Secondly a pretty average contractor day rate is 500pd, which is over 100k, and there are a lot of contractors. I think it makes eng salaries in the UK seem lower than they are. Many of my friends went contract and would never go back. The senior market is therefore hard to hire for, outside trendy/exciting companies, unless you pay for contractors.
That said, we should all be asking for raises <3! By all I mean everyone apart from the C suites of public companies
I'm not sure big tech and finance are representative of London.
There are a lot of people in finance in London, also a lot of big tech (seen the current, and new, Google buildings at KGX?), quite aside from a lot of contractors :)
edit: ah, those stats are based on advertised salaries, not actual salaries after the bait and switch - so they're all inflated.
There are 10 000 employees in every building in canary wharf (the financial center with tens of banks). There are a similar amount of employees in the new buildings of Google, Apple and co. Plus multiple large companies but not necessarily as great. That's tens of thousands of roles to fill.
Look at Canary Wharf at lunchtime and tell me with a straight face that those are developers.
Ironically, accountants and finance folks eat at their desks, so if you see people outside at lunch time, they might very well be technology folks. They'd be wearing shirts though, easily confused with business people.
It's true that there are startups that try to get away with hiring people out of school for peanuts, from all across Europe. They often have a turnover of half the staff leaving within a year and it's no coincidence.
I worked in startups. I've seen first hands employees being abused and leaving in drove after 1-2 years to get significantly more, literally anywhere else. Name any company in London, probably have some ex colleagues there.
That being said, I am talking about developers who can handle a HackerRank test and a coding interview on the whiteboard. It's not a high bar by any means but it is something.
With the IR35 changes I've been looking at switching back to full-time, but the salary ranges are just so low in comparison, it's quite disheartening really. Most comparable full-time positions offer about a third of what I make contracting.
I also expected contractors to be more highly skilled, but in my experience it's almost the opposite. I recently worked with a devops contractor earning probably around £100k who had set the organisation wide SSO administrator password to "Password1".
If I didn't have so many commitments in the UK I would seriously consider trying to move to the US. The market here seems completely bizarre.
I’d suspect 20% of my engineering colleagues make in excess of £150k a year.
My personal experience being a contractor vs. employee though is that contracting is Significantly more lucrative. Not orders of magnitude more lucrative, but at least ~2x in gross terms. What really sets it apart for me though is the freedom to choose how to make the best use of that revenue. That freedom to me is priceless, and can absolutely increase that multiplier quite significantly by way of investments, expense allocation, pension schemes etc. It’s more responsibility and more admin than simply being an employee and collecting a salary and benefits, and it’s certainly not for everyone, and you will definitely need a good accountant, but in my experience being a contractor is worth every second of extra time and effort.
I often see cash compensation >300k on there.
Here's one for precisely 150k right now https://oxfordknight.co.uk/jobs/big-data-engineer/.
These aren’t junior jobs, and they often require you to be in central London so your money won’t go as far, but these jobs do exist.
> For the right candidate year 1 comp will be up to £500k.
After going through a three hour coding test, phone screen + onsite it turned out to be 120k + smallish bonus. Maybe I'm not the right candidate but most likely 500k was never on the table.
It's not the first time this has happened to me or people I know either. What I'm getting at is that I'd take the Oxford Knight compensation numbers with a pinch of salt. Those 300k jobs _do_ exist but nowhere near as many as in the US.
Additionally levels.fyi or glassdoor data doesn't support a large number of 300k jobs in London.