Cardiff tech firm: 'We'll pay £100k, but can't get staff'

https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-wales-45891002

30 81 8 years ago

leed25d• 8 years ago

Can't get staff? What a shame. Would you consider starting some kind of training policy?

dazc4• 8 years ago

Same for almost every industry, training is only paid for if it's to fulfill some legal requirement such as health and safety courses and such.

choot• 8 years ago

I wonder if training works for developers.

I've never seen any company offering developer training, so i assumed training developers doesn't work.

ashelmire• 8 years ago

If there's a junior in the job title, it means they train developers.

crispyambulance• 8 years ago

Training? These days? Not gonna happen.

If it does, it is in elite organizations under the wing of highly principled bosses who are able shield their staff from project-management and organization-wide performance-metrics bullshit.

mhd• 8 years ago

Their career page says 60k, though.

If it weren't out of area of expertise, Wales is quite beautiful. And I almost understand Rhod Gilbert.

maaark• 8 years ago

I wouldn't be able to stop myself from saying "way-als" in a mocking accent. Just like how I can't stop myself saying "moo-ney" when I hear it from a Dubliner.

consp• 8 years ago

This reads like an advertorial. Does the BBC have some interest in getting tech workers to Wales?

dazc4• 8 years ago

No, the BBC has an anti-Brexit agenda.

growlist• 8 years ago

Well I gave you an upvote, because it's true.

martiuk2• 8 years ago

They didn't mention it in the article but I wouldn't be surprised if it crossed their mind.

matthewmacleod4• 8 years ago

That’s a ludicrous statement. Do you have any evidence whatsoever to back it up?

bulatb3• 8 years ago

The company just raised a series B. Might be part of a PR push.

joezydeco• 8 years ago

MyPinPad needs 100 software engineers in Cardiff to roll out a new product

Roll it out, or actually get it written? What kind of product needs 100 additional engineers to launch?

bulatb3• 8 years ago

They just raised £15 million in series B, enough to pay those 100 engineers £100k each for... 1.5 years, assuming zero overhead and no other expenses?

Edit: also assuming no revenue, so I don't know. Is that normal startup math?

Double edit: Crunchbase revenue estimate is $20.9M.

strig• 8 years ago

Also assuming zero additional revenue.

dagw2• 8 years ago

The kind of product that needs a lot of bespoke customization for each customer.

swarnie_• 8 years ago

As a tech worker who started close to Cardiff i've slowly moved down the M4 as my career has progressed. Jobs over 60k are rare outside of London - > Bristol and all towns in between.

mattlondon2• 8 years ago

In the article they say they are offering London salaries. Fine. But Cardiff is not the same as London!

London is huge comapred to Cardiff. Cardiff has about 500,000 people in its urban area compared to 10,000,000 in London, and Cardiff is about 30 square miles compared to almost 700 square miles for London [1]. As such London just has a lot more going on - theatre, museums, nightlife, restaurants, sports, shopping, meet-ups, career-possibilities, transport, galleries... you name it there is more of it in London, and its also generally all very good or even world-class quality. Sure Cardiff has some stuff going on and has its own cultural & social activities, but it is in no way even in the same league as London by any stretch.

As a result you're not going to lure someone to Cardiff by just matching London salaries - who would give up London to go to Cardiff to get the same salary but a culturally and socially moribund (by comparison) experience? You have to offer them something above and beyond. Not everyone likes hiking & nature, and I'd wager that most people in these salary ranges aren't that badly impacted by high property prices in London.

Perhaps offer salaries that are more than London and then see if the applications start rolling in?

1 - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cardiff & https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/London

celticninja4• 8 years ago

Also Cardiff doesn't have London's high cost of living and ridiculous property prices. So if you get a London equivalent wage then you have a lot more disposable income if you live and work in Cardiff.

zimpenfish• 8 years ago

who would give up London to go to Cardiff to get the same salary but a culturally and socially moribund (by comparison) experience?

Me. But then I'd much prefer to have lots of open space around and orders of magnitude fewer people.

calyth2018• 8 years ago

Or this is the same kind on insanity that you see with the Bay Area? Or hell, even Vancouver.

Everyone's rushing there for the same reason, with all the cultural things that's suppose to be going on in the big city, only to find that the high CoL make life actually quite a bit more difficult to enjoy.

It gentrifies the area quickly, the commute is either long (in the case of the bay area) or being one of the sardine in the Tube.

The disposable income ends up being lower, so there's less money to actually enjoy the things that actually attracted people to the cities.

new_here• 8 years ago

100%. London has become a tragedy of the commons.

golergka• 8 years ago

Judging from the Wikipedia, Cardiff metro area has about the same population as Tel Aviv, which still manages to host one of the world's hottest start up scenes.

dagw2• 8 years ago

It's not a matter of population. Tel Aviv is probably the most interesting and happening city in that whole great region, while Cardiff isn't.

tome• 8 years ago

The Tel Aviv metro area is closer to 4m people: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gush_Dan

pjc502• 8 years ago

I'd seriously consider it, and I think a lot of other people would as well. People who are a bit older, a bit less sociable, or have families? Absolutely. Alternatively, new graduates who've not settled anywhere yet but would really like some money thrown at their overdraft.

most people in these salary ranges aren't that badly impacted by high property prices in London

Everybody is impacted by high property prices in London, except the tax exiles with the empty mansions. I moved from Cambridge to Edinburgh and benefited greatly from the lower property prices.

However, as others point out, this seems to be fraudulent advertising: all the advertised positions are £60k. Where's the £100k coming from? Did they only have one post at that range which is now filled?

There does seem to be a sudden hiring boom going on in the UK, which I'm curious about - applicants are hard to find and advertised salaries are up. Alternatively is this the consequence of Brexit-induced skilled staff supply shortages?

(Pet peeve: it should be mandatory for job adverts to post a salary range, even if it's a really wide one)

mkingston• 8 years ago

I found Cambridge salaries weren't wonderful in general, though I'm aware that's probably changing, and there are exceptions. How have you found Edinburgh salaries compare? Obviously I don't expect data, just an anecdote would satisfy my curiosity.

dvdcxn3• 8 years ago

You're projecting your own perception onto others.

Let me raise a counterpoint, the cost of living in Cardiff is vastly less than the, frankly, over inflated prices in London.

I'm going to reuse your tone here - who would give up Cardiff to go to London to get the same Salary but pay twice as much for rent?

I'd raise another point as well - you're assuming people prefer the art and culture scene in London in comparison to a more local scene in a smaller city where gentrification isn't as ubiquitious. I'd rather live in Glasgow, where anyone can afford to go to a club or gig than London, where such activities are generally reserved for rich kids.

wmonk• 8 years ago

who would give up Cardiff to go to London to get the same Salary but pay twice as much for rent?

Clearly nobody... which is what they are talking about in the article.

mattlondon2• 8 years ago

You're totally correct - its not for everyone (just like Cardiff is not for everyone). London is a big city and comes with big city problems.

However, I'd still argue that their offer is clearly not competitive by matching London salaries since they are not getting applicants.

For what it is worth, in my personal opinion if you are renting on 100K a year, you're Doing It Wrong. I appreciate some people value the flexibility of renting though. Saving up for a mortgage deposit with £100K a year salary and equity grants etc should be no problems, and mortgage repayments are usually either equal or substantially lower than rental rates for equivalent properties. Even in London, a commute of just 25 minutes from central London [2] you can buy a one bed flat for 250-300K which is very affordable on a 100K a year salary. [1]

1 - https://www.rightmove.co.uk/property-for-sale/find.html?loca...

2 - https://www.google.com/maps/dir/Finchley+Central+Station/Tra...

ljf2• 8 years ago

For housing = yes it is crazy.

For loads of clubs - you'll pay the same. There are hundreds of tiny clubs in London - many offering free or very cheap entry every night of the week. Yes London has a few expensive clubs (that are generally rubbish once you are in if you aren't paying for champagne) - it has loads of great places to see live music, comedy, djs and acts for pocket money. Just pick up a copy and Time Out and you'll def find soemthing you are interested in... 'If one is bored of London...'

biztos• 8 years ago

you name it there is more of it in London

Welsh speakers?

(Probably not a big factor in recruiting, but still...)

DrNuke• 8 years ago

London is huge compared to Cardiff

Yes, so many more rats running the same race on the same overcrowded facilities? Cardiff is a nice city and the same London money is worth two times more there.

Jmcdd• 8 years ago

+1 hour commutes on the tube, rude people, diesel fumes, outrageous rental prices. I could go on but I'm at work. This country cares WAY too much about London.

briffle• 8 years ago

Or even better than just increasing salaries.. Let people work remote. Then people who want to live in the big city can (without the commute, which is a plus!) and people that want to live in the small town can, plus everyone in between. What part of being a programmer means they 'need' to be in the office in that town?

notahacker• 8 years ago

Every other industry manages to find hires in Cardiff on less than London salaries, and programmers aren't that special in terms of cultural needs. A London salary in Cardiff is a lot more disposable income than a London salary in London (or an owned large house rather than a rented apartment), and plenty of programmers that wouldn't start their search for their next job in Cardiff would see that as tempting if they were aware the company was keen to hire people like them at London salaries.

Of course that's part of the reason companies spend budget on headhunters rather than extra salary...

jfindley3• 8 years ago

I am continually amazed at the cynical attempt by hiring managers to try to pretend that the laws of supply and demand shouldn't apply to non-exec level staff. If you can't hire the people you want for what you're offering that should be a signal to pay more, not to whine that you can't force your idea of a reasonable wage on others.

petermcneeley2• 8 years ago

Yes but you missed out on why they are doing this. This "whining" is actually about changing public perception such that business can take action to widen its access to a larger pool of skilled workers. The more competitive the talent market the more they can keep a larger share of their profits.

BurningFrog2• 8 years ago

True. On the other hand, there are hard limits to what companies can afford to pay their employees. Related to the same supply and demand laws.

petermcneeley2• 8 years ago

I think your following the logic of the minimum wage laws. In this case however the wages are not fixed but purely determined by the market. Given that markets are optimizers of capital allocation, if a company cannot be profitable at the current values (relating to input and output) then it should not exist.

skybrian• 8 years ago

Job offers aren't a liquid market. Publicity is still needed or people won't find out about the job. It can be hard to tell whether the problem is with the job offer or word not getting out.

Getting a story in the BBC and on Hacker News might help, though.

repsilat• 8 years ago

Exactly. Actions that spread information make the market more efficient, which is good for the business, their customers and the economy at large, if perhaps not for existing employees.

The same goes for skills/training/policy. Getting the word out that programming is a comfortable, well-paid job that requires no formal education is a huge net win.

Really I can't understand the grandparent's post... The article says "We tried paying more and it's not working" and their answer is "Try paying even more."

ableal• 8 years ago

Among the insightful humorous essays of C. Northcote Parkinson (cf. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parkinson%27s_law ) there's one about wording job ads that says:

"Only a little thought is needed to convince us that the perfect advertisement would attract only one reply and that from the right person."

matthewmacleod4• 8 years ago

So while there is validity to this, my experience hiring staff is that there is genuinely a lack of skilled tech workers in the UK, especially at senior levels - it’s not just down to salary requirements.

Sure - as demand goes up and supply is constrained, salaries have to rise. But it’s more complex than that - first, salary increases don’t magically increase supply. There’s a long lag time between salary rises and increased supply. On top of that, there’s a particular dearth of senior engineers. It’s easier to recruit people with less experience, and there’s nothing wrong with doing that and training them up - but this in itself takes quite a lot of investment and can be difficult in a small team. And third, the UK’s shitty immigration process and ongoing Brexit catastrophe make it more difficult to recruit developers from other countries.

At some point, it becomes economically infeasible to run a functioning business as the staff you need become more expensive to hire. It’s good for people in that market, but it can also make it difficult to run a sustainable small business, and it’s okay to call attention to that. Like most things, it’s a bit of a balancing act.

jfindley3• 8 years ago

I'm not sure I find this convincing. There are lots and lots of skilled tech workers in the UK that want permanent roles, but the really good ones already have well paid jobs, usually either for the finance sector or with Google/Facebook/etc. £100k to relocate to Cardiff isn't even slightly tempting to these people (source: I'm one of them).

For many years the UK has had very low tech salaries compared to similar locations, and compared to other similarly skilled jobs[0][1]. As demand for good tech staff rises this is starting to equalise. This is a trend that's unlikely to reverse, and IMO this is a good thing.

I appreciate that if you're trying to run a small business it's frustrating that you can't get the staff you want at the price you want to pay, but the solution isn't to hope that people will work for less you make you richer. You'll need to either adjust your budget, your expectations, or offer something that their current job doesn't give them (share of the business (with the same liquidation prefs that you have), or 100% remote, or something else along these lines). If you really can't do any of those things, then maybe your business just can't afford what you want and you'll need to hire more junior people and train them up.

I've been on both sides of this fence, lots, and I've never once felt there was a shortage of good tech people in the UK, or found it hard to find smart candidates, it's just that the good ones expect to get paid well for the skills they have spent many years honing.

0: e.g. in Zurich finance and tech are compensated similarly, in London finance gets significantly more (sources: https://www.payscale.com/research/CH/Location=Zurich/Salary https://www.cwjobs.co.uk/salary-checker/average-financial-sa... https://www.cwjobs.co.uk/salary-checker/average-software-eng...) 1: http://www.p2pfinancenews.co.uk/2018/02/08/london-tech-salar...

otras• 8 years ago

Onboarding and dividing work between 100 engineers is hard. Makes me think of Brooks' law: "Adding human resources to a late software project makes it later." [0]

MyPinPad's careers page [1] lists four positions (Android developer, iOS developer, senior devops engineer, and services developer) with the same "salary up to £60,000 per annum, depending on experience" for each position. The higher salary makes for a good news article (and a good advertisement for their recruiting team), but I wonder if they could increase their application rate by showing the same salary as the one they advertised in the article.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brooks%27s_law

[1] https://www.mypinpad.com/careers/

nhkssol• 8 years ago

Brooks' Law: "nine women can't make a baby in one month."

flashgordon• 8 years ago

When firing duds, no women will ever get pregnant!

ericcholis• 8 years ago

On a similar note, putting "Pay based on experience" also limits your application pool. Tell people what you are willing START the pay rate at.

BurningFrog2• 8 years ago

Depends on how your work and code base is organized.

In my pair programming jobs, we've usually been able to onboard people to be fully productive in a few weeks.

HarryHirsch• 8 years ago

If you are laid off in London your next job will be in London and you don't have to move house. If you are laid off in Cardiff the next job is in Bristol, Birmingham or Milton Keynes. Property prices don't figure into the equation so much because no one is going to buy in a town where the tech scene is small.

edem• 8 years ago

Maybe you should allow remote work?

martiuk2• 8 years ago

Up to 60k p/a[0] for a Senior DevOps engineer is not exactly London wages when the exact same job can start at or above 80k. [1]

Have they also thought that not every engineer lives in (or wants to move to) Cardiff?

What is their remote working policy? Do they even have one?

[0] https://www.mypinpad.com/careers/

[1] https://www.cwjobs.co.uk/jobs/permanent/senior-devops-engine...

CryoLogic• 8 years ago

Bad Title. Actual article says "up to 100k", as in maximum. I assume most people don't get that offer.

EnderMB3• 8 years ago

Their job posts say "up to 60k", so it's not just a bad title. It's a blatant lie.

The main question, for me, is what point the article is trying to prove. The cynic in me believes that it's an effort to drive down permanent developer salaries by saying "we already tried to offer above market rates and it didn't work, so we're bringing them down again".

From a .NET perspective, I think you'd be lucky to get £100k a year in a contract role, let alone as a permanent employee. With that said, if you want to earn more than £50k in the south west, your only choice is large multinational company (which are mostly in London), management, or contracting.

EnderMB3• 8 years ago

So, has MyPinPad actually tried raising their salary offering to £100k? I find it very hard to believe they have, because that would be well-above the average for the area. In relation to standard Web Developer roles, it'd be over double what I could expect in Cardiff for a mid-to-senior level role.

Their website currently says "up to £60k", and in my experience companies that say "up to" will rarely go to that number unless the candidate is very/over qualified, in which case that candidate has zero potential for growth and will have a hard time getting an annual raise unless things go brilliantly.

MyPinPad look like a reasonably large company, so their salary offering right now is probably average or above, but the article itself is absolute crap. If MyPinPad were to offer £100k for their Services Developer role I'd beat their door down for an interview. It's double what I'm getting in Bristol right now, I have C# and non-CLR expeirence, and the commute would be worth it. Hell, for that money I could drive in, pay an obscene amount for parking and still be ahead!

I don't buy for a second that they have failed to get devs in when offering £100k. Either they're full of shit, or they are terrible at advertising roles.

bshimmin• 8 years ago

I agree with everything you're saying, apart from the very last clause - they made it to the "Most Read" on the BBC News web site, so I think they must be pretty good at advertising themselves!

pjungwir• 8 years ago

There was an article last year titled, "I’d Pay You $500k a Year, but You Can’t Do the Work". It said they were looking for "React/Redux specialists, Unity developers, data scientists, and data engineers (proficient with TensorFlow), technical project managers (who used to do the above, but have evolved into managers), and technical account executives". So $500k for React programmers. (Also note the hero image.)

But there was no careers page, no call-to-action to apply, or as far as I could tell any way to contact them at all. Here's what I wrote then: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14248550

It sounds like today's company is similarly interested in getting some press and maybe influencing immigration policy, not in getting applications.

digianarchist• 8 years ago

Right. 100k probably included their end of National Insurance, recruiter fees and all that hidden costs that don't end up in a persons final compensation.

EnderMB3• 8 years ago

That's what I initially thought, but even with my rough estimates of around £8500 in NI from the employer, and around £9-10,000 in recruitment fees (assuming roughly 15% of the first year salary, which is already pretty high) - with all of this rounded up to roughly £20k, that's still a full £20k short of what the article says if they were to hire someone for the maximum £60k a year.

The easy argument is that they're full of shit. My guess is that the only way they can attract people to Cardiff is to raise salaries, but even £60k (which is a good salary for Cardiff) isn't enough to stop people from chasing the big bucks in London. They don't want to pay more than £60k, so their alternative is to complain that salaries aren't enough and that the problem is out of their control.

CalRobert• 8 years ago

So.... pay more then. Does the city say "we'll pay 100k but can't get quants"? Or do they pay market rate?

If they can't pay more, perhaps other people have found ways to make more profitable use of their engineers' time, in which case their business is not viable.

poulsbohemian• 8 years ago

I see articles like this and they always seem to overlook the solution: hire remotely. Oh sure, it isn't what they want and yes it introduces complexity they might not want, but it is the answer. People want to live where they want to live. Some might be lured by more money. Some will recognize that there are clusters of jobs in certain urban areas and be unwilling to move to other locations as a result. Not in one of those prime tech clusters? Just accept that you need to hire where the people are, not where you want them to be. Furthermore, there's an irony of tech firms making money over the internet, but believing all their staff must be physically located together.

londons_explore• 8 years ago

Engineers willing to move for their job would normally move to silicon valley and get offered $150k, and much lower taxes.

Even at £100k (and ~45% tax!), you're only going to get people who either already live in Cardiff, or are happy to relocate to Wales, but not to relocate to the USA (not all that many people).

Cardiff tech firm: 'We'll pay £100k, but can't get staff'

Related Stories