Hacker News new | past | comments | ask | show | jobs | submit login
Poll: Full-time software engineers in London, what's your annual salary?
481 points by basicallydan on June 1, 2013 | hide | past | favorite | 402 comments
Inpsired by the poll of SF & the Bay Area, this poll is targeting current full-time software engineers and software developers in London, UK.

Base salary only, pre-tax. No options, shares, bonuses, adjustments for inflation, or benefits.

(Don't forget to up-vote the poll to get more data.)

40k-49k
98 points
30k-39k
91 points
At least 200k
52 points
50k-59k
51 points
60k-69k
51 points
20k-29k
42 points
70k-79k
32 points
Less than 20k
26 points
80k-89k
16 points
90k-99k
16 points
150k-159k
11 points
120k-129k
10 points
100k-109k
9 points
190k-199k
7 points
160k-169k
6 points
130k-139k
5 points
170k-179k
5 points
140k-149k
4 points
180k-189k
4 points
110k-119k
3 points



Having read all comments, I'm somewhat lost. I was hired in London in 2008 on £37K, it was my first programming job after uni, I had clean resume. Today a competent beginner with a few web projects under his belt easily gets around £45K.

I'm hiring developers for my startup – http://www.makersacademy.com – and I wish I had more applicants. I'm happy to pay £350-450/day for a decent Ruby dev and or around £60K permanent for the same position and I don't get nearly as many candidates as I'd like to. I was hiring devs at Forward Labs (http://www.forwardlabs.co.uk), arguably one of the coolest places in London, and I had the same problems: small number of applicants, qualified candidates asking for £400-£450 or equivalent.

At SiliconmilkRoundabout, the biggest startup job fair in London, dozens of startups are fighting to find a developer, many of them happy to pay more than £40K or £50K. From what I can tell based on my experience and what other entrepreneurs/recruiters are telling me, hiring devs is incredibly hard not because the companies are unwilling to pay but simply because there are not enough devs looking for work.

Occasionally I interview candidates that don't know the basics of software development, e.g. what mocking is or how to use TDD but they are asking for £400+/day because someone is going to pay that.

The data by Adzuna (http://blog.makersacademy.com/what-is-the-demand-for-ruby-de...) shows that the average Ruby salary is over £50K, and top 30% make over £60K. How is that compatible with the results of this poll?

How is it possible that there are so many complaints about low salaries in the comments, while at the same time my experience hiring Ruby devs suggests the low salary isn't a problem at all?

If you're one of those devs who voted £30-39K or £40-49K above and know how to use Ruby/JS at a decent level, drop me a line, I'll have a much better offer for you: evgeny@makersacademy.com.


I agree. My experience of folk I know in London is that even vague competence is going to get you £35-40k - and being actually good is going to get you a fair bit more than that.

Hell - I live in bloody Dorset and I'd be expecting to pay at least £35k for a decent dev.

I'm confused about what kind of work the 0-30k folk are doing and for whom. If I were in that group I'd be seriously thinking about:

* Switching jobs - I'd be job hunting right now

* I'd be looking at freelancing rates and experimenting with that

* I'd be taking a serious look at my skill set, and the skill set of the job adverts and doing a compare and contrast

* Thinking about whether I'm selling and marketing myself appropriately

Seriously - it's a sellers market in London for dev skills right now. I regularly get folk chasing me for £50-60k jobs - and I'm explicitly not looking, don't live in (or want to live in) London, and have very un-hip skills in the old CVs they have of mine (perl anybody ;-)


It is not a sellers' market just yet but hopefully will be. £50-60k is slowly coming back to pre 2008, but the pound was stronger back then.


So at 60k you can't find devs maybe that's not high enough. Try offering 100k, see how many applicants you get. If you can get lots of CV then you've found the market price.

Remember, to attract people you'll also need to attract people who are in jobs already. For that you'll have to offer something better than what they have.


Yes, I understand this, although I don't see any difference in number of applicants when I mention the salary and when I don't (I usually don't). I'm not seeing many good people who would be ready to join if I paid them more (it happens occasionally and we usually find a compromise). My recruiters are telling me that increasing the offer wouldn't give me more applicants.

However, if the harsh reality is that I must be paying more to devs, then how come there are so many devs (about 200) in this poll indicating they are getting under 50K? Why these two hundred people don't talk to me and many other companies desperate to hire developers on much better terms?


I don't see any difference in number of applicants when I mention the salary and when I don't (I usually don't).

Perhaps potential applicants think that you, like all companies, are going to pay what everyone else is. If you don't mention salary, they presume (correctly) you're paying about the average. You don't have an opportunity to "wow" them.

if the harsh reality is that I must be paying more to devs, then how come there are so many devs (about 200) in this poll indicating they are getting under 50K? Why these two hundred people don't talk to me and many other companies desperate to hire developers on much better terms?

One potential reason: Fear of the unknown.

Someone in a job for £45K knows what the job is. They know what their co-workers are like, they know how stressful/relaxed it is. They know what their boss is like, they know what the commute is like. Your new job is a big unknown. It's risky. It might be just as good, or it might be crap, the boss might be an asshole, you might be working for a client from hell, it might be very stressful, the technology stack might be horrible.

If someone changes job to you, they are taking a risk. A £15K raise (£45K → £60K) is only about ~ £7K after taxes (right?), which is about £500 per month extra in their pocket. If they have a decent salary already, it might not be worth changing to a potentially crappy job for only that. However if you offer a large salary increase (£100K), then suddenly the equation looks better, maybe that risk might pay off.

The "risk pay off" doesn't have to be salary. Why not offer 40 days annual leave, and a 4 day week for £60K. Again, reward the risk. Applicants might think "Oh the job could be boring and the boss could be an asshole, but it's only a 4 day week, and double the amount of holidays!"


The £15k is worth £8700, I believe, or £725 per month.

The 40% higher rate tax takes £6000, but the extra National Insurance contribution is just £300 (it is only 2% on earnings above £797 per week).


Personally, I get a little bit turned off by offers around £60k-£100k because I associate them with working in finance, which is something I don't want to do and I know a lot of folks I know also don't want to do that. Making subject lines or ads a bit more explicit and descriptive as well as offering those large sums might work just fine. How are you describing the company and the current growth of the company?


I am receiving letters from recruiters every day. Salaries rarely exceed 55-60k. Why should I bother if I am already getting that? And that's a mainstream enterprise skill set. Also your recruiters are likely to filter out people you might like. Did you tell them that github repo trumps a degree?


Exactly, for some people that's the baseline. 60K might not be a 'wow' factor.


Speaking personally, I would take not mentioning the salary as a signal that it's just really low.


Oh yes. Whenever I see a job advert where the salary range on offer isn't mentioned, I presume it's low, so I skip it.


As it's been mentioned elsewhere in the thread, asking for base salary only is a bad idea.

I'd be happy to consider moving jobs for £80k~+, but £60k would be a huge step down, and yet I voted £40-49k because that's my base salary.

My company knows they can get away with paying me less because I have enough stock+bonus to make it worth it anyway (which I don't agree with, but it's still better than not being paid that at all)


In the end it's not so much about the money, but I'd be surprised if you didn't get top candidates for 100K (obviously). I don't think, however, that money plays a big part. In my case, I'm earning in the 30-39K range as a full-stack web dev (ruby and javascript), but I wouldn't change for 40, 45... and might start to think about it if I am offered 50, 60, or something high enough that it'd be difficult not to accept, but the bottom line is that a lot of us are not looking, or willing to change, because we're happy with our jobs. But of course, every now and then we think about moving on, and then even just a small rise in salary would interest us, as long as we get a change it atmosphere, meet new developers with some passion for what they do, etc.

If you have a nice team (which you do, and forward labs is also an awesome place by the way) and offer an average to high salary, then I think your problem won't be so much in attracting good devs, but more in filtering out bad ones. Another thing might be that the developers you want might not come across your offers, since they're not out there looking.


Is it the number of applicants or the quality which is the issue?

Would it help if you targeted CS students by running web dev workshops? That way you could attract developers who haven't considered applying to a startup and might not otherwise teach themselves web development. Student salaries are also lower.

Maybe you could look further geographically too. We had an ItMegaMeet in Bristol yesterday which sponsor companies used for recruiting.

I too would be surprised at how little some CS students know about web development and testing-- if I hadn't sat through a web tech unit so outdated that those of us with some experience could easily have done a better job. I helped the lecturer improve the course for the next year, but think these kinds of things need a different and more collaborative teaching model.

Thing is though- some things are easier to train on the job than others. So while I would hire my peers, I'd personally see it as a bonus if they used TDD not a prerequisite.


Just from what you said, the solution 'seems' very simple: Compensate more. This may mean pay, equity, or being able to work on interesting problems. From my experience there are many extremely talented programmers in London, and these guys can work anywhere they want, including starting their own company or moving to the US.

Also 'coolness' is hard to define, I see many startups think cool is having some beanbags and a pingpong table, whilst working on a standard CRUD RoR app. To most talented engineers, they would much rather be working on interesting technical challenges. This is how hedge funds get them: squeezing a few millis out of an already optimal trading engine by whatever means possible is extremely fun. Same reason game companies, F1 and GCHQ can pay peanuts.


I live and work in Prague and recently our team have finally found a sponsor for our software project. I am very happy that in a month or two, together with full-time system administrator pay with maximum bonus from state research/education institution we work for I will finally be able to pay my rent and food at the same time.

We are looking at ~£13K each.

I am very competent in C, Python and do Racket for fun. Both other guys are competent in Python, one of them have some Android experience, both are competent in modern web stuff. One of the guys just learned PgPL/SQL in a week, on flu, because it was needed.

Do we even live on the same planet?


Ruby is not mainstream at all. Also my guess is that most decent experienced Ruby devs are already on at least 50-60k - why switch? Another thing I noticed is that London start-ups are a bit shy when it comes to offering stock options. So the recipe is something like 70k + 1-2% stock options and ideally a bonus (doesn't have to be a huge one 5-10%). It's a market - if you can't get something at given price it doesn't mean it is not present/not for sale.


I think one of the big issues is visibility. When I was in London getting £35k I thought that was good. I had no idea I could get more moving around. I got a lot of emails from recruiters, and pretty much the only ones that had salaries were for contracts not permanent. If I knew I could have got more elsewhere I bloody well would have taken it :)


./spark 18 28 65 73 33 39 28 10 10 7 1 6 2 3 7 3 2 1 3 34

  ▂▃▇█▄▄▃▁▁▁▁▁▁▁▁▁▁▁▁▄
     ^ 40k-49k
[1] https://github.com/holman/spark


Made a real chart.

http://cl.ly/image/0S0e0t1G0U2Z


Hey, nice idea, thanks for the plug! :-)


Sample size=1, I've found that the "idols" of the developer community in London work for gov.uk or the BBC. I respect both very much, but you can't optimize for "soft" values and cash at the same time. It's a bit tautological, but if you want to make a lot of money, you have to go do that. You can't optimize for a fun, "meaningful" (hugely subjective, obviously) job with short hours and expect the money to just come rolling in.

Note on finance: It's not as bad as some people like to make it sound, and if you're ruling it out wholesale, either for ideology or prejudice, you're doing yourself no favours salary-wise. Banks (by which I mean investment banking, retail is not even on the radar) are by no means a singular working environment, it matters a lot which team you join. Banks works on absolutely massive problems, and have plenty of new work going on. There are tons of opportunities that don't involve sitting in a basement, fiddling with a 20 year old Java 1.1 codebase under a psychopathic boss. The reason banks can pay well is that it's generally pretty easy to follow the money, and if you get yourself in a position where you pretty clearly create value, you can (almost) write your own paycheck.

Alternatively, if you're still not going for the banks, there is a huge cottage industry of companies catering to the banks: financial services. They will be a lot more "normal" than the banks, but they still pay decent money.

EDIT to add: Finally, obviously, contracting. If you have a couple of years of solid experience, you can make £500+/day. Add a good blog, a few conference talks, maybe a book and you can easily 50-100% to that. That's £110-220k/year, with 8 weeks off.


Financial services? A typical financial services company in London this fine day (no names mentioned):

Still has classic ASP deployed, VB6 COM is the backend, "extreme waterfall" is the process and integration via CSV files (using ' as a quote char of course!) over FTP is the mutt's nuts. Add to that a security policy which involves a large brush, a fucking huge rug and a copy of the production SQL Server 2000 database on every laptop.

The system build is the "secure windows XP build" which is XP SP1 with no patches other than to put the company logo on the background, some bastardised IEAK'd up IE7 build, content filters which understand HTTP like Manwell from Fawlty Towers understands English.

The price of muttering Linux, Python or even Windows greater than XP in the office is to be whipped by lengths of state of the art 10base2 with BNC plugs on the end until you submit that there is only Windows.

Management is entirely powered by crack dust and "champers". And the architect to monkey ratio is at least 10:1. The architects don't even know what the hell an HRESULT is.

A good day is when SourceSafe doesn't try and fuck you.

Fortunately we only have to integrate with them...

Stay away. You have been warned.


These companies exist outside of finance too, which is why I made a point out of how it's not a homogeneous job market.

No, don't work on crap, but also don't write off half the SW engineering job market on the back of an anecdote.


I've done contract work in London and had several permanent positions over the last 15 years. That's a BIG chunk of it unfortunately. The rest is "big names", "trendy startups" and high finance. There is literally nothing else.

The best opportunity would be a small established business but they get eaten in London instantly.


Sorry, but that's not 'typical' at all. At least not for investment banks. It's true that Python is used (when used) only for peripheral tasks, but there is a reason for that. Number of Linux vs. Windows shops in the City is about even. Banks employ some really smart developers, in general.


I have similar experiences. 900 mails through many layers of management to find out after flying in for an on-site visit they were running our app on unpatched pre-sp1 ie6 which doesn't even support script tag injection properly.


EDIT to add: Finally, obviously, contracting. If you have a couple of years of solid experience, you can make £500+/day. Add a good blog, a few conference talks, maybe a book and you can easily 50-100% to that. That's £110-220k/year, with 8 weeks off.

With contracting you will end up with a lot more the 8 weeks of down time in the year unless you are in long-term engagements...


Doesn't match my experience, or that of any of the contractors I know (in Perl, admittedly). I've never been a week out of a contract job when I wanted one...


Y'right. I'm dumb. I was reading "contracter" as "consultant" in my head.... my bad. More coffee ;)


The software industry here in London is really badly paid, for salaried jobs outside finance at least. I know plenty of developers who started at £20-25k as graduates from decent universities and whose salary has slowly risen to 40k over quite a few years. PhD graduates making £35-45k too.


It's the legacy of the old class system rearing its ugly head. No matter how well educated, and from what prestigious colleges, (software) engineering is blue-collar work and will never be as well paid as the "graduate management fast-track" type with a sociology degree from a "red brick".

Finance isn't highly paid for software work, it's fairly paid, by world standards, only because they contrary to popular belief, don't have any class hangups there and are comfortable with the notion of playing in a free market.


I remember a story that the no2 guy at Martelsham Heath wife was asked what he did for a living she said hes an engineer. The response was thats nice what sort of cars does he work on.

Martelsham is the place where Tommy flowers used to work its the equivalent of ATT labs.


What is a "red brick"?


http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Red_brick_university

One of 6 particular universities.

A similar term in the USA would be something like Ivy League:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ivy_League


We call them brownstones in australia - because they are all made of sandstone


[edit] I think you mean 'sandstone universities' [1]. 'Brownstone' is generally a US word (plus most Australian sandstone is not brown).

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sandstone_Universities


Yeh it's sandstone. Group of 8 is also sometimes used because ANU and Monash wanted to be included :P


The analogy to the Ivy League is the Russell Group.


Please do note that I said 'similar term', I didn't say it was a direct equivalent. I was just providing an example that someone from the US might immediately understand.

It's a phrase that someone from the associated region of the world can generally go "Oh, you attended a <terminology> school?" and immediately have certain stereotypes and assumptions (accurate or not) come to mind.


I think Oxbridge + Edinburgh is closer to Ivy League


What makes Edinburgh special in that regard? As far as I can gather the admissions standards and support levels aren't in the same league as Oxbridge. League table results are fairly high for most subjects, but not any more so than some other russell group members.


According to various world rankings, it's top 20-40 and 5th or 6th in Britain and Europe.

But it's quite strong for CS/AI, as they have the largest CS department in Europe, producing the largest amount of world-leading research (according to the latest government-organised Research Assessment Exercise).

For undergrads that means there is an unparalleled variety of courses you can take, both in depth and breadth. I remember I had a choice of about 25 courses in my 3rd year and over 50 in my final year. For most British universities, your choice is rather limited - usually between 8-12 courses each year. Another bonus is that you get to work with leading researchers on your final year project. E.g. some of my friends were supervised by Phil Wadler - the guy was one of the principal inventors of Haskell and, with Gilad Bracha and Martin Odersky, designed Java generics and the extensions of the Collections framework.

So, Edinburgh is quite special and CS/AI is a particular focus at the University, so it's a shame not enough people know it.


no, just oxbridge. in terms of prestige and difficulty of admission Edinburgh is well below other non-oxbridge universities...


Edinburgh is definitely not quite Oxbridge level on those factors. But it certainly is higher than the 'Red brick universities'. There are 24 universities in the Russell Group, and none of the red brick universities fall in the top 5 as it is an outdated term. It could be argued that Edinburgh falls in the top 5, which are comparable to the Ivy League.


That's more like Harvard, Stanford level.


Damn right.


Erm, no. Red Bricks are ex-polytechnics or newbuild universities, generally specialising in quality degrees like urban forestry and golf course management. Oxford BROOKES is an example of a red brick. But not Oxford.


No. Just no. You are wrong. Red brick universities are not ex-polys. Just read the Wikipedia link in the parent post. I went to University of Sheffield, which is one of the Red Brick Universities and it has always been an Uni. Sheffield Halam, however, is the ex poly.


You are 100% wrong about red brick universities. Are you English?

http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Red_brick_university


In common usage the term "red brick university" is at least a little bit disparaging . It tends to be used to emphasise that we are not talking about the entrenched, traditional universities of proven excellence - Oxford and Cambridge. So likening the term to "ivy league" is very confusing. Better to say "red brick university" (UK) = "not ivy league" (USA). Note that I don't buy into this judgmental attitude myself.


It used to be disparaging (compared to Oxbridge) I don't think it has those connotations any more - the few red brick universities in the uk place highly in rankings.


This applies to the US as well, but probably not as severely since software engineers aren't as underpaid in the US.

Finance pays a fair market wage, which seems high by comparison to all the unfair players out there, but isn't actually that unreasonable.

Startups pay a theoretically fair wage (if you accept valuations at face-value and exclude liquidation preferences). It's when you see the equity/cap table (2% for useless VPs and 0.03% for engineers)-- as well as what the founders have done to ensure their careers no matter what happens to the business-- that you pick out the classism of the well-connected. If you look at salaries alone, though, you won't see it.

Outsiders complain about finance "bonuses" (finance salaries are only at-market) while failing to account for the fact that that's a much fairer compensation system than whatever they get at their corporate jobs. Granted, the banking bonus system is horribly corrupt in practice; but in theory there is nothing wrong with it, and I'd rather have a corrupt profit-sharing system like that in finance than none at all.


This comment nicely captures a misconception about how employment markets work.

If, stipulating the dollar value of the whole comp package, a comp package appears fair, it is still fair no matter what that company pays anyone else. Wages are "fair" or "unfair" based on prevailing rates and supply/demand.


How employment markets work, and fairness, are not the same thing. It's not a misconception, it's a criticism.

And of course in the real world, wages are not based on supply and demand. They're based on leverage and BATNA.

Simply put, given two equal employees (hypothetically, if it were possible to measure this), it's not "fair" to give one $50k and one $300k. It's not about the prevailing wage, it's about the contribution relative to what is coming back.


No, the argument you're making is irrational.

You're a $100k/yr FTE dev. A VP above you makes $200k/yr. You believe that VP should be making $50k/yr. But your position isn't improved at all if they do. You're still making $100k/yr, and someone else is taking the $150k/yr premium.

So you say, "no, I should get a share of that $150k/yr premium." Well, OK, why aren't you? What you're saying is that you're worth more than $100k/yr. You already have a way of demonstrating that: demand a raise, then start interviewing.

The flip side of this, if it helps make the point clearer: you're a $100k/yr dev. The VP at your company is already making $50k/yr. This is good how? By any logic you could employ in the above scenario, you're worth more than $100k/yr in this scenario too.

What other people in your firm make is an orthogonal concern to what you make. Clinging to the belief that pay equity is an important part of your compensation is as likely to harm you as help you; stipulating that we are all especially high-functioning professionals, the notion of pay equity is part of what puts a ceiling on what you earn now.


This is the most anti-rational anti-worker worthless "explanation" I have ever heard.

What other people make is definitely not an orthogonal concern, and is hugely relevant. Your justification of not caring about other people earning more is incredibly short-sighted. Yes, it does improve my position if other people earn less, because that money is then available for the company to use on other things, such as paying me.

Furthermore, to suggest that this is "irrational" is offensive and irrational in itself, and would not be inconsistent with psychological propaganda.


How are you better off if an overpaid VP is laid off and replaced with a cheaper VC? Try to be specific.

The word "irrational" doesn't mean "idiotic", by the way.


The company has an extra $150k to spend on everyone else, R&D or sales, or distribute as profit. I think it's a net positive (for the employee, company and/or society).


Before the VP got his pay cut, you made $100k. After the VP got his pay cut, you made $100k. Explain to me how this is a rational thing, in the economic sense of "rational", for you to care about.


Wanting your employer/society to perform better is pretty rational in my book, and could result in personal economic gains in the future. I think you are working with a very narrow definition of "rational" here (earning more money right now).

Here is an analogy: the business has $150k to spend. Would you rather have it spent on a pair of paintings for the meeting room, or in company-wide renovations? I think it's rational to choose the latter, though it doesn't immediately affect your bottom line.


> Explain to me how this is a rational thing, in the economic sense of "rational"

Ah, I think this explains the disagreement. That kind of "rational" has nothing to do with fairness, and everything to do with maximizing individual payoff. I think you've conflated the two, when they're almost completely incompatible. I knew you were a closet republican ;)


What definition of "rational" are you working from?


Maximizing individual payoff is not necessarily contradictory to more intuitive notions of "fairness". One ignored variable is the timescale you're maximizing over. If your company spends money on other things than exec pay, you (and others) are very likely to do better in the long run, in ways that are not mathematically (or computationally) quantifiable, at least by existing theories (or resources). But just because something is not quantifiable does not mean that considering it is "irrational". Rather the opposite, you are using what computational resources you have personally (emotions and intuition) to judge this, rather than ignoring it completely.

This is why I get supremely annoyed at claims that a specific non-mathematical argument is "irrational".

(Examples of non-computable things: company spends resources on R&D and makes more long-term profit; company spends resources on higher pay for everyone else and boosts morale; reputation of company increases and you attract a wider pool of potential employees; etc.)

In more mathematical terms, greedy optimisation algorithms in the name of short-term "rationality" most often lead you to a local, not global, maximum.


There is nothing irrational about equitable pay, unless you're the check-writer trying to depress wages and pay everyone the minimum that you can get away with. This is, of course, why salaries are secret.

For what it's worth, I have made substantially more than my coworkers in almost all of my jobs (based on what I could infer from watercooler talk after being around a while), and I don't think that's fair either. I actually chewed out one of my managers once when I found out a coworker was making half of what I was.

Why wasn't he paying him more? Because he could get away with it, not because it was fair. He was a hard worker, very smart, but rather timid. Put this guy against the alpha male manager, and unless the manager wants to be charitable, that guy is not getting a dime more than the manager can bully him into taking. What's worse, the guy will probably come out thinking he got a good deal.


I don't think you addressed my point. How are you better off if a 200k/yr VP is replaced with a 50k/yr VP, and whatever benefit you get from that transition, why should it depend on what some other person makes? If you did work worth 150k/yr, you should be making 150k/yr regardless.


Equity grants are somewhat more rival than cash salary, though.

If a company has 5% to give to employees in a certain year, VPs getting 1% does increase the odds an engineer will get 0.03% instead of 0.1%.


> The flip side of this, if it helps make the point clearer: you're a $100k/yr dev. The VP at your company is already making $50k/yr. This is good how? By any logic you could employ in the above scenario, you're worth more than $100k/yr in this scenario too.

The difference is in one scenario you're talking about a company that can pay out 300k a year, and in the other it's only 150k. Fairness is not about absolute numbers, but relative numbers in proportion to the total available.


Are you doing work worth 250k a year? Why are you accepting 100k for it? Do you think every dollar generated by a company is allocated to salary? That's a company with a 0% (or worse) margin.


Then why all the hand-wringing about a "shortage" of engineering talent?

Because the market cannot operate, it is suppressed by the class system.


I am not smart enough to understand what this comment is trying to say.


Simply that in a free market, the market would clear and sellers (talent) would reach an equilibrium with buyers (employers). That cannot happen because the buyers - for ingrained, cultural reasons of reinforcing a class hierarchy - refuse to play. So the most senior engineer in an organization, no matter how much value he creates, can never be paid more than a middle or in some cases junior manager incase he gets "ideas above his station" and fails to doff his cap to his "betters". That is the #1 problem in the UK employment market, the dead weight of the entrenched management class. Only in the finance industry does the talent market operate as it should, because contrary to popular belief, that's actually the only industry in the UK where the old boys network doesn't have a stranglehold.

If you're smart enough to be an engineer, you're smart enough to realize the only way to win is not to play. So you either go into finance, or leave the UK, or grit your teeth and accept that in order to do the work you enjoy, you're going to be poor compared to someone who couldn't do your job in a month of Sundays, but has the "right" connections.


Oh, oh oh oh. You're talking about the UK (of course). I'm sorry, I misunderstood.

Is the UK class system still that bad? (I'd heard horror stories but assumed they were at least somewhat overblown).


Imagine Downton Abbey with beige carpets and fluorescent lighting and that's most British companies today. Except it's not blue-blooded aristos running the show, it's old boys, school ties, golf buddies, MBAs. Contrary to popular belief the old boys network isn't actually sexist: it discriminates equally against male non-members too.

Same in out politics too actually. Might not be Lord-this or Lady-that running the show, but they all graduated in PPE from Oxford...


I've worked in the UK tech industry for 15 years, none of it for an investment bank, and I don't recognise your description at all.


This applies to the US as well, but probably not as severely since software engineers aren't as underpaid in the US.

I presume the US wouldn't have as strong a class system as the UK. There's a bit in Mad Men, where the British character (Lane Pryce) complains to his wife that "I've been here over a year and no-one's asked me what university I went to!"


There is more in "the old class system" (or the caste system) than just attending elite college. It is genes.

You like it or not, breeding matters a lot. What all those companies buy is not grades, it is not even a particular phenotype, it is a few generations of fine breeding, well-educated parents and relatives, etc.

So, most of those guys "with a sociology degree" worth it, you like it or not. It is just one of these small unpleasant truths about life.


First of all: genes? Do you seriously believe that? I'd like to see some citations for that, if you don't mind. I think you're farcically misrepresenting the nature vs nurture debate here.

In general, people with well-off, well-educated parents tend to do better than people who have undereducated poor parents. If you ask me, that's an argument for making sure we have less poor parents and for making sure that more people have a proper education, and not an argument for unfounded admiration for supposedly superior genes.

It's an argument for socialism, not for elitism.


Well, the well-known formula is "Nature and Nurture" - we are what we are due to genes and environment. This is, of course, huge over-simplification, almost a meme, but it is correct one.

Of course, "genes" does not mean the destiny, even if preferences and abilities are "encoded" there. There are long and boring debate about role of genes and IQ score and the consensus is that "almost everything is inherited but without proper environment, training and fertilizing the potential could not be fully expressed".

Well-off, well-educated parents, in a few generations back, is what could be called the environment. And what it amounts for is not just self-esteem and developed, refined mind, but also non-verbal behavior, which, like looks (a signal of good genes) are much more powerful drive that people like to admit to themselves.

As for ideas of so-called equality, be it socialism or equality between men and women, these are just theories. In reality (at least what we could see in labs) genes are the vehicle of evolution process, which is all about inequality.

It is correct to say that these theories, being intellectually attractive, are in contradiction with the very process which made us. So, it is better to check ones premises.)

For example, people might like it or not, a good-looking person (due to genes) will receive much more attention from people in all his endeavors, be it studying or carer building, or simply having a good time. Too much attention could ruin, and it is well-known in the field of personality disorders.

Please, do not even mention that nonsense that what is considered good-looking varies from culture to culture, from age to age. Good looks are youth, health and lack of deformations ("average" face considered the most beautiful) or signs of good genes.

Actually, any modern psychology textbook treats those subjects is very clear.


LOL, did you mean in-breeding within a limited pool? We are talking about UK high class, right?


Why, no. There are lots of offspring of world's elites in top-tier US colleges.


...studying liberal arts.


Is there any actual evidence to support this?


One could see hundreds actual evidences in any alpine slalom world cup, or US golf cup or a Paris fashion show.)


That tends to be the case mostly everywhere in Europe. For that matter, most places in the world outside the US (and Silicon Valley) tend not to pay software engineers very competitively.

I am from a fairly small central European country and programmers there barely make more than other professions; the salaries often amount to the national average.


But competitively is the word. They can attract software engineers at those low wages, therefore they are competitive.

This seems strange to me, as it takes a few years for someone to get good at software (the supply is constricted), and where I've been involved in recruitment, finding good people is difficult.

It's also interesting to see that people get paid so much more in finance, or at American companies. That is, a finance house could probably hire any good 5+ year C++ developer at the 'normal C++ developer' rate of 30k, and get good results. But they choose to pay 50K for a 'finance C++ developer', whether he was earning 30K last week or not.

That says to me that pay is not set by supply by labor supply and demand but something else. That is, you don't get rich by having rare skills that make people money, you get them by knowing which industries pay over the odds for labor. I think that's a good thing to realize if you want to be comfortable.


It's not so much that they're paying for a C++ developer, they're paying for a C++ developer (or C#/Java/whatever developer) with a certain set of skills.

The sort of developers that get well paid in finance (it should be noted that there's a vast range of dev salaries in banking depending on the sort of roles being worked in with Quants, Quant/Devs and Front Office developers being very much at the top of the pile) are those that have Masters or PhDs in Maths and work on pricing algorithms, those who work on high frequency type applications, those who have enough maths that they can turn algorithms into solid applications that can't fall over during the trading day (i.e. solid, highly optimised software), or those who can interact with the trading desks and build anything which helps the desk make more money. One thing they'll all have in common as well is a large amount of domain knowledge about the (financial) products that they work on, as well as the ability to work in environment which are often noisy and stressful. Anyone who needs their own office and a quiet environment in order to get into the zone and hack on some code is not going to thrive at a bank.


YEa i think the op is ignoring the value of domain knowledge


In reality pay is not set by supply and demand. People have fixed ideas about what a job is worth, and refuse to pay above this. When everyone thinks like this, you have implicit collusion.

Banks, finance etc do tend think in supply and demand terms. Can't find good people? Raise the price. Hardly ever happens in other industries.


How familiar are you with the finance industry? I'm not currently under the impression that anyone with C++ experience is interchangeable with a C++ dev with finance experience.


I'm also from Europe and in our country it's the contrary, one of the companies was few years ago advertising that they give developers salaries that are at least two country average. And that wasn't even in the capital (but a 2nd largest city). Here I think we are one of the best paid non-management people (apart from doctors/lawyers)

Edit: Forgot to mention the country - Poland


I am from Europe but have friends in Ukraine among other places. In Ukraine, programmers are paid very well compared to the national average. So well paid that the 20-something programmers gets rockstar status with girls, and rockstar habits with vodka and drugs. This isn't very good for Ukraine startups.


> I am from Europe but have friends in Ukraine..

Ukraine is in Europe.


Geographically yes, but politically and culturally the line gets a little blurry. I think parent meant to say "I am from the European Union".


but politically and culturally the line gets a little blurry

Politically and culturally, it's in Europe. Greek Orthodoxy and Greek-derived scripts are something you find in Europe since the Middle Ages.


Politically and culturally Ukraine is in Europe. I'm polish, visited Ukraine several times, love the people (we're very similar nations) and I think that it has a great potential. I hope it joins EU some day in the future.


> I think parent meant to say "I am from the European Union".

Not really. I don't know of anyone who identifies by EU citizenship. Not even EU top level politicians. We're all nationals, and even 3rd world refugees becomes citizen of a nation rather than EU.

When speaking to people from US, I usually identify by from [country] or "from Europe". The latter seem to be enough for most mericans that think of EU countries as US states.


Maybe geographically, but it's not in the EU and nobody in/from Europe or the Ukraine would ever say it's in Europe. Just like Russia is also geographically (at least in part) in Europe, but it's by no means European.

Google (or books) are your friend :)


I think your condescension is unnecessary, you know nothing about my reading (or Googling) habits.

By any reasonable definition, Ukraine is in Eastern Europe, whether you use geographical, political or historical definitions. This is what Wikipedia says, as do most atlases and the CIA world factbook, in fact I've yet to see a source saying otherwise, but you can surely provide links to one. The EU is not the same as Europe, by that narrow definition, Switzerland is not Europe. Your statement that nobody in/from Europe or Ukraine would say it's in Europe can be disproved with a simple counterexample: I'm from/in Europe and I say so, just as a random sample of my Ukrainian acquaintances.

No comment on Russia being "by no means" European. I guess you'll need to do a lot of Wikipedia editing to remove all references to Tolstoy from the pages on European literature.


I'm from Europe and I would.

In my experience it's only people from the US and possible the UK and/or Scandinavia that only think "Western Europe" when they say "Europe".


Very interesting. You are on to something - I am using Europe as shorthand for Western Europe. When I speak of Eastern Europe I always add Eastern. Just like when I speak of [North] America versus South America or [West] Germany vs East Germany.

However I would say this type of shorthand is far more widespread than UK and Scandinavia. My German friends adds Eastern Europe when speaking of Ukraine, too, as does my Italian friends.

The cultural differences in Europe are far more complex than an East-West divide. Saying that Ukraine has a European culture is like saying India and Japan have "Asian" cultures. It sure doesn't make them the same and frankly, it does not even very similar.


Remote-work-friendly companies can capitalize on that.


They sure do :) Can't name names but I know at least one of the biggest (and wealthiest) companies in the Rails apps scene pays its remote employees a fair wage by where those employees live, not by what would be acceptable in Chicago.


Wait a sec, are you implying the remote employees live somewhere with a lower cost of living than Chicago? In my experience Chicago is pretty darn cheap, comparable to a place like Berlin.


37 Signals it is then.


They pay just fine in Australia.

Of course the cost of living is alsop very high.


Best of both worlds. Live in small European country. Work remotely for Australian company.


I also work in Australia (having come from UK after finishing my uni degree last year), and am already being paid $75k AUD (nearly £50k). For this reason I was shocked to see how low the salaries were for London, and working for an Australian company remote in England is what I'll aim to do in the future. Being here has been a great way to form connections.


In Romania an entry level dev gets 30% more than the national average and that raises quickly. In 7-8 years he's able to earn 400%+ more than national average. And still be paid less than an entry level in UK.

National average net income is about 400 euros


Is this anecdotal or do you have data? If real, it's nice seeing the beginnings of programming jobs crossing arbitrary political lines.


There is data regarding the national average net income - this article for example, from april 2012: http://www.romania-insider.com/average-salary-in-romania-alm...

Regarding payments to juniors and interns, I know it from the market - I know some salaries of my colleagues. When I started in IT - in 2006, I started with about 230 euros net, which was also decent.

I am talking here about Cluj-Napoca (the second largest city in the country), not the capital, where salaries are better.

So, if you want to live in a place and earn 4-5 times the national average income while doing what you like (programming), come to Romania :))


I'm a Romanian student in Bucharest and tudorconstantin's claims seem on target. The average wage for an intern is 400 euros (based on what I hear from other students) and the starting salary after graduation is about 700 euros. Here are some internships with posted salary:

http://4psa.stagiipebune.ro/stagii.html&id=1189&cate...

http://adobe.stagiipebune.ro/stagii.html&id=1241&cat...


Are those internships and jobs aimed at relatively competent students/grads? I'm asking because those salaries would have been considered quite low back in 2008 before I've emigrated.


> For that matter, most places in the world outside the US (and Silicon Valley) tend not to pay software engineers very competitively.

In the US, my experience is that software developers generally are paid competitively. CS and chemical engineering graduates routinely get the highest starting salaries all around the country when it comes to four year degrees.

That starting salary may be $100k in Silicon Valley, $80k in Chicago, and $60k in Nashville, but all three numbers are competitive relative to the local market. In fact, you will find that in comparison to the cost of housing $100k in Silicon Valley is not quite as well paid as you think.


I'm from Ireland, and the government's low tax approach is great for us workers. We get lots of bit US employers setting up here, and hence increasing the competition for developers.


You have to compare like with like: number of days holiday is different (we have different numbers of public holidays); you don't have to pay for health insurance; the numbers here are in sterling not USD; do we value experienced developers more than very new ones; how many have bonuses as a major part of their salary [which this doesn't show]?


Pretty much any full-time developer gig in the US will include employee-provided health insurance in addition to salary, so salaries are still pretty much directly comparable in that sense -- take-home pay shouldn't be that different. I could see that argument being used to justify higher salaries in the UK, since employers don't have that additional expense, but not lower ones.


Sure, a lot of things here are taken care of. But compared to other jobs for smart graduate in the uk, e.g. law (£35-40k as a graduate trainee), investment banking (£40+k as a graduate, rising very quickly and with significant bonus) it is poorly paid.


With law you have to do a two year training course (so effectively two years of training) where they're usually sponsored.

Investment banking is often long hours (9-midnight) plus weekends. Many leave after a year or two or don't make it past 2 years (don't get their contracts renewed after analyst). Also, I'd consider those individuals to be some of the very smart; does this survey really allow one to filter how good they are at their job? There are different levels of software engineer from someone tweaking a wordpress blog template to someone writing assembly code on chips.

Also, what about google and facebook? They pay pretty well, don't they? Also, there are other companies like linkedin and oracle here too. No idea if they pay well or not (no info to base it off)

Working for government contracts as non permanent employee ?


I've worked at investment banks. People are committed, but they're not there after 7 on the whole.

There are smart people, they're the seniors. The juniors are just like everywhere else. There are the actively clueless.

The only good thing about investment banks is that they're more agile than consumer banks. That's probably country dependent though.

Don't think it's like this special place or some crap. It's really not.

On the whole, if you have strong programming skills you're going to be better compensated in the financial sector than at google or facebook. You just have to work with a non software oriented business that doesn't give a shit, and put up with things.


What about cost of living in general in UK/USA (or perhaps more relevant, LDN vs SV)?


All of that's true except possibly the bonuses. It's probably still worth noting that £50k is worth about $76k at the moment, so most of the London responses so far would be lumped together in the bottom category on the previous poll.


Direct comparisons are difficult though. Price of living differs dramatically. Taxes are different. The risks of switching jobs are different. (e.g. nobody in the UK has to worry about health insurance costs).


er you do have to pay insurance NI is 12% its not as ruinious as the USA I will give you.


Tell me about it.

I moved overseas to Australia from London a few years ago. Same job, same company, 60% pay rise.

Now I'm back in the UK the permanent salaries on offer seem like an insult. I have to go contracting to match it.


But isn't Australia 60% more expensive to live in than London? I know salaries are sky-high, but I'd heard there were living costs to match...


Sure is! But when you're spending a third on housing, a third on living and the last third goes to savings and international travel, well that last third goes a lot further on an Australian salary than a London one.


I'd add that for jobs in startups (a focus for the HN crowd) salaries are particularly low.


Why is this the case? I'm a frontend dev for a startup in London and I make 18k annually (80% of that because I only work 4 days a week). It's peanuts, but luckily I don't mind being poor.


Do you mind sharing whereabouts in London you're staying? (Zone x, or slightly outside London...?) I was there for some years, and my rent was always around 8k a year.

I find trying to live in an expensive city while on a low salary admirable.


In London, it's incredibly popular to live in roommate situations and have just a single room in a house with shared kitchen/bathroom for this reason. I know a lot of people still live with their parents into their late 20s and pay little or no rent, too.


It's common but it doesn't follow that it's popular.


Currently way out in the boondocks (zone 8). I'm looking to move into Zone 2/3 East London (Shoreditch/Bethnal Green area) to be closer to work. There are quite a few flat shares available for £500-600 pcm, which is my budget. That leaves me with £400/month to live off, which is good enough I suppose.


It's good that you don't mind being poor, 'cause that's what you're gonna be. I hope that start-up is worth it.


Good bunch of guys, and they're helping me add backend development to my skillset. That's how I look at it. Don't care much for equity.


No mate, unless you are getting a significant cofounder-level stake in the project these guys are exploiting you.


It depends how good/wanted he is.

I live in Scotland near Edinburgh, my first dev job I was earning £13k. It isn't super easy to break into development in the UK but within a year that had about doubled and that and learnt enough to be able to jump ship, which I did.

Now years later, I've happily earning more than the London average by contracting. I ate shit early on because I wanted to get somewhere in an economic time where the young are being screwed. I think it was probably worth it, but only until your experience and talent matures a bit.


Considering a lot of founders themselves are straight out of university I think your underestimating yourself.


Move. Seriously. You're harming your future.

I made very nearly that as a fresh graduate with an unremarkable degree and no relevant experience. Out in the sticks with more reasonable living expenses. Thirteen years ago, and I'd come close on several better paying positions. (Tip BTW, £400/mo after rent won't be enough for independent living.)

You're letting loyalty cloud your judgement; you can do better for yourself. Counting pennies isn't fun and you don't need to.


I'm a start-up founder, and live in Bethnal Green. It's a lovely place to live (in London).

Our office is just off of Brick Lane, and it's a short 15 minutes to work every morning :)


Bethnal Green isn't exactly a lovely place to live. It's saving grace is it's proximity to central London/Shoreditch, but there's nothing stand-out about it at all. It seems like no one respects it - every day I walk home from the station past at least 1 drunk/crackhead and rubbish all over the street.


No offence, but Bethnal Green looks like an ethnic ghetto. Is it getting better further to the south?


I guess it depends on your requirements. If you're young and without dependants it's much cheaper.

I live in a flatshare, 40 minute door-to-door commute (via overground, luckily, not the tube) and the rent is about 4k a year.


Damn, ask for a raise.


Indeed. It's a shame to see that they manage to hire some young talented people. I'd rather go to Google. Better experience regardless of future path.


Yeah this is my experience as well. I was fortunate to start on quite a good salary and have managed to maintain that while changing jobs. London certainly isn't the place if you want to make a big career though. Even a start up here is so much harder than in America. People just don't want to invest much until you have a solid business.


Employers will always have the upper hand because in the western world discussing/knowing salaries of peers is considered taboo( I never understood this as somebody who comes from the east where asking friends and peers their salary is very normal). Level the playing field. Discuss your salary more openly and you will see things get fairer( if that's a word). Not all will make the same but you will get to what you deserve very quickly. It also helps by letting you get an idea of what you need to do to get to the next level. Would love to hear the communities thoughts on this somewhat contrarian view.


£40k is not badly paid. It's significantly less than SV sure, but it's a lot more than the average UK salary.


Apparently it is about average for London http://www.london24.com/news/business/london_has_uk_s_highes... - London salaries are much higher than UK average.


This is probably skewed by finance and a small number of extremely well paid bankers, hedge fund traders etc.


Yes, see here: http://www.thisismoney.co.uk/money/article-2269520/Best-paid...

Some people seem dissapointed that developers are not being paid more than airline pilots: it's just not realistic outside of a boom economy (see: bay area).


Why is that not realistic? An airline pilot can only fly one plane at a time. No matter how much he/she trains there are severe physical limitations on the value they can create. Software engineers can easily write code that generates millions of dollars of ongoing value and scales infinitely.


It is when compared to other professions a GP (family doctor) earns on average well over £120k very few devs with say 10 years experience earn any where near that.


GPs in the UK earn an average of £103k if they're a partner in a practice or £54k to £81k if they work for a primary care trust - that is if they work directly for the NHS unlike many GPs who are self employed but contract their services to the NHS but who don't work for the NHS. [1]

They also have to go through a five or six year medical school and five years of post-graduate training along with profesional exams (MRCGP exams). They're also bit of an anomaly compared to other doctors in the UK - consultant salaries are between 75k and 100k according to the official pay bands [2]. The only way that most doctors can make serious money is by having a private practice along with the risks and costs that come with it (for point of reference, my other half is an obs and gynae surgeon and in that field the private insurance is £150k a year).

[1] http://www.telegraph.co.uk/health/9300823/Most-doctors-are-n... [2] http://www.nhscareers.nhs.uk/explore-by-career/doctors/pay-f...


And would the average engineer earn any where near that given the same amount of professional development/work experiance. And professional engineers often have to have indemnity insurance.

I bet the average Ceng doesn't earn anywhere near 100k.

And your forgetting that consultants often have a private practice on the side from thier NHS gig.


Never underestimate how little some fresh faced university graduates know and how unscrupulous some employers are.

In university you're surrounded by clever people who can programme (if you're in a CS degree). It can make one think that one is nothing special, and everyone can programme.


The rest of the UK seems much worse.


It's not as bad as you think. The number of applicants is lower per position outside London and the ratio of muppets to positions is higher.

If you're not a muppet, it's quite easy to land 50k+ in any major city.


Not many advertised positions here in Leeds pay 50k. Senior roles seem to top out at 45k.


Look at large I.T service companies, e.g Accenture. They don't tend to advertise much, and you have to apply directly via their websites.


I recently saw Accenture advertising for a load of intermediate PHP developers in my region. They were being advertised through third party recruiters, so I got to see the salary, which was around 20K. On this occasion it was even lower than design agencies, who already struggle to find developers on their pay levels.


That's odd because their graduate developer scheme pays 32k


Hmmm, this is pretty different to my experience (as both employee and employer), perhaps it depends on the skillset and exact location.

I have a (non-finance related) start-up in central London and it's pretty difficult to find skilled developers with 4-5 years experience who are asking for less than £50k p/a.


And I would expect no less. Considering the travel card (anywhere between 1.6-3k year) and the cost of living (at least 1-1.5K/month. How can anyone honestly expect someone to work for less than 60k, even as a mid tier dev?

I hear so many companies that whine about the lack of perm developers then go ahead and hire a contract dev at 500/day. That is the market at play, if our city cannot pay our developers enough to sustain a reasonable standard of living then they wont work.

Honestly I'm glad to see it. The more developers that follow the market (contracting) the better. Hopefully that'll wake a few people up and we'll see salaries start hitting the numbers that are needed to live in this over priced city.

That said, if I WFH 100% 50-60k would be fantastic but that's not acceptable these days.

</rant>


Yes. Some people actually really dislike London (i.e. won't sacrifice to live/work there) and £50k is probably the minimum to consider commuting.


Heh. That's me. I remember having a very annoying conversation with a recruiter many years back when they were trying to persuade me I should take less money since London was such a cool place, and I was saying that I wanted more money to have to put up with such an awful location ;)


Yeah, that would be the threshold for me to begin to consider commuting to central London (I'm in Cambridge).


If you think that's bad paid, come to the wonderful Spain. Graduates start with <= 18K€...


Or just cross the border to Portugal and have them for even less. The difference between even similar countries is huge.


At one point we were outsourcing to Portugal. I asked one of the guys when he was visiting here in the Bay Area what a recent grad would be making typically. He said about 1200 Euro per month at one of the Big Four consulting companies.

Now we're outsourcing to Romania. I haven't had the heart yet to ask one of them.


It's about 6-800€ for a recent grad with a bit of experience.


I make 25k in Brighton as a graduate. Most of the jobs I applied for were 18-22k.


That does really quite grate. I got a 21k graduate software engineering job, when most graduate software jobs were in the 18-22k range, 13 years ago. It's like the salary range has been static for more than a decade, inflation be damned.


If you look at the stats over the past two decades nearly all wages have been near static regardless of profession. No wonder there is a credit crisis...


That almost makes German/Dutch wages seem good... (average wage for a just-graduated developer is around 35000 euros in both countries).


is that with or without the 13th Month


I've seen salaries between 2900-3300 per month for university graduates (master). That is without bonusses or 13th which isn't a given.


Well, my wife recently started in France, with M.Eng. in CS, for what translates to around £25k/year. And that is considered well paid.


France is completely different, she is employed either hourly- a maximum of 35 hours/week- or employed daily, ie. 218 days a year (for starters).

EDIT: @nawitus:

Sorry but your data is totally useless for this purpose. 1) it's the whole economy, not just programmers and 2) it includes part time workers! To imply that full-time programmers in London are working on average less than a 40 hour week is so far from reality.


The average hours worked in France is 1500, UK 1600 and USA 1800[1]. Therefore if you factor in hours worked, a developer in France should be paid 83% of average salary in America and 94% of average salary in the United Kingdom. This of course assumes that everything else is equal (which is untrue). A 30k salary in UK should translate into 28k salary in France when you factor in the number of hours worked. We should really find the difference in hours worked for softare engineers, of course.

1. http://stats.oecd.org/Index.aspx?DatasetCode=ANHRS


> The average hours worked in France is 1500, UK 1600 and USA 1800[1]. Therefore if you factor in hours worked, a developer in France should be paid 83% of average salary in America and 94% of average salary in the United Kingdom. This of course assumes that everything else is equal (which is untrue).

Notably, the longer hours worked in the US compared to Europe comes at the expense of less per-hour productivity in most studies I've seen, though not enough to result in less per-worker productivity. If that's true within Europe as well, the value of the time worked would be closer than the number of hours would suggest.


>Sorry but your data is totally useless for this purpose

Imperfect doesn't mean totally useless.


The total cost to her employer is probably triple what her pre-tax wage is. It's nearly triple here in belgium as well (very similar taxation system). The net wage people make is maybe a quarter of what they cost to an employer. All those government services have to get funded somehow. This is very different to the US where the gap between net wage and total employee cost is much smaller but you have to spend more of your net wage on things you would get subsidized in western europe.


also does a PhD really help when programming (serious question)?


Maybe not for web or mobile development, but without getting into specifics I'm thinking of friends with PhDs directly using their skills in optimization and machine learning in their jobs.


Depends what you consider programming, but if it includes getting a job at Microsoft Research or the more interesting jobs at Google, definitely.


Yes, it does if you are considering career in scientific computation.


No longer full time, but I thought I'd share my salary journey.

Graduated ( computer network management and design ) working in Portsmouth started on £16k (software developer).

Three years with the same company progressed to £25k.

Moved to London salary £33k

Two years with the same company salary rose to £40k

Went travelling, came back, started freelancing/consulting earned ~£50k last year.


80k base, 130k last bonus. I'm 2 years into doing mostly Java, Python and C++ in a hedge fund. I left a small non-finance software firm where after a few years I was on 25k.


That's quite impressive! I work in an investment bank (my team is the only one that sits on the trading floor) developing low latency systems in Java. I get around 65K pre-tax in salary and bonus is not even 10K (I have about 4.5 years of Java experience and started working on this job about 2 years ago).

I have been interested in moving to a hedge fund for a while and even had a telephone interview with one of them. I thought I did really well and it did seem like they agreed with me in their feedback to my recruiter but they also declared that "while I was an outstanding candidate, I was not what they are looking for and will come back to me once they have a more suitable role". I just don't understand what that means. From chatter with recruiters and friends, your best change of getting into a hedge fund is through personal contacts. Can you confirm this theory?


> From chatter with recruiters and friends, your best change of getting into a hedge fund is through personal contacts. Can you confirm this theory?

During the period I worked for a hedge fund, no one we employed came from a personal connection. They did have stellar CVs with very good academic or industrial track records though.


You are underpaid :(.


I'm thinking of moving across from a financial IT consultancy to a hedge fund. What are the hours like? I'm not that interested in working in a large IB (e.g RBS,CS pr ,MS) I've done that before and the work in that space is a lot less interesting now and has stagnated somewhat. I know this is a bit long winded but your skill-set matches exactly what I have but I don't have much opportunity to use it on a daily basis. Any comments or pointers will be really helpful.


My hours are pretty heavy: 55ish hours is an easy week, bad weeks can get a lot worse. It really varies team to team and I think a lot of people in my firm do 9-6 consistently, so if it's a dealbreaker then just ask about it explicitly during the interview. I'd definitely give it a shot (or a few shots, since the recuitment process is indeed a lottery)


Is that 130 on top of 80? Are you doing trading systems / algo trading?


Nice. Are your people hiring? :)


Why are the salaries so much lower than in the States? I know part of it is that demand outstrips supply here, so perhaps my question resolves to why there is less demand. I assume that the point of software is that it can be an efficiency multiplier, so if you hire someone to automate a process, that is either reducing costs or increasing revenue, which should be fundamentally valuable.

I am deeply ignorant here and will gladly learn from relevant links or responses.


I think perhaps you're looking at this backwards: it's not that salaries in London are much lower than the US, it's that salaries in certain specific parts of the US that get mentioned a lot on HN are much higher than just about anywhere else in the world.

As for how this happens, I'd say it's a combination of two things. Firstly, salaries in the software industry are mostly determined by market forces rather than actual value generated, because there isn't any driving force, union-based or otherwise, to give individual developers leverage to set rates based on value instead. Secondly, incompetent middle management is a speciality here in the UK, and a lot of the people responsible for hiring software guys wouldn't know a good developer if he single-handedly displaced Google in his spare time. Therefore many businesses that need software wind up hiring poor developers and then complaining about the results.

I concluded after a while that the solution to this problem almost always involves founding your own company, even if it's just a vehicle for freelance contracting. That way you are negotiating with clients on a business-to-business basis and typically dealing with senior managers who have a real problem to solve and will pay for the actual value they get if you can solve it for them, bypassing all the PHBs in middle management and their foot soldiers in HR, accounting, legal, etc.


Outside of finance most profitable businesses do not have a culture of paying out those profits to the workforce, they pay management a lot and everyone else as little as they can. And don't forget that most businesses are not very profitable anyway. Europe has very few large profitable internet businesses, and not many small ones either. Bootstrapped businesses like to invest in growth not salaries. Many non startup businesses have low productivity.

London also has a large supply of people coming from other countries as the job market is much better here, and these people will often accept fairly low pay as it is higher than what they would have got at home.


When I worked for a large multi-national (quite a few years ago) I brought some software engineers working out of one of our UK offices onto our team because of some collaboration initiative. I was surprised not only at how much lower their salary was than in the U.S. (I was in Palo Alto, CA at the time) but how much shit they put up with that software engineers in the US would say "fuck off" to, hoops they had to jump through to advance, wearing neckties, yes sir, no sir, three bags full sir, etc. It felt like being in high school or something. I felt bad for them, and they were good engineers.


UK Business also seems to be somewhat more conservative about technology choices from what I can tell.

So being the type of developer who can get up to speed on new technology is not necessarily so useful as it might be in the US.


They're not lower than in the States, they are lower than the bay area, which is a very, very small bit of the States. Also, it's dominated by a particular kind of business (VC funded startups) that have the cash and mandate to spend a lot of money on engineering salaries. These are not too common outside the bay area, and certainly not as concentrated anywhere.


I'm not sure how the relative geographical size of the Bay Area is relevant here. In terms of programming jobs, the Bay Area is a very significant part of the US.

In any case, this and other polls indicate that programmer salaries in London are also lower than in many other large American metropolitan areas, not only SV. I did a quick search on Indeed for software engineer salaries in several American cities (NYC, Seattle, Chicago, Boston, Houston, Austin, Portland, Miami, whatever came to my mind) and in all of them the average salary is over U$85k. In fact I also searched for junior software engineer and in all of them it's at least U$60k, still within the £40~45k range which is the mode of the poll (and presumably filled with mostly non-junior developers).

If you look at average programming salaries in Tokyo or Paris you'll see a similar thing. The interesting question is not why London salaries are "low", but how come American salaries are so high.


If you think the software engineer employment market in the bay area is dominated by VC funded startups you've spent far too much time on Hacker News.


Actually I would say that they are lower that in the U.S. Again it depends on where in the U.S. you're talking about but I would say that £40 is entry level, £50K is for a intermediate level £70K for senior and £100K is pretty much the max before you hit management.

I would say that salaries like this are pretty much on par with most major metro areas in the U.S. (not just silicon valley)


The level of sheer incompetence in management of European software companies is pretty staggering if you're used to Silicon Valley standards; it's common to hire programmers who have no idea how to write a program, use completely obsolete tools, have no clue about design or process and little clue about marketing etc.

The result is that companies don't actually make a huge amount of money from each programmer so they often genuinely can't afford to pay good salaries.

On the bright side, if you are a competent manager or willing to learn to be one, and willing to either stomach European employment legislation or hire remotely, you could treat our continent as a bounty of little-used resources.


Some suggestions. Don't know how true this is in UK but comparing US to scandinavia i think these factors weight in some bit.

Education is cheap so there are less student loans to pay back and more people get a degree saturating the market. Having a degree simply isn't that special.

Healthcare and other public services are cheap, you don't have to pay expensive health insurances which lowers the salary level for everybody, not only engineers.


Salary: £85k + bupa + pension and a 25% of gross salary (£~21k) a year paid each quarter if objective are met (70% or above).

Tech: Primarily Java with some C, C++ and more recently Go (although Go is only in our code playground, nothing even close to production yet)

Location: West London

Company: Small but well established (since 1996). There are 4 developers including myself. One software is one part of what we offer.

Edit: I know you said without benefits, etc. but I included it for others as well. Just look at the £85k figure if you want a hard number.


You are making decent money compared to SF. According to the poll, not many are though. Does the UK not value intellectual workers?


The UK isn't the best place for software people in my opinion. I have been around for a little over 10 years in the field now and worked for big, medium and small companies. I think this is because people seem to gamble more in SF by investing in companies which we don't really have much of in the UK. You don't get the big angel investors or VCs sticking a million £ into a start up. I know of a few start ups that got some VC funding but most were small under £100k investments and normally by many people. Crowd funding seems to be picking up a bit here though.

I certainly feel valued as an intellectual everywhere I have worked but I may just be lucky?


Disclaimer : I'm not from the UK, nor have I ever worked there

The UK as a whole has long had a reputation for having low wages relative to the US. Anecdotally, I recall coming across a mention here on HN where certain dev jobs were being classified as "clerical" and offered at around ~$20k - $25k USD equivalent.


London's an awful lot better than most of the rest of the UK. I'm on a similar package as the post above, but only since moving to London.

Working anywhere else in the UK, I'd struggle to get half that.


NO unfortunately the "two Cultures" divide in the UK is very strong!

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Two_Cultures


Is this poll in pounds or USD?


I think most people have taken it to mean GBP, but I wish it was explicit in the description.


Here's a £ sign for someone to edit in.


shitballs people are making more than 200k sterling in the UK?


Yeah, that's really hard to believe. I know some 3rd year associates (meaning they've been coming up the ranks for about ~6 years) in Goldman Sachs who don't make that much.


As someone debating whether to do a Mathematics vs Computer Science vs Joint Honours, I'd really like to hear from graduates what worked out for them.

    - As a developer, how often are skills from CompSci degree applied on the job? 
    - What do you wish you knew about the job market as an undergrad?
    - How much part did the prestige of your university play in your current salary?


I did two years of computer science, then quit. I use very little of what I learnt, and the personal development (no pun intended) outside of what I was taught at university has been far more important to my career.

If money is your goal, knowing how to sell yourself (in job applications and interviews) is very important. For job security and progression in general, people skills are essential.

My advice? Don't bother with university, start work ASAP, and keep learning in your spare time.


Could you please refer to any good sources or books that you've worked through for people skills? Thanks!


How to win friends and influence people - Dale Carnegie. I found this book quite brilliant.


What about job applications? Almost every job application requires a degree in CS?


If you have some experience you can point to, say contributions to open source projects, your own personal website (that isn't just a generic blog site) or maybe some volunteering for a non-profit or something like that, you can get around it. Well, I guess it depends geographically where you are as well as what sort of position you're applying for.

Maybe also consider getting your foot in the door via QA?


I find that skills from more traditional, hard degrees (maths, physics, chem, history, philosophy) translate into high-level employable skills more than raw computer science. raw comp sci (and basic programming jobs) is a useless skill without advance business domain knowledge (and the traditional hard subjects provide the scaffolding, if you will, to pick that up more quickly.)

One think I wish I knew about the job market before I started: you'll be more successful using programming as your "secret weapon" in some other domain than as line-engineer elsewhere. of course, "success" here is defined in terms of what I like, and may not match you.

I found my personal development and existing work mattered a lot more than my university.


and my experience is that the people with hard degrees tend to write bad code, as a result of not really understanding what's going on.

this may not matter for some CRUD website, but does when you're pushing the limits...


This is entirely anecdotal so take it for what its worth. In Canada I've noticed that graduates of Computer Science programs can barely operate a computer by the end of things. They can write and explain some pretty cool advanced algorithms and explain it in Big O notation - yet the business value of this knowledge is almost nil.

On the other hand, skills schools and engineering programs churn out better programmers by far. They are trained to know how to dive into other peoples code, work with a project team and generally apply methodologies to improving code wherever they encounter it. From day 1.

And yet some how managers still cling to the dated notion that a university degree guarantees return on investment.


What is a "skill school" for software development? I'm not from Canada, and unfamiliar with this.


Sorry for the late reply - skill school means places like SAIT/NAIT (in Alberta).

Basically diploma level or accredited degree programs. Most of these programs tend to focus on software development at a practical level, less on abstract concepts traditionally studied in Computer Science programs. The good ones focus specifically on developing software in one or two main technologies rather then a smattering of random stuff (:cough: Devry :cough:)


To answer you questions...

1. Hardly ever. Then again I am not doing anything amazingly special or complicated. Just standard business apps.

2. That experience is worth double what theoretical education is. So make sure you DO STUFF and stick it up on github. Write a blog about what interests though. Writing a blog is great at improving your language skills. Also take some presentation skills courses while you can as it is all about selling yourself and your MSc won't sell you sorry to say.

3. Zero. Nobody cares what uni you went to unless you are going into fields like medicine. Your experience and previous work (again stick stuff on github!!) will help more than saying you got a first from Cambridge. The exception might be places like Google but I don't know anything about working for Google :)


while an elite degree might not get you the job, it does help in getting your foot in the door, and it's likely to get you a higher base salary.

the data I have shows me that my (non first) Cambridge degree allows me to command a 10-20% higher salary than my non-Oxbridge colleagues.


1. My job requires software engineering skills more than compsci skills, i.e. designing a program in UML, or writing elegant code is important, but most actual algorithms are pre-implimented, e.g. container classes implement sorting.

2. Big companies pay more, and give you access to an internal job market. Getting work is easier than you'd think, so don't worry all that much. Your first pay settlement plays a big part in your subsequent pay deals.

3. In the UK, elite graduates (oxford etc) that I work with tend to get about 1/3rd more to do the same job. They find it much easier to get onto elite graduate programmes, e.g. in finance, so I guess the employer must compete with that. STEM graduates with a 2.1 or better from a top 50 university do not have a problem finding 'graduate' work. Anything less than that, and you may as well not have a degree (i.e. you can get good jobs, but have to work your way in as you would without a degree).


Is the 2.1 number you refer to a GPA? What's it out of?


UK degrees are classified into four classes: 1st, upper and lower 2nd, and 3rd. A first corresponds to about an average of 70%, 2.1 60%, etc.


A 2:1 is the same as B+ so it corresponds to about 68%, 60% is a Desmond.


So then is a 2.1 considered impressive?


For a hard STEM degree, a 2.1 is considered about what you should get at minimum if you have done enough work, and a first is good. A third most likely not worth having and you will have to explain in interviews why you didn't do any better, most likely. A 2.2 is "okay" but won't help you much in finding work in general. That's how I have come to understand it anyway.


If you went to an 'elite' university a 2:1 would be generally taken to indicate that you worked hard, but you also had a social life as well. A 1st from an elite would not uncommonly come with the assumption that all you did is sit in your room and study for three years and that you might lack some of the softer skills.

All the above is, however, a massive generalisation.


Not really, since it's the most-commonly awarded grade and awarded to a clear majority of students at many schools in many subjects. Usually it means that the student was in at least the top 60% of students (but probably not the top 10%) on their course.

Since our quirky grading system leaves most students' accomplishments indistinguishable, it's the reputation of the university you studied in that matters.


I won't talk about grades. Getting a 2:1 or better is a given when applying in the UK. My experience is mainly London, Finance/Tech. The hardest class was my algorithms class in my second year and it turned out to be the most useful. The rest of the degree was too unfocused. The school you go to does matter. It counts a lot. People tend to hire from Universities that they are familiar with. Not out of any elitism but it often boils down to being familiar with that university's curriculum. The biggest piece of advice is that you shouldn't expect your Computer Science degree to teach you how to develop software. You should be advancing this skill alongside your course in popular languages, by yourself in your own time. This will ensure that you can talk intelligently about technical topics. Finally, your extra-curricular activities count for a lot more than you realise.


Choosing a university degree to maximise your salary is a counter productive waste of opportunity. Become a generalist where command line foo is your super power, not your day job.

People hire to get stuff done. They have zero interest in your qualifications. They have every interest in your github repos. One cool project trumps your degree.

Employment offers plenty of scope to increase your salary. What it doesn't offer is much space (unless you work for decades to earn it) to study anything for the sake of it. That's your current opportunity: you can choose to study something for the sake of it, like Mathematics & Philosophy, History of Computing or Smart Geometry.

Don't put yourself in a box. Plenty of other people will be trying to do that for you.


>People hire to get stuff done. They have zero interest in your qualifications.

This seems to be a massive oversimplification. For a recent example, note how Yahoo is changing their recruiting to favour applicants that have a degree from a "prestigious" university.


Freelancer here: the prestige of university is certainly very useful for getting more work and commanding higher pay - some people use it as a simple marker for quality.


Started on £17.5k in Wales and was moved to the London office for £25k, after a year I got a new job for £35k, and a year later took a new job for the same money but for a much better company. At the same company, I've reduced my salary to £32k since the pension law came in, but I take home the same amount as I did at £35k (some loophole).

I hate London, and the company I work for is now allowing me to work remotely so I'm keeping my salary and moving back to Wales, where it is much cheaper to live and I will not have to share a house with people.

I really don't care about money (really) and it's much more about being happy, which I will be once I move out of this city.


I have a friend who decided to stay in the area he grew up in for a better quality of life (North Devon). He is 25, now earning £35k and looking to buy a second house. No way you would be able to do that in London :) Kudos and good luck!


This surprises me given how god-awful expensive London is. I remember it being one of those cities I've visited where I was like "how do people live here? what do all these people do?"

Or maybe, like New York, you actually can live there fairly reasonably if you really know the place and know how to do it. As a visitor maybe I was paying tourist prices.


London cost of living isn't so bad.

Public transport is cheap and abundant, competition keeps prices down for restaurants and shops, and there are a lot of free events to keep you busy.

The main expense is in the accomodation, which most people in their 20s combat by sharing houses in undesirable areas. (This is a problem UK wide though as they have managed to keep our housing bubble inflated unlike in the US.)

London is expensive for tourists though. A ride on the Heathrow Express, a few nights in a 3* hotel, and a spin on the London Eye would be enough to make Zuckerberg wince.


Public transport in London is anything but cheap. It is simply the most expensive urban public transport system I know of in terms of cost of monthly passes (or travelcards). Currently a monthly travelcard in zones 1-2 is £116.80 ($177.30). In comparison, a similar monthly pass in New York costs $112, $74 in San Francisco, $167 in Tokyo, $84.50 in Paris, $99.95 in Berlin, $100 in Chicago, $67.96 in Melbourne and so on.


£116 a month for unlimited travel around the city really pales into insignificance against even the average IT salary.

In many towns and cities outside of London you would need a car to get to work which would cost much more, even without the London uplift in salary.


That's for zones 1-2. If you live in those zones, you probably pay quite a lot for rent. If you live further out, monthly travel cards cost more.


It's not unlimited - just zones 1-2 and the tube shuts down around 12 making it a pain to come back home after a night out.


You also get unlimited bus travel through all of London and if you're on a travel card, you can safely travel overground to any station without exit gates without fear of paying extension charges.


You can take buses from anywhere, I think you're forgetting. That's still a good deal.


I'm not particularly familiar with most of those cities, but the transportation system in SF is a joke compared to London's.


When pricing public transport in London, you have to consider the sheer abundance of it. Zone one and two are littered with tube and bus stops, and there are plenty of interconnects. I haven't spent too much time in NY and SF, but their public transport systems seemed very awkward in comparison.


Not sure what these prices are based on, but in Tokyo a monthly pass for all of a zone doesn't even exist - you'd get a pass for a specific route from station A to station B only, with no buses and so on.


"Tokyo Metro All-Line Pass" http://www.tokyometro.jp/en/ticket/types/pass


That's a good find, but note that the name is a bit misleading: "Tokyo Metro" is only one of many train/subway corporations in Tokyo, so the pass is far more restrictive than the London one. There are a few company-specific passes like this but they're rarely economical since you have to change company to get pretty much anywhere except on your own line.


Yes, and I pay about that much petrol month just in petrol to get to work. London's a swings and roundabouts thing, I can see the attraction TBH.


Buses in London are a lot cheaper, it's £1.40 a trip, but the trips can be much longer than the relative speediness of the tube.


The bus is £2.40 now ...


The overwhelming majority of non-season ticket bus fares are paid via Oyster. The cost for paying by Oyster is £1.40


You can also pay for buses using a credit/debit card with contactless payment for £1.40, which is pretty cool (particularly when my Oyster credit runs out) http://www.tfl.gov.uk/tickets/26416.aspx

BTW I work/have worked in other companies in the Forward group, the parent of Forward Labs, and can confirm it really is a great place to work


> London cost of living isn't so bad.

Really? London has the highest rent and house prices in the UK.

The average rental for a 1 bedroom flat is about £1200 a month, if you attribute that to the average UK salary of about £26k that's about 70% of your take home (monthly) pay.

I agree that the other costs are mainly in line with the rest of the country, although the tube is very expensive (buses are much cheaper)


As mentioned, people get around this by house sharing in dodgy areas with a commute on top. This isn't great from quality of life perspective but that's another conversation.

London housrhold incomes (rather than salaries) are much higher than UK average so calculating as a percentage of that £26k is misleading.


The cost of living is absolutely awful in London.

You'll be fine doing a flat share etc in some of the nicer metropolitan bits, but if you have 3 children like myself, things get expensive awfully quickly.

You have to fish out £1500/month for a 3 bedroom house in a suburban area (zone 5/6) which you won't get stabbed in.

If you want something really nice, say Richmond/Strawberry Hill, try £2250 for the same.


A US HR consulting firm called Mercer ranks cities by their cost of living for expats -- what a professional-class resident would expect to pay. They rated London in 2012 at #25 in the world, and more expensive than any US city.

http://www.mercer.com/costoflivingpr#City_rankings


I've been living here for a few years, and the main killer has always been rent. I've been able to get this down by sharing with others, learning about nice but cheaper neighbourhoods (I live in Putney now), and being prepared to commute 30-45 minutes in to central London.

Aside from travel (~£120/month), other costs are similar to elsewhere in the UK. There are decent, well priced (<£10-15 per head) places to eat, drink etc.

A salary in the £20-30k range would require careful money management, but you can live comfortably on £30k+.


I have to agree. I've seen positions advertised via LinkedIn for 20k (GBP, but still!) and I'm not sure how you'd make that work in any big city, let alone London...


I worked in central london for RBI in part of Reed Elsevier and 2 out of 3 of my younger colleagues had access to family property in London which is how they managed to live in London.

Ironically I had a 70 mile commute and I got into work before the ones who lived in London 90% of the time :-)


2007-2008: 28k in games industry.

2008-2011: 60k ( including bonus ) in finance.

2011-2012: <20k freelancing as a creative coder for museums and advertising, lost half my savings doing this...

2013: 68k in educational software used by millions of kids.

As a lot of people mention here, only finance pays well in the UK. If you don't mind working in that you can earn quite a lot. The other route is contracting, but that works if you have a skill that is in demand.

I am very happy with my current job though I make roughly half what I could potentially get if I went back to finance.


I made a quick and filthy script[0] to pull out job listings from indeed.co.uk - it's pretty scrappy but maybe someone wants to try and improve it (or generalize it to other countries)

    In [348]: %run salary.py "London" "graduate developer"
    
    Job Title: Graduate Developer
     Location: London
    
     Salaries:
       20000 - 794
       40000 - 288
       60000 - 85
       80000 - 25
      100000 - 19
    
    Number of jobs: 1,211
    Average salary: £30,057
    
    

    In [349]: %run salary.py "London" "software developer"
    
    Job Title: Software Developer
     Location: London
    
     Salaries:
       30000 - 5762
       50000 - 3303
       70000 - 1298
       90000 - 590
      110000 - 345
    
    Number of jobs: 11,298
    Average salary: £46,018
    
    

    In [350]: %run salary.py "London" "cobol developer"
    
    Job Title: Cobol Developer
     Location: London
    
     Salaries:
       50000 - 7
       80000 - 4
      260000 - 3
    
    Number of jobs: 14
    Average salary: £103,571
[0] https://gist.github.com/chris-taylor/5694151


This is surprising considering cost of living in London is higher than San Francisco (at least by my perception and a quick google search).

http://www.expatistan.com/cost-of-living/comparison/san-fran...


"At least 200k" full-time, wow. For anyone who's on that type of salary, what role and industry is it? CTO-level?


London has a big financial sector, so a lot of the big pay packets probably come from there - hedge funds, banks, HFT etc.

See here:

http://jobs.efinancialcareers.co.uk/Information_Technology.h...


I've been in working in investment banks for 10 years and I've never seen any base salaries this high. If these answers are true then they must include a very generous bonus or be at hedge funds.


Definitely hedge funds as they rely on algorithmic traders rather than traders. Interestingly BB IBs are starting to follow the trend...


The only SE roles I know if that sort of salary range is in financial services for a couple of the top guys in the company. No way is that anywhere near standard salary for 99.99% of employees.


Finance is like its own universe. The salaries for software are like nothing I've seen anywhere else. I get the sense there's so much money sloshing around it doesn't seem that out of wack to anybody. The investment guys probably can't even figure out how anyone could even live on 250K a year.


> Finance is like its own universe. The salaries for software are like nothing I've seen anywhere else.

That's because Finance is not grounded in Reality. Destroying the world's economies and the wealth of us little folks everywhere is massively lucrative, who knew?!


Given the way the City works, do you really want us to not include bonus?


Wait, could you explain to us outsiders "the way the City works?" Are bonuses that important?


In the City, you get hired based on a "total comp" package that includes salary and a practically guaranteed bonus, that can be as much as your base salary or even more.


Well that changes everything, maybe we should reboot this entire thread.


That is a minority of programmers, even for London.


"Practically guaranteed" nowadays means about 70% probability in finance :). There are almost no hard guarantees anymore.


"The City" is a small area of London, in terms of business, the US equivalent of a financial district.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/City_of_London


It's the UK term for Wall Street. It doesn't have as much of the geographic connotation these days - working in Canary Wharf or a Mayfair hedge fund can all come under the phrase of 'working the in the city'


The city is certainly a geographic area. It's the City of London, an entirely separate city with it's own government and everything.


"The City" is usually taken to mean the world of London finance, and in finance, bonuses are generally huge.


Some places have very big bonus' with average salary. I have a few friends on 35-45% bonus on £35k a year as swdevs.


Unless the devs in question are building trading algos or other front-line work the bonus isn't often much more than other industries. The idea you're going to get a 100%+ base salary bonus when you work building order resolutions for a T2 investment bank in the City is laughable.


Not every business in London is a bank?


Wow, I am shocked at the low salaries. There go my fantasies of doing software development in London. From what I've read about there's no way I could afford rents there on that salary.


And yet, I can do a bootstrap startup and my girl is unemployed (just finished her PhD and now looking for an academic position) and we do alright on a combined salary around ~£1.1k per month take home.

If you're fine living in Zone 2 or 3 ( the grey concentric circles on this map: http://www.tfl.gov.uk/assets/downloads/oyster-rail-services-... ).

Then rent in London: Shared house/apt = ~£650 per month, private apt = ~£1.2k per month. Deals are to be had if you can wait for them and do the legwork... those are the averages my friends pay.

Now... on a £40k salary, the PAYE tax calculator here: http://www.listentotaxman.com/ shows that you'll be taking home £2.5k per month.

You can definitely afford London rent on £40k.


I lived in South Wimbledon (the not so nice part, but still better than surrounding areas - i.e. you won't get stabbed) paying £400 for a double bed in a shared house. It is zone 3, so 30 mins to get to zone 1 on the tube, but I liked it.


You can definitely afford to rent in a shared house or rent a 1-bed, you can't afford rent if you need to support others.


And yet, the post you are replying to shows 2 people living on ~£1.1k Net monthly income in London, and already shows rent isn't as extravagant as people think.

You can support someone else, on a single £40k wage, in London, in an 1-bed place (assumes you're supporting a partner).

Maybe you can't afford a car, or to eat out several times a week, or to take lots of holidays... but £40k goes pretty far and providing money isn't being spent frivolously it easily supports 2 people in 1 flat in London.

When ~£13k per annum can support 2 people, £40k is a very high standard of living for 2 people.


Contract wages are considerably higher, especially in London. In some cases, twice as high. If you have a little fire in your belly, and don't mind living with some uncertainty and a lot of change in your life, contracting in London can be great -- financially and otherwise.

Ex: City (finance) contract rates of £500-£700 per day are far from uncommon, if you have finance experience. Non finance, £400+ per day is not hard to find.


Just for reference, I don't think I've seen a rate of under £400 per day for Ruby/Rails developers, and I used to get £400/450 several years ago when I was still doing that, even outside of London.


Direct contract rates are even higher, somtimes > 100% higher. The pimps (contracting agencies) really screw over contactors on London. My personal experience: went from £30/hr to £100/hr by bypassing the former pimp and contracting directly to a London oil company.


Yeah, markup of 100% on contracts is not uncommon in London.


they're in pounds - multiply by 1.5


Started on 30k progressed to 60k in London. People who stay in one place for more than 1-2 years without decent raises do a bad favour to everyone except for employers. Do move around and get what you deserve along with varied experience! Companies do shell out on contractors when there is a need and can keep them for years. I think it is some sort of misrepresentation that leads people to think that it is OK to pay less then 50k to a decent dev in London.


Is there a point when moving around too much is starting to look bad on your resume?


Yes, you need to use your best judgement. I would spend at least a year at each place depending how good it is. I think changing 4-5 jobs before you turn 30 is good enough, would've looked weirder when you are 40. It should come across as normal during interviews as well. How do you know you are doing what you really want/should be doing if you did not try multiple things? How do you know if a small/mid/large company is your favourite environment? Have a story/plan and have some achievements at each place, always leave on good terms. PS: contractors move around at least once a year on average and it is considered normal (unfair).


I wasn't trying to argue against you, I was just asking for opinions on the limits of changing jobs too much. My own estimate is something like 1-2 years minimum per job.


When interviewing candidates, staying under 6 months makes me slightly concerned. But only slightly; there are many good reasons a good developer might only stay somewhere briefly.


It's surprising how poorly paid developers are in this country, even in London. In Bristol I was able to earn £25k after graduating, but from what I've heard a lot of companies are now offering lower, around £17.5k to £20k if lucky. A lot of programmers with five years experience are still on around £25k, whereas a post-doc in Cardiff will be on around £32-35k fresh out of their PhD. Hell, friends of mine that went into sales instead of uni are on £40k, a salary I'd probably struggle to get in the next five years, even as a senior dev.

What I also don't understand is that salaries are getting lower, and hiring is getting harder. Anyone that has hired will appreciate how difficult it can be to get good developers. Given the long hours and need for learning in development it's shocking how low the salaries are, and how it's not talked about more often by UK developers.

The last time I was solely responsible for hiring was at a start-up that had just been acquired. I said that £25k was the bare minimum we should be offering for a junior to mid-level developer. We hired a really good developer, who now leads that team and landed another couple of pay rises (probably now earning a fair bit more than me). The start-up was acquired based on a product largely created by the developers, so we needed a strong developer to take over and I guarantee that if we offered the same low salary that others were offering the product would have been run into the ground.

It's really bad. In my mind, developers across the board should be on £5-10k more than they are, across the country. Hopefully within the next few years the tech industry will push towards better compensation, instead of thinking a drinks fridge and a ping pong table will win other twenty-somethings with no other commitment in life than to they hand their rent to.


I'm assuming GBP, you should probably specify that.


If you live in London and do software for a salary, you better LOVE what you are doing and where you are doing it, 'cos you aint doing it for the money.

You might want to also ask daily rates for contractors... most of the salary rates I've seen are around 60-75% of what contractors go for, and London has a crazy number of contractors (I'd guess 75% contract, 25% full time?)


A lot of my colleagues have said it's not just about the money. That is important, and OK when your on your own, <30 and trying to make a name for yourself. But I know of some SHIT and I mean AWFUL programmers who get paid thrice as much as I and some colleagues, it often seems experience, or years count more than actual talent sometimes. I'm between 20-29k.


The contract market here is pretty vibrant. I'm on close to a 100% premium to the permanent employees sitting in the same office, doing the same work.


Working in London is not great as a dev or in technology as a whole. I'm a dev working in London. My 1st job out of Uni I was paid 15k working for a start up. After gaining an years experience I left and move onto a US company that paid me 25k initially and now after 2 years my pays 45k.

Pay in London is a lot less then SV but that's acceptable we don't have as much VC funding for start ups. One issue allot UK companies/starts ups have is that they all think they can offshore all devolopment work, allot companies are slowly learning that having in-house devs are the way forwards. But the UK has got that dev is somthing we can off shore mentality an due to that pay for dev is substantially lower then some area's in the US.

Also don't let some of the high flyers pay( from the banking industryy ) fool you into understanding the average wage in the UK. The average wage in the UK is fairly low.


Frighteningly underpaid! I am sure this is true for other parts of Europe too, especially Germany though. People undersell themselves, because they still believe in the so called "crisis", or have no clue about their own value.


true! I am from germany and i believe you can transfer these poll results quite accurately to germany by just changing GBP to EUR (1 EUR = 0.85 GBP)


Curios about the 200k group - what kind of things do people who earn so much do?


Lie on polls and/or work in finance at companies with generous bonus packages.


I live in Central Europe (Poland) and fortunately, there are cities where IT jobs are very well paid. I work for 10 years in IT and can easily make equivalent of £25K per year - which is more than decent salary here.

UK recruiters are very active here (most my fellow developers are regularly contacted), but even though I was considering moving to London or SF, it has to be something really exciting - majority of well paid s/w engineering here is boring "typical" business stuff.

I wouldn't expect any significant financial boost, but possibility to work for LinkedIn, eBay (Google maybe :) is an advantage.


It'd be interesting to also hear some average hours worked. I have the image that the average hours worked in the IT sector in Bay area is quite high, so it's not directly comparable to the previous poll.


The cost of living in San Francisco, according to Numbeo, is overall lower than London: http://www.numbeo.com/cost-of-living/compare_cities.jsp?coun...

Having said that, food is mostly more expensive in SF, and the results there are skewed by the cost of cigarettes being much lower.

Rent appears to be higher, which I've also been told by a three or four ex-Londoners who've moved to SF.


I think the currency should have been specified in this poll. It's a little ambiguous as to whether this should be read as GBP or USD. (Though I imaging most responses would have used the former.)


When I graduated in '09 I accepted the first offer I got as I had no idea how the job market worked. I found it through a recruiter rather than trying any graduate programs. I started on £23k which went up to £25k after probation. After a year and a half I got promoted from a junior and was on £35k.

Last year I quit to work for a friend's startup and was offered nearly double that, before I left they offered me £55k to stay. Afterwards I found one of the guys doing pretty much the same as me was getting £60k, so I made the right choice :-)


This tallies with my experience in London. In fact, at Google, where after questioning their salary scaling vs competition, we were told that financial companies where NOT included in calculations. "WTF" or words to that effect were our general response.

Apparently this was eventually fixed, but not before about 80% of my ex-colleagues (I left for the Bay Area) ended up in... financial companies. Go figure. If you want the talent - put up the cash.


Nice attempt, but how do you correct for bias here? What type of people visit HN? What type of people visit HN that come from the UK? At what point of the day? Which people are happy to fill in a questionnaire that shows how little they earn? It is probably skewed in the direction of high wages. To know that I would recommend at least the same poll for another European city and for several American cities.


What would figures for another European city tell us about London? Rates for programmers in Dublin are about 20% higher than London, but that says nothing about the London figures quoted here.


Of course the data tells you something. - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Non-response_bias - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_desirability_bias (quote: Personal income and earnings, often inflated when low and deflated when high)

Something to cope with it: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heckman_correction


Why would anyone avoid telling others how much they make? For example, I make £32k (£1900/month) and I pay £800/month rent.


I'm a full stack developer from Buckinghamshire with 4 years of experience (mainly web dev), currently working with PHP/MySQL/JS/Java developing large scale enterprise software, also learning Scala on a side. I was gonna start looking for a job in central London this year, preferably Java/Scala based, but I always though that I'll be lucky to get £40K. Does this mean I can aim higher?


In which currency?


In London UK, I will assume £, Pounds Sterling, GBP.


The available options suggest this too. OP should probably edit to clarify though.


My bad. It's too late to edit now. Yes, GBP is what I meant :) the original one didn't specify Dollars though, and I think anybody who is answering would probably expect to answer in GBP anyway.


Arrived and found a job for £45K

Raised in one year up to £55K

Next job in another year £63K

Raised in one more year to £70K

Plus bonus (financial industry)

C#, Java, Matlab, real-time trading

Now quit the whole thing and doing my startup


I earned between 35-50k when I was there ('08-'11). Salaries are crazy low. The secret is actually contract work. Friends of mine were doing bog standard java dev work, and taking home between 80-100 £/hr. It was big company work so it was full time, 40 hours a week type of work.

As others have said, finance is the way in London. Better salaries, better perks.


26k before taxes.

I can live without be thinking about money. I pay £700 for my flat and £170 for transport (zone 4) and I can save about £250.


Started off at a consultancy company in central London in 2010 on £30K as a 'grad dev'. I know that a 'Senior Consultant' would be given between £40 and £50K at this company.

Since then I've moved on, and am on £48K.

Full stack developer, using mostly ruby and related tech atm, was .NET based mostly before that, but could have been thrown into a project doing anything.


I also see a lot of contracts around 400GBP a day in London for front end folks, thats around the 100K mark per year.


As a contractor you can spend a lot of time just marketing yourself, invoicing, etc. I'd imagine this is more like 50k per year in practice.


I'm calling BS on this, being a contractor. I spend around 10 mins a week invoicing. Nearly no time "marketing myself".

I DO spending a bit of time saying "no, I have a contract" to recruiters tho.


How many billable hours a week do you tend to work, and what's the average number of working hours for employees in your locality?


I'm a contractor also, front end, and my agency invoices for me. All I do is fill out a timesheet on work time. It's literally no different than a perm role, but I get 100k instead of the 50k - 60k I'd get for the same role as a perm.


Ditto, I don't need to put a huge amount of time into the admin side of things. The volume of recruiter emails & calls can be oppressing at times haha


Well it's genuinely great to hear you two have got so much work on. May I ask why you have not doubled your rates?


Recruiters generally aren't interested in you at any advertised rate, or even for any particular skill. They just see Java (substitute as necessary) and contracter in the general vicinity of each other and decide to call you up and smooch you, even if the job is not a good fit and pays half what you charge. Problem is, you often have to keep in touch with recruiters to keep the flow of work, so you can't just cut them off entirely.

Burner phones and email addresses for recruiters is certainly a thing, though.


This times a million.

When I was doing contract from 2004-2007, a shit Nokia and an O2 PAYG phone was a good investment. Many times did I just chuck the thing in the bin.

Recruiters will suck up to you even if you've ignored them for months. Commission vampires - that's all they are. You're just a line in a spreadsheet to them.


I just stopped putting my phone number on my CV about a year ago which cut down the calls a great deal.


Good plan! Never thought of that!


My current rate is nearly double the rate of my first contract which was equivalent to double my last permanent salary. This is after a few years of contracting, starting off in a low-cost city (Belfast, N. Ireland) branching out to Dublin and now London.


Probably because they prefer to spend their time working in a stable contract rather than out of work marketing themselves.

My current contract is for a year and I invoice monthly. If I doubled my rate I'd be out of work.


> May I ask why you have not doubled your rates?

Because they're not going to go in and cause a huge increase in revenues like Patrick does.


Also there is a risk of being fired with a one week notice and not being able to find next gig for a couple of month. So 400 is not a lot, it is just an adequate minimum for London.


>and not being able to find next gig for a couple of month

In London? Sure, you could be laid off anytime, but if you can't land a new contract in two weeks then there's something wrong with you. Contract market in London is buzzing.


Could you help point a stranger towards these contracts? Cheers.


Just search for Java contracts on almost any job site. My rate is comfortably more than £400/day even well outside London (1 year contract term, extended).


Front office rather?


I assume a Dutch software engineer would not have problems living and working in London? I'm currently living in a remote area that I really like, but it feals a bit 'dead'. I'm yearning to get back in to a more action-packed working environment.


Given the poll earlier today re: valley/bay area salaries, WTF, are all the "best" programmers in northern Cal?

Unlikely.

The salary disparity between London and the Valley is absolutely shocking, all the more so given that London is not at all a cheap place to live.


It Jobs Watch scans job postings for London

http://www.itjobswatch.co.uk/default.aspx?page=1&sortby=...


I guess this shows that people can achieve a much higher return on capital investment in the bay area. That's the only way that they'd be able to afford the significantly higher salaries per worker.


Looks like my plan for eventually moving to London and earning a £100k whilst commuting in my 911 are out of the window. How hard is it for a UK programmer to find work (not telecommute) in the US?


I'm on about £42k + a 12% bonus, not sure if I'm going to get one this year though.

My colleagues who are mainly contractors keep saying I should leave and become a contractor but I'm not sure about the uncertainty.


You need a big stock of cash, a hard skin and a good accountant.

The uncertainty is a problem, particularly when you end up getting booted early (it does happen), but occasionally you get to sit on your arse for the last 3 months of a say a 6 month fixed term contract being paid to play solitaire because they can't get rid of you early.

The agents are all asshats and will screw you for a penny if you're not careful.

The hiring companies treat you like a disposable tool. Don't expect to make any friends at the companies - the permanent staff know you're making more than they are.


The hiring companies treat you like a disposable tool. Don't expect to make any friends at the companies - the permanent staff know you're making more than they are.

This is a key reason I got out of consulting. At least, consulting on the same things that the full-time staff were working on (so training is good because it's obviously temporary in nature and no-one in-house does it). The money might be good but there's more to life than that.


is £50k enough to live in London on your own? (i.e. a one br flat)


Yes. A reasonable one bed (not a studio) flat in zone 2 will be around £1000-1200 pcm.


Of course it is. If you are single you can live comfortably in zone 1 for that, even in Kensington. All-in rent for about £1k. I'm confused by the replies saying you can't. There's people living happily near me earning a lot less than that.


But you wont be buying anywhere anytime soon in zone one


Yeah. I am in zone 3 (15 minute walk from the office which is awesome) at £1200 a month for a very nice (large) one bed room flat. I could get a two bedroom with a little more space for the same price but this flat is gorgeous and I love the lay out plus location to work is perfect. Close enough but not too close ;)

I would say you could get by on 35k but you wouldn't have much left over. Could do it for a year or two in a grind if you really had to though. Anything less and you will probably get pissed off with yourself as you will most likely feel under valued quite quickly. Especially if you have to pay anything at all for travel.


I lived comfortably in zone 2 on £40k a year.

I was paying £250 a week rent for a one bedroom flat in a complex with gym + pool in zone 2.

Rent prices are a little higher than they were two years ago now though!


Prices are generally higher now. How much were you spending on commute?


It was approximately £20 a week.

In the summer I used to walk which took around 40 minutes so I spent a little less.


Yes.

Myself, my wife, 3 children, a car in a 2 bedroom maisonette with two gardens in zone 5.

No problems. Apart from the incurred debt from having to live on a much lower salary for several years beforehand. That is the biggest problem for me.


Barely, if your lifestyle is western (can't leave in bad area), you like to have holidays abroad and what to save some money as well.


Yes.

I live in Zone 4 in a 1 bedroom flat for £910 a month and I only earn £42k.


No.


Bollocks. My gf and I are currently living off of my 40k since she's unemployed. In zone 2. It's totally doable and you'll have money to spare if you're alone with that kind of salary.


A friend of mine built a pretty good tool for this sort of research and sharing long ago if any of you are interested:

http://salaryscout.com/


site is throwing "Error establishing a database connection" on pretty much every page except the front page.


The most interesting point is that there is a concentration in the 30-70k range and then you have a significant number in the >200k.


I suspect most of the >200k have "trolling HN" on their resume ;-)


In Canada you can expect to start at $40k-$50k (CAD) and top pay I've heard is about $125k for more mentoring/managerial type role.


Agh - voted in the wrong poll. Not really on topic (more of a question about HN in general) - is there a way to remove upvotes?


Is that in USD, British Pounds or Euros? I think a poll with just numbers is quite worthless.


obviously GBP.


[deleted]


Wow, that's well above the norm. What job is it?


That is a good starting salary. Make sure you stick to your guns when you move about. If you are staying in your area of expertise you should never take a pay cut. Ever.


I've heard that their hours were rather long. Is that true? I myself am considering getting a job in finance in London, so I'd like to know what I can expect.


Graduation from a BSc? I didn't realise Bloomberg made offers this high to graduates. I thought the square mile standard was still the 25-30 range.


Can someone make one of these for New York City?


Need more info on this 200k bracket please!


Voluntary response data are worthless.


1 GBP : 1.5 USD

(I assume people answered poll in GBP?)


would be helpful to specify units and show $ equivalents


tldr: despite the flawed stats of the poll, similar skillets are actually paid similarly between London and SV.

It's hard to compare directly between SV and London because they're very different economically. SV is full of huge pure tech companies (the googles, apples, facebooks) that are hugely profitable and HAVE to spend heavily on R&D. Their product is literally technology and so they need 'high end' engineers. This therefore attracts 'high end' engineers from around the world, and the large number of these companies created a bidding war, hence wages rise.

The majority of developer jobs in London (and for that matter everywhere except SV) are at enterprises where they are slogging out backend code - think projects to integrate internal systems. Most of these roles aren't particularly 'high end' and don't need guru 99 percentile programmers, and hence they can pay less. Most of these companies see tech as a necessary evil and not a competitive advantage.

For these enterprise roles, base salary is also meaningless as nearly everyone contracts. A typical 'senior java dev' that pays £60k permanent, would contract for £500/day which is the equivalent of £115k [1]. Rates upto £700 are common, and £1000 isn't unheard-of for rare skills in vogue. Junior programmers should expect £350+

So comparing like-for-like skill set, London programmers are actually paid pretty well - There are many making the equivalent of $150k+ who wouldn't even pass a phone screen for Google. Now London has a few 'high end' roles that pay very well, the majority of which are in finance, with notable exceptions being the London engineering offices of big SV tech companies. Don't be mislead that all of finance is high paying, only the front office roles at the 'computationally intensive' desks are. There are also 'high end' but relatively low paying roles at game companies, F1 and GCHQ.

Another factor is the financial crisis, which has hit London severely. Since 2008 a huge number of jobs have gone, and wages have been essentially flat. If you include the fact the the GBP:USD rate went from $2.10 to under $1.4 at the lowest [2], UK wages actually declined 40% in USD equivalent. This is in stark contrast to SV which in the same period saw huge growth.

The funny thing is that almost the opposite was happening just a few years ago. I graduated in 2006, and London was in the middle of a huge boom. I was at Imperial College, and all the major firms would come to campus and have big flashy recruitment drives. There just weren't enough quality engineers and so starting packages for fresh graduates were literally twice what ANYONE else was paying. Also many of these roles were extremely interesting, working on real problems with cutting edge tech and brilliant people, and the firms had enough money to invest in training, extravagant grad programs etc. This has changed quite a bit now!

[1] http://www.contractorcalculator.co.uk/ContractorFinancialPro...

[2] http://finance.yahoo.com/q/bc?s=GBPUSD=X&t=5y&l=on&#...


We really need unions. These polls only help so much. Unfortunately also, there are both retard programmers, and actual programmers. I worked with a retard programmer, he thought that learning Django was a feat of strength...sigh..when I told him about OOP he almost shit his pants.


> I worked with a retard programmer, he thought that learning Django was a feat of strength.

Maybe it was for him?

You shouldn't be so hard on someone else. I'm sure there are people here way smarter than you or I, and they don't call us "retard programmers".


> he thought that learning Django was a feat of strength...sigh.

Unbelieveable, pulp fiction or Jackie Brown if you really must, but really why bother?


Unions ain't gonna happen. Not accepting low salaries could be a start.


Norway has unions for IT-workers. The union base pay of around 470k NOK (~52K GBP, ~80K USD) is pretty much guaranteed straight out of university if you have a masters degree.

In general I think it is a good thing, although I dislike the biggest one (Tekna) (that I was formerly a member of) because they supported the DRD[0]. I have since become a member of a different union (NITO).

[0]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Data_Retention_Directive


Prospect represents people in the IT TMT industries http://www.prospect.org.uk/




Guidelines | FAQ | Lists | API | Security | Legal | Apply to YC | Contact

Search: