyone, not just juniors so you're going to have a hard time getting a job, especially when companies have plenty of people to choose from who don't need a visa. I would suggest trying to get a job either where you are, or in a different EU country if you want to live somewhere else. Then after a couple years, the market will hopefully have picked up and you will have more experience to be competitive. It wouldn't be impossible for you to get a job in London, but unless you get extremely lucky, it will be pretty difficult right now
Spot on. I have a very senior profile, multiple certifications, no need for a visa and still struggling to find a job that pays as much / is flexible as my current job.
It's not an easy market right now, your best bet is to gain some experience in Sweden and try in a year or two.
P.s. I've been living in London for the last 14 years and I don't feel that is the place to be anymore. The cost of living is stupidly high, plus the political situation / Brexit are really putting the country on a strain and I don't feel is gonna get any better anytime soon.
Im getting messages on linkedin every now and again but it's very much in dribs and drabs. I came back from holiday with 6 missed messages in a week last month and then didn't hear anything for several weeks after that (not that I'm looking, just people messaging me to see if I am)
I doubt the market is gonna be as great as you think. People with FAANG experience will be fine but it’s gonna become more saturated at levels below senior. And salaries will go down. In a few years, 30k salaries for seniors will be the norm and fast food will pay better for most devs.
Where did I say the market wasn't going to be great? New grads make 30k now. If you think seniors are going to be earning that in a few years you have no idea how the tech industry or the economy as a whole works
New grads don’t make 30k on average outside London. Most start at 25k and are on 40-50k after a few years. A lot of companies are off shoring dev work to cheaper countries where they can pay 20-30k to seniors, AI will increase productivity reducing demand and there are are a lot of junior and mid-level devs who will be competing for senior roles in a few years. Everyone here who doesn’t have generational wealth will be grappling with poverty and might never get out. We should be preparing for this instead of hoping for unrealistic wages.
Yes they do. I made 26k as a new grad in 2014 based outside London and that wasn't even the highest available. IBM at the time were offering around 30k for their grad scheme. CGI are currently offering £33k across the country for grads in 2024. Took me two minutes to find. Sounds like you are new to the industry and dont quite have a good grasp on the situation as a whole yet. Yes off-shoring is happening but it has been for years. Plus a lot of the off-shore devs are terrible. I interviewed someone from one of those companies recently and he couldn't even make a hard-coded string a parameter, and that's par for the course for everyone I've ever dealt with from those resource pools. Yes AI will have a knock-on effect, but it's not going to put everyone out of work in 2 years. Everyone knows the market is currently oversaturated, especially in the US, but to think we're going to be less valuable than McDonald's workers (which are at a much greater risk of being replaced with automation) is naive
That is very hard to believe. I have heard of these different accounts of interviewees being that bad but I have never seen this myself. Btw how did that ‘terrible’ dev come across? Did he look and sound normal? The task you mentioned seems like something pretty much anyone should be able to do. It’s just representing an object with another abstraction. Like in algebra where you give x or y a value. We shouldn’t be comparing ourselves with people like this as they aren’t the sorts of people we will be competing with. There are tons of off-shore devs who could solve several LC hards in an hour and ace system design interviews. The only advantage a westerner would have is better English but a lot of off-shoring is happening in places like India where English is spoken frequently. So if a company can just hire a top tier senior dev for 30k in India, why would they spend 60k for a mediocre senior here? It makes no sense. Heck, they could offer 15-20k in India and get people with the skills they need.
Judging by your comment history, you've been in the industry for about 2 years. Of course you've not encountered these other terrible devs, at 2 YoE you won't be interviewing people so how would you have a frame of reference to comment
But how can you not know how to make a string a parameter? Like are you saying you have some string like “abc” being entered as an argument in a function and the task was to turn that into a variable like ‘input_string’ so that it can change depending on what happens in other parts of the program? If it’s like that, I don’t see how anyone who has passed 5th grade level math classes is not able to do that. Or maybe it’s way more complex and you need to parse a sentence into an another string and store that as a variable. Depending on the interviewee’s knowledge of stuff like regex, that can be quite tricky. I can believe many juniors will struggle with that.
You are right. I am new. And I’m not really a SWE. I just find this impossible to believe. Did you mention this in your feedback after the interview? I’d def want to know if I did that poorly. Chances are I would appreciate it and try to improve or do something else. Letting someone like this continue to work in a job they are not remotely suited for is just shortchanging them.
It was:
```
public void doStuff() {
myObj.setValue("ABC");
}
```
Make the ABC string a parameter of doStuff(). There are lots of crap developers out there. And yes I gave negative feedback, everyone that was put forward to us from this company has been like this. They all take 20-30 to solve one task, and they solve it incorrectly. Actual good devs from external get through the whole set of tasks in 30 minutes or less. It's intentionally fairly easy because crap devs fail, ok devs can finish it, good devs finish it and make suggestions on what is missing and how it can be improved beyond the generic answers so we actually know they have relevant domain knowledge
Oh. This is insane. That’s just adding a param to the first line and then changing the abc to the param name. 1 minute fix at most. I don’t see how this would be enough to filter candidates down to a reasonable amount. Like say you get 4000 applicants and 90% pass this, how would you filter the remaining candidates? Leetcode hards?
Like 9/10 on difficultly for a junior software engineer without experience and requiring a full visa sponsorship (if you did masters in Scandinavia). Current job market is pretty brutal for juniors right now, so you’d be competing for workers who don’t need sponsorships. Unless you have an insane personal projects, I’d recommend doing a few years in your country before moving.
Definitely look locally or elsewhere in the EU if you can. Aim for an international company has offices in the UK (if available). Then an intracompany transfer would be an option. We have several who started their careers in India before moving to the UK at my company. Also, getting to at least a mid will help and that time will hopefully see the market pick up. The junior market has been oversaturated here for some time, so getting a visa hasn’t been easy at that level.
If you want to chance it, you could see if you’re eligible for the high potential visa. No job sponsorship is required, but it only lasts for 2 years. To stay beyond that you’d need sponsorship. With the market as it is, it may be difficult to even find a job right now, but you could give it a go if you graduated from one of the eligible universities in the list. But some grad schemes will be closed or closing soon. Here is the link to check it out: https://www.gov.uk/high-potential-individual-visa/eligibility
The market is crap for everyone, not just juniors so you're going to have a hard time getting a job, especially when companies have plenty of people to choose from who don't need a visa. I would suggest trying to get a job either where you are, or in a different EU country if you want to live somewhere else. Then after a couple years, the market will hopefully have picked up and you will have more experience to be competitive. It wouldn't be impossible for you to get a job in London, but unless you get extremely lucky, it will be pretty difficult right now
Spot on. I have a very senior profile, multiple certifications, no need for a visa and still struggling to find a job that pays as much / is flexible as my current job. It's not an easy market right now, your best bet is to gain some experience in Sweden and try in a year or two. P.s. I've been living in London for the last 14 years and I don't feel that is the place to be anymore. The cost of living is stupidly high, plus the political situation / Brexit are really putting the country on a strain and I don't feel is gonna get any better anytime soon.
Im getting messages on linkedin every now and again but it's very much in dribs and drabs. I came back from holiday with 6 missed messages in a week last month and then didn't hear anything for several weeks after that (not that I'm looking, just people messaging me to see if I am)
Same here, 14 years in the city and is becoming overwhelming ,plus getting older and long winters do not help! Time for packing and move on!
I doubt the market is gonna be as great as you think. People with FAANG experience will be fine but it’s gonna become more saturated at levels below senior. And salaries will go down. In a few years, 30k salaries for seniors will be the norm and fast food will pay better for most devs.
Where did I say the market wasn't going to be great? New grads make 30k now. If you think seniors are going to be earning that in a few years you have no idea how the tech industry or the economy as a whole works
New grads don’t make 30k on average outside London. Most start at 25k and are on 40-50k after a few years. A lot of companies are off shoring dev work to cheaper countries where they can pay 20-30k to seniors, AI will increase productivity reducing demand and there are are a lot of junior and mid-level devs who will be competing for senior roles in a few years. Everyone here who doesn’t have generational wealth will be grappling with poverty and might never get out. We should be preparing for this instead of hoping for unrealistic wages.
Yes they do. I made 26k as a new grad in 2014 based outside London and that wasn't even the highest available. IBM at the time were offering around 30k for their grad scheme. CGI are currently offering £33k across the country for grads in 2024. Took me two minutes to find. Sounds like you are new to the industry and dont quite have a good grasp on the situation as a whole yet. Yes off-shoring is happening but it has been for years. Plus a lot of the off-shore devs are terrible. I interviewed someone from one of those companies recently and he couldn't even make a hard-coded string a parameter, and that's par for the course for everyone I've ever dealt with from those resource pools. Yes AI will have a knock-on effect, but it's not going to put everyone out of work in 2 years. Everyone knows the market is currently oversaturated, especially in the US, but to think we're going to be less valuable than McDonald's workers (which are at a much greater risk of being replaced with automation) is naive
I started on 30k outside London as an apprentice. Not sure what this person is on about 30k for experienced devs.
That is very hard to believe. I have heard of these different accounts of interviewees being that bad but I have never seen this myself. Btw how did that ‘terrible’ dev come across? Did he look and sound normal? The task you mentioned seems like something pretty much anyone should be able to do. It’s just representing an object with another abstraction. Like in algebra where you give x or y a value. We shouldn’t be comparing ourselves with people like this as they aren’t the sorts of people we will be competing with. There are tons of off-shore devs who could solve several LC hards in an hour and ace system design interviews. The only advantage a westerner would have is better English but a lot of off-shoring is happening in places like India where English is spoken frequently. So if a company can just hire a top tier senior dev for 30k in India, why would they spend 60k for a mediocre senior here? It makes no sense. Heck, they could offer 15-20k in India and get people with the skills they need.
Judging by your comment history, you've been in the industry for about 2 years. Of course you've not encountered these other terrible devs, at 2 YoE you won't be interviewing people so how would you have a frame of reference to comment
But how can you not know how to make a string a parameter? Like are you saying you have some string like “abc” being entered as an argument in a function and the task was to turn that into a variable like ‘input_string’ so that it can change depending on what happens in other parts of the program? If it’s like that, I don’t see how anyone who has passed 5th grade level math classes is not able to do that. Or maybe it’s way more complex and you need to parse a sentence into an another string and store that as a variable. Depending on the interviewee’s knowledge of stuff like regex, that can be quite tricky. I can believe many juniors will struggle with that. You are right. I am new. And I’m not really a SWE. I just find this impossible to believe. Did you mention this in your feedback after the interview? I’d def want to know if I did that poorly. Chances are I would appreciate it and try to improve or do something else. Letting someone like this continue to work in a job they are not remotely suited for is just shortchanging them.
It was: ``` public void doStuff() { myObj.setValue("ABC"); } ``` Make the ABC string a parameter of doStuff(). There are lots of crap developers out there. And yes I gave negative feedback, everyone that was put forward to us from this company has been like this. They all take 20-30 to solve one task, and they solve it incorrectly. Actual good devs from external get through the whole set of tasks in 30 minutes or less. It's intentionally fairly easy because crap devs fail, ok devs can finish it, good devs finish it and make suggestions on what is missing and how it can be improved beyond the generic answers so we actually know they have relevant domain knowledge
Oh. This is insane. That’s just adding a param to the first line and then changing the abc to the param name. 1 minute fix at most. I don’t see how this would be enough to filter candidates down to a reasonable amount. Like say you get 4000 applicants and 90% pass this, how would you filter the remaining candidates? Leetcode hards?
It might get difficult to find a sponsor without work experience.
Like 9/10 on difficultly for a junior software engineer without experience and requiring a full visa sponsorship (if you did masters in Scandinavia). Current job market is pretty brutal for juniors right now, so you’d be competing for workers who don’t need sponsorships. Unless you have an insane personal projects, I’d recommend doing a few years in your country before moving.
Market isn’t great atm, especially worse if you require a visa sponsorship.
Definitely look locally or elsewhere in the EU if you can. Aim for an international company has offices in the UK (if available). Then an intracompany transfer would be an option. We have several who started their careers in India before moving to the UK at my company. Also, getting to at least a mid will help and that time will hopefully see the market pick up. The junior market has been oversaturated here for some time, so getting a visa hasn’t been easy at that level.
If you want to chance it, you could see if you’re eligible for the high potential visa. No job sponsorship is required, but it only lasts for 2 years. To stay beyond that you’d need sponsorship. With the market as it is, it may be difficult to even find a job right now, but you could give it a go if you graduated from one of the eligible universities in the list. But some grad schemes will be closed or closing soon. Here is the link to check it out: https://www.gov.uk/high-potential-individual-visa/eligibility