Quote:Original post by Buster2000
I should add that my starting salary of £24,000 is in the east mids and pretty much inline with all the other juniors I know at various companies around here.

The iPhone jobs that were offering around the £30,000 mark wer down south however.

£24k! Really! I'm Nottingham based with about 6 years experience and not on much more than that :(

Quote:Original post by Buster2000
Which company in nottingham and are you a designer or a programmer?
I know designers get paid a lot less.

Can't really provide my company name, especially when talking about pay :)

I'm a Programmer, got experience on 2 un-released titles and 4 released across PC, PSP, PS2, Xbox & Wii. Currently working on Xbox360 and PS3 racing game due out early next year.

Been a coder for 5 years now and am currently on a little less then the average pay for a programmer in the aforementioned Develop salary survey of £25,810.

Where are you based if you don't mind me asking? Obviously if you can't say I'd understand :)

PS: I think this is in line with the other coders at the studio. Can't say for certain as it's against the rules to discuss pay.

It depends a lot on your degree and other experience. I got £25k just after graduating two years ago, but I graduated from a good university with a first class MEng and had been developing some small games in C++ in my spare time too. This is in the Midlands. Apparently I was given slightly over the odds, though I had the same offer elsewhere. Strangely up north the offers were slightly higher than down south. And of course the offers are much higher the further from games you go (I had a job offer for £30k from one vaguely games-related studio, and an invitation to an interview for a £30k job not in games).

I haven't increased from that salary much since then, mind, but that's a story nobody wants to hear.

Another way to bump up potential salaries is to have several offers on the table. Then you can do some simple bargaining by just telling them what other offers you have - if they like you they'll offer a higher salary (which in turn you can feed back to the other potentials). It's a bidding war in your favour :) Definitely don't just go for one interview. I think I went for 5 in total, and turned down a few others for various reasons.

Tell them that in the interview :) I'd be a useless programmer if I didn't have access to Google and Intellisense.

I remember for one test I was expected to do some things I considered silly. I had to write an A* search in Java but wasn't allowed to use any of the Java standard library, and had to write my own queues and so on. But I used them anyway, and wrote comments telling them how mental I thought that requirement was, hoping they'd like the cut of my jib. They disagreed, but offered me the job anyway.

Quote:Original post by icethelog
I doubt I have the job though because I butchered the technical test.

Don't worry about it. I'm hopeless at interviews, panicked and skittery usually.

I went for one at Sumo Digital in Sheffield a few years ago and when asked the very simple "In C++ what is the purpose and use of virtual keyword?" my brain fell out.

I still knew what it was for, I just completely forgot the terminology + 75% of the English language :) I had to resort to describing things like inheritance and polymorphism with hand waving and random nonsensical gibbering. That was BEFORE the technical interview started. Thankfully they're a great bunch there and the CTO who was interviewing me realised how nervous I was, got me a glass of water and sent me on for the team lead/technical interview.

I left there feeling really down because I was sure that I blew it completely.

I started 3 days later :)

Interviews are strange artificial things that often stress people out in completely the wrong way. You won't be asked to behave or act like you do in an interview (well most interviews) during your everyday business and hopefully the company knows that.

Andy

Quote:Original post by icethelog
thanks, that's makes me feel a bit better aswell considering you just pretty much described what I did. Congrats on the job aswell.

I work somewhere else now, in Nottingham. Commuting to Sheffield each day up the M1 or by train (shudder) is a killer after a couple of years so I joined a startup 3 years ago that was more local. Still miss working at Sumo because of the great people there though, I was less keen on the overtime + commute ;)

Andy