Ask HN: Which UK consultancies offer best dev salaries and salary progression? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: Which UK consultancies offer best dev salaries and salary progression?

7 pointsshetill10 comments

Recently I've been trying to find which is the fastest way to increase your salary and receive steady salary progression. Two things come to mind working for a Consultancy or Contracting. Could consultancy be the easier route and could it offer just as much money as contracting?

My question is what are the pros and cons of working for Consultancy and which are good consultancies to consider applying for in London,UK?

- How does the dev experience compare?

- How many more hours do you work there on average?

- Can you work remote for them and do you have to travel to different clients?

- Do you get commission for each client project?

- Do they even pay more compared to big tech companies?

- Do they have a culture of rewarding their devs and talk openly about money and help devs progress in their careers?

View on HN

If you are thinking of digital/technology teams in consultancies the Accenture, Sapient, Deloitte etc. I have a few broad generalizations off the top of my head:

1. These organizations will focus on servicing clients with market leader technologies; Adobe, Salesforce, etc. There will be very little if any bespoke work, unless they're lucky to win some creative/communications projects. As such, they tend to attract large clients who can afford such projects — i.e. automotive, financial services and insurance, governments etc.

2. Bonuses maybe, but I've never heard of a commission model in those organizations for developers. Bonuses are usually not paid unless you are at an executive seniority with lead-generation or client-service role (in which case, very likely you are not a day-to-day developer)

3. Travel is very common, even for developers. The more senior you are in your role, the more likely you will travel for pitches and meetings. Developers can be co-located (i.e. you work client-side), and this is common when you have a few local leads and have development teams elsewhere (i.e. India, Poland, etc). You are a 'consultant' first, developer second.

4. Glassdoor/LinkedIn salaries are fairly accurate. From my experience, tech companies will pay more, have greater benefits, and bonuses. Few of these organizations are publicly traded, so there's no shares. However, if you are a specialized talent, i.e. Salesforce architect, Amazon Cloud certification etc., you can expect a significantly higher salary as those roles allow the organizations to go for accreditation and can be billed to clients at a much higher rate. Clients are happy to pay for "Salesforce experts," but will wonder why every other developer isn't 50 EUR an hour...

5. Most consultancies are very heavily invested in the technology space, and I have found that these organizations tend to have very clear performance frameworks for promotion. Largely, however, it focuses on the "client service pathways" i.e. if you want to be promoted, expect to do more and more client service work — pitches, planning, team management, etc. And less development over time.

As for contracting, IR35 has changed the UK landscape a lot. There is a lot of money for specialized talent (experts in a particular product suite), but because of IR35 I feel most organization will try and hire internally to avoid the grind of per-project contracts.

IR35 is only a problem for the individual, not the company especially if you are deemed inside IR35.

Thanks for your insight that gives me a good idea of what it's like. It does seem that to make more you have to be more client facing and less of a developer which is not what I'm looking for. Specializing is something I also think it should have better payoff.

Are consultancy salaries that good? If trying to optimise for compensation, my mind would jump to finance or contracting, not to working for a consultancy.

note that contracting requires establishing and maintaining relationships. there are also legal implications of messing stuff up. working for a consultancy shields you from all of this.

exactly what I thought, there is a lot of accounting, tax and legal things to consider when contracting.

Yes - managing relationships, uncertainty, tough to get started, lack of continuity and very different career progression, a lot more work in general - none of those are appealing.

There's not really personal implications of messing stuff up, if you contract outside IR35 as a Limited company most clients require you to have Indemnity insurance, which costs around £20 a month and gives you a couple million of cover.

Tax and accounting is easy, a good accountant for c. £100 a month will cover everything for you such as payroll, any accountancy questions and preparing your end of year company tax returns (CT600) as well as your personal self assessment each year. Honestly the most I have to do each month is send an invoice to the client which takes about 10 minutes and tag a couple of business transactions in FreeAgent every couple of weeks.

Keeping a pipeline of work is obviously the trickier part, but once you get your first couple of contracts (probably via a recruitment agent) then you quickly build up a network of other independent contractors you can reach out to as well as any other permanent members of staff you worked well with who have moved to new roles etc.

> note that contracting requires establishing and maintaining relationships.

What relationships? In the UK, most people find contracts on job boards. You just filter by "Contract", instead of "Permanent". After that, there's a job interview etc. The advantage of being a contractor is that the interviews are much more relaxed and there's no HR involved in them at all.

I'm a contractor from eastern europe, its a completely different ball game to contract "cross country". Especially in EU, where much of the work is still done on-site, especially in embedded which is my domain.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com