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Comment by hkarthik | Hacker News Reader

If you are already in London, I would stay put. Major FANG companies like FB are already making major inroads to build out offices in the UK. And they will likely disrupt the UK/EU salaries quite a bit in the coming years.

Look for contacts in those companies and try and land a gig there. Far easier than relocating and dealing with Visa issues in the US.

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All the big tech companies in the area pay significantly less in London from knowing engineers there and talking to recruiters in the past. I doubt they are going to start changing that any time soon when they can get good engineers without doing that. I've kept an eye on this when looking for jobs before because I think it would be fun to live in London for a few years, but it's not worth the tradeoff when you can make much more and save much more on the west coast in the US. COL in London is high, and pay is low comparatively (and this is coming from someone in Seattle which traditionally has slightly lower pay then Bay Area)

Those companies already exist in London and they give a haircut of 30% over US salary practically as a matter of policy. Why would they pay more than they need to in the abysmal UK market?

I'm trying to understand your 30%. Are you saying they give 70% of US salary or 30%?

Sorry, I meant 30% haircut, so yeah, 70% of total US salary. Granted that's totally rough but you can confirm it on glassdoor. People will give you CoL arguments but they're BS -- London is just as expensive as NYC, if not more. A big part of the problem is that HMRC costs increase so rapidly above £120k. It seems like the UK government is hampering the willingness of US companies to raise salaries past that level. It's typical UK government behavior, honestly.

This is interesting but I think it's just a matter of time before the dam breaks and all the tech companies with a UK presence start increasing salaries to get more competitive. The same thing happened in NYC around 2015-2020. At some point money talks and the bullshit starts to walk.

I know someone who is moving from NYC to the UK to run an engineering team at a FANG company. He'll want to hire the best engineers and be willing to pay for them. And I know he wouldn't have taken that job if it didn't come with a big pay increase.

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