Also there is a good overlap for companies based on the east coast to do hand over, which I believe is common in finance.
The UK for an American tech company is a large stable country within 1-2 hours of the timezone of the largest single market in the world and has a shared language and culture.
If you want to sell into Europe then Britain made sense...until the fuckwits voted for leave (yeah I'm bitter, they fucked over everyone my age and under).
I think this is where the 'Remoaner' labels come from.
Plus on top of that many of the pro-leave arguments have proved to be outright lies already ...and we still haven't even left yet.
oh and the Gross Incompetence of David Cameron in how they wrote the goddam question.
Friendliest people I've ever seen, though.
Not really. Only some things are significantly affected by the local cost of living: rent, food, nights out for instance. Sure, they probably make up the majority of your spending, but CoL is almost irrelevant for
- Buying luxuries: a Porsche or an iPhone are nearly the same price everywhere in the world
- Going on vacation
- Savings, if you don't intend to stay where you currently live forever
Depending on your lifestyle, these categories could easily make up most of your income, in which case $5k per year is terrible even if it covers the CoL in Tunis.
When the GBP was a bit stronger you could fund a trip to NY and buy an iPhoneX/Macbook instead of buying in the UK.
I think this doesn't affect my point though, which is mainly that iPhones are just as expensive in generally cheap places.
"Luxuries the same price around the world" is just straight wrong. I don't know how anyone could think that who has lived in various countries, especially for American goods.
For example, no matter where I've lived in the world, it was 25%-50% cheaper to wait until I visited family in Texas to purchase new Levi's.
It's the high salaries that cause gentrification, not gentrification that causes high salaries.
Consider that Azure, AWS, Google Cloud Platform, etc. are all huge in the UK, yet most of the work on them is taking place in the US. Ditto for Oracle, Office 365, the Google Suite and even consumer stuff like Craigslist, Reddit or Apple's services (that the UK never home produced something like Reddit continues to boggle my mind). Why pay for the best people in the industry to work in the UK when we can just stand on the shoulders of work being done in the US?
If you look at industries where the UK does take an innovative role like finance or bioinformatics, the salaries seem a lot more competitive, though are still not at US levels due to the UK's lower cost of living I guess.
For consumer goods it seems they're comparing a cheap UK supermarket to Whole Foods in SF, and for rents they must be ignoring square footage and/or using different definitions of city center to get those comparisons. I checked out rental prices in SF on a recent visit and found SF pretty good value compared to London.
It's actually possible for me, a not-especially-good junior/mid developer to consider living alone with a <40 minute commute in London; that seemed to be a no go for guys making far more than me in SF.
All that being said, I saved a stupid amount of money in SF working on intern level wages. If your goal is to slum it and accumulate money, London does not come close. SF is a place to go and pile up money with a get out plan in mind.
Talking to people from around the US, it's just generally cheaper in other places in the US. Gas is cheaper, insurance, (non-SF)rent etc.
As far as space is concerned, in my experience one of the Bay Area's biggest problems was inefficient use of space in every which way possible. Even beyond the lack of usage of vertical space, every room I had was pretty huge, double bed, desk, room to do just about any kind of yoga I could think of and still a ton of extra on top of that. I'd have happily traded half of it for a few hundred off my rent.
I'd need to know what metrics are being used for quality (e.g. I'd take an absolute slum of a single room over sharing in prime apartment).
Probably the biggest is that the UK doesn't have the number of large tech companies in one place needed to push up wages. ARM is in Cambridge, Rockstar is in Newcastle, Dyson near Bristol. The only exception is in Banking where the salaries are much higher than the UK average (but still lower, as tech is views as second to other roles, not as the primary focus).
Other reasons are that the UK has a better social safety net. That to many people in many places in the uk there is no such thing as an engineer, if you work with computers you work in IT (and can you fix my laptop please?).
There is in many places (especially older companies with non-tech middle managers), also a management problem. You can't pay an engineer more than a (non-technical) middle manager, because the manager is (obviously) more important, as they can tell then engineers what to do. And all the engineers do is what management tells them to, so they're replaceable. This is obviously not a good environment for productive engineering, but explains why some companies see engineers as a cost centre rather than a revenue generating centre.
- More regulation around employee protection
- Excellent talent drawn from less wealthy EU states who may be willing to accept a slightly lower wage than locals
- Lots of STEM graduates from UK universities
- A different work life balance
- Tech skills are not seen as valuable as law/banking/medicine
- A more profit-first rather than growth-first startup mindset
What’s special about Silicon Valley is that nowhere else comes close, that the minimum efficient scale for a great many software ideas is small, that it’s new, the addressable market is close to the entire global economy, and most importantly, they’re talent constrained, not capital constrained.
Is that because of labor regulations there?
Most companies I know much rather have permies than contractors.
Pay tends to be quite a bit higher for contractors but without all the perks like pension contributions and leave that a permanent position has. However, as a contractor, you have more control over your life.
As a contractor, it's also easier to get exposure to different tech, rather than be stuck doing the same thing day in and out.
They just disappear for weeks and then pop up again as if nothing happened. I don't know if it's a cultural thing like Indian programmers who always say yes even when they mean no, or I've just met unreliable ones.
It would be very weird for someone employed full time in Poland to disappear for weeks.