Software engineer, Technical delivery at BJSS

The following is a Graduate Review for BJSS.

BJSS scores 4.3/5 based on 81 reviews.

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What are the Best and Worst things about your job?

Best

There is always something new to learn and problems to solve.
My project teams have been full of excellent people who are willing to share their knowledge and strive to build great solutions.

Worst

Sometimes getting support is difficult - I suspect this is a remote/hybrid working problem, and is mostly solved by not being tentative or shy about asking for help.

Rapidly changing requirements and tight deadlines can result in huge amounts of team pressure, but I've generally find teams work to try and limit this kind of strain.

What is the annual salary for this role?

Starting salary: £27,000 - £29,000

Current salary: £37,000 - £39,000

What hours do you actually work, on average?

Start: 08:30

Finish: 17:30

What advice would you give to someone applying to this role?

My experience of the application process was via a cv sent to graduate recruitment by a friend who already worked for the company. My cv was a skills-based cv with some explicit details about past employment.

There was a following phone interview (mostly just a chat with graduate recruitment) then an online technical exam (timed coding exercise). I wasn't familiar with the languages offered in the coding exercise, but really it's principles being assessed. Don't feel disheartened if your code fails to "pass" an online assessment.

Do you have any interview tips?

I did an assessment day which included technical exam, group task, interview and pair programming exercise.

- In the group task, read all the info and don't try to present something the 'customer' didn't ask for. Be confident in your presenting at the end and be prepared to answer questions about your decision making.
- The technical exam was in your language of choice (from a specified list), and I wasn't particularly familiar with the language at all. In this case it was really important to try and answer as many questions as possible.
- The interview included going through some of the errors/misunderstandings of the technical exam, which was great because it offered a chance to ask questions and also to prove the ability to learn quickly. I was also asked some general questions relating to info on my cv. Others were asked to explain solutions to problems on a whiteboard, but I dodged that by talking about the exam for quite a while. (Maybe less likely if you were already proficient in the language of the exam)
- The pair programming was an exercise about building a specific tax calculator. Again the language wasn't one I was proficient in, but the supporting dev was very relaxed about it and encouraged Google as a problem solving aid

Very importantly, I was never made to feel lacking by any of the interviewers/assessors because of my lack of programming skill.