>> Writing software for Internet routers sounds like pretty specialist 
>> stuff. (It's basically writing security-critical software for an 
>> embedded platform.) I'd be surprised if somebody with no 
>> qualifications other than a degree could actually get a job like that.
> 
> They were only taking graduates, so obviously they were going to give 
> training, they weren't expecting you to walk in on Monday and start 
> programming routers.  The same way as my employer wasn't expecting me to 
> walk in on my first day and design an LCD.  Hint, if it has "graduate" 
> in the job title it probably means they aren't assuming anything more 
> than a typical university course.

Hmm, I hadn't tried doing any searches for graduate positions recently. 
Maybe I should try that, if only for completeness. Dr Pepper.

I'd bet even a graduate position would require a strong understanding of 
C though (and probably lab experience of writing firmware and flashing 
it onto microcontroller boards or similar). And at any rate, I don't 
suppose there are too many people hiring for this sort of thing. (In 
other words, they can pick the best of the best of the best, and if that 
isn't you, you needn't even apply.)

>>> How come? Even if you started on 20K, a 50% pay increase over 7 years 
>>> is not surprising.
>>
>> Er... OK, I may have got my maths wrong here, but if we assume that 
>> you get pay increases as large as 0.5% every single year,
> 
> I assumed you'd get about about a 4% raise per year and maybe a single 
> 10-20% raise for a promotion during those 7 years.

20% seems like a really rather large riase. (Unless you, like, 
single-handedly revolutionised an entire department or something.) Then 
again, having never received or met anybody who received a promotion, I 
guess I wouldn't know.

> If you're only getting 0.5% per year (last year or two can be excepted 
> for obvious reasons) then that is really bad, inflation is usually 2-3% 
> so you're actually getting a pay *cut* each year.  Never heard of that 
> unless your company is in big trouble or doesn't want you any more.

I don't think there's ever been a raise here of an entire percent. Most 
years there's no raise at all, but sometimes we get 0.25% or something. 
And when we do, everybody complains [which always seemed odd to me]. 
They say what you said "this is a pay cut". Personally, I would have 
thought *not* getting a raise would be worse... but what do I know?

Currently my employer loses around four million USD per year. You may 
remember there was recently some talk of the company globally handing 
out a 4% pay cut "temporarily". There used to be a time when the UK 
division was the only profitable site, but AFAIK now all sites are 
running at a loss of some size or other.

But hey, we've hardly had a single order on our books (i.e., the UK) for 
about a year and a half now. It costs money to pay people to stand 
around doing nothing. Seems like there's more activity happening in the 
lab recently though. I don't know if this is a trend or a fluctuation.

My plan, of course, is to not stick around to find out. ;-)

>> She's younger. She hasn't been in accounting for 7 years, and doesn't 
>> have her qualification *yet*. (She gets her final exam results this 
>> month IIRC.)
> 
> By the time she's passed her qualifications and got 7 years experience I 
> would expect her to be over 30K.  Then you'll know someone :-)

Heh, well, I guess we'll see.

Of course, she lives in Guildford, where the cost of living is 
apparently very much higher, so she'll probably still be fairly "poor".

>> I guess as you say, the problem is that I only know people with quite 
>> low incomes. It seems incongruous to me that somebody without a PhD in 
>> astrophysics [or simply an enterprising genius] could actually earn 
>> decent money.
> 
> I don't think you need to have a PhD in anything to earn decent money, 
> or be amazingly clever.

Right. Well then I guess it's just that everybody I've met happens to be 
fairly poor then.

Post a reply to this message