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Comment by matthewmacleod | Hacker News Reader

I suppose that depends on what you categorise as 'high reward'.

I basically mess around writing software—something I like doing—for 6 hours a day, attend a few meetings, and every month somebody deposits a ludicrous amount of money into my bank account. And I'm not even working for one of the larger companies with correspondingly better salaries.

I'm certainly not going to become a cash millionaire off the back of it, but I'd wager that in aggregate the amount of investment one makes into a stable job at a large software company pays out more on average.

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Just clicking on your profile I see you work in London. From what I can tell most programmers don't get paid 'ludicrous amounts' there. Though maybe you have a rare role, or maybe you just have a very low threshold for what you consider ludicrous.

You are correct about the tech industry here (low salaries relative to US) but developers working in finance in London make comparable money to Bay Area tech firms.

People routinely get paid £100k straight out of university to write code in London, just not in the tech scene. Total comp in the financial sector with 5 years experience is commonly £200k.

Which is not 'ludicrous' but more than you might imagine from seeing £40k job postings in the web dev sector.

Damn, I've made some bad decisions in this career!

That is so no true in my experience as someone working in finance in London. Can you name 1-2 companies paying 100k for graduates or 200k after 5 years?

Not true.

I’m extremely skeptical of your estimates; they’re considerably higher than I’ve heard of in London.

What a load of bollocks! £90k in finance with deep technical expertise is already in the 99% quantile for London.

That's not true as such. £100k with no experience is very hard to achieve, even with long-term comp. Maybe if you work at an algo trading company and get paid by the performance of your algorithms. But then it's more like being self-employed (they just provide seed money and some basic salary).

Total comp of £200k/year is clearly possible but also just on the investment side (not writing software for support systems) and usually involves some risk (i.e. income is volatile). Finance easily pays 2x that of tech in London but only because tech doesn't pay very well. A lot of startups pay programmers not more than you'd get with any other office job which is clearly not comparable with the US.

"I'm certainly not going to become a cash millionaire"

don't be so sure. invest 10-20% wisely and you may be one sooner than you think ;)

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