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Comment by RossM | Hacker News Reader

£40-45k with that experience sounds about right in my experience (startups, not sure about large companies).

Is that all? In London? Nevermind, below poster stated supply/demand lowers the cost of PHP developers.

At a RoR/JS/Go shop in London I was making about that much with ~4 years experience, yeah.

Also you need to realise that the wage in the Uk is lower than elsewhere. They have lower employment tax, etc. The average wage in the UK is £24k. This is take home more money than people who get paid €45k in Germany.

But that's pretty low salary for london. Bankers/Accountants/Professional services, 45k is first job level for london.

It's just programming in general in UK, isn't that highly paid.

> It's just programming in general in UK, isn't that highly paid.

Why is that? Lack of demand/anaemic tech industry, lack of respect for developers, or too many developers?

British companies aren't very tech focused and there's an oversupply of "good enough" developers for those sorts of companies.

Sounds like the best bet for a British developer (if possible) is move to the US or work remotely for a US company.

Here's a previous 'Ask HN' question I asked about this. There are some interesting comments about UK management culture.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10987237

Whilst not quite at the 45k level, I'm on more in marketing in London than I would be doing RoR work at a similar experience level. Probably better career progression and increases on the developer side though.

Think it's partly because there are very few specific dev shops, and most of the roles are in-house where development is a support activity rather than the meat.

I think this Could be an eu thing. I've moved to Berlin and while wages here are cheaper than the rest of Germany I still see a lot of companies looking for senior guys who think paying 55k is asking a lot. They really start going what when I'm asking for 65k€. All while paying other departments ok. Like one company I seen them paying 40-50k for their devs while paying 40k to a finance assistant (literally the person they loan out to other department to do ask people to sign forms and stuff.)

Pretty much - I've recently been through the hiring circus - the best I saw advertised was £60k (for a team lead + full stack dev (literally full-stack - devops requirements and more)). Even for positions where I was relatively overqualified, the offers were in that range.

As others have said - the big bucks here are in contracting, but personally I'm not up for that level of risk yet. In career terms I see the later-game positions as those in management or those in consulting.

It seems intuitive to think of contracting as being at some level risky (particularly the "leap into the unknown" aspect of it), but I can't really say I know anyone who's tried their hand at in London and actually failed in any meaningful way. Most of the contractors I've worked with would scoff at the idea of struggling to land a new contract - though, as with anything, you do need to keep your skills relatively up-to-date, make sure you have a decent CV or equivalent, and I guess reasonable interpersonal skills do help.

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