Well, low-level roles are harder to come by, for one, but they also tend not to pay terribly well; especially as they're competing against Finance in London, which does.

Here's my top tip for attracting amazing candidates: pay them a lot of money. Simple as that.

Speaking as someone who used to hire low-level developers in the financial sector (i.e we could pay them an above average salary) I'd disagree.

There's only a handful of universities now which teach C to a decent level, and if a candidate doesn't know C already it's very hard to tell if they'll be able to conceptually handle pointers and indirect referencing. So there's actually a very small pool to recruit from compared to the number of vacancies.

If someone can't understand pointers, recursion, etc, then paying them extra money isn't going to make them understand.

Well if we're talking about grads then yeah you're going to end up with programming newbies -- whether it's the right thing for CS programmes to churn out academics and not developers is a different discussion altogether -- but there's plenty of greybeards out there with C skills and what have you; and if they're smart, picking up C shouldn't be a huge challenge, nor should the other issues you mentioned. Again, with grads, it's hit and miss (is it ever not?) -- but senior developers who gun for low-level roles? Pay them enough and they will come.

A lot of finance companies have rejected me for placements for low A level grades despite high firsts in all my CS modules, solid extra curricular's etc...

The problem with unit grades is that they're not standardized across universities, so what might be a first at a lower-tier university might be a 2:2 equivalent at a top-tier university.

Hence companies relying on A-Level scores and university reputation when filtering.

What ECs do you have ? - that's probably your best bet of getting visibility. Assuming you're a second year student you might want to apply for a GSoC on a low-level project.

ECs are Formula Student (Mostly embedded systems stuff, also did a lot of sponsorship getting organisation type stuff last year), Cyber Security Challenge UK (Got invited to a conference, have been told to keep the dates of two more face to faces clear...) and general member for one of the uni's bigger societies.

I'd recommend contributing to an open source project that aligns with your interests, as that's much more understandable and verifiable to someone reading your CV.

I don't know what any of those academic terms mean but what have you coded and are most proud of?

At the moment me and two fourth years are basically writing all the code for a single seater formula style electric race car. This means Motor controller, battery controller, HUD, sensors, telemetry and getting it all to communicate. (on the way having to learn a lot about control, signal processing and learning a new platform) Its by far the most complex system I've ever worked on and coming together really well - the guys I'm working with really know there shit.

Understand the key word here being "placements" whereas we were talking about a, sadly, today, niche skill: low-level programming. Generally finance companies are exceptionally picky and the only way to get a job in finance is to have worked in finance. Yes, that is indeed a catch-22.

All I can say is keep at it but remember, especially for grads, they get a million CVs.

What A levels did you get? I'm doing them now. It's looking like I'm going to end up with AAB, kind of disheartening seeing people around me with A*AA though...

I got BBC(Maths,Physics,Chem), My attitude to A-levels wasn't exactly great...Its not that bad tbh - Work hard at uni and you'll easily leave people that did much better then you at A-level behind in the dirt :) Also AAB gives you 340 ucas points which would be fine for every job I've seen.

Hey, do you have an email/twitter I could contact you on? I'd like to ask you a few questions, if you don't mind. Or you can shoot me an email (it's in the profile) if you prefer.

I want to work in low level dev and I'm struggling to find anything...

Where have you applied so far ?

Arm, Qualcomm, various defence companies, Siemens(rejected A-level grades), IBM(rejected A-level grades), Microsoft(rejected A-level grades), HP, broadcom, BAE, Detica, Google for low level jobs.

Any low level companies?