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What's with Feral and their very low range pay?
Arehandoro Nov 9, 2021
As usual, I was browsing for any cool job vacancies that could be out there (UK Based) and today I bumped into several role offerings from Feral. However, it really astonished me how extremely low the wages are in general, and in particular considering they are highly special roles:

UI Programmer: £22-25K
Java Tools Developer: £20K
Development QA Engineer: £23K
DevOps Engineer: £22-26K
Lead QA Technician: £22-25K

Those are only an example, and the role would be London based, which makes them even lower considering how expensive life is in this city. Sometimes Feral employees visit the forum, perhaps they can clarify whether those are very entry-level roles or whether the salary ranges were copy/paste into all vacancies?
Liam Dawe Nov 9, 2021
Yeah that's pretty low, considering even when I worked in a call centre years ago I was on 19K a year. 1K more for a Java Tools Dev? Wow. That's bad.
damarrin Nov 9, 2021
These would be pretty good wages for Poland, maybe they're opening an office in Cracow?
Samsai Nov 9, 2021
Quoting: GuestSuch roles are not considered very special. That pay is very low, yes, but not surprising to me. They are for junior developers or basically interns - anyone with very little experience, and who with a right mind won't stay there very long.
I've seen quite a good deal of this - it's not limited to Feral, the UK, or even to software development I suspect.
I would disagree. Some of those titles seem like they could be just code monkey positions, but hype words like DevOps will get you a fair bit better pay provided you actually have relevant skills. From my point of view, as an intern, the pay still seems fairly low considering my intern salary has been over 31k euro per year. Granted, that salary is on the top end, but these salaries equate to low-to-average intern salaries. I've got intern colleagues that are in their first or second year of BSc studies that are being paid more.
Arehandoro Nov 9, 2021
Quoting: Guest
Quoting: Samsai
Quoting: GuestSuch roles are not considered very special. That pay is very low, yes, but not surprising to me. They are for junior developers or basically interns - anyone with very little experience, and who with a right mind won't stay there very long.
I've seen quite a good deal of this - it's not limited to Feral, the UK, or even to software development I suspect.
I would disagree. Some of those titles seem like they could be just code monkey positions, but hype words like DevOps will get you a fair bit better pay provided you actually have relevant skills. From my point of view, as an intern, the pay still seems fairly low considering my intern salary has been over 31k euro per year. Granted, that salary is on the top end, but these salaries equate to low-to-average intern salaries. I've got intern colleagues that are in their first or second year of BSc studies that are being paid more.

Ah, sorry for my terminology - I didn't intend to imply they weren't special, just they aren't considered special (by management). In all fairness to some companies, that kind of thing is going to be relative depending on the needs of the company. The DevOps infrastructure for somewhere with 250+ people to support is going to differ against somewhere with about 20 people (of which 15 are experienced developers already). I'm not saying where Feral might fall on that scale.

I have seen a lot (in the UK) of companies trying to lob difficult tasks at very inexperienced people and expect the same results. I've seen the thinking of 1x experienced person's salary = 3x complete beginners, obviously 3 more people means 3 times the work! No, doesn't work that way at all, but that's how management is approaching it. Just ends up burning out people, the experience they gain goes walking out the door, repeat the same thing in a year or two and product quality suffers.

(My current work does not want junior people - they want the experience, they're willing to pay, and damn does it make such a good difference to a working environment when all this is understood by management.)

I should not have used "special" for the description of the roles. All roles are special. What I meant is that they are highly skilled and specific roles.

However, I disagree with the DevOps Infrastructure being different in small or large companies. The methodology, way of communicating, tools, etc should be the same for a job well done. What it might differ is the complexity of these tasks, the amount of people in the team, etc. Furthermore, in my experience, a team of 20+ developers trying to do DevOps without having worked in Infrastructure before, or without a proper DevOps team, tends to cause more issues, and bad practices, more often than not. Although, this is a different topic.

I fully agree with your last 2 paragraphs. My current work wants the same, but they can't afford senior engineers, for a while now too. They end getting Junior roles, putting more pressure on Senior engineering, eventually Junior leave to get more money somewhere else, product suffers big time, and repeat the process.
denyasis Nov 10, 2021
Woa .. those are bad...


I'm a street cleaner and make more than that.
Shmerl Nov 10, 2021
That is surprisingly low. In some places even junior programmer positions would pay a lot more than this.
PublicNuisance Nov 10, 2021
To add some context here, 25000 Euros would be $35000 CAD. If it is GBP then it goes up to $42000 CAD. I make $36000 CAD as my base pay and with overtime and bonuses I made $46000 last year and am on pace for $42000 this year. I work in a warehouse moving boxes around. I only graduated high school and dropped out of college. The requirement for my job is functional limbs, not much else. So to me those seem like very low wages considering I am betting they want college/univeristy for them.
alex_stargazer Nov 10, 2021
It’s hard to believe Feral would have developed Gamescope or ported Tomb Raider while paying their employees such low wages. That’s difficult C and C++ programming that requires talented and expensive people. OP, could you post the link to these job openings? Even for entry-level positions, they are quite low salaries.
denyasis Nov 10, 2021
Maybe they are part time? If this is like a part time thing or includes non-salary benefits (bonuses, etc), it might be more reasonable, I think.
Arehandoro Nov 10, 2021
Quoting: alex_stargazerIt’s hard to believe Feral would have developed Gamescope or ported Tomb Raider while paying their employees such low wages. That’s difficult C and C++ programming that requires talented and expensive people. OP, could you post the link to these job openings? Even for entry-level positions, they are quite low salaries.

They all are in Linkedin.
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