Comment by yrgulation | Hacker News Reader

Comment by yrgulation | Hacker News Reader

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The issue is I don't know how these average salaries are calculated. I can confidently say that I know no one at a Senior level working on less than 60kGBP a year, and I don't imagine the bulk of engineers are junior or mid level. I do know however that people who earned a lot once they moved to either CA or AU, they earned less - but were happy given the benefits in previous comment.

> I've worked in Australia, and compared to the pay of most salaried programmers in the UK, the money on offer was much better. Hell, doing the same damn job for a big corporate over there as I had done in London (same team and everything) netted me a 60% payrise.

New data points are always welcome - I might have to read more on the topic as I am clearly missing some data in regards to AU (my peers told me otherwise, maybe they do something wrong).

> I know no one at a Senior level working on less than 60kGBP a year,

I don't think I know anyone in our sector that's currently salaried so I can't say I have many personal datapoints there. However I do think that outside of London the UK pays salaried software folks pretty badly.

> I do know however that people who earned a lot...

Maybe there's less variance and less room at the top end in CA and AU? That could explain our conflicting views.

My last experience over there was not as a "senior", though I had a few years experience I wasn't at the top of my game compared to today.

£60k gives you about £3650 after tax. It could feel like a lot if you live in a flat share and don't plan to start a family, but otherwise this just gives you a very basic life. Definitely not something you would expect after committing your life to this trade. I have a friend who is a self-employed cleaner and she makes much more than that and is much less stressed (what I mean by this is you need to commit far less time to learn how to clean and you are unlikely going to be woken up by a dream about that corner you forgot to clean).

Can't argue that being a self employed cleaner would be lower stress. What's your friend charging and what kind of work does she do? I only have limited experience with paying cleaners in the uk, but she must be charging more than those I've seen.

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