How do I get a pay raise?

[Ronnie]

I started my career with a company 5 years ago as a flash developer but my company is small. I get paid 18k

In this time I have not had a pay rise yet, starling, mobile, HTML... All of this is coming from my free time. I spend 8 hours a day working then at least another 3 studying when I get home and my work just bears the fruit.

I feel petrified of loosing my job unless I keep up with technology but I feel that if this is how life is, I could get paid 23k at my local bank punching digits into a computer and would have a better quality of life with more money and much less stress.

I am 30 years old with 5 years prof experience, but personal experience dating back in flash to 2001.

I just ain't getting any money though. I do not know if I am expecting too much from this career, not clever enough, or my salary is unjust.

By comparison the dude I worked with recently did not even know what the garbage collector is, and he was working externally for 490 pound a day.

When I look at jobs, each job has 10 pages of requirements, it is not enough to be a flash guru, you gotta be a js guru, a unity guru, a CSS guru, and be familiar with video streaming, phone gap, impact, air.

I just feel stuck in a rut. I cannot lose this job, I do not want to ask for an update if that thn means they will turf me out and get someone cheap in like an intern, and I can't put together a portfolio because basically I work on work projects to improve them and learn that way, I have never met a fellow developer, there are limited technical roles where I live, and even where I do not live, I still got 10 years of study to meet a 23k job spec.

Can anyone give me advice? . My back ground is unconnected, the job centre doesn't know what I am talking about, and if I talk to an agency, they just try to rip me off and not even they know what they are talking about. It is keywords on a list.

Like I made a soft body sample in Pixi and they kept asking me if I knew Json... Like that was a separate entity......

I am really lost . Of all the thousands of hours in my life with computers, I get paid the lowest out of all my family and friends yet in terms of job difficulty, skill, and study, I do 10 times what they do.

Ronnie

[rich]

Which country are you based in? How easy would it be for you to find another job around your area? What about moving? (although I'm guessing at aged 30 you might possibly have a family or partner, which makes matters more complicated)

 

What is your game dev experience like? I hear you when you say you're learning lots of new technologies, but to what degree? There's a real danger in IT of becoming a "jack of all trades, master of none". Those sorts of people are the hardest to employee and I've always found the least commercially valuable. But then again being a specialist in something has its issues too

[Starboar]

First of all, the job centre will probably be totally useless for that kind of job, you should be looking on jobserve or one of the other IT job sites.

 

Secondly, agents often know very little about the technology, and their number one driving force is just to get anyone in a post so they get their commission. To this end they will focus heavily on the candidates they think can get the job, so yes they don't know what JSON is, they are trying to figure out from you if you can easily get the job or not, if not they simply won't put you forward, so confidence is useful when speaking to them. 

 

 

 

 he was working externally for 490 pound a day.

 

He's a contractor (or "consultant"), sometimes the agency is creaming some of that off him, but even so the higher pay for contractors is to offset the fact that they might not always be in work and have other costs. On the other hand they can spend the time between contracts working on their own games

 

I've never interviewed for a "flash developer" job, is a portfolio really needed? If so why not take part in Ludum Dare or set yourself a day to "make a game in a day" and make the simplest thing you can using Phaser or some other framework.

 

 

 

When I look at jobs, each job has 10 pages of requirements, it is not enough to be a flash guru, you gotta be a js guru, a unity guru, a CSS guru, and be familiar with video streaming, phone gap, impact, air.

 

These can sometimes be the Agent just vomiting a bunch of keywords into the advert.  Some interviews will ask you lots of questions though, often trivia you don't actually need to know in the job  Others (better ones) will ask you questions around the subject that better gauge whether you've really used it than quiz questions they found online, like they might ask you "what does it mean when you see this error message" or "what are the downsides of multiple CSS files". 

 

Don't give up, keep applying. I had a science background and ended up in software dev because I enjoyed it and kept working at it. 

[aladine]

Have you ever thought about Freelancing ?? full or part time, it could help a lot

i live in a country (Tunisia, what is yours ?) that if you are MEGA-LUCKY your salary will be around 2000$ per month, and trust me, am not lucky at all   !! the first problem is that there is practically ZERO game companies here, not even small publishers, the second problem is just like you mentioned above, the 10 pages of requirements  nonsense .... and like Starboar said, most of the time they have no idea about the terms they are using.

But even that for now am just a 21 years old student, i really have no plans to apply for any agency here after i graduate, the salary is just abusive...

 

Now in the bright side, since i started this business, my average month incomes is about 2000$, which is a lucky number like i mentioned above    and that started just 2 months after i decided to make money from game development, i've been working like this for more than 4 months now, and i can say that everything seems to get better, and i recently had a long term agreement with a mobile game publisher who make games for kids (it's very fun lol) 

So the point of this is that you can always make a decent incomes, as long as you can produce something, if you are into game development, just start making as much as you can and look (online) where to sell these games, and also you may want to add a new thing to your tech-list ? because most of the publishers out there just want there product to be available in each platforms as soon as possible, and the first thing that comes to mind is HTML5 ( that's why am here  ) or just start playing with an engine or a framework that can deploy to all the popular platforms.

 

Now in case all what i said cannot help you for some reason or another, i guess then that the answer for your question is pretty straight forward...

if your boss needs you and cannot replace you easily then just collect some courage and ask for a pay raise, but if your services can be quickly replaced by an intern (like you said .... ) then i think you might want to re-check one or two things   i mean if you can have someone to do something for you for just 10 points, why hire someone who will make the exact same thing for 30 points ?

 

Good luck