What students want from their first job
In preparation for hiring our first developer, Sprend cooperated with Andrej Gardijan on a survey of computer science students' expectations on their first regular job. The participants are students of University of Rijeka Faculty of Engineering.
Andrej published the method and full result on GitHub (no longer available). Being the geek he is, all charts were created by code written in Python. 💻😎🐍📊
The purpose of the survey was to make sure our job offer exceeded expectations. I was most curious about the preferred salary level, on the office, and if there were any surprising needs or wishes.
Sprend’s plans for the office was to find a city center location, because that’s where I would like to work myself. Pula isn’t Zagreb so the traffic situation is different. Also, I highly recommend walking or cycling to work which makes you immune to traffic jams anyway. The survey says that 4 out of 5 students prefer a downtown location. Our address in Pula is Mletačka ulica 12 which certainly qualifies as downtown.
When it comes to the office itself almost two thirds prefer an open area workspace instead of private office. The best way is probably to give each person a choice. If you prefer an open area you also sometimes need a private workspace, and vice versa. An exciting development in Pula is the planned co-working building. Co-working can give the advantages of working for small company while also providing the social context of a bigger company.
The salary is obviously important so we made our salary formula public (or should we call it a public beta). [Note: See the end of this post]
When it comes to surprises in the survey results there isn’t much to talk about. Rather unsurprisingly, the students want flexible work hours, ability to work from home, the opportunity to learn and improve, decision-making power, and respect from colleagues.
A shocking disappointment is that students do not want free pie. I’ll eat it myself then. Here is the chart of the progress I’ve made so far.
For reference, this was our developer salary table in 2020. Those were other times and even a differenct currency, the Kuna. Since then, we've closed our Croatian subsidiary, but we are collaborating more than ever with Croatian and Serbian writers, designer and developers. /Noted in 2026
