To be bluntly honest £14k is absurd, with living expenses going through the roof, and studying a BSc degree in Computing, and obtaining a few MCPs on the way, only to be told that your worth less than a Sainsbury’s trolley boy would make me stand up, and leave the interview mid way through process.

Before I started my course, I had a figure in mind of the salary I expected, which was £20k - £25k, and when I left, I didn’t even look at jobs offering less than £20k, even with debt mounting from student loans and credit cards. The main problem is confidence in ability, as no one knows it all, and since we tend to just get on with our work, we don’t often socialise about these things. Where a business candidate would know exactly what they are looking for, and what they need to get it, we tend not to play our hand, fearing that we may have our bluff called on not knowing how to code embedded javascript via depreciated c# coding, or how to declare a cursor in a stored procedure (which are arbitrary practices, but we still worry about it!).

In my opinion, if your employer starts off in undervaluing from the get go, don’t be surprised your getting a low pay packet.

A canny person should know what they’re worth and try to exceed that target.

As for Junior (as in Junior straight out of Uni), anything goes. I wouldn’t pay less than 18k, but I’m in London, and that’s probably comparative to 14 or 15 up north, maybe even less.

Lets face it, the market for Juniors is saturated, 10-a-penny. As an employer it’s hard to find a good one, but if I just wanted someone and had time to train them then i’d pay BOTTOM dollar for them, purely because they’re everywhere.

It’s up to the Junior to prove their worth that little bit more, and the only way to do that is bend over backwards once ‘you’re in’ and show that you’re better than your (probably irrelevant, no matter what your university says) degree.

In my opinion, £14K is a bit of an insult to an intelligent, skilled developer (even with little/no experience). Companies will get what they pay for, and if they only offer low salaries, they wont attract the best candidates.

btw, I don’t see what the point of not divulging your salary to your peers - unless we discuss it, how will we know if we’re getting a fair deal as developers?

I run a *small* web development agency and have done for the best part of 10 years since leaving university and there are two ongoing issues for every similar company:

1) Lack of good clients - the kind that allow small companies to grow and pay reasonable market rates for designers and developers - the answer to this one is just to keep looking!
2) Lack of good candidates - I really don’t come across many people at all who have a good knowledge across a wide range of skills who aren’t already in good jobs or wealthy freelancers(!). You don’t have to be a world class expert in any of these areas but if you have a reasonable command of the key web skills you will always be in demand both as a freelancer and an employee. For example good knowledge of XHTML/CSS, at least one javascript library and a reasonable understanding of how to use some of the most obvious open source publishing platforms would be a good place to start.

Finally, as Phil says, get yourself a blog. This site is a great example of self-promotion - well designed, plenty of content that indicates a wide range of understanding of many different areas of web development - not a bad example to follow.

My experience, is this: Your salary will only increase by a few percent with your current employer so the chances of your boss upping your salary by £5k within 18 months is very slim - your employer may be different. However, if at 12-18 months you leave for another agency you will probably command a higher salary than you are earning now.

Get yourself a blog and start blogging about your progress learning those skills you are picking up and within time other web agencies in your area will start to notice you.

I am living in the North East of UK. I have just recently finished my degree 2 weeks ago. My course was Business IT and the only web dev content was a core, year long module. This was learning XHMTL, CSS, JavaScript, PHP and MYSQL Database.

I successfully passed an interview 1 week before my degree finished for a ‘front and back end web developer’ position. The advertised salary was 16k - 25k.

They gave me a 1 week trial at the pay of 15k. Having passed the trial and reflecting back I had no knowledge or experience of the following new skills picked up:
Drupal & PHP
JQuery (JScript library)
Python & Django

They have now said that I would be getting a salary of 14k. The reason given was a lot of hand-holding and seen as more of a trainee programmer. However, I was noticed for being hardworking, able to learn fast and after 18 months the pay could rise by 5k if I was really good.

How do you guys and gals see this? They also said that the starting salary was reflected by me not staying for too long. I was thinking maybe naively I was gonna be with the agency for the long term in my career. How long should I ideally stay?

Thanks in advance for any comments.