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Comment by jon-wood | Hacker News Reader

I feel like people overstate just how massive the divide between SF unicorns and everywhere else is. While I admit I'm not on the 100k+ salaries of the big five, I'm definitely not struggling and pulling all nighters - I work 8 hours a day, 90% of the time from home, with the odd evening of working on something if I'm particularly into it.

For that I get paid a decent salary for my area, get to do a job I find interesting, and without having to live in London.

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As a comp sci student up north, are the salaries in London worth the hassle of living in London? Don't get me wrong I like visiting London, but I wouldn't want to live there unless the incentive is too good to pass up.

They are barely worth the hassle of relocating from Poland to London. High rent eats up almost all of the gain.

How's that? You net maybe 2-2.5k pounds per month contracting in Warsaw, and 8k for an equivalent job in London. Rent and commute in London is maybe 1k more than in Warsaw.

I get 1500 pounds net per month in Warsaw with 2 years of experience. For London (according to numbeo.com) I would have to make at least 4500 pounds net to have comparable lifestyle. That's 80k pounds per year before taxes - AFAIK not feasible for someone with my experience.

Right, London starts making sense only once you can get into senior roles.

In finance, probably. Start ups and other industry, probably not so much.

I lived and worked in London for a number of years, and in the end, no amount of extra salary was worth the packed commute, sky-high rent, bad air quality, and (controversial...) the bad manners of people in general. Moved back to Scotland and my quality of life now is so much better. I don't know how much money I would have needed to make to make up for all the negatives, but personally it was way above what a developer could realistically achieve. Very subjective I guess.

You kind of have to love living in London just for the sake of it. I'd want to live and work here, no matter what job I was doing.

That said the average salary isn't worth it at all, but the top end is. You can't really get 6-figures outside of London, but there's plenty of banks that pay that in London.

I love London, and I love my commute (15 minutes on a scooter). If the UK didn't have London, I'd move to another country. Living in London is the major draw of the UK in my eyes.

It's not easy to get a 6 figure GBP salary outside a bank or contracting (usually with a bank), but north of 50K is very doable, and there are a lot opportunities. Rent / mortgage is a low fraction of income especially when your significant other is also making a similar salary (it's about 20% for myself and GF).

If you see living in London as a hassle, then you should stay up North. I would hazard a guess and suggest that the salary would have to be at least double what you could earn up there to make it worthwhile. Have a look at Scotland, plenty of tech companies there and it's a lovely place to live.

100% this. Some people simply do not like London - they stand atop the tube station at Oxford Circus and look at the succession and repetition of massed humanity (to quote Waugh) and think, "How unpleasant." Even if you're making a six figure salary, if you find that many people - and everything else that goes hand-in-hand with that - unpleasant, it will grind you down; that salary won't cheer you up every time you're having a horrible, hot, sweaty commute, or you're staring in misery at your lack of garden, or wishing that the other tenants in your building would stop stealing your copy of The Economist.

I personally like London very much, but eight years of it (and now just a day every two or three weeks) was plenty for me.

I grew up in a small town in Scotland, and my mother was always going on about how terrible London was. So much so in fact that when I finished university I was looking for a job anywhere in the world except for London (even had a telephone interview with a company in Palo Alto before I knew where that was). But as things happened I eventually ended up in London. And I do think that moving here was one of the best things I've done.

My mother had of course never lived in London, just visited once as a tourist. And if you are a tourist you are likely to end up in the busiest, noisiest, smelliest and most expensive parts. But once you live here for a while, and realised how enormous it is, and how many completely different experiences you can have and how many different things you can make of it, there really is something for just about everyone. And now I've settled in a relatively quiet and green area, even my mother is willing to concede that maybe London might have some nice parts.

Its not just the salaries, its the opportunities.

There are just so many tech jobs available in London. And once you have a job, you have much more flexibility to change jobs without having to move home. This might not be a consideration when you are younger and more flexible in terms of location, but I do know some people who have settled in other parts of the UK who now have families and feel stuck with their current employer due to lack of other opportunities in their area.

And it isn't just the jobs, but also the developer communities. If you live in Shoreditch, for example, you could go to a tech meetup (many with free beer and pizza) within walking distance of home pretty much every night of the week if you really wanted to.

I looked at relocating from London back to Scotland many years ago, and was perfectly reconciled to halving my salary given cost of living and quality of life considerations, but it was simply the relative lack of opportunities that was the main issue in my case.

I respect the idea of a vibrant job market but free pizza seven nights a week sounds a bit like hell.

If you want to move, but don't fancy London, come to Bristol. There's a great (and growing) tech scene here, and a wonderful developer community (tech related meetup events virtually every evening, and people know and are friendly to each other).

Of course if you're happy where you are, then stay there. Tis just another option you may not have considered.

If you want to stay up North, Manchester is a good place to live.

Why does it seem everyone in the UK that doesn't live in London dreads it? Is it just the high rent? London is the only part of the UK I'd seriously consider moving to. Everywhere else reminds me of something out of a Radiohead song.

After I graduated I moved there (from the South West), and yes I would say it's worth it. Although I left London after three years (it's not really my thing either), the experience and networking I gained have paid off. I have a friend who stayed in his home town, he is doing similar work to me, and gets paid around 60% what I get - which is a good wage for that area. Even without the salary, I feel that I've had the opportunity to work in more interesting jobs as well.

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