Every place I interview at thinks:
- developers want to work in fishbowls ("fast paced environment")
- thinks old/used furniture from the 80's is suitable for developers
- assumes we want stock options as compensation (in a "start-up" hell no, give me actual stock or a real salary)
- assumes 40-60k a year is a good salary for developers. Yeah, no, not in Calgary. ("but we're not Oil and Gas so we can't pay as much..." deal with it buddy)
And since this isn't exactly a tech hotbed, most of us are forced to nod politely and take what we get offered (and maybe negotiate a third week of vacation if we're lucky).
Companies that are outside the industry really do have a hard time matching compensation.
It's a funny situation in a way. The average person within the industry doesn't know how good they have it if they have worked their whole career in oil and gas.
Generally people that are outside the industry have a sense of how good it is but don't really know.
Why fight the machine? You should get on the oil and gas ride and do the "fun" stuff on the side.
If I could put up with the O&G corporate environment I'd be all over it - but I do prefer natural light in my work environment and an interesting problem domain over a flourescent lit grey cubicle on the 12th floor of some sky scraper and another well analysis application.
If you managed to grab a job working directly for an Oil & Gas dept doing mobile (they exist), you'd be able to command 90k+. Work would likely be boring though - but you'd get impressive bonuses, benefits and other stuff that you'll never find at the mobile agencies that exist in this city. Most of the agencies are marketing houses - development isn't treated as a priority at most of them.
I will tell you this - mobile dev experience (especially iOS) is hard to find in this city - make sure you get as much as you can for your experience level.
Unless I'm misunderstanding something, in which case I'll have to change my mind on this.
If I'm issued stock options in a privately held company at $1 per share, and I vest 200, I get $0 (the value hasn't changed since I was issued them). In order for the value to change, the company needs to be purchased or be listed on an exchange. No?
We SWEAR by this book: Who (http://www.amazon.com/Who-The-A-Method-Hiring/dp/1400158389)
Skip to chapter 4.
It's structured our interviews as we grow our team at http://thinkful.com/ as well as work with students to improve their resumes as junior engineers.
* Johanna Rothman's "Hiring Geeks that Fit" (https://leanpub.com/hiringgeeks) does what it says on the tin - her blog is a useful resource too http://www.jrothman.com/blog/htp/
* Andy Lester's "Land the Tech Job You Love" (http://petdance.com/book/) is written for job seeker - but is actually a good read for folk on the recruiting side too [bias warning: I was one of Andy's tech reviewers on this book]
* Lou Adler's "Hire With Your Head" which completely changed my approach to interviewing for the better and made it vastly more effective. His accomplishment based interviewing technique is very effective in my experience.
