UK IT salaries are really low and it's easy to set up a company. If you make economy business-friendly it's probably same as Android app store without a fee.
Maybe compared to the crazy US salaries you see here, but compared to continental Europe, CoL adjusted UK salaries are difficult to beat and also you have a lot more interesting opportunities there vs here where it's mostly small web-shops or big name consultancy sweatshops.
Wanna see low (CoL adjusted) tech salaries? Try Spain/Italy/Austria/France where they shaft you with high taxes and there are no top tech opportunities.
CoL adjusted UK salaries for anyone from junior to mid-level are terrible, and saving even 1/3 of your income on that kind of salary is hard. Not to mention, the lower CoL areas (and correspondingly low salaries) generally just aren't nice places to be. The idea that you can pay someone 24k/year to write C and Python filling a "junior" role that requires two years of expirence is crazy.
Even if you adjust for healthcare, even if you adjust for cost of living, UK tech salaries are simply bad. I don't know why, and my only hypothesis is that there just isn't much respect for tech workers in the UK in general, or companies don't make much money.
I'm not asking for a Bay Area 150k, I'm asking for 35k outside London for a junior role and 45k for a mid role. It's unlikely I'd get it. The number of people who brush this huge discrepancy off with "healthcare costs" (which, in the US, is a matter of company-paid insurance), or "safety" (as if that's something which should cost half my salary in the developed world) or "social safety net" (something I'm happy to pay for, but that comes out of tax which I already pay, not the take-home) is ridicuous.
There's no way around the fact that UK tech salaries are low, even accounting for the high tax in Western Europe, and I'm tired of being told that they are in any way equivalent to US (non-Bay) adjusted for CoL and healthcare. I'm paid poorly, and if I could access the US employment market, I'd be paid at least 1.5x before converted to USD no matter where I am.
The fact that things may be worse in France or Italy doesn't mean anything to me. In fact, it just makes me surprised that the UK has done well in comparison.
My perspective as a hiring manager at a UK based SAAS company is this:
I will and do pay as much as I can afford to secure developers who are actually good at their job. I can't really comment on why they're so hard to find, but my experience is that they really are.
Maybe it's the side effect of there being very few of the kind of developers who could command those SV level salaries in the UK, or maybe they just aren't in the market for my kind of opportunities. It's a hunch that would require more data because I've not hired developers in the US so I don't actually know if there's a quality difference.
Probably just the location? London has a huge gravitational pull in the UK. If you’re outside London you’re basically limited to people who can’t or won’t move to London, which excludes most (though obviously not all) of the most ambitious and talented candidates.
Funny in Ireland I find tech salaries quite generous with 80k+ easily achievable for someone with 5+ years experience and 6 figures being the norm for a senior worth his salt.
In the past few years IT salaries in continental Europe have increased significantly and, adjusted for the cost of life, German salaries are significantly higher. French and Spanish are almost on par.
If you make less than 40K£ in London, you are likely to experience a form of poverty that is unseen in the continent (pests in your flat, revenge evictions, very very bad healthcare, etc…). Outside of London, salaries are ridiculously low.
If by Europe you mean only the super expensive cities like Paris, Amsterdam or Munich, then yeah salaries maybe have increased, but to what good when property price increases have far outpaces whatever salary increases the industry may have seen.
And most who stayed at one job haven't gotten any significant salary increases unless they job hopped often which brings it's own problems later in ones career.
Edit: Had a quick look at jobs in Munich and curious where those high salaries are as 80k for senior positions on 40+h/week seem like a joke to me considering how expensive it is to live there and how high taxes are.
A senior dev in London makes 60-80K, so it’s almost the same without cost of life adjustments. Outside of London, economy-wise, you are likely to find places more similar to eastern Europe than to Bavaria.
80K€ in Munich is a good salary, considering that you don’t have to pay for private healthcare (in the UK you have to), education is free (in the UK it costs a fortune, either in private school fees or in housing premia) and rents are much much lower than in London (for equivalent properties).
Taxes are higher in Germany, but not extremely so if you account for child deductions and family support. A family of 2 in London making 80K per annum, will spend ~20K to send a child to a random nursery, 5-6K£ in healthcare and 2K£ in public transport (just to name the first 3 thing that come to mind), and will be much poorer than a German family making 50K€ per annum.
The quality of service of the NHS is extremely low compared to its European counterparts. It’s not my problem, because I have a very comprehensive healthcare insurance from my employer, which costs more than 300£ per month per person.
Just to give a practical example, you can go through an entire pregnancy without ever seeing an NHS gynaecologist (I know because it’s my experience), and if you go to private doctors, which you should, 3 visits plus some ultrasound scans and tests may cost in excess of 3000£. Also GPs have a tendency to prescribe (random) medicines without referring patients to specialists, which is simply not civilised, and so you end up going to a private doctor and paying 2-300£ per visit.
A family of 3 can easily spend 5-6K£ per annum in healthcare, especially during the first years of the child.
With the NHS you need to "play" the system a bit unfortunately. The key is finding a great GP and asking for him/her by name when getting an appointment. There are a lot of terrible GPs out there and if you just listen to them you may get screwed. If you have a good GP (I would recommend looking up the practice and figuring the head GP there and then asking for him/her by name) the healthcare system is pretty good. Yes specialist referrals can take a while, but again if you have a good relationship with your GP they will be able to expedite it for you.
It's definitely not the same as the German system for example where every minor issue gets a million tests and multiple specialists, but usually that isn't needed. If you feel you need that and want to spend thousands on private appointments with specialists it is not going to be a good system for you. FWIW I've never ever heard of anyone that hasn't had loads of ultrascans in pregnancy. That is not normal at all.
> With the NHS you need to "play" the system a bit unfortunately. The key is finding a great GP and asking for him/her by name when getting an appointment. There are a lot of terrible GPs out there and if you just listen to them you may get screwed. If you have a good GP (I would recommend looking up the practice and figuring the head GP there and then asking for him/her by name) the healthcare system is pretty good. Yes specialist referrals can take a while, but again if you have a good relationship with your GP they will be able to expedite it for you.
Which means that the quality of service is worse than other countries, where you don't have to "play" the system or become friend with a GP to get referrals. Again, not my problem, I can use private healthcare, but this is not civilized.
> It's definitely not the same as the German system for example where every minor issue gets a million tests and multiple specialists, but usually that isn't needed. If you feel you need that and want to spend thousands on private appointments with specialists it is not going to be a good system for you.
As I said, it's not the same as the German or the Italian system, it is evidently inferior. I don't feel I need to spend thousands of pounds in appointments (I don't, my insurance pays), I feel I need to get a western European healthcare service (which, again, I get through my insurance), and I'm forced to go private because the NHS is not good enough. The point is that a German (or a French or an Italian) gets that for free and a Briton has to pay thousands of pounds for the same level of service.
> FWIW I've never ever heard of anyone that hasn't had loads of ultrascans in pregnancy. That is not normal at all.
I wrote "you can go through an entire pregnancy without ever seeing an NHS gynaecologist", not that you don't get scans. By the way, you do get 2 scans from the NHS, not loads. You get to see lots of midwives, which are not doctors, and lot of doulas, whatever they are, but unless somebody who is not a doctor thinks you need to see a gynaecologist, you don't get to see one, which is not civilized.
A senior dev in a hedge fund may make more than 200K£ and I was well into 6 digits before becoming a manager, but a senior dev at non-FAANG wouldn’t usually make more than 80K and I know several good senior devs who make less than 70K£.
I 'earned' about 24K (equivalent before tax - as a stipend) as a doctoral student in London. Yes, once we had a mouse in the flatshare, but this is ridiculously exaggerating things.
While everybody I know who rented in London had to deal with mice or bed-bugs (and I don’t fully understand what these are, because before coming to London I never heard of them), at least those on low income, I don’t know of any other place where this is even remotely true.
Unfortunately rent regulations in the UK are designed to protect landlords from tenants, contracts are renewed yearly and you are always at risk of eviction. So maintenance is almost non-existent and if you protest, you will likely end up evicted. After god knows how many years or decades of this state of affairs, the housing stock in London is of a ridiculously low quality, and a local would consider normal to have a mouse in a flat and to have to deal with it (rather than the landlord paying for pest control).
To get what in the continent would be a normal flat, you need to aim at what the locals may call “luxury apartments”. And still, if it wasn’t built after 2010, you’d still have to deal with rotten sash windows, no escalator and other crazy stuff I’ve never seen before.
Mmarq is exaggerating quite a bit. It may be that they are accurately reporting their own experiences, but as a description of typical life in London, take it with a huge pinch of salt.
Yes, the NHS is weirdly worshipped in the UK, but is much worse than the Italian or the German healthcare systems (to name the 2 I experienced personally). The emergency service is good, but prevention is borderline non-existent and getting referrals to see specialists may be challenging.
This isn't the case. People read about salaries in the UK, and they are usually referring to one of the big tech cities.
In reality, most tech jobs are the small web-shops or big-name consultancy sweatshops (one particular example is Edinburgh, huge market for tech jobs, there are quite a few startups now but the tech industry ten years ago, the period when the OP occurred, it was mostly sweatshops...and still is to a large extent, large companies who open up an office but labour is cheap, and will head off to Eastern Europe if wages rise). Starting salaries under £20k are not unusual in the UK, and startups are still definitely the exception outside London. In particular, the market for grads in the UK is very difficult...it is very, very hard to get your first job because there are lots of scammy companies offering slavery wages, lots of consultancies looking to churn staff, and a relatively small number of decent companies that often aren't particularly good at hiring (or willing to train, or willing to take risks...the UK job market is flexible relative to Europe but not flexible enough that employers don't view hiring someone as a big risk...because it is).
To say this another way, the UK does have some startups where you can make decent money...but the core of the industry that employs most people is just like Europe (because the UK still isn't very well-developed outside London).
