I studied here at UWE, graduating from the now-defunct Web Design course a year and a half ago.
Anyway, I’m not too sure why I’m qualified to be here. Dan invited me to come along. I asked him what he wanted me to talk about, and he replied:
So, essentially, an open invitation to talk about anything.
Let’s get started.
We live in a brave new world. You technically don’t need a degree at all to do most jobs in the web. Most jobs in the web are incidentally pretty good and fairly lucrative, but you’re competing against people who never went to uni and have three-four years of real-world industry experience in the time us uni students have sat in ivory towers writing dissertations and learning about table layouts from the 2000s. Or so some people think.
I happen to think Dan’s courses actually set you up really rather quite well for the real world. There’s a breadth of different topics that are covered, so you learn a little bit about most things, but you’re still given some room to specialise.
Yet still, you can’t possibly cover everything. So I will instead. You’re welcome, Dan.
Joking aside, my talk is going to be split into two major themes. Of course, it’s not super rigid and I may go on several tangents, but this is the gist of it:
- How To Not Be Unemployable By Decent Companies
- How To Find A Decent Company And Not Get Fucked Over
Ultimately, it’s a small world. Some people claim that the technology industry is completely meritocratic, which means that people get where they are solely based on their ability and nothing else. The logical conclusion of this is that you can be a complete unlovable hermit and have the world’s best companies pining for you solely based on your ability.
You shouldn’t believe a single word of it.
Of course your ability matters, but it honestly doesn’t matter as much as you think it does, or, in an ideal world, how much it should matter. What really matters is people, and your relationships with them. Once you get a job, you will also be able to hang onto this far easier if you’re good with people. People matter more than the stuff people create.
I didn’t apply for my placement, and I didn’t apply for my post-uni job. I’m currently at a company called
cx are pretty great. I’ll tell you more about this later. My point here being, I didn’t end up with this job because I’m somehow really amazing at my job or because I’m the best front-end developer in Bristol or anything like that. The job wasn’t ever advertised publicly. The job was basically created for me.
How did that happen? Ultimately, I made friends, and I made some noise.
I posted a blog post saying “Hey, folks, I’m nearly done with uni. These are the kind of things I’m looking for and this is what I care about. By the way, I make great cakes. Does anybody want to hire me?” I then tweeted this post and got on with my day.
A friend of mine called Mark Skinner who I had met through the internet and hung out with during several conferences fairly recently got a job at cx. He saw this post, wanted to move from his development position to a more UX-focused role, and basically suggested to his boss to replace me with him so he can do what he really wants to do and I can get a nice job.
I got three job offers from that tiny blog post that took me an hour to write. Ultimately, I decided to go with cx.
What I’m trying to say is: People matter more than nearly anything else.
What I’m also trying to say is: The thing I did while I was in university that had the best return on investment considering the time I spent was:
When I say making friends and being nice to people is the most important thing you can do for your future self right now, I don’t mean you should go to those sleazy douchebag
I see advertised. I’ve never went to one of those. I imagine it in my head as a bunch of balding business dudes who base their entire life around the concept of making their business slightly more money and boasting about it to other balding business dudes. I imagine there’s lots of sweaty handshakes and back-patting and TPS report comparison and all manners of horrendous stuff.
This might be completely bullshit, and the events may be nice, but I’ve never went and so that’s what I imagine it’s like.
All I’m saying is that you shouldn’t be put off by people saying “networking” is important. You can just make friends who just happen to work in the same kind of area as you do. People like making friends.
I genuinely didn’t do this because I felt it would advance my career, it was just something I initially did to procrastinate. But if you’re a bit intimidated by this whole thing, as I totally was, then here’s basically what I did:
- Find people I already knew on Twitter
- Look at who they were following
- Follow some of them
- Talk to them
- Go to the kind of events they’re going to
- Have a drink or two
- Make friends
Events are another important part of the equation. There are three kinds of broad event types: Meetups, hack days, and conferences.
If you’ve ever been to one of Dan’s Digital Media meetups, the meetups are broadly like that, casual evening events that are typically free or very low-cost. Usually, though, there are a couple of talks focussed on the topic of the meetup, which vary a lot. You get meetups on topics on everything from knitting to robotics.
Meetups are really quite nice in that they only last a couple of hours, and especially relevant to you students: free food and booze. Nearly every single meetup I attend get free food and booze. This happens because companies are often keen to sponsor meetups. Do you know why they do that? As you know, companies are ruthless, bloodthirsty entities whose primary purpose are to turn a profit over everything else. Why would they spend a couple of hundred quid for people to be able to get free stuff?
Anyone?
So they gain visibility in the local community so it’s easier for them to hire. Hiring good people is really expensive. Have you seen what recruiters charge? They’re for the most part rubbish, too. Nearly worse than letting agencies. So chucking a couple of hundred bob at a meetup so us nerds can enjoy free food and booze give them lots of goodwill and let them pitch their jobs at local meetups. It works surprisingly well.
Normally there will be a few people from the company at the meetup, so if they’re pitching for new jobs, it’s always worth approaching them and talking to them, even if you’ll be in uni for another while. They might be able to give you a placement if you’re looking for one, but either way, as long as you leave a positive impression, you’ll be ahead of the pack when it comes to getting a job there as the people who are in charge of hiring have already talked to you.
Some local meetups relevant to Digital Media students that you should definitely check out:
- Bristol JS (cxpartners sponsor this pretty regularly despite not actively hiring at the moment, because when we do, more people will have heard of us)
- PHP SW
- SWUX
- SWMobile
- CodeHub
- Accessible Bristol
- BrisTech
- Sass By SouthWest
- Bath Ruby User Group
- Bristol Ruby User Group
- Bristol Web Performance
- Bristol WordPress
- Bristol Photography
- Bristol Media
- Bristol Tech Spark
- Bath Tech Spark
Sure, these are a lot, and I’m not saying you need to go to every single one of these, unless you’re really desperate for free food, but have a look. At least a couple of these will be relevant. If you’re not a social butterfly, grab a coursemate or two along if you can, it’ll be less intimidating that way.
Hack days are basically events where a bunch of nerds get together to make something cool. They’ll usually have a theme to them so people can focus on something concrete, and there are often prizes.
This is how I got my placement job at Simpleweb. I went along with a good friend of mine, Mark, to one of Simpleweb’s hack days.
We cobbled together something fairly decent using their own product, Rusic, and we ended up winning third place in one of the categories and didn’t think much of it after that. However, Mark had the foresight to ask Simpleweb whether they’d consider taking placement students. Initially they said they didn’t, but a few months later during our exam period, they emailed us back, inviting us in for an interview. We both ended up working at Simpleweb for our placement year, which was pretty cool.
Oh, and by the way, we heard about this hack day thanks to a friend on Twitter. Go figure.
Of these types of events, conferences are typically the more formal of the events. Most conferences last from a day to three days, although I’ve seen half-day events and week-long conferences, too. Conferences largely revolve around talks from professionals in the industry the conference focuses on, but some also focus strongly on the social aspect.
Conferences are pretty cool. You may have all went to Bristol’s WebDevConf because you get free tickets, but there are many more conferences out there. The reasons I love conferences are:
You get to learn a lot about new things and gain new perspectives. The talks are typically more rehearsed and professional than at meetups. This is typically because there’s more pressure on as people will typically have paid to attend.
There’s a lot of people there just like you and the social events are often very cool. My favourite conference is HybridConf, which features a bowling night as well as a pure afterparty at the end of the conference, and I had some of the best times of my life there.
More importantly: Most conferences will have subsidised student tickets, or even free ones. This makes sense, as if you enjoy the event as a student, you’ll most likely come back once you’re a professional and pay the full ticket price; especially if you have a training budget to spend like me.
If they don’t, however, you can always volunteer. This way you get to see most of the conference for free in exchange for only a few hours of your time, and this is well worth doing.
Some of my favourite conferences that are accommodating to students are:
- HybridConf
- Reasons to be Creative (£60 for 3 days!)
- New Adventures
- WebDevConf
- SmashingConf
- IndustryConf
- Port 80
It goes without saying that if you’re looking for a job in the web, you should have a website. Right?
Don’t worry, nobody is saying you should have a beautiful, perfect, flawless website out there with four years of weekly blogging as well as ten impeccable case studies of your projects.
But, you should have something. The main reason I hear from students who don’t have a website is that they don’t have time to make one or that they don’t think their work is good enough.
But, trust me, examples of some work that may not be perfect is far, far better than no website and a promise of “my work is really good! please hire me!”, because that, generally, is not going to fly.
The most important thing you can do is describe your projects, what your role was in them, what challenges you faced, how you overcame them, or eventually, how you didn’t. Be honest and open. Don’t try to blag and say you’re better than you are or know something you don’t. It’s really easy to see through this in an interview, or if you magically get the job, it’s even easier to see it through then. This is why probation periods exist.
Oh, and by the way, if you’re not already in final year, for the purposes of getting a job, I highly recommend you choose the Creative Technology project over a dissertation. Of course, if you’re aching to do heavy research into a specific topic and it’s something you wanted to do for a long time, then by all means, go ahead and do that. But if not, or you’re not sure, then I highly recommend the Creative Technology project. It’s a lot easier to go to a potential employer and say “Hey, by the way, look at this cool thing I made in university, it’s online here” than to go “Oh hey, by the way, do you want to read my 12000 word dissertation”? Unless you’re dealing with an academic, the answer to the latter is probably going to be “nope”.
Being in for an interview at cx and being able to show them my final year project and talk about the process was incredibly valuable.
In addition to your website, having a semi-professional Twitter account will also be a great help. It doesn’t have to be all business all the time, because that’s really rather boring, but as long as you tweet about relevant things every now and then, you’re going to leave a better impression on someone whose checking you out on the internet. Trust me, if you apply for a job, they will be looking at your social network profiles. Tweet about your coursework, about what new technologies you’ve used recently that excites you, your lectures, and about non-work stuff too. If you have cats, that’s a bonus.
Some people use LinkedIn, with varied results. I’m not on it (see my earlier comments about networking), but some people find good opportunities over there, so I’m not going to dismiss it. It may work out brilliantly.
When I asked my colleagues who went to university about what they wished was covered in university that actually wasn’t, I got two common themes.
Firstly, in a workplace you’re expected to be pragmatic and know what’s good enough. You heard about the 80:20 rule? Academics often use this, too. 80% of the mark comes from 20% of the effort. The last finishing touches take a long time. You will rarely have time to do this in a commercial workplace.
Secondly, group projects aside, at uni, you’re left to fend for yourself, while in a workplace, if you’re not doing your utmost to collaborate and make things easier for your team, you’re holding everyone back.
At uni I had some pretty bad experiences with group projects (and some good ones). Initially they were mostly bad, and the projects where you couldn’t choose your team were worse, because there will inevitably be stragglers. There are always stragglers.
The fantastic thing about a workplace is that if you have stragglers like I had in my group projects at uni where they only turned up to work 10% of the time and said “sorry I haven’t done anything for the last two months. Been busy init”, you’d most likely be shown the door.
I’m not sure how many of your projects involve teamwork in Digital Media, but it may be less than I had. This is both a good and a bad thing. Good, because there is less of a chance of randos fucking your group mark up, but also bad, because workplaces expect you to be able to collaborate. If you don’t have much experience with this, then you’re going to be at a disadvantage.
An obvious, but time-consuming way to get around this is to work on a little side project with some of your friends or coursemates, or contribute to an open-source project. You don’t have to be a genius to contribute to open-source projects. There’s a fantastic resource on Twitter made by my friend Charlotte called Your First Pull Request. If you’re unfamiliar with the terminology, a pull request is what you do to request a change to a project. Your First Pull Request is aiming to highlight beginner-friendly pull requests for people to be able to work on. Your First Pull Request only showcases issues which come with a clear explanation of what they expect you to do, and how you might go about doing it. Contributing to open source can be intimidating, but Your First Pull Request is aiming to change this.
Also, if you’re in any way looking to do development for a living here, one thing that will massively improve your prospects is learning how to use source control tools like Git or SVN. Git is starting to dominate the space, so I would focus on that.
This is far too broad of a topic to talk about today, but here are some of my favourite resources on it:
Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0fKg7e37bQE Text: https://guides.github.com/activities/hello-world/
Again, I can’t understate this. Nearly every single professional developer will be using source control at work. You’re not expected to be an expert by any means, but even if you know the very basics you’ll be far ahead of most university students. Using version control on your own university projects is a great start, and it’s how I learnt how to use it. As it’s essentially an online backup system by design, it might also save your bacon if your computer dies two days before the deadline.
Nice people matter more than anything else in a job. More than your salary, or your projects. If you work with people who are genuinely nice and not just polite, it will make your life so much better. If you don’t know much about the company beforehand, it’ll be hard to tell what kind of people they are before you go into an interview. The best way to find out is to ask around before applying: Ask freelancers who have worked with the company, ask people who used to work there, or invite someone who works there right now out for a coffee and ask them for their candid opinions. You’ll be surprised at what people tell you.
Most of us decide to participate in the capitalist economy and trade our labour for monetary compensation. Right now, for programmers, designers, UX people, we’re in a pretty good spot. There are more jobs available than there are competent people to fill them. This leads to a generally increased salary level across the board. You should not feel bad for not wanting to get ripped off by a company.
If you take a job in Bristol or the immediate region, this is what you should expect. Placement students should accept no less than £14K, but you should honestly shoot for the top of this £14-18K range. My placement paid me £15K, but that was a few years ago in 2012.
For your first grad job, you’re looking at £20-30K.
If you’re going to London, add 10K on top of these figures, maybe a bit less for a placement.
If you’re going to Nowhere-On-Sea in Ruralhamshire, local salary levels may be a bit lower than in Bristol. Adjust your expectations accordingly.
When it comes to that dreaded point in the interview process where they ask you how much you’re expecting, if you’re anything like me, your stomach sinks with dread. This is a really, really difficult conversation to have, but it’s a really, really important one. No pressure, yeah?
Now, I’m going to tell you to do something even more awful: I want you to ask for more money than you’re comfortable with, and I want you to negotiate your salary. Salaries compound. Salaries are generally pegged to what you used to earn, especially if you don’t switch jobs too many times and just go through the annual review process, but even if you apply for somewhere new, they will ask you about your previous salary information.
If you get an extra £2K from your first job out of uni, that will easily add up to hundreds of thousands of pounds by the end of your career. Is negotiating scary? Yes. Is it worth it? Hell yes.
This blog post I’ve linked to by Patrick McKenzie is a fantastic opus on how to negotiate it, and you’d be very wise to read it carefully.
But nice people and salary aside, what should you look for?
You don’t want to stay somewhere that don’t invest you and take care of you to ensure you do the best work you can do.
I see far too many companies having an anti-investment policy basing it on the reason of “what if we train people and then they leave us? we’ll have wasted all that money!”
Reasonable people will retort that with “What if we don’t train people and they stay?”.
cxpartners is a fantastic example of a company that invests in you.
We get a £1200 individual training budget, which we can use for books, conferences, and workshops. We also get a £1200/per person team training budget. Last October we went to Barcelona to attend Velocity Conference and catch the last of the sun and we had an excellent time.
We get a £200 hobby fund we can use for whatever we want. People have used that for driving lessons, for books, for trips, gym memberships. The only rule is that it can’t be directly related to your job. This is to encourage a good work-life balance.
These are all perks of a company that invests in you and wants you to do the very best you can. I’ve worked at companies who skimp on every penny, refuse to let you work from home even if you really need it, forcing you to take a day off if you’re waiting for a plumber or a delivery or watching your kids’ school play or need to deal with paperwork or admin.
These are not the kinds of companies you want to work for.
So in your interview, if you don’t already know, ask how they invest in employees. Ask if they support you going to conferences, ask what you’d have to do if you had to stay at home for a plumber.
As a junior, you will have so incredibly much to learn, and in my opinion, there is no better way to do that than to pair up with seniors and learn from them. When you’re looking for a job, ask who your seniors are and what your role will involve.
You do not want to be the only person in your role at a company. Say you joined a company as the only designer while the rest of your company is largely programmers. You will not be treated with enough respect, nor will you have anybody more senior to learn from. This is more acceptable when you’re a senior, but not at the start of your career.
This is something that occasionally is missing at cxpartners. One of its few flaws. I’m part of the dev team, which is quite small compared to the UX, design, and PM teams there. Due to the nature of agency work I often find myself working as the only developer on the project. This way I rarely learn as much as I could have done. And recently, one of our full-time devs transitioned into a dev lead role, meaning she takes on a bit more project management. This leaves just me and one other person as dedicated full-time devs. I wish there were a couple more, but we’ll get there eventually.
I could rant for days about these things but our time here is short and you’re probably dying to leave, so I’ll leave it here.
In summary, here’s some advice on getting a job:
- Find nice people and make friends
- Go to events, they’re fun
- Put your work (and yourself) on the internet
- Practice teamwork
- If you’re a dev, learn Git
- Enthusiasm nearly counts for as much as experience
And here’s how to find a nice company and do well there:
- Ask people if they’re nice
- Negotiate your salary and get what you’re worth
- Make sure there’s people in the company to support you
- Make sure the company invests in you
That’s it! Thank you for putting up with me. :)