May sound weird, but don't forget the Job Centre. I got a previous job at a startup via the Job Centre. My employers hadn't thought of advertising there until Business Link or some entreprisey support place like that suggested it. They've got a good job search facility. Don't think it costs anything to advertise a job there. People mistakenly think people only go there to collect dole but actually it is a place to look for a job too!
I probably sound like a broken record on HN, but this is surely a big part of the problem - living costs in London. Even £40k doesn't give a great standard of living in London, due to ridiculous accommodation and transport costs. I think that startups should locate somewhere much cheaper but still attractive to grads, somewhere north. Examples - Birmingham, Nottingham, Sheffield, Leeds, Newcastle.
Fair point. My personal definition of a reasonable living standard, is being able to save a house deposit and eventually buy a 2-up 2-down terraced house, without forgoing all social life or basic no frills holidays. Such as house costs £70-80k in a cheap part of a northern city, £120k in a more up-market part, and, as for London, well maybe its under £300k on the very last stop on a tube line - Morden for example.
In London you're likely to end up in a shared apartment for years. It might be a nice apartment, with good housemates, but it'll never be yours, and what happens when you get married and have kids? Lots of people answer "well then I move a 45 min train ride away". My other definition of decent standard of living involves not paying out thousands of £ to catch a stressful crowded train every day. ;)
Nowadays unis get ranked partly on what % of their grads are in employment x number of months after graduating, so its important to them to get graduates placed in jobs. I've come across a Computer Science department having a careers contact, who emails out vacancies to students. Maybe you might get somewhere by contacting unis and trying to get these careers contacts? (assuming a few of them do this?)
I can't answer for agavin here, but I can tell you one reason why I write more code in Ruby than in Smalltalk: integration.
Smalltalk, more than Lisp or Java, is just not suited to little programs that get the job done. It is really great for rapid development of things that live in the Smalltalk image and play with other Smalltalk objects... but stepping outside of those boundaries is often painful and frustrating. Squeak, for example, is plagued by arcane and undocumented classes for socket I/O or HTTP.
It just feels like its own isolated world compared to a simple Ruby hashbang script that reads from stdin and writes to stdout.
Thank you. :) As a fan of PG's articles regarding language power, I've wondered why he didn't make more comparisons of other languages to Smalltalk (whether positive or negative)
For the UK startup scene to really succeed ..... how about if people located their startups in places where people can actually afford housing costs ? such as - Sheffield, Leeds, Birmingham, Nottingham, Newcastle etc .
I completely disagree with this, simply because there is already a fantastic and large hub in London. There's hundreds of startups here already and proximity to VCs, in one of the world's best cities. It makes a lot more sense to build on something that's already strong, and make it stronger.
I think one of the smartest things this Government has done is to recognise that and ignore calls from people outside London to create something elsewhere. But yes, London is frigging expensive. That said, you can live close to, but outside London and it's no more expensive than the other places you mention.
I acknowledge London is in many ways a fantastic place to live and grow a business. Its great for the UK if we can have a growing startup hub based in London. However, while many startups will flourish in London, so many others would be completely dead in the water if they tried to grow while facing London costs.
Living just outside London is surely more costly than living in a comparable area of a city further north, when you take into account a rail season ticket? Also, commuting times get silly.
There's loads of talent scattered across the UK. Whats the point of trying to get that talent to move somewhere where everyone else already wants to live, and quality of life in many ways is poor as result? Silicon Valley is different because they actually pay enough for people to live there. Maybe that's the answer - startups need to start paying £70k to developers in Shoreditch when the same person would have been happier being paid £20k to live in Derby?
Thanks for the response though- its interesting to debate these things. :)
You might be in a strong position with that part-time job, if it covers basic living costs. It leaves extra time that full-timers don't have. With this time, you can try ideas that may or may not pay off, like freelancing, start your own company, or contribute to open source in the hope of gaining a reputation that brings in work / job offers.
Often on HN there's talk of quitting a full-time job to start a start-up. That's high-risk unless you're married or in long-term relationship with someone who has a secure job. But working part-time while doing your own thing part-time too sounds potentially good to me, however boring or unsatisfying the part-time job is. And BTW it'd be a lot worse if you had a full-time boring job, right? ;)
You say it hasn't worked out .... well, it just hasn't worked out YET. In a few weeks time ski resorts will be hiring for the winter. How about doing that for a few months? You might be very glad you did. :)
Additional info : Changing this slightly to drop range header when more than 10 ranges (i:e the 5 on the third line becomes a 10 instead ), can avoid problems where serving of large pdfs get broken by this fix.
