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Comment by siquick | Hacker News Reader

I had been considering moving back home after 10 years of living in Australia so started researching wages for Engineering roles and the salaries were so low, with the cost of living nowhere near balancing out against the low salaries.

I’d expect a big boost in wages since they left Europe due to a loss of available employable market but it seems the opposite.

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>I’d expect a big boost in wages since they left Europe due to a loss of available employable market but it seems the opposite.

Salaries have spiked, immediately after brexit, but have stagnated because no new investments are gonna happen in a country that's separated from the EU single market, so all new big tech has decided to expand instead to Amsterdam, Dublin and Berlin.

London is still the best in the EU for tech salaries. They’re just flat and have been so for the last year.

33k is pretty low for cyber security but there is this: https://metro.co.uk/2023/03/30/hm-treasury-listed-head-of-cy...

>London is still the best in the EU for tech salaries.

At the top end, yes, but there's also the long tail of very poor paying tech jobs relative to how expensive it is compared to continental Europe.

Zurich and Switzerland in general is probably better. It’s just a much smaller market.

Up voting this isn't enough. London can pay well, better than everywhere in Europe even, at the right company and with good negociating power. If a UK firm contact you, you're set and have us-level salaries (upward 200k 8 years ago in medtech). If you're just going back to europe for a routine job however, you should first check Switzerland (then Netherlands. They also have the most interesting jobs if you're a low-level guy)

>upward 200k 8 years ago in medtech

Which UK companies paid 200k 8 years ago?

I'm not the one who got hired (sadly), but the person who got the offer was a nodejs developer who wrote some random promise libraries (he was really good at optimizing calls, both real-time and async, and knew js better than anybody I've met since), and I think I remember he talked about a private clinic or something (private monitoring?). He ended up being tech lead at an online bank for less money.

> I’d expect a big boost in wages since they left Europe due to a loss of available employable market

Despite Brexit having arguably been driven by immigration concerns, immigration to the UK has increased since that vote, and reached a record of 606k in 2022 [1]. It has been increasing since 1995, and in 2015 13.2% of the UK population was foreign-born [2] - so not counting children of immigrants.

[1] Britain’s record-high immigration — in charts - https://www.ft.com/content/cb9120d8-0595-49d9-8f66-92b95acba... - unpaywalled: https://archive.ph/Wqalm

[2] https://www.macrotrends.net/countries/GBR/united-kingdom/imm...

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