However, management is no panacea. The pay is higher, but you can easily be stuck in mid-level management limbo with no say on budget or technical direction. Of course, you are "empowered" (read the remainder of the sentence with an abundance of sarcasm) to do reviews, deal with resource allocation issues for projects, operations, support work, and not to mention the coveted verification that your team does mandatory training on sexual harassment and the like. My manager is a prime example. He sits in many meetings. Ostensibly, he has a voice at the table with the "big wigs". In reality, he controls nothing and has the boring administrivia to handle. Mid-level management is also the first layer to be cut in a down-sizing.
If you stay on the technical track past 10 years, it really has to be because you love the ability to create something and see it used. I've been on the technical side for 25 years. Much of my job I find boring and intellectually vacuous. But, the times when I can actually create something still thrill me like the first time I wrote a program and saw it run.
One downsizing later you find yourself with 10 years of experience in working around limitations in the stationary ordering system at NowBustCompany. Welcome to the scrap heap.
By contrast in IT you can stay fresh more easily and be in demand should you need to move on.
If you don't maintain some semblance of connection with the outside world you can get stuck. The scariest thing in the world to me is a job that is only internal facing.
It is mind-blowing to me how huge a disparity there is between the British and US mindsets on technology talent in an identical industry. The American companies, even the more old-fashioned ones, are (or are starting to) treating technical talent the way a sports team treats it's players. The British companies are way, way more 90's style: the techies need to stay in the closet and let the big-boy managers do all the talking. The pay, of course, reflects this. I'm sure there are numerous exceptions in both directions, but within my industry it is pervasively accurate.
As an American, when I was early in my career, and had a baby and wife to support, being underpaid was super painful. Medical care, for instance, was expensive. Being able to be easily and quickly fired without a typical European justification process is another factor. You can find yourself unemployed at any time, with any justification.
It all lit a fire under me to demand better pay. In fact, I got very used to doing so, and also got very comfortable with the idea of doing whatever it took to turn myself into a sought-after commodity, with a goal of being able to find a new job as fast as possible "just in case" things went south quickly. I quickly learned to recognize companies where technologists are treated as a cost center. These companies, if they are indeed technology focused businesses, are going to inevitably have terrible products, mediocre employees due to the dead-sea effect, and awful work environments.
I wonder if a strong social support system would have never incentivized me to get comfortable negotiating, to invest in myself as a valuable piece of human capital in a very cutthroat, competitive market. Who knows?
Here in the UK, you can be fired quite easily until you've been in a job for 2 years.
After that, you can still be made redundant. IBM are currently laying off a lot of people and only paying them the legal minimum settlement (1 week's pay for every year worked).
Our unemployment benefits are very low. Most professional people wouldn't even bother claiming them when between jobs, the hassle involved is huge.
It's nice to know the NHS is there and I'm not going to go bankrupt if I get cancer, but it's massively overstretched and under-resourced. I'm happier knowing I have private health insurance.
So I still feel pretty damn incentivised to look out for myself, even in this socialist utopia.
However, don't underestimate the NHS. My biggest fear when I was early in my career was not having health insurance for my baby boy and wife. Getting ill between jobs (this was before Obama's new health care expansion) could result in bankruptcy. In fact, perhaps the biggest driver for me was the fact that my wife was not insured by her job when she became pregnant with my son. My job charged unaffordably high premiums to cover her (they don't scale to your salary, and I was being paid $11/hour, so it was literally a third of my monthly pay to cover her). The awful medical care she was able to get was Medicaid, which is the government subsidized health plan for the poor in the United States. Good doctors don't take it at all, so you end up getting terrible health care from the doctors nobody wants to see. She received horrible pre-natal care, typical screening procedures were never done, including simply looking at her cervix to check for warning signs of pre-term labor. Had these warning signs been even checked for, we could have avoided my son being born 3 months premature. But they weren't, and we didn't. The doctors at the hospital were appalled when they found out that my wife had gone to a checkup and been cleared a few days before the labor started, and one of them began crying when she found out from us that the doctor hadn't looked at my wife's cervix. My son was given a 70% chance of survival at his birth, because my wife didn't have fucking insurance.
Just be thankful you have the NHS. Healthcare here is a fucking horror show.
I had to accept that I live in a country where not having a GOOD job means that you and your family are going to get inferior medical care in tangible, life-threatening ways.
I think people like me who are lucky enough to be basically healthy can get a skewed view of the NHS, because for routine medical care the 'customer service' is pretty awful.
I've come to believe this slightly mediocre experience is actually necessary to the survival of the NHS. If you could (for example) instantly see a GP and get referred to a physiotherapist every time you got a bit of back pain, the whole system would be inundated with demand. For routine stuff like this, most working people would skip the NHS altogether and go direct to a private physio (or have it covered by their employer's plan).
But it's there for all the important (and expensive) stuff like childbirth and serious illnesses. And for that we are insanely lucky.
I'm sorry to hear about what happened to your wife and son. I hope they're both doing great now.
I have private medical insurance in the US. I can still go bankrupt if I go to the emergency room and whomever is providing care isn't covered by my insurance plan.
Is the NHS really that bad? I understand there must be some disadvantages to it but it is still pretty damn impressive especially when you consider that Americans spend more per capita on health care but still need to get private health insurance.
The UK seems to be somewhere in between the US and continental Europe.
Thinking about it, I know a dozen or so people in the "poor deprived" north east of England earning over £40K who are under 30 years old so we're not all badly paid.
Sure, PPP (Purchasing Power Parity) comparisions are important (e.g. it's easier to live in Thailand with $1000 per months than in NYC), but absolute values matter as well.
UK and American prices are around the same number but in pounds which meant ~1.6x USD at the time.
Are you sure about that? For a start, converting USD to GBP will make their money go not as further
Might be just general British negativity, they probably feel miserable at Disneyland.
No. I was just going off what parent said. I've seen way too little UK (mainly only London) and US (mainly only NYC) to judge myself.
I.e. sure when you go to the US and have to buy USD with GBP you'l be at a disadvantage, or when you buy some electronics priced in USD, but how big a portion of your spending is that compared to food/rent/commuting/hobbies etc., all of which are priced in your local currency.
This is only true when being a tourist though as you are thinking in your native currency and basing purchasing decisions in that frame of reference, when you actually live and work in the respective country then (ie if you move to another country) then that stops being an issue as you are earning in the new currency.
Contractors have also been first to be let go. The last 10 years, yes. The next 10, not so sure.
What I've said above is of course anecdotal based on my circle's and my own experience, but when looking I was never without a new contract longer than a couple of weeks in the last 7 years. The next 10 years... I don't know, however another advantage being a contractor in my opinion is that you have more opportunity to be exposed to and learn new stuff, which helps staying current.
Pre 2008 I was surrounded by contractors all citing the benefits of the extra money. Then things thinned out. I remember one day looking up and I was sat with loads of empty seats around me and I realised just how many contractors they had let go over a period of time.
Edinburgh recently topped the stakes for average disposable income in the UK - £800 per month compared to £300 in London.
Glasgow is a really fun city though. I'm staying here cause I like it, I don't really care that I could earn more living in that other city.
Are you sure? I made the opposite move for reduced cost of housing (and commuting).