Do you work there? What has your experience been so far?
How competitive are they relative to the rest of the market in London?
How challenging is the interview process?
Culture/work-life balance?
Is the number of teams and the problems they work on limited because they're not in one of the primary US offices?
I've worked at FAANG in US and UK and am currently going back to the US for non-financial reasons. I don't regret being here but I find London to be impossibly expensive to build a family in.
[0] https://www.theguardian.com/science/2020/sep/10/uk-mathemati...
On £100k London is pretty affordable, so I’m curious, how much were you making in London and what do you consider to be a required salary to start a family here? London is very expensive but I’ve not heard the sentiment that FAANG salaries aren’t enough — would be helpful to learn more specifics of your view!
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_average_a...
Is that different elsewhere?
Edited to note this is "Base" not "Total" Salary
A house with a garden, kids, private school etc. 100k won't cut it unfortunately.
For some reason I thought FAANGs in London were paid really well but seems like contracting or finance is the only way to get a reasonable income.
I have a buddy who was working for a DeepMind and now works for Google (UK). His salary is £140k. Meanwhile day rates of £600 per day are pretty standard and pay the same for arguably less hassle.
Even in London £100k is above a reasonable income for one person. It's not enough to buy a house and provide for a family on one income and still have no worries, but expecting that is unreasonable. It's really easy to get stuck in a bubble where we forget that six figures is crazy out of the ordinary for an average person.
But as to your main point. Yeah finance and contracting really is the right way to go to get a high income. Though I think this might be changing with the contracting as there were some recent changes that make contracting less efficient tax wise, and could push high performers to either ask for more, or just move to being an employee.
We shouldn't be lowering our "unreasonable" standards. If you're in the top 1% in income - you should have an complementary lifestyle. Not just be grateful that you're not in complete financial misery like everyone else your age.
Assuming you're single and in the top 3% of HH income (top 1% personal) - you have 2.1 less persons to provide for. You should probably be better off than two people with a kid. You need less bedrooms and floor space, that's for sure.
If you can't find a decent 1 bedroom in town - I feel sorry for the family shopping for a 3 bedroom on a slightly higher income that has most of that extra income going directly to the tax man.
It’s not necessarily the case that top 10% individual income means you’re top 10% household income (and the top 10% household income can obviously bid more for housing than the second, third, or farther decile of household income).
The following search for 3 bedroom houses [1] provides either flats, maisonettes and a few houses in areas with poor transport links, and many of these are still over budget.
[1]: https://www.rightmove.co.uk/property-for-sale/find.html?sear...
I agree with your general point that housing is too expensive! I'm just curious.
An usual downside is that technically you never own it.
£150k per year is tricky to find for salaried positions as a dev. They exist but not as visible (to me at least) compared to the contract equivalents.
The enjoyment side is something I hear mixed opinions on. There are plenty of "disguised employment" type contracts in the UK that just go to contractors for rarer skill sets. YMMV.
It would be great to get your feedback on this.
[1]:https://old.reddit.com/r/UKPersonalFinance/comments/nhe8v1/w...
[2]:https://old.reddit.com/r/UKPersonalFinance/comments/nhe8v1/w...
[3]:https://old.reddit.com/r/UKPersonalFinance/comments/nhe8v1/w...
While this does have a partial truth to it, the examples are delusional. How can anyone compare 50k GBP to 130K USD?
I have lived across the USA, EU, and Asia; but such comparisons are heavily personal situation dependant. The calculations would differ for single vs family as well.
By the exchange rate right now, 50k GBP is around 65k USD. If you want to live within (say) an hour reach of an office, you’ll have a much easier time doing that in the London metro area with 50k than you will in the Bay Area with 130k. This is before you even consider taxes and healthcare. High quality groceries also substantially cheaper in the UK. A new wildcard is the price of energy, which looks to have gone up considerably in the UK since I left, though.
Neither would be a comfortable position, and you wouldn’t be in danger of being able to buy a house absent other income. All in all though, if they were my fixed options, I’d take the money in London.
Houses, even small ones, in zone 1-2 are now prohibitively expensive, but if you are willing to move further away there are options.
But yeah, overall it's highly personal depending on personal circumstances than anything else.
Regarding transportation, I have been living here for 13 years and still don't own a car.
I still wouldn’t compare 50k GBP to 130k USD.
My experience is you can't really compare salaries directly, you really need to think about your personal lifestyle. First, if you care primarily about money then there's no substitute for being in Silicon Valley. After that it gets more complicated, basic cost of living like food and going out to the pub is cheaper in London, but high end goods are more expensive and the 20% VAT really hurts. People are generally calibrated on less material goods than the typical American is used to. That includes smaller flats and spending a greater percentage of your income on them. On the other hand though, you don't have to worry about health care, and you don't need to own a car because public transport coverage is solid, and the majority of places have at least decent walkability with some local shops. Overall I would say if you're interested you need to look at potential salary and rents and figure out if it works financially, but don't expect to make equivalent as the US and stay on the same financial trajectory—it's apples and oranges.
I am not sure what you mean by less material goods... I don't think that's true or really means much of anything. Not having space means less stuff in general anyway cause you have to put it somewhere.
It's worth pointing out that this is below FAANG range. A software engineer with zero years of experience in the US should make roughly $160K-190K in compensation at the large tech companies.
https://www.levels.fyi/?compare=Amazon,Google,Facebook,Apple...
In the Bay Area, the cost of real estate will dominate your cost of living. If you are happy to live in a 1-bedroom apartment, that entry level FAANG software engineering job will pay for everything you need in life and more. If you want to buy a house for your spouse and three children, it will start to depend much more on precisely where you want to live.
Unfortunately a 5 bedroom house in Mountain View will run you maybe $3.5M. But it depends a lot on where you go though. Look out in the San Jose suburbs and the same house might cost half as much. I don't know much about the London real estate situation so I can't speak to it but if you really want to compare cost of living for software engineers you probably should look specifically at housing, rather than comparing general statistics.
I don't know how expensive the Bay Area may be, but 50K in London (3100 per month) are barely enough to pay rent (2000 per month) and definitely not enough to send a child to nursery (2000 per month).
I lead the development of a product in an investment bank, and I concentrate almost entirely on frontend web dev. I've been on a contract for 5 years, and currently pull in £900 per day outside IR35 (£200k equiv or $260k). We routinely hire devs for £700-750 per day and we STILL find it difficult to hire.
I can walk into a number of roles tomorrow paying at least £800 per day.
I spoke to a recruiter about a role at a food delivery app, and he said almost all of their new contractors (rates advertised were £650/day) are working remotely in Europe to avoid IR35.
I did go there for a mobile conference a while back and they were not sparing any expense on the conference location and catering etc so I assume they are reasonably competitive. I haven't heard anything bad from the couple of people I know who were based at Google London (although I assume they're still home based, one of them lives near Milan!)
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2020/jul/28/google-co...
Edit, more recent article
https://www.hamhigh.co.uk/news/business/kings-cross-google-c...
London is one of the most expensive cities in the world. It makes more sense to negotiate a good amount of PTO instead and take a London vacation
Ironic because I know a few recruitment agents that have said IR35 have made things increasingly difficult in an already scarce market, alot of the clients they recruit for are in public and government sectors.
With the changes you'll be less tax efficient and paying almost the same as you're permanent counterparts.
You can avoid IR35 if you're conniving enough to work through a specially setup PSC however these are so difficult and costly, for the fat cats and not the general populous.
Penalised employees pretending to be self-employed in order to evade tax and national insurance.
2.5 years in London to level up my skills and work in a few startups, then buggering back off to Australia for CoL that while still expensive is less than London and much better weather and similar salaries to London.
They pay like 13% national insurance.
The rest of the tax is paid by the employee. And the 45% rate is only on any earnings OVER £150k. So the money eart less than that is at lower rates.
Threshold is probably 100 + (personal allowance)*2 where that was 12.5ish last I looked.
Also some state support (childcare maybe?) evaporates at 100, which is fairly similar to another tax.
There are also substantially more bank holidays (on average 10), and an additional minimum of 20 days of paid leave. Sick leave is generally paid,too, and for at least the first week fully paid by the employer.
There are exceptions to this rule but overall funding is less.
Another thing I've heard is that many European countries have rules on how to terminate an employee, and most states in the US you can just fire someone at any time for almost any reason, or no reason. So in the US a high salary is essentially a short term risk that can be removed immediately if the company hits a financial downturn. US employees know that there is no loyalty from the company, and in-turn are constantly looking for new positions that pay more.
It's just supply and demand. When I was working at Facebook they figured out what salary ranges they should pay in each country by doing a survey of how much software engineers were making and picking a target percentile. I might misremember but I believe Facebook was trying to pay 90th percentile salaries. Then every once in a while they would redo the survey, maybe you tweak it if an office has a hard time hiring, etc, but that's the core logic. I heard anecdotally that Google did it similarly.
So in London the market is just paying software engineers less than they make in California, and so the large tech companies follow that market.
Interviews are relatively easy, salaries have increased significantly in the past 2 years. You should be able to get 90K per annum with minimal effort, but that won't be enough to live like a low middle class German, if you plan to start a family. Housing is third-worldish, unless you can spend 2500-3000£ per month, weather is infernal and food has no flavour (unless you can afford to pay 2£ for an apple).
If you can get a visa to live in the EU, I'd consider Germany. If Brexit had one effect, it was to transform Berlin in a tech hub. It is much cheaper than London, salaries in tech are roughly the same and there's a large community of foreigners, so you don't need to learn German.
This isn't even remotely true. Have you ever lived outside of London in the UK?
I live a few hours away from London by the fastest train and life is great. Free health care, great neighbours, the software engineer salary compared to many is very good, and there's loads to do. Cinemas, live gigs, local festivals, beautiful landscapes if you like the outdoors. There's just as much in the UK outside of London as there is in London.
There are many people who enjoy living in London, and that's great more power to them but non-London UK is definetely not "a non-place where only locals can live". I've moved around the UK loads and always been welcomed into new areas with friendly neighbours and such.
You’ll barely find a pub still open at 11PM in Westminster (where I live), let alone Mortlake or Brentford. And don’t make me start on the beer selection. It’s hard to get a decent espresso in London and there are at best 10 places where you can get a edible pizza, I’d be surprised if there were any in the rest of the country. In Westminster I don’t have a single cinema at walking distance (it’s a 20 minute walk to Leicester Square), and I live in the area with more cinemas and theatres in the entire country. I want to reiterate that I live in what is probably the most expensive and most active area of the country, and compared to Rome or Berlin sometimes it feels like living in the middle of nowhere.
Outside of inner London, the UK is a gigantic periphery, with square kilometres of houses and not even a church or a café in a 10km radius. At best you get a shopping mall and a pub that closes at 9PM.
It can't be all rollercoasters and silicon geography everywhere all the time.
Anyway, the UK has some of the most dense proportion of pubs per capita in the world. (Since that appears to be a concern in your comments)
On pubs, I was being generous by picking the most common, say, cultural attraction in the country. And yet, you get a better pub offer (in terms of variety and opening times) in Rome or Berlin or even Dublin. On density, try to re-compute that density at 11PM or check in how many of these pubs you can get a Chimay Rouge or a Franziskaner.
The countryside looks more like a nuclear test site than Tuscany or Latium, to name a few places I'm familiar with.
Today I was listening to a podcast where the host said something to the effect of "sun, stars, trees and open space are all that matters in life". For much of the UK, especially north of the Exe-Tees line, they have literally zero of those things.
- TC is lower, but how much lower is highly dependent on your level as the multiplier on base is smaller than the multiplier on stock refreshers.
If you are very senior, then the total difference will be ~10-15% (TC), which is arguably not that large.
- Private schools are generally cheaper in the UK.
- The UK does not have a property tax (!).
So, all in all, at very senior levels the difference is gonna be much less about TC/money and much more where you find more desirable to live.
It most certainly does, and is called council tax, based on the value of your property, plus other factors
- Salaries are generally a bit higher base than the rest of the permanent tech market, higher still total compensation, lower than the same companies in the US market, and lower overall than the contracting rates which are popular in the London tech market. You will definitely receive a reasonably comfortable and competitive salary, decent pension contributions, shares, and decent holiday entitlement.
- The interview process is the same nonsense as anywhere else.
- Engineering culture appears to be pretty relaxed. I've heard way more complaints about colleagues who don't pull their weight than I have about companies expecting personal sacrifice.
- There are some interesting teams and challenges but the selection is more limited than other markets.
YMMV.
So what dark economic magic is causing this?
The interview process is pretty much the same as you get in the US. Lots of leetcode and system designs.
Designing Data Intenstive systems will get you about 80-90% of the way there though (in the UK), certainly enough to get through the door as a mid engineer in many bigger places, although possibly not a FAANG.
You may read some of the interview preparation books to get an idea of the concepts and keywords the interviewer want to hear - but it's not too dissimilar to what you would do in practice.
System design correlates to architect level work.
Leetcoding instead requires you to know the basic patterns to use to solve the problems and either A. be a incredibly quick thinker or B. have memorised tons of exercises - especially if you're not super young and age and sleepless nights are starting to catch up with you.
Leetcoding doesn't correlate to work in any way. You just suck it up and spend 2 months preparing for it so you can have a nice looking CV and a truckload of money after you get the job.
I would weigh carefully whether you want to go to a FAANG though. Some people lucks out and they end up in a role where they do very little, others end up overworking.
You can make decent money contracting for less demanding companies (both interview and work-wise) and being tax smart (I would say almost as much as a FAANG, considering half goes in taxes).
The UK is the best of both worlds: you have much higher salaries than in the rest of Europe, and a more functional state and society than in the US. If your plan is immigrating and settling somewhere or not being a workaholic then the choice is a no-brainer.
Keep in mind there is a wide range of salaries, with large FAANG companies and a few medium-sized ones in the upper part. I would check levels.fyi for real salaries instead of going for averages.
The rest of the country is beautiful. The people in thread telling you there's nothing good outside of London have never left the city.
I'm an Argentine immigrant to the UK who worked in large and medium tech companies. AMA!
[0] https://fortune.com/2021/10/29/faang-mamaa-jim-cramer-tech-f...
FAANG includes Netflix, which everyone keeps repeating does not belong in this acronym.
[0] For example: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29785526
i see more and more people dropping the amazon A though