According to a website "efinancialcareers" or something, I think first could be getting £90k, and that before the bonus. And yes that is very IMO but in their career trajectory it seems to be small.
A £3k/month flat is certainly lavish. Or at least sized for two incomes.
(And even then, probably a nice a place in zone 1. Did that figure come from actually looking for places, or just exaggeration to make a point? I mean, of course you can spend that much and far more, but it's by no means the entry point is all I'm saying.)
I have a friend who used to rent a flat pretty much opposite Facebook's office, paid £2800/month for a 1-bed studio. Know someone else who works for a law firm in the City, he pays dead on £3000/month for a flat but he's 2 minutes away from the office and pays for that convenience. And yes, I know someone who lives in Ealing, but a 2-bed flat(not a house) is still £1900/month, and the commute was 45 minutes each way on the tube.
But furthermore, you can find 2-beds in the same location for around £2000/month (I live in one). Suggestions that an analyst at GS or an E3 at FB earning 70-100k isn't actually that well off because rents are high are silly, if they're struggling how is someone on a more normal grad salary of 35k supposed to be coping?
Our standard of housing is extremely low here. And small.
- Being in high demand, especially after your first job in the industry. Nope, every job search is as difficult as the first one and there are no companies competing to have me on.
- Being able to get a FAANG job as long as you're great at algorithm problems. Nope, those companies have limited presence in the UK, their salaries aren't nearly as good as in the US, it's tough to get an interview and there are no UK equivalents to them. So even if I'm the best at whiteboard problems, that makes no difference to my career.
- High salaries, both right out of university and later in one's career. Or tech salaries being much higher than other industries. In the UK tech is just another group of okay-ish white-collar jobs.
[1] https://www.bls.gov/ooh/computer-and-information-technology/...
You should check Spain. I'm paying more to the hires in latin america than I got offered while trying to work in Spain
US troops are given a cost of living allowance (COLA) while stationed in Germany. It is (or was while I was there) tied to the USD/Euro exchange rate. Even so, we always tried to avoid shopping "on the local economy" and stick to base facilities for groceries and such as much as possible.
- Social security is far better. You of course need to save for bad times, but getting sick will cost you practically nothing (you're always insured and the insurance will pay you 2/3rds of your wage) and when loosing your job (which is already far harder than in the US) you'll be covered quite good for 18 months and fall back to basic social support after that
- Generally a bit lower standard of living. It's not bad, of course, but 100k$+ cars, for example, are usually only leased via work, and 2k$+ laptops are a rather large expense to many people.
I consistently see JavaScript SEng roles at startups and large companies going for 40-60k.
The big cities are quite expensive, and you're not going to buy a mansion with that kind of money but it's still pretty good, especially compared to the national median.
What department? I couldn't stomach working at a particular 'international trade' department, because they managed to hire the most awful team of over-engineers to build a CMS.
I couldn't understand what the fuck they did there, other than force me to do superfluous shite for months after I delivered what they wanted. That superfluous shite being the bifurcation of a PDF generator Django application to a 'server' and 'client' micro-service that communicated over an HTTP API; which they also demanded that I write a pip installable client for (a client for an API that had one endpoint!)
This was years ago, and I still have no qualms about deriding these jackanapes who work in the insular world of government Python development in London. I felt like a proper whore working for the government, extremely easy work, good pay; but a terrible inability to see how mediocre what they were doing was.
British and American companies are structured quite differently. As a contractor in the UK, you effectively have the same rights as an American employee.
If you look on the job boards for contract work, hardly any of it (prior to corona) was under £500pd.
Median household income is £29.9K (and some households have two or more earners).
Full time minimum wage is ~£15K a year.
I look over the pond and see what people with my level of experience are earning and think "damn, I'm under paid" then I look at at the median household income and think damn I'm way over paid.
1. Pay in general is lower in the UK than the US. The bank will pay what they can get away with and there isn’t enough competition between banks/consultancies/tech/law to drive pay up. I wouldn’t be surprised if more competitive candidates got higher offers.
2. A lot of compensation can be made up in bonuses, though I don’t know what kind of bonus a junior analyst might get.
Minimum wage is £8.72 / hour.
So at a bare minimum (before perks / generous pension / very generous bonus) they are getting three times the minimum wage.
That's still not great, but they are suffering far less than millions of cleaners and other essential workers, not to mention the millions of people on zero hour contracts who are unable to get minimum wage and the thousands of people in forced labour conditions aka slavery (ie migrant Labour).
Which is mostly to say that the condition of most people is a lot lot worse than most of us stop to think about most of the time.
£90k was something that you'd take 10 or 20 years to get to.
Though this was nearly 15 years ago so I could be misremembering