Hacker News Reader

Comment by _0o6v | Hacker News Reader

There is not a single engineering job in the UK that pays $1m per year. There are barely any engineering jobs that pay £100k+ a year.

View on HN

There must be some that pay £1M at the tech giants.

£100K is a minimum for most of the financial tech recruiters, for senior hires. At least I chat to quite a few of them and there doesn't seem to be anything under. Typical build-a-market-connector jobs.

Also there's a big contracting market where people will pay £600-£2000 a day, depending on what you do. They're semi-permanent jobs that superficially seem to be temporary, but something about how banks are organised makes them feel more permanent.

I have spoken to a handful of recruiters that have suggested £100k but they definitely seem rare. I've _never_,not once, seen or come across an offer for more than 500k. Im sure there are people who are on it, but I have absolutely no idea who they are or where they work.

Assuming you mean senior jobs in finance, 100K is a sort of modal zone. You lose your personal tax allowance just above, so there's a dead zone around there. That's my guess anyway, what's the point of your employer paying 100% tax?

£500k as a salary is rare, most comp at that level is some sort of bonus.

I've heard of banks that hire people in at ordinary day rates, but then once they are familiar with the person will bump the rate to whatever.

> You lose your personal tax allowance just above, so there's a dead zone around there. That's my guess anyway, what's the point of your employer paying 100% tax?

It's tapered from 100 to 125k, but at no point is your employer paying 100% tax. From 100 to 125k, your marginal tax rate is ~60%, but drops after that point.

> £500k as a salary is rare, most comp at that level is some sort of bonus.

Even with bonuses, or RSU/some other form of shares, I think "rare" is understating it, and that's exactly the point. The discussion in this thread is that the top performers in FAANG are clearing _well_ above these values (multiples of these numbers).

> once they are familiar with the person will bump the rate to whatever.

Can you be a little more clear with the "whatever" number? 100k? 500k? 1m?

1000 - 2000 a day

> It's tapered from 100 to 125k, but at no point is your employer paying 100% tax. From 100 to 125k, your marginal tax rate is ~60%, but drops after that point.

Actually you're right, I had misunderstood something. Looking at an online calculator, if you go from 100K to 125K gross, you take home 10K more.

I work in UK FS in London as a contractor. The work is pretty lucrative (for the UK) but not overly exciting. It possible to make this sort of money (I do not) but it is extremely rare.

Most of the >£100k permanent (not contract) jobs I see have "Architect" in the title which typically means not just coding.

As an additional note, the UK contracting market is on a precipice at the moment with an uncertain future.

I'd imagine much of the top performer work at FAANG (like the OP's post here) isn't overly exciting either!

> but it is extremely rare.

I'd expect so, and it seems this is rare in the US too, (this is literally the top of top performers at the top companies), but you'd expect to have _some_ indication of this information leakign out.

> Most of the >£100k permanent (not contract) jobs I see have "Architect" in the title which typically means not just coding.

Any idea on the 500k+ roles? (e.g. this post).

I don't see the FAANG companies offering specific roles for "Architect" like the old school enterprises do.

Architecture is something to reason about as a team and the accountability of architecturally significant decisions seems to rest with the team also.

The >$500k roles seem to just be the upper echelons of a software engineer role.

As an architect you'll unlikely do any coding, maybe when there is a downtime and you are extremely bored. Most of this job are meetings, writing reports, passing messages, consulting developers and giving direction and resolving issues in the teams (e.g. team A wants to use framework X, team B wants to use framework Y) by creating guidance.

The contracting market will be culled from next year when IR35 changes come to play. That means people providing services as a business will not be able to claim business expenses (with some exceptions) plus they will have to draw all revenue as a salary. This makes essentially running such service pointless. They will also have to pay employee and employer's NI (without having any employment rights), that gives effective tax rate at around 54%. There will be awkward situation where engineers would work only half a year, to pay more reasonable tax or become an employee of agency. Coincidentally the share prices of Indian consultancies rocketed upon the announcement of IR35 going forward.

What is a going rate for senior engineer in a tech company in the UK? Last I look, it was in the order of about £65K to £70K for the really top performers.

Maybe outside London. I recently left London but took my salary with me. If I needed to get a new job where I am I'd probably be looking at a 40-50% pay cut.

My experience is it is possible earn a lot more than that in the UK as a senior engineer, even outside of London

A big pile of "it depends", just the definition of senior engineer varies so much from company to company that comparison is all but meaningless.

I know that at Facebook the ballpark salary for something approximating senior is approx £100k. I think a range between around £60k to £110k is in line with what i've seen on offer for senior (source: i've spent most of this year looking for work, and this is pretty much what i've seen)

It depends far more on the company than anything else. I've seen engineers earning over £120k that wouldn't have been able to get hired as senior at my last role, where the senior salary was in the £70-80k range.

As a (mediocre) Senior engineer at a London startup i'm on 75k per year + up to 20% annual bonus.

FB/Google/Microsoft seem to be in the 80-100k ballpark for senior engineers.

They have RSU which can be sold, or hold for even more money later.

Yup - Australia also.

Wage stagnation for the last 15 or so years.

Meanwhile things get more expensive and we are in a recession.

Technically, we're out of a recession now. Technically.

https://www.abc.net.au/news/2020-12-02/australia-september-q...

You could hit $1M+ as a quant in trading with bonus tied to PnL. There are quite a few shops in London as it's a major finance hub outside US.

£100k is easy to achieve in pretty much any faang - https://www.levels.fyi/comp.html?track=Software%20Engineer&s...

Bear in mind the majority of that comp is equity.

My first software engineering job in London in 2011 was arguably $1m/year, if I'd hung on to the equity until now!

Facebook equity != some 2 person startup share options

Reply on news.ycombinator.com