Best Paid Computer Science Jobs

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Give Planto a star, you pretty much took the words out of my mouth.

In my opinion, you will learn a lot more coming from a small digital agency. From my experience because the larger global digital agency’s have larger budgets and are much more strategic when dealing with their clients this also tends to lead to more development and design time. It's not always the case but it certainly was a lot more manic working in a small digital agency but it's just what I needed as someone looking to learn as much as I could during placement.

If you come from a digital agency background chances are you know how to work fast. Being able to complete a project quicker means you can undertake more projects in less time which in turn makes you more desirable as you can bring in more money for the company.

Demand for jobs in digital agencies tend to be high because of the many benefits in terms of self development however, in terms of salary the smaller studio sized agencies often can’t afford to pay as much as the global sized agencies.

You need a central website that showcases your work to employers. Thats where the portfolio comes in.

(edited 11 years ago)

Reply 21

tkwan196

Original post by anonymouse01

Why

Posted from TSR iPad

Network administrators are just paid highly on average, seeing as it's a very critical part of most modern day systems.

Reply 22

anonymouse01

Original post by tkwan196

Network administrators are just paid highly on average, seeing as it's a very critical part of most modern day systems.

Ah okay. I'm quite interested in Networking but would you need to know much programming? this has never been my strong point

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Reply 23

mos182

Original post by Planto

Digital agencies are companies that provide outsourced design/development expertise to other companies, as opposed to in-house software teams (i.e. a company that develops its own software/website in-house).

In general, this means that developers will have to be much more adaptable as they can't simply learn a single system inside-out.

It also means being able to work to tight deadlines as these will be either imposed by a third party (the client) or imposed by the company's own quoted timescales, meaning project overruns amount to direct loss of profit, while overruns for an in-house development team are usually just an inconvenience.

Further, working for a digital agency will mean the quality of your work is under more scrutiny as your superiors will likely have a better understanding of it at a technical level.

Obviously, succeeding in these circumstances is a strong indicator of your ability - future employers will know that you haven't been coasting.

To be honest, your industrial experience will eclipse any choices of module. Once you have a year or two of professional software development experience, your intuition, problem-solving and knowledge gained on the job (and, more importantly, being able to expand that knowledgebase quickly) will be all that matter and the details of your degree will be more or less completely irrelevant.

I'm nearly certain those are the type of companies we're recommend to get a placement year with. Hopefully will be able to secure a placement year with a good company.

Reply 24

rjm101

Original post by mos182

I'm nearly certain those are the type of companies we're recommend to get a placement year with. Hopefully will be able to secure a placement year with a good company.

Your uni might work differently but our placement office used to basically send everyone a list of placements available at a number of companies. The problem the majority of students had was that every student was chasing the same placement. The best thing you can do for yourself is to go and find one yourself, that way you dont have to compete with everyone in your year.

Reply 25

mos182

Original post by rjm101

Something which I've considered, but I'm not too sure if there's too many companies around my area which would offer me a placement year.

Could someone link me to a couple of these digital agencies? Would like to look for similar companies so I could apply for them

Reply 26

mos182

Something I'm wondering, what kind of salaries would the best paid computer science jobs have?

Reply 27

rjm101

Original post by mos182

It would help if you mentioned your area :smile:

Heres a list of some of the big digital agencies:
http://www.thedrum.com/digital-100/2012

I'm with Razorfish which isnt even on the list but theyve been around since the dawn of the web and were one of the first big digital agencies formed.

Just use google for the small studio sized agencies. Me giving you a list of some of the small digital agencies in London won't help if you dont live or intend to live in London for your placement.

(edited 11 years ago)

Reply 28

mos182

Original post by rjm101

It would help if you mentioned your area :smile:

Thanks for the link!

Well I'd probably be looking into programming related placement, considering going into Software engineering however I'm considering mobile app development or maybe even web application development. Still undecided. :confused:

Pretty sure I don't want to go into Databases. Find them so boring :frown:

Ideally I'd prefer a placement in Belfast however I would be open to traveling to Dublin/ mainland UK if it would be a very good placement to go to for experience.

Reply 29

rjm101

Original post by mos182

Pretty sure I don't want to go into Databases. Find them so boring :frown:

Ideally I'd prefer a placement in Belfast however I would be open to traveling to Dublin/ mainland UK if it would be a very good placement to go to for experience.

Sounds like you need to make a personnel decision before you think any further about particular companies. Doing a quick search shows up a decent amount of digital agencies in Belfast so you shouldent have too much trouble.

Reply 30

tkwan196

Original post by anonymouse01

Ah okay. I'm quite interested in Networking but would you need to know much programming? this has never been my strong point

Posted from TSR iPad

Nope, not at all. If you're not strong at programming you should definitely look into networking. I'm the total opposite, programming is one of the few parts I'm actually good at. I'm hopeless at networking though :frown:

Reply 31

rjm101

I remember my networking module being quite dull until it came around exam where I actually needed to study. Once I seriously looking into studying it, it became more interesting but as my degree wasent heavily focused on networking you couldent really take it any further with my degree.

Reply 32

mos182

Original post by rjm101

Thanks for the advice anyway

Reply 33

anonymouse01

Original post by tkwan196

Cheeers mate. You've just fixed my life.
Networking it is then!

Reply 34

Planto

Original post by rjm101

Heres a list of some of the big digital agencies:
http://www.thedrum.com/digital-100/2012.

Have to say I am surprised by a couple of the names on that list. I have worked on some of the legacy code left behind by a couple of those agencies and... well...

Reply 35

rjm101

Original post by Planto

Have to say I am surprised by a couple of the names on that list. I have worked on some of the legacy code left behind by a couple of those agencies and... well...

I haven't been working at digital agencies for long time but something I've noticed is that every developer seems to hate every other developers code. It's because we all have different ways of doing things as well as have different styles of code and because we haven’t written it ourselves there will be a lot of little annoying things that just add up. On top of that because its not your code you don’t have a full understanding of how the code functions so you have the added frustration of trying to make sense of things. The new developers will make plenty of mistakes and the advanced developers will develop the code so far into abstraction it becomes very hard for any other developer to easily understand.

One senior web developer I used to work with never used to indent his code and blocks of CSS were always on single lines. I found it annoying as hell because its harder to read but I used to put up with it because that’s just his style.

It also seems that as long as it works the people in charge don’t care how you do it or how well you code it. Of course coworkers who have to pick it up in the future will not be so happy.

On another note I see the list mentions Publicis London and seeing as Razorfish is apart of the Publicis group I would think Razorfish would fall under this so does that count? Hmm not sure, doesnt matter anyway.

(edited 11 years ago)

Reply 36

Planto

Original post by rjm101

I can see where you're coming from, but there are stylistic differences and then there is indisputably poor code. Architectures in which you can't modify things for fear of it breaking something in what should be a completely independent part of the system. I've come across code that actually has to be changed on deployment to another environment because there are environment-specific paths, identifiers and even logic hard-coded. I've had to modify VBScript that writes out the same C# method 20 times with different hardcoded string literals. We maintain a site produced by a company in the top 5 on that list and I happen to know that they dropped support of the solution because it was unmaintainable and they built it in the first place.

We work with a very specialist proprietary CMS system that's designed for managing multi-lingual, multi-site solutions (appropriate if, for example, you want to share a layout between 50 different langauge sites and be able to localize translations) and on some of the legacy stuff we support it's very clear that the company who built the solution had very little knowledge of how to integrate with this particular CMS.

I would like to give the developers whose work I've seen the benefit of the doubt but sometimes, unfortunately, there is such a thing as objectively bad software engineering.