If you're European it's one of the few options you've got. I find it odd though that people make so much less compared to their US counterparts. Does anyone know why that is?
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.
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.
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.
There are exceptions to this rule but overall funding is less.
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.