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Where to find software engineer jobs

Given there are quite a lot of IT professionals on these forums, I’d like to ask a question… If you’re a software developer or in a similar role, where do you go to find (permanent) jobs? A preferred agency, if so which one? A jobs board on a website – again, which one? Cold calls from agencies via LinkedIn? Self application having seen jobs listed on LinkedIn or the company’s own website? Or is it all just word of mouth? I have a whole department dedicated to “talent acquisition” but they’re struggling and the agencies they usually work with are failing us.

Thanks.

Administrator
EGTR / London, United Kingdom

David wrote:

Given there are quite a lot of IT professionals on these forums, I’d like to ask a question… If you’re a software developer or in a similar role, where do you go to find (permanent) jobs? A preferred agency, if so which one? A jobs board on a website – again, which one? Cold calls from agencies via LinkedIn? Self application having seen jobs listed on LinkedIn or the company’s own website? Or is it all just word of mouth? I have a whole department dedicated to “talent acquisition” but they’re struggling and the agencies they usually work with are failing us.

Thanks.

Hi David, in the UK you usually go to LinkedIn (where I found all my new jobs for the last decade) and jobservee.com. It helps immensly with the talent search if:
- job description is fairly generic (quite often HR people are VERY specific) and don’t demand many elements as a must
- people could apply with “easy apply” on LinkedIn and single-step application on Jobserve. I know I’ve decided not to continue with quite a few applications after I’ve been sent to a company job site and needed to complete an extra 5-page application even before the first interview. It is OK for AFTER the job offer, but before?
- the hiring process reasonable in general – I’ve seen people stand up (“f£$% it!”) and leave during some of the testing. Not many want to go through 8 hours of interviews (real example) or tolerate very enthusiastic HR person (“are you looking for an extravert monkey or an IT professional?!”).

But in general: it is now MUCH harder to find people in the UK, so if you have offices in other countries, try there; and try paying more – the market has really changed within last few months and I know of quite a few people that have changed jobs because it is a job-seekers market now, especially if you remember that many contractors stopped contracting now (thank you, HMRC) and now request their contract rates as a permanent salary. My wife’s company initiated a personnel-retentional programme, just trying hard to make people stay, that is another way…

EGTR

I thought the whole point of Linkedin was for contract programmers (not a fashionable name today, I know ) to line up the next contract while still working on the existing one and without time to attend interviews

Thinking a bit laterally, I have had great success getting little snippets of code written via freelancer.com. I post a detailed spec, a budget (say £200), and I get offers from all over Europe. Typically from the UK at £200, or Ukraine (pre-war I mean) at £50. So I go for the Ukrainian guy, who speaks perfect English and does a superb job. I would thus probably dig around freelancer.com for people looking for work. I am sure most have jobs already because you won’t make a living at £50 a pop unless you live very cheaply.

OTOH it will be very hard to get a Ukrainian to come to the UK. This has always been the case; in the 1980s (i.e. pre-EU, and roughly what we have right now again) I spent 6 months trying to import an excellent Polish programmer, and had to give up against the Home Office obstacles. OTOH, as of 56 days ago, you probably can get a Ukrainian to come to the UK… provided he has the army exemption, which is unlikely for someone young.

Getting good programmers in the UK is a nightmare. For embedded (ARM32, C) I am using one contractor in PL and one in NL. The PL guy is also good with PHP and LEMP server config (he wrote the entire EuroGA airport database, which has not yet been successfully trashed, despite a vast amount of attempts). For web (Magento, server config) I use a Romanian guy living in SW UK. Only the NL one is totally freelance AFAIK. All of these charge about $50/hr and all are very productive, with excellent comms, and crucially not limited to working hours. The UK is hopeless; everybody wants to make enough for a couple of T72 tanks in their drive, an APC for the school run, while working 35hrs/week and not being online for urgent stuff outside of working hours, which just makes one tear one’s hair out.

IR35 (or whatever it is called now) is not and has never been an issue IF you have at least several clients, and take the most basic precautions re (e.g.) using your own equipment, not having a job contract, etc. It hits only those (admittedly the big majority) who want a full time secure and safe job, 100k please, while being able to avoid NICs (and using up their non-working wife’s lower tax bands, if applicable) by living off dividends. It was never possible to sustain this with a single client, once HMRC got around to checking your returns (often following a tip-off).

There are other sites. For example I use a forum called EEVBLOG for embedded help, which is brilliant for me, and has a Jobs section, but I am not sure how good it would be for IT workers. Certainly finding Ruby on Rails programmers is pretty specialised stuff today.

Administrator
Shoreham EGKA, United Kingdom

The only job I formally applied for was my very first one (which was during the placement year of my university course). All others since then have been from word of mouth. I’m changing jobs after almost 19 years in the current one, to an embedded ARM and C job, full time remote working for a very small and new company. This time it’s someone I’ve known for a few years and done a bit of contract work for in the past. It’s a bit of a risky move but I’m a bit tired of being mired in bureaucracy…

Embedded stuff is quite tricky, as it often requires someone who has at least a reasonable appreciation for the hardware and isn’t a pure software person, so a broader skillset than the typical “boring business software” jobs. If you want someone who lives to work rather than works to live, then yes – you’re going to have trouble finding developers especially in a fairly niche skillset!

Last Edited by alioth at 21 Apr 10:57
Andreas IOM

I suspect David is after what I think is called server side programming.

There are a lot of people in it but few of them are good. In the old days you just needed to know PHP and how to interface to a database. Then you wrote… a pilot forum, or a dating site Today, you need a vast range of skills: several server languages, client browser scripts, style sheet stuff (which is a vast field, because it needs to work across a big range of client devices and several browser types), security (any public facing site will be attacked within an hour of the DNS being published, and any site which attracts, shall we say, controversy, is going to get hit with highly specialised attacks because there will be motivation, and funding to do it). Even banks do it badly. And each Chrome update breaks a lot of sites…

Embedded is relatively simpler. You normally control the whole thing, write it all in C, one good coder can usually do the entire project. There is still a lot of skill needed (hardware, software, smart component selection especially these days) and most of the good people are 40+ Good luck with your ARM32 – that’s what I am going now

I’ve never had a job. Applied for a contract position in 1978 and got turned down because they thought I was a KGB plant

Administrator
Shoreham EGKA, United Kingdom

The problem with PHP is there are millions of PHP developers, but only a small number of them are good, and PHP makes it easy to write bad code, and even good developers make errors with PHP which are much more difficult to make in Java or C#. My current job is server side development (but back end stuff, so Java). We try to push all the user interface stuff to the browser these days, rather than trying to have essentially “server side UI” written in PHP (which essentially is what PHP was written to do – it originally stood for “personal home page”, although in the 2000s, given the number of security issues with PHP and the mess that was its standard library, I preferred to think it stood for “Pretty Hopeless Privacy”).

Javascript unfortunately suffers many of the same problems as PHP (plus a bunch more) when it comes to security. At least the tools for Javascript are decent these days! (And I still don’t know how Netscape didn’t get sued by Sun for calling it Javascript – it has nothing to do with Java).

Last Edited by alioth at 21 Apr 11:53
Andreas IOM

Peter wrote:

I’ve never had a job.

You don’t know the fun you are missing – the corporate world is fantastic! :D

Hiring good technical people is very hard. I’m trying to train my HR recruitment team to adapt to the type of people we are targeting. Very little success. What I typically do is to hire people that are recommended by my existing team – whether I have a role at that moment or not. Somehow, we always find a place for them to add value…

Fly more.
LSGY, Switzerland

We try to push all the user interface stuff to the browser these days

What the inexperienced coders don’t realise is that you have to validation of everything in two places: client side and server side. This is because every half respectable hacker bypasses the browser and drives the server interface directly. It would be nice to do it just in one place (would have to be server side) but there are responsiveness issues, in general.

PHP is OK. It is easy enough to write crap code in any language. The key to good sw is knowing where the skeletons are buried; the actual language is secondary.

there are millions of [ x ], but only a small number of them are good

True for any x You have the same problem finding a carpenter who is not a complete dickhead.

What I typically do is to hire people that are recommended by my existing team

IME, the existing team will only ever recommend either nobody or somebody who is worse than they are Almost nobody wants to work among smarter people. I find that weird; I always wanted to work with people way smarter than I am because it’s a lot more fun, and good learning.

Administrator
Shoreham EGKA, United Kingdom

Peter wrote:

IR35 (or whatever it is called now) is not and has never been an issue IF you have at least several clients, and take the most basic precautions re (e.g.) using your own equipment, not having a job contract, etc.

@Peter, most of my present and former colleagues who were contractors stopped being them. You are being paid the same for higher risk of losing that job and less protections. And many employers just stopped doing it at all.
Surprisingly, quite a few decided to just retire. Some of them are in their forties!

@David, where are they have to be based? Many people now plainly refuse to work from office (other than to visit for some meeting).
Some insist on working from another country if they wish so. Another challenge is some just don’t want to relocate to the UK – at least few of my former colleagues that work in FR, DE, IE or BENELUX just refuse. “Why bother? Some work permit and then you have follow some extra rules and then you have that (preceived) xenophobia… What for?” The pay in the UK is greater as well as expenses.

Things have really changed in the last 12-24 months.

And some things have changed around 5-10 years ago – it is no longer that desirable in the UK to work as a geek. May be manager, but not a geek – not glamorous enough.

EGTR

Thanks for the various replies. And some interesting comments – not necessarily relevant, but interesting as to the perception of the market.

It’s not about the job ads, the salaries, the T&C’s, the availability of people and skillsets etc. As I mentioned, I actually have a dedicated team for finding candidates and doing first round interviews, all of which works really well. I employ developers (front end, back end, QA, DevOps, researchers, analysts, etc.) globally, some work from home, some from offices around the world. These are £75-150K perm positions generally.

So really this was just about asking some existing developers “hey, where would you go online if you wanted to find a new job?”. I could ask on a developer’s forum, but pilots are more friendly! Agency fees are pretty painful (30% in some places and even higher in the US), terrible guarantees (only 25% fee returned if they don’t pass probation, etc.) and they do very little more than being a source of CVs – their interviews and commentary on the candidates’ skills are literally worthless. So in an effort to cut back on agency use, I wanted to find some good online sources. StackOverlow was good a few years ago, but these days they’re all about “branding” and don’t even want to speak to us (< 1,000 people company).

And yes, I’d agree the market has changed quite a bit since the pandemic. Good mobile app developers are especially hard to find, but always were.

Administrator
EGTR / London, United Kingdom
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