Considering prices in the UK are 22% higher than they were in 2019 that's pretty bad, and IT is a well-paid industry, so you can imagine what it's like for people on lower wages.
IT in the UK is poorly paid. Sure people get more than average salaries, but they no longer afford you a comfortable living.
It's not poverty yet, but it is heading that way.
Governments make sure that skilled work doesn't pay.
Many people in the IT that I know, don't work for UK companies anymore, because they hit the ceiling (it's difficult to get paid more than £150k for a developer) and only way to get above it is to work with US companies.
It's difficult to get paid more than £80-90k as a developer.
I see some that go over £100k but they are uncommon. I had to go the contractor route to make more than £100k.
If I went FTE at my current company they wouldn't pay me more than 90k, unless I moved to the US office and they would pay me $200k.
The UK has become cheaper offshoring.
I stayed with a friend and he kept his flat at 15c because heating beyond that was too expensive. I used to keep it at 18 and didn't even consider the costs (once I stopped being a student).
I appreciate that the 22% more expensive is on average, but the things that I care about have gotten significantly more expensive. It really killed any desire I have of ever moving back there.
'Abbot' ale was on special at £1.50 a pint and when the special price ran out, other beers were starting at £2.50
I'd like to know where specifically you were drinking. A Central London hotel bar? Because £7 a pint is ludicrous and not at all representative of normality.
I would consider that to be very cheap, even when I lived in Bristol (before cost-of-living crisis). I don't recall pints being that cheap at Wetherspoons either. Even most beers at Tesco are more expensive than that. £1.50 is roughly the same price as Tesco[1] (£1.375 for a 500ml can).
[1]: https://www.tesco.com/groceries/en-GB/search?query=abbot%20a...
After multiple attempts to get the app to work, I gave up, and found this: https://pantryandlarder.com/spoons-map/
Turns out you can still get Abbott for even less than that. Looks like there's quite a lot of variation in Bristol but the Robert Fitzharding seems to be cheapest, selling a pint of Abbott for £2.34, the city centre pubs seem to be selling for £3.42ish, and the less central pubs seem to be around £2.77.
It's not at all beyond the realms of possibility that you might still see a special offer of around £1.50 for a pint. Nice!
I mean, even back in 2020 4-5 quid for a pint wasn't cheap, but the beer was good and always changing. I'm sure you can still find a £2-3 pin _somewhere_ in Edinburgh, but that's not where we used to drink.
My monthly mandatory expenses (excluding mortgage, since it's fixed for now) have crept up 15-20% this year.
Just renewed my home insurance it's gone up 40% since Dec 22
In 4 years I'm expecting my mortgage payments (my biggest expense) to increase at least 30%.
We're pretty comfortable, and think we stay off the hedonic treadmill as much as possible, but looking to start a family and I have a lot of financial anxiety despite a decent 6 figure salary in London
Total (not marginal) tax burden on my salary is >40% and getting worse every year due to fiscal drag.
Used to be until the government decided to kill contracting. Now tech pay in the uk is pretty low.
In some odd niches where the pool of talent is very small and client's can take the risk of getting status determination wrong - yes, but this is also shrinking and people retire early.
You have also wrong understanding of IR35. The legislation has been created to protect interests of big consultancies so that their developers don't quit and start working with their clients directly taking profit for themselves.
If the legislation was about "working as employee" then the big consultancies that supply workers who do just that wouldn't be exempt from it.
That and also to make it look like the government has increased the financing of the NHS and other government agencies that rely on contractors.
Here is how it works: increase daily rates by classifying workers inside ir35, allocate more funding, claim half the finding back through taxes, use money for something else.
But indeed the main reason is to help consultancies - notably those such as Infosys, owned by the prime minister’s family.
The result is a steady brain drain, outsourcing of work, and a drop in quality.
I do agree that some folks have been disguised employees, but the majority were not. Contracting has been the main driver of innovation - the best in tech were motivated to spread the knowledge and prop up the industry. Some of the best engineers I knew, hired or worked with, were contractors. Now a significant portion have left the country, are serving us clients or are moving on to something else. Being a permanent worker is simply not attractive given the low pay.
Even that is a red herring. This angle has been created to gain public support for the legislation. If you run a business, you have to charge more than you would get paid as an employee, simply because of your overheads, things like insurance, accounting and whatever else that is part of running a business and to cover for periods of downtime or to be able to hire someone else. It is easy to create envy in that situation, because the worker sitting next to you seems just like you, does the same job, so why they are paid more and pay "less" tax? Most employees don't understand how business works so they of course support these rules thinking contractors are gaming the system. But they don't understand that if the contractor gets replaced by a "disguised employee" from a big consultancy, exactly the same thing is happening, except the big consultancy is taking all the profit. But workers got gaslighted - big consultancy = real business, someone like you trying to run exactly the same business = disguised employee That's what it is about.
IR35 basically targets service based business where the owner of the business is providing service. This is probably how most of businesses start and this legislation blocks that to fill the pockets of big corporations. That's insane.