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On our 'grote mensen baan'

Photo of Robert Spier

SPEAKER

Robert Spier

15/05 • 5 min read

work

Robert is a former CMD lecturer who taught tech related subjects such as Information Design-Tech. He now works as a Creative Technologist at Deloitte. He was once a CMD student just like us. He studied media design at ROC Flevoland, followed by CMD and Information Science at the University of Amsterdam. He worked at Clarify (formerly Booreiland) and also served as a creative producer in Amsterdam nightlife. Describing himself as a digital superhero, he engages in front-end development, research in emerging technologies, qualitative user research, stakeholder management, creative problem-solving, and automation. His expertise includes HTML, CSS (Sass), JavaScript (TypeScript), heavily leveraging Vite and Svelte(Kit). While Angular, .NET, NodeJS, and Azure are in his toolkit, he prefers GitHub Desktop over terminal commands. He'll be discussing people like us: those who build using tech.

He asked us what we want to become when we grow up. Creative developer, ethical hacker, these are some of the things that were mentioned.

He's really kicking off the existential crisis in my mind big time.

Notes on positions

Things to consider

It's your responsibility to be up to date about the factors in the sector at the time that you are seeking a job, to know what the options are. Stay on top of the details, learn fundamentals, remain curious.

The type of employer

All of these things have advantages and downsides - talk to people that are in these sectors to know what's up!

All frameworks are the same, once you know the basics; a company not does just pick a framework based off their needs, its the preference and stack used by the first developer that started working there. If you master HTML, CSS and JavaScript, you can learn any framework. Robert tells us that he learns new languages / frameworks / technologies very year and pretend to know them fluently on LinkedIn. It's okay to do so. This is what everybody does - when you see people online that have a huge list of different technologies, they probably wrote 'Hello, world' in it once and put it on the checklist.

The most popular languages that are used in the market are as followed:

The money: Bruto vs Netto

Say, Robert earns 3800 euro per month.. after all the tax gets taken off, only about 2900 remains. But what is a good salary? There isn't a good answer; discuss with eachother, use the internet, calculate your monthly costs; you need to know what is a lot according to you and what is sufficient for your life. Apply to jobs too if you're in a position to turn down a company if they don't agree with what you're asking for! It helps you learn what to expect; what is high, what is low? If you have 1500 in costs to pay, you want at least 2100 euros netto - without any taxes. A normal salary is what you can, combined with how your peers are being evaluated and how much your company can pay. Robert has seen 2400 last year as well as 3400 between students that were just starting off. There is no one salary.

Also, don't forget that there are benefits; travel reimbursement, if you're going to CSS Day you can ask the company to pay for that, if you have glasses, stock options, bonus, pension building, you can get a lease car from the company if you need to visit a client, etc.

The most important: the vibe

Here, Robert shows his boomer moment as he mentions that the vibe is the most important thing ever; no matter how much you earn, even if it is a lot, but the job is weighing you down, this is not worth it. But, you could also not be earning a lot, but still really enjoy your job! This is also okay. There are also factors that add onto the vibe, that you could potentially consider a benefit, depending on the person.

The vibe is no substitute to a fair and honest salary combined with a realistic expectations of a junior; a nice ping-pong table does not take away from the fact that you need to put food on the table. Do not be afraid to say 'no' to a company! Even if you've become best buddies with the person that guided you during your internship and is offering you a deal you're not content with. It's not personal. Something nice he said: 'We don't have a problem' is not your problem - insufficient salary will however be your problem.

These quotes also stuck with me:

The best way to learn is by doing your own projects. Tutorials will only get you so far. Go build epic shit.

and..

It is okay to fail, it's better to build 10 average things than get stuck on a single perfect one.

and finally..

Network network network! I never had a portfolio but people still find me because I meet them, reach out to them, interact with them. Soft skills are vital.

Reflection

Like I said, very existential crisis inducing. But very important. It was nice to get an idea of how much CMD students earn following the study and where they work, what kind of advice they have to give us. These things are important. I always read up on statistics of what was are for example the most popular languages in the market but that's so broad; often times it's for all kind of developers, but hearing this data comes from recent CMD graduates was refreshing. This was some perspective I very badly needed.

He emphasized the importance of learning the basics of HTML, CSS and JavaScript, something I'm actively striving to do. I want to make sure my understanding of the foundation is solid before anything else. He also encourages us at the same time to remain curious about new factors in the sector, a big one right now being AI, and to experiment with them because this often teached us valuable lesssons.

It was nice to get to talk about more than being a student and shift to talking about that we'll soon be in the market. At least now we don't go in completely blind. Thanks, Robert.