The market is broken (at least in Teesside)

I'm screwed, and no, not in a good way.

For the past 15+ years, I’ve clawed my way through the tech industry - from the dysfunction startups to the soul-numbing bureaucracy of ‘big’ corps.

I’ve survived codebases they were held together by hope, wet dreams, and duct tape - which, coincidentally, is also how I’d describe a decent Friday night.

All while being force-fed a steady diet of toxic positivity by middle managers who genuinely believe a motivational quote on Slack can fix existential dread and the desire to end it all by calmly walking into the sea.

I live in Teesside - the ‘taint’ of Great Britain. Famous for the Transporter Bridge, smog, and Parmos so greasy it’s recommended you eat one in a hospital waiting room.

In slang, "taint" can also refer to the perineum, the area between the anus and genitals

Round here, a “competitive salary” means £40k, a ping-pong table salvaged from the 2006 office refit, and a manager who genuinely believes posting a cat playing chopsticks GIF in Slack is an acceptable substitute for a pay rise.

And yeah, I get it – saying this probably tanks my chances even further. But at what cost? I’d rather be balls-deep making cheese and onion pasties in Greggs or unloading a container full of novelty-shaped rubber chickens than accept some of the "opportunities" knocking around locally.

I see job descriptions like this:

An Actual Job Description

We are looking for someone to join our team as a Senior PHP Developer for our SaaS product accessed by over 1 million users.

Focus on engineering and maintenance tasks. The primary focus will be to implement new user interfaces and features together with automated unit and integration tests.

The code you write will need to be cleanly organised and of the highest quality. You’ll also help ensure solid application performance and an excellent user experience.

Responsibilities

• Develop and lead on new features and user interfaces from User Stories.

• Ensuring the best performance and user experience of the application.

• Provide direction on fixing bugs and performance problems, writing clean, readable, and testable code.

• Guide the team on coding standards.

• Create back-end, front-end or infrastructure.

• Work with other developers, designer, Product Manager and the rest of the team to deliver well-architected and high-quality solutions.

• Ensure all your code has associated tests.

• Documentation is written for all code.

• Migration of new customer data.

• Extensive knowledge about mobile app development. This includes the whole process, from the first line of code to publishing in the store(s)

• Deep knowledge AWS.

Skills

• App Development & Deployment

• Proficiency with writing automated tests

• Good knowledge of RESTful APIs and mobile libraries for networking

• Good knowledge of the JSON format

• Extensive experience with profiling and debugging mobile applications

• Strong knowledge of architectural patterns

• Good knowledge of Git

• Good knowledge of push notifications

• High understanding mobile app design guidelines on each platform and being aware of their

• High understanding of CI/CD / DevOps

• Complete Code Reviews

• Understand and work within release governance

• Investigate and diagnose issue when they occur - interprets logs and metrics - suggest improvements and fixes.

People & Other Skills

• Mentor more junior members of the team

• Communicate collaboratively with other members of the team - Design and Product Manager

• Detailed documentation

• Understands and is comfortable working in an Agile environment

• Lead Show & Tell presentations

• Active contributor to the Agile ceremonies

• Understands the current Vision of the Product and how current work will realise this

• Supports the capture of requirements

• Understands the estate that the team are responsible for.

Benefits

• Competitive salary based on experience and skills.

• Flexible work schedule and remote work options.

• Early Friday finish (12:30pm).

• Events and evenings out.

• Gym membership.

• Casual dress.

• Company events.

• On-site parking.

Job Type: Full-time, Permanent.

Pay: £40,000.00-£60,000.00 per year.

Still with me? Great, right let’s break down this skid-mark.

"Casual dress" as a perk

Casual dress? That’s not a perk - it’s just common sense. Why would I need to wear a suit and tie to change a button from blue to green?

"On-site parking"

On-site parking? Maybe a perk in central London - not converted storage unit beside a half-empty public car park.

"Competitive salary based on experience and skills"

So… fair pay is now a perk? That’s like calling “not being exploited” a staff benefit. Isn’t that just… the bare minimum?

It’s wild how job ads will dress up standard expectations like they’re handing out golden tickets. “Competitive salary based on experience and skills” sounds more like “We’ll lowball you, but we’ll pretend it’s generous.” Paying someone fairly isn’t a bonus - it’s a moral and legal baseline. If a company needs to advertise that they might pay you what you're worth, it probably means they won’t.

Salary Range of £40,000 - £60,000

Let’s talk about this. You want someone to lead a team, develop new user interfaces and features, implement automated tests, handle performance optimization, work across back-end, front-end, or infrastructure, and all that while being an expert in mobile apps, AWS, CI/CD, DevOps, and architecture. You’re also looking for a mentor and someone to guide the team in coding standards and performance.

Yet, you’re offering between £40,000 - £60,000? For that level of responsibility? It’s honestly pretty underwhelming, especially for someone managing a significant SaaS product accessed by over a million users.

When you add in the technical complexity and team-leading expectations, that salary range doesn't feel competitive for someone with “extensive experience” - if you're asking for deep knowledge of mobile development, AWS, and CI/CD, you're asking for a senior engineer with a broad skill set. People at that level expect a bit more than just what the company can afford. For comparison, similar roles at major companies can be pushing £80K-£100K, especially when the responsibilities are this high. So, this salary range feels low, even for a startup trying to attract experienced talent.

"Lead Show & Tell presentations"

A nice little line thrown in there to show they care about Agile culture. But if you want someone to lead presentations, you’re probably asking for someone with experience in stakeholder communication, leadership, and mentorship, essentially, a role that’s looking for someone to wear multiple hats. Throwing this in without considering compensation can feel like the company is putting more "nice to have" roles on the job description without any extra reward.

“Mentor more junior members of the team"

Again, you're asking for someone to mentor juniors—and this implies a leadership role. But what’s the reward for this mentoring? You’re talking about a leadership role without offering leadership-level compensation. Senior devs, in particular, tend to leave or get frustrated when they’re asked to mentor without any formal recognition or promotion in pay/role. £40-60k, wow… WOW.

The "Agile" buzzword overload

Nice that they mention Agile, but the constant name-dropping makes it feel like they're overcompensating. Like they read one Scrum guide and now think it’s a personality trait. Agile’s a methodology, not a miracle - stop selling it like it’s going to solve all your cultural and technical debt.

"Migration of new customer data"

That line screams legacy systems. Nobody’s shouting about "data migration" unless there’s an ancient platform creaking in the background. It’s code for “we’ve got a janky old system we’re too scared to touch, and we need you to clean up the mess.”

"Deep knowledge of AWS"

AWS is a huge platform with a steep learning curve. Expecting someone to be deeply knowledgeable without offering a salary that matches the expertise required feels a little mismatched. Also, "deep knowledge" is a vague term, does it mean managing EC2 instances, working with Lambda, designing cloud architectures, or something else entirely? £40-60K.. wow, WOW.

"Flexible work schedule and remote work options"

This is a nice perk but in 2025, this is expected at most companies. It’s not groundbreaking to say you have flexibility, especially if the company is still in the early days of remote work culture. If you're looking for top talent, flexibility should be par for the course, not an additional incentive.

Conclusion

In short, this job description has some great responsibilities, but it also feels like it’s trying to get a huge amount of work for a relatively low salary. It's asking for someone to wear many hats—lead, mentor, develop, test, deploy, and manage complex systems—and then offering underwhelming compensation in return.

And this seems to be the norm. It’s ridiculous.

While the benefits like flexible work hours and remote options are nice, they’re not the game-changer here. If the company wants to attract senior-level talent with these kinds of responsibilities, they’ll need to reconsider both their salary range and the breadth of the role.

And back to why I’m screwed?

Because I’ve spent over 15 years levelling up my skills, leading teams, cleaning up legacy disasters, mentoring devs, and building rock-solid systems - only to find that, in my region, jobs like this are the standard. Roles that want a tech lead, an architect, a DevOps engineer, and a spiritual mentor all rolled into one... for the kind of pay that barely offsets the stress-induced hair loss (minimum wage is £24k now, guy, the base pay here ain’t THAT far off).

I’ve out-priced the market and now I’m stuck turning down work that undervalues me (locally anyway) unless I become a Tech Lead (I might get £10k more but it takes me away from day-to-day coding).

I have to source out fair remote opportunities (which are extremely competitive by the way) otherwise I’m going backwards.

Cheers, Teesside.

P.S - hire me. I’m a decent contractor.