Ask HN: How much do you make in London? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: How much do you make in London?

126 pointsldneng170 comments

There's recently been a lot of discussion about how much people are making in different areas of the US, but the threads about London are either outdated or not too comprehensive.

Please include your company (be it BigCo, startup, finance) / contractor status, level / years of experience and compensation breakdown in GBP.

I'll start: Investment bank front-office, 3 years experience: £59k, ~10% annual bonus, no stock.

Links to previous somehow related discussions on HN:

- https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7672167

- https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11317897

- https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5804134

View on HN

Reading some of the amounts listed is a bit depressing, I thought that the increased cost of living in London would justify salaries and rates much higher than the average.

By contrast I know from personal experience you can earn the same or better than what's listed here outside of London and enjoy the lower cost of living.

Any recommended locations to look at?

Berlin.

Manchester, Leeds, Newcastle, Bristol, Liverpool... probably in that order. I've heard good things about Glasgow, Birmingham and Cardiff too. The North West has been good to me and I've never really had to leave the area because there's pretty good transportation links over a wide area with a large population.

And I've lived and worked in Berlin too, it's nice, but by no means the perfect solution. And y'know... it means I can live close to family by being in the UK.

"Close" is a relative term.

Is it closer to London a little Scottish town, far from any airport or major communications hub, than Paris or Barcelona?

http://jorgepratscher.com/commuting-from-barcelona-to-brackn...

http://www.totaljobs.com/insidejob/extreme-commutes-to-londo...

I think you're missing a word .. but yes, parts of the highlands and islands are definitely further away in time from London than Paris is. I think even Manchester may take longer, at least until HS2 is operational.

(The first link isn't very encouraging! "As a consequence I had to visit my dear friend the physiotherapist to check my displaced vertebrae and super swollen trapezius muscles that didn’t let me get off my bed after travelling nonstop for 6 months"!)

lol yeah! I would never commute from Barcelona like this guy, but just puts into perspective how fast can you be very far.

I once had to visit a customer a Friday and a Monday (so there was no big point on staying the whole weekend in a hotel), having to drive each day 5 hours each direction. That was without leaving the UK. Apparently this guy makes it quicker from Barcelona to Bracknell (not even London, which would take less time IMHO).

You should try Nottingham too. There is at least 1 major brand with deep pockets offering very interesting amounts of money for developers at the moment.

What is the company? Recently moved to Nottingham. Not looking for a job but curious to learn more about the tech scene.

Alliance / Boots maybe?

That's great until that major brand goes bust. At least in London you have hundreds of major brands.

I'm in nottingham. Would be interested in any opportunities or some ideas. Boots, capital1, reuters seem to be the major ones. I'm currently contracting in smart metering.

Edinburgh works for me, although it seems skewed towards multinationals and banks rather than small companies. I nearly went to work for "Clydespace" in Glasgow.

I too have heard good things about Liverpool these days.

In my experience, contract rates in London have been dropping like a stone in the last 2 years. I'm still not sure why that is, but feel forced to start planning my escape...

(My current rate is an awful £300, and that was hard to find!)

Is that per hour? I think I'd kill for that.. or was that per day? I'm based in the states so that seems quite nice for me.

Daily

In UK, software contracting rates are almost always quoted and billed based on days.

Senior Software Engineer (and manager) at Google, ~15 years experience. 100k GBP salary, plus 20% bonus and stock vesting. Gross 200k+ GBP.

how's this compare with your colleagues on the state side?

London Googlers get paid significantly less than their CA counterparts for the same roles.

It's not like there are zero benefits to working in the UK vs the US though. University tuition is cheaper being one example.

Way more vacation as well I would presume.

Nope - 25 days for the US (assuming >5 years employment) versus 25 days in UK.

Do you have the option to move to Google in the states? Would you take it if offered?

ASIC design, 7 years here now. £45k + bonus + pension + healthcare. Without the bonus it isn't anywhere near what you'd get in a bank, explains why so many of my university mates took their EE degrees into finance. Probably partly due to the lack of hardware jobs in the capital. I've always found the name 'Silicon Roundabout' very ironic.

Where do you work? There seems to be a significant lack of hardware jobs in London.

Nokia (and it's only just about in London). Other than Cambridge, Langley and Bristol there's very little in the UK at all.

Ah interesting, I didn't realise they had an office in London. Are there any engineering vacancies at the moment?

Graduate positions - yes. Otherwise I'm not sure.

Time to switch to ImgTec and get some of that Apple $

This is a bit depressing. In 2010 I retired from full-time post as Investment Bank, front office senior dev on £100K with 30-50% bonus, 20 years experience. C++, Java, Sybase, finance tech and domain knowledge, and colleagues in hot areas were getting way more than that. My impression that rates are dropping seems to be confirmed.

Those developers I know who work in similar industries to the one you describe are taking broadly similar salaries; I suspect the bias here is away from those kind of position.

today you can still get £100k+ as a senior developer in a bank for doing c++, java, with or without domain knowledge, but bonus is likely to be a lot less, more like 15-30%, of course exceptions apply

Pure curiosity - is this for an 8 hour day? or 10? or more? Just wondering what the downsides are to working for a bank.

If you have chaotic alignment, you'll like it. 12-hour workdays mixed with occasional periods of having nothing to do at all, no specs, no working process (or, alternatively, multiple failing attempts to go full SCRUM), hacks upon hacks upon hacks in systems processing billions per day, on-site urgent calls at 2AM, having to double as devops, internal tech support and psychotherapist...

On the upside: money and lots of interesting technologies and shiny things in the zoo.

everyone's experience is different, but usually the pain is not from long hours, but from bureaucracy, old technology and some hostile colleagues.

It's the hostility that would kill me.

Good Stack (international)

Senior technical author. I freelanced from 2004-2013. My very first London contract in 2004 was at £350 a day. Nowadays, it's crazy bad - anything from £200 to £400, maybe £450 if your domain knowledge is spot on. And Google - I'm looking at you - contract rates of £20-£25 an hour have been bandied around in conversations with recruiters. So, no real market uplift in more than 10 years, which is why I'm now a permie (not in London) on £55K basic plus 20% bonus, no stock.

Degree in Graphic Design, 8 years industry experience, started with Flash / ActionScript and moved to JavaScript about 5 years ago.

Freelance Flash animation / dev for big digital agencies and ad companies (5 years ago) - £250 p/h, with 3 years experience.

Tech Lead - Digital Agency in Shoreditch (1.5 years ago) doing Node / Ember / Angular / DevOps - £45k, however I chose a lower salary for more leave and flexible working hours.

Freelancing JavaScript dev (Node, Angular etc), digital agencies - aprox £300-350 p/h

Now I work in Berlin in a dev role doing Node / React / Redux. €57k. My living expenses are 1/2 what they were in London, and I live in a central Berlin 1 bedroom apartment rather than shared housing.

>Freelancing JavaScript dev (Node, Angular etc), digital agencies - aprox £300-350 p/h

I assume you mean per day and not per hour right?

PHP Developer in the Southwest of UK (Devon, Cornwall, Somerset etc) 25k, no bonus - and that's about average. Living here isn't the cheapest either, £600pcm for a 2 bed flat, over £1,000 a year for water.

Really need to move towards the midlands (Bristol, Birmingham, Leicester, Staffordshire - cheaper rent, cheaper water, higher pay)

I've been a Dev for 7+ years.

That does seem awfully low given your experience. I hope you could double that by moving to one of the places you mentioned.

Hadn't worked in the western workforce in 7 years. Turned up in London in 2009, got £40k, kicked ass, had £60k within 3 months, up from there. These days I honestly wouldn't live in London for under £100k. I think the thing to do is contract work, live out of London (even in mainland Europe) if at all possible.

Yet another throwaway acct. 20+ years large-scale ops and security, last five with one of the "big five" tech companies. £100K base plus stock worth £150-200K/year depending on which way the market wind was blowing on vesting dates.

Currently doing my own startup and cyber-security consulting for £750-900/day.

This thread has me thinking whether all those claims that financial compensation isn't that important in job satisfaction is true or not. How often do we see threads asking about non-financial benefits.

Contractor, PHP/Full stack, 11 years exp, £350 - £400 a day in London. Not risen much in 5-6 years which is why i started doing other things like business consultancy.

How's business consultancy doing for you? Seems it's better paid, but I prefer the technical side personally.

You surely have more experience than me, but what I personally do is increase my rate by X% every 6 months or so, non-negotiable for new clients, with fair warning for existing ones. I often start a contract on tech X, and after some time I'm touching other parts of the business, so the rate increase makes sense.

I actually prefer the business consultancy now. I got bored of writing code all the time, i still do it for fun, but only about 1/3rd of my time for my business is coding now.

While we're on the subject of tech jobs in London... does anyone work with FPGAs?

Some investment banks do.

Developer (currently at a startup) £62k, no stock but I do have a pension/healthcare.

17 years experience, initially as a general web developer, then front end, now more back end. Currently Ruby on Rails but I can turn my hand to almost anything.

Not a manager, not a senior developer, not a tech lead. No desire to be.

I work quite short hours (9.30-5) and that's what's most important to me.

A startup in London that has both a pension and healthcare scheme in place where you work 9.30-5? That's a pretty rare beast.

I know! I am very very lucky, and I scouted around for a long time before I found it.

(throwaway account for obvious reasons)

Web Developer in London for a dating company - £75000 pa (with bonuses it's around £110000 pa)

Are you a team lead or architect or similar? This seems high for just a web developer

More importantly, are they hiring?

Actually no :( we just finished hiring some new candidates to fill our team. Like I mentioned in the earlier comment I am an outlier because I do end up working a lot with architectural tasks so maybe my job title doesn't justify my work.

Nope, but I am one of the seniors in the team and been here for a while. To be honest my title doesn't really reflect my work because I do end up dabbling a lot with other infrastructural work so could say it's an architect position.

excellent income; you can almost afford to buy a flat in London for that.

75k, bonuses, dating - I smell badoo. Am I right and if I am, how is it working there? Glassdoor is conflicted.

Contract Senior Developer, stack is usually SPA (Angular/React) with "modern" .NET.

Current gig £475pd, to be honest I had better leads but the client offered the same day of interview and I started the following day.

I have 6 years experience and no degree.

Guy next to me does the same job for 53k.

Edit: media type of industry. Work normal hours, usually 9-5:30.

Throwaway for obvious reasons.

No degree. Around 10 years experience in Network Security.

- BigCo

- Permanent position

- Cloud stuff

- £66k plus bonus et al which pumps it up to around £88k

Adding some important things:

- Stock

- Up to 10% pension match

- I work from home most of the time (got a little kid, so I can enjoy more time around him)

"Lead Developer" with a startup, £55k (I refused options in preference of salary).

I have a PhD (4 years programming), and ~4 years professional experience as well.

Previous roles: Fresh Graduate: "Developer" £28k + £3k bonus. Fresh PhD Graduate: "Senior Developer" £40k.

Mind if I ask what the tech stack is? I wonder if there's significant disparity in relation to the tech stack.

Oldest job was SQL/.NET and ActionScript, Post-PhD was mainly Python/C on Linux (I did a lot of that during the PhD too) and latest one is C++, PHP, SQL and little bits of others.

Do you feel like you are using your PhD being a lead developer?

1.5 years experience, full-stack web developer at a startup (Ruby, some Go), earning £25k in Central London. I'm broke and it sucks. I've tried interviewing other places but haven't found anywhere offering above £30k.

Throwaway. Data Scientist, Insurance, FT, 39k a year, approx 3 years experience.

Oh, yeah, also got a PhD in Maths. And am looking for a new position.

Shoot me an email (see profile). Medium sized company - analytics, financial services, other interesting data science stuff. Offices in London and elsewhere :-) I'll help steer you to our HR people and if you're successful, will receive a modest introduction bonus. We pay well, but not investment bank salaries. We have lots of PhDs - they're coming out of our ears, so you'll feel quite at home. It also seems that the planets are in alignment for our tech and its place in the market, so things are very upbeat right now.

tried, I seem unable to find any email.

Sorry old.lag@gmail.com

Slightly unrelated to your offer but I am curious that you have lots of PhDs. Is this a requirement for the position or is it just by chance?

Currently Senior Dev at a startup: £50k + 3.5% equity. Previous Hedge Fund: £95k + 25-50% bonus. Investment Bank: £80k + 25% bonus

Experience: 20 years as a dev. Skills: full stack dev .net, angular, iOS etc.

Senior iOS, contract, last year: £575 per day in a medium sized company Switched to a smaller company as Team Lead for £500 per day

£650 / day, almost all remote doing Hadoop and Redshift Consulting and POVs. Coding for 15 years, in Big Data for the past 5.

How is the contracting market health these days?

Are you finding it easier or harder to find contracts? What is your average downtime between contracts?

I had 15 unpaid weeks this year wrapped around the referendum. Last year I had 7 unpaid weeks.

Do you rely on random calls from agents throughout the day to setup your next role or do you have a couple you rely on? How many calls / emails do you get a day?

Half my contracts are through agents, I spend a lot longer than I'd like to admit on my LinkedIn profile. One agent has admitted they have a 30% margin which explains the ~1,000 phone calls and emails I got last year.

I run a blog, I'm active on Twitter and I've worked with a lot of different businesses and coworkers since I started my career so this is where the other half of my contracts come from.

I've heard from someone at (Big Hadoop Consultancy) that they send consultants out to train and do POVs paying the consulant £1,200 / day so there should be some growth in my day rate to come.

It's probably worth mentioning I only sell my time in one week blocks. I had two contracts this year where a client was having some troubles with Kafka on AWS. The first problem was taken care of in an hour in a half but they were still billed for a week. Same thing a few weeks later when Zookeeper was feeling upset.

Thank you for your replies, they were most informative. I'd love to read your blog if you want add me on twitter and DM me, thanks!

Contractor 100% remote, full stack, 10y experience, currently £40/h, will increase to £50 before the end of the year.

May I ask whats your stack?

Current contracts are on PHP, Vue.js and Go. Experienced on backend systems, C, Python, Linux sysadmin, MySQL DBA, and a security enthusiast.

I'm specialised in being a jack of all trades.

Senior Systems Specialist,32k pa. This is in the North East of England. Job actually involves anything from traditional system/network admin to web development and almost everything inbetween, supplier management, procurement. Probably under paid for the roles covered but thankfully not in a major city.

Contractor, currently £650/day. Hoping to increase that to £850/day by end of year. Experience > 15 yrs in web dev, though maybe only last 5 applies now (I don't do PHP 3 or perl any more).

Edit: long term so no "off" days & 150k ish per year depending how many holidays I take.

what language?

Mainly PHP if you can believe it. Lots of JS too though these days.

How do you plan to get beyond £650/day?

Haven't increased my rate in nearly 2 years and soon will be expected to take on extra responsibilities (herding a team etc) so going to negotiate a bump in rate.

I have a computer science degree and around 9 years experience doing full-stack web development(Ruby, PHP, Python, JavaScript). A year ago I was making £55k + around £5k worth of perks as permanent employee. Now I'm doing freelance roles for £350-£400 pd.

Developer contractor, nearly 20 yr exp., now mainly .NET, works out at just over £1 a minute :-)

Just switched roles so can give two:

Small Investment Bank - 61k + ~30% Bonus (3-5years experience) Java / Angular - Back Office Developer - Permanent

Small Hedge Fund - 65k + 50%+ Bonus (expected/promised) - .Net / WPF (5years experience although not in .Net) - Permanent

What are the hours?

Not bad to be honest, 8-7 but I do get out for an hour or so at lunch.

Those look pretty bad to someone outside London.

How much travel on top of that?

Working 10hr per day looks bad even inside London!

I'm young, so if I'm not coding at work, I would be doing it at home most of the week.

Travel is < 30 minutes each way.

But the coding at home would be your IP and you'd have no boss to tell you what tech to use.

For comparison, in Devon. Full stack senior developer, 20 years experience, full time - £42K.

(kind of off topic) considering a move? considered riverford.co.uk? if so fire me your CV...

Riverford is hiring? Oh that's funny. Could be fun to work where I buy my veggies.

Are we only talking programmer side?

Digital marketing, education sector, 4 years experience: £39k + healthcare

Although I initially thought it out for tech, I think any area is relevant. Thanks for sharing.

Am also looking if you're after a digital marketer who can also hack about in Rails to build dashboards, tools and insight analysis pieces.

"Intermediate" dev using Ruby-On-Rails mostly with a bit of Python, JS, and Go: £41k for the first year and £45k for the second. EDIT: no stock, and only benefit was WFH 1 day/week, and 1% matched retirement savings plan.

Senior front end developer. 4 years experience. Now a contractor on my first project at £350/day in a big company. Expecting this to rise to 400/450 for the next gig. A few months ago I was full time at a startup on £52K.

48k, London startup, frontend, 2.5 yrs exp. Took a paycut from 52.5k (@ 1.5 yrs exp) for this role.

Off topic - As someone in your exact previous position and looking to make the same move to contracting do you have any advice, did you find it easy to land that first contract?

I did find it quite easy. I just followed up with a recruiter, went to interview and got the job. You usually have to start fairly quickly so have some holiday banked up so you can leave permanent work sooner.

The work, culture, etc is similar to any other permanent job I've had. As long as you keep up to date and are good you'll be fine. Other companies may differ wildly I'm sure

Semi-related question: How do you calculate taxes in UK? Is the base of the tax the salary offered by companies in job offers? I mean, with say £60k job offer, do I pay tax from £60k? (with the last £17k being taxed at 40%)?

Yes salaries are advertised gross, and you deduct tax from the gross figure. Try this site: https://listentotaxman.com/

I mean, for example in France, the salaries might be advertised as "€35k", but from this you deduct social charges etc., and you pay tax from the "taxable income" which would be for example "€27k". Does this work the same in UK, or do I pay tax exactly from what the job offer says?

In the UK you pay National Insurance (NI) on your gross earnings. NI pays for things like the National Health Service. The amount you pay depends on your employment status and how much you earn [2]. I assume this is similar to "social charges" in France.

After deducting NI and the tax-free allowance [3], you pay income tax on whats left. And whats left after that is yours to keep.

Most regular employees have tax and NI automatically deducted from their monthly/weekly pay by their empoyer. This is called Pay as You Earn (PAYE) and keeps things simple. Company owners, contractors, etc. often pay tax yearly or half-yearly and often employ an accountant to arrange this.

[1] This is the amount that the job pays, before all taxes and deductions.

[2] https://www.gov.uk/national-insurance/how-much-you-pay

[3] https://www.gov.uk/income-tax-rates/current-rates-and-allowa...

Great, thanks!

Nope, you pay tax on the full amount. Each taxpayer has a personal allowance (currently £11,000 generally, but this varies) on which no tax is paid; a rate of 20% applies to income between £11,000 and £42,000, a rate of 40% on income between £42,000 and £161,000, and a rate of 45% above that.

Don't forget you start to lose the personal allowance at 100k, so someone earning earn between 100k and ~122k has a top rate of 60%

Front end developer, large IT consultancy, £35k, no bonus. Feeling underpaid.

Senior Web Dev £550/day 7 years experience no degree.

Startup salaries topped out at 80k (ignoring non-liquid stock) so went contracting. You need the stomach for it, but it pays a lot better for similar work.

Finance, QA, permie, 5 yrs exp., 56k + ~10k bonus.

I've been longing to go contracting in the last few months, but judging by the sentiment on this thread, it doesn't look like it's a wise choice.

This is kind of offtopic, but "There's recently been a lot of discussion about how much people are making in different areas of the US". Where can I find that post? Thanks

Most likely this one: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12588202

I don't work in London but I know many people who do. The experience Scala developers I know who work contracts get £500-£700pd outside of banks, and £600-£900pd in the banks.

The Cassandra guys I know get at least £1K per day. They are the top of the top but you can get paid serious bank doing SMACK stack type gigs

High demand. Very small supply.

Snr Cloud / Infra. £650 day remote working (desk in London but physically in the office 1-2 days a month), 1 yr contract - but renewable. Annualised, £156K

Do you mind describing what are your daily tasks in broad terms?

Asking for a... uh, for a friend. Yeah.

Front-Office Quant Research in French bank, 4 years experience, £70k fix + £35k bonus. Definitely lower that what you would get in a US or UK bank.

Startup, full time employee, called Senior but I only have one year of commercial experience, £47,500. ~10% annual bonus & Stock Options.

Lead a team of 6 in one devision of a medium sized org. Web services + api. ~10 years exp. £85k plus 30% bonus (expected), no stock.

70k + stock + 1% matched pension. Senior software engineer. PhD and 4 years professional experience. Work 9:30 to 6. Ruby on Rails.

Throwaway account

Senior developer with a front-end focus at a startup with some corporate backing, 7 years of experience, ~80k plus benefits.

Established privately held (profitable) company, full-time tech-lead, Telecoms + Web + Backend, 10 years experience - £50k.

At a major retail company, here are our published ranges: Engineer £40-65K Senior Engineer £60-80K Principal £75-95k

7 years of experience, mostly PHP and Python. Started at 44 after 2 years 51k. Now got offer for 80k~ as devops.

In 2013 I declined an offer (first job, graduate): software dev in bigco (IT Provider travel industry), £38K

Startup, Software Engineer (JavaScript), 2.5 years experience (Grad May '14), 38k, 12% bonus.

Senior Infrastructure specialist, big bank, 14 years, £450 a day, annualises to about £110k

Software Developer - 13 years experience

One of the big tech companies

70k Base 20k Bonus + ~20k / year stock vesting

£52k, some stock, healthcare. Senior dev in a video game company. ~8 year experience

Contractor, £700/day, investment bank, back office role

10 years C++, specialised in low latency

Full stack (mostly PHP) contractor, 15 years experience, 100% remote, £400/day

Quant risk analyst for a commodities trading house

Base £67k Bonus anywhere between 15 to 50%

5 years xp

Contract PM in Investment Banking IT, 20+ years experience, £800/day.

Senior developer in the Civil Service, 8 years experience, £60k/year

45k pa working as a DevOps for one of the console companies for 2 years.

Mid senior Android Developer in social network £55k +12% bonus no stock

Software engineer (front-end) 8 years experience

77k basic 10k bonus plus stocks

working for an engineering consultancy at a very senior technical level, overseeing big data projects, and doing some business development. £80k p/a plus benefits

Im not in London still in(uk), 1.5years IT Security,18k :(

Full time senior Java/Scala/JS @ £48K :/

Used to make £32k at startup. 3 years of experience .

6 years experience. software developer 450£ per day

what is your stack? frontend, java, c++ (and, do you work in finance?)

nodejs right now, but I'm full stack

I don't work in finance

yikes!

28k in London, full stack dev with 2 years experience... react + redux, node, express, elasticsearch, rabbitmq, postgres, mongo etc.

Throwaway. £79k + stock option + benefits

forgot to add - startup, 16 years of experience. lead role

throwaway account

Front office large investment bank. Java. Perm. 15 years in banking, 20 years in programming

110k - no significant bonus.

lead developer, no degree, gaming: 75k base + 30k bonus. Mostly c++, some objectiveC and java

7 years of experience

May I suggest something more anonymous like a google spreadsheet? Or a HN poll?

I think keeping it in comments here is better since spreadsheets tend to to have a lot of messed up data (looking at previous surveys). What people share is definitely free-form, so I'd prefer to leave the data rather unstructured. Creating a throwaway is also really easy and bogus comments are easier to deal with than someone messing with the spreadsheet.

However, I've created a spreadsheet (https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1MAIX9UEnpq0pAsMWr1NW...) if anyone prefers that.

I recommend making a web form using Google spreadsheets - which takes 3 minutes, and making the spreadsheet read-only.

When I last posted an open spreadsheet to hacker news it grew, then got defaced with all the data deleted. Someone restored it but it was work to ensure no data was lost.

Those people @ 55 - 60k (EUROS) should really ask themselves if it's worth working in London.

Can they do better elsewhere in the UK? Seems like many options except move to the US

I do not have the statistics but you can earn that much elsewhere and pay less rent & other costs of living.

Well so unless you are a briton or you love the country / city too much I do not see a reason not to move elsewhere.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com