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Comment by nextos | Hacker News Reader

To some extent, this also applies to software. Except for DeepMind and a few other select places like Altos Labs, getting past £100k is hard, especially outside London. Unless you go into finance, of course. But then, you have to stick to London. Finance is like a black hole that sucks a big chunk of the mathematical, CS and statistical UK talent. They have very proactive recruiters trying to e.g. connect with Oxbridge students when they are approaching graduation.

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It’s shocking. Software engineers in the UK are treated like engineers in the US were in the 1960s. Low respect, low pay, while city boys strutting around in shiny suits snapping their fingers to get anything they want.

That's a weird statement considering I'd have guess the greatest amount of respect and adoration (not necessarily money) (non-software) engineers have gotten in the US would've been during the Space Race and Cold War years.

It was real respect for the trade as well, not some secondhand respect that people who make a lot of money and wield a lot of social influence get.

It was respected in the sense that there was a need then in american manufacturing for engineering. But the compensation was nowhere near other professional class jobs. So really the respect seemed a bit false: to get people into the door pigeonholed so they can’t leave for higher compensation. Then when manufacturing was outsourced after the 1960s, many of these jobs disappeared. Now people in Guanzhou are designing the factories and process controls.

This isn't my experience at all, and I've been in London tech for 8 years now. I'm not entirely sure what "low respect" means here, but anywhere I've worked the company is pretty wary of knarking of their developers because we can just up and find another job basically immediately. We get paid a fair bit too - not sure compared to finance, but not hard to hit the 95th percentile or so.

Glad to hear it’s working out for you. I’ve talked to too many UK devs who feel handcuffed when they get even 50% of the US equivalent, because it’s a pay cut to go elsewhere. But, as you say, it’s all relative.

Can't beat yourself up for not getting a salary commensurate with an entirely different economy and strict visa rules. That's just torturing yourself.

If you work for an American company, then your teammate back in NYC might be a daily reminder.

I know plenty of engineers (web application developers) making over £100-£150k outside of London, usually in fairly low-stress remote jobs.

The pay is clearly nothing compared to the US, but I wouldn’t say it was massively hard for them to get where they are. They all have 5+ years experience at a senior level, and are otherwise just reliable, capable, low-maintenance employees, but maybe that’s rare!

They are almost always contractors. If you work permanent it tops out max at about £75,000-90,000.

They’re not, they’re full time employees.

Then they are very few and far between. Generally the absolute limit is £90k. I've never seen any role for more than 90K unless it was a company in London and those are typically hybrid and not remote.

The jobs above 90k generally don't specify a salary on the job posting. Just two examples: Goldman Sachs and Meta.

So like I said originally these jobs are few and far between. The point is that in the UK the salaries are much lower than those in the US and this is across all experience ranges.

I only have the figures for end of 2018[1], but meta employed around 2300 people in the UK, if we assume the same distribution of jobs as elsewhere in the world about half will be engineers, so 1150 engineers. There aren't that many of these jobs. At goldman its a lot higher, aboutn 10,000[2] globally, but they only have around 3,300 employees in the Uk so if its the same ratio as global (25% tech), then that means around 800 developers. Again you'll note this is a very small number compared to the number of top graduates a year, with class sizes of 100-200 per university.

[1]: https://engineering.fb.com/2018/11/16/production-engineering...

[2]: https://brainstation.io/magazine/goldman-sachs-digital-team-...

[3]: https://www.fnlondon.com/articles/goldman-sachs-internationa...

They're in the extreme minority. Most software dev roles in the UK top out between £40 and £50k, £60k if you're lucky.

I am not a top software engineer( (otherwise I'd be working fang tbh) and I earn 85k up north. Hybrid role that's local as well.

I know people that earn a lot more than me.

It's just the recruiters are a joke and advertise silly salaries from local companies that are out touch. You have to know what companies are serious or not, and just apply direct or via recommendations.

I used to work at bet365. They don't even offer that to the permies (65K for Senior), if you stay there a bunch of years maybe 85k is doable.

365 are probably the best playing place outside of Manchester in the NW. So I find this rather hard to believe.

Took me about 5 seconds

https://www.civilservicejobs.service.gov.uk/csr/index.cgi?SI...

Those are government, so probably have even better pensions than private sector.

And there was job advertised for lead software engineer by computer futures(probably an agency) for 80k

I didn't even look deep. I know there are even better jobs.

There are jobs that pay more than 65k. Just have to know where to look.

If you're working for undercapitalized local private companies, then yeah not going pay very much.

I'd also recommend looking at remote jobs. My really smart friends who can beat the competition got 100k+ jobs working remote that are officially based in London but they work up north. Then come down for meeting once or twice every few months.

A lot of the fintechs allow for fully remote and pay well.

We are comparing salaries of Software Engineers between the US and the UK. A Senior Developer position won't pay more than 90K in the UK outside of London. In the US I see well over that for a Senior Developer position.

Even in your examples (which are higher position than what was being discussed) they didn't top out past 90K (just like I said). Whereas in the US you can earn much more quite easily.

You've moved the goal posts. You said 60k if your lucky.

I just found multiple jobs that pay more than that easily.

85k job up north is a comparable lifestyle than 100k+ job in London.

> You've moved the goal posts. You said 60k if your lucky.

No I didn't. I suggest you re-read the thread. I said 75K-90K max.

> I just found multiple jobs that pay more than that easily.

There are always certainly outliers. However most of those places usually have a bunch of iffy things going on e.g. you have to live at your workstation/laptop, or they are in the middle of no where. Enforced pair programming (fuck that btw), or have a stupid interview process (no I won't go through the humiliation rituals anymore).

However the vast majority of positions are paying max 65-70K for a Senior Dev.

I am glad that you managed to find something. But the rest of us haven't been as lucky.

"Most software dev roles in the UK top out between £40 and £50k, £60k if you're lucky" was the comment I was replying to.

But I agree we don't compete with the USA. Even London struggles with that.

Yeh I figured that. No worries.

That bad? Huh. Last time I was a permanent employee in the UK was nearly a decade ago now, and I think I was on something like £37k, I think some of my friends (Cambridge graduates and slightly older than me), even back then, were on £65-75k.

I kinda assumed inflation would have raised all of those by about 50% since then.

That is indeed very rare. A simple sanity check you can look at how many people earn about 100k in the UK, we know the figure for above 125k is 500,000 [1]. We can subtract the number of other jobs that we know for sure pay above this for example lawyers at magic circle firms which start on >150k for newly qualified lawyers, consultants in the NHS, directors of large corportaions, and we end up with a very small amount of people in other industries that earn these figures. Even before that we know the median is about £50k, and I can tell you from experience you can hire very very good software people on those wages, even in London.

From personal experience, I also know of software guys making that, but I also know far far more people earning below that, and these are oxford/cambridge/imperial/UCL grads....

[1]: https://www.gov.uk/government/statistics/personal-incomes-st...

> and these are oxford/cambridge/imperial/UCL grads.

There are many bad things we can say about software hiring, but one of the good things is that (outside the US at least), it's much more concerned with what you can do than the name recognition of the institution where you studied.

The US isn't that focused on elite schools. It's only in the VC/startup bubble where bias exists. Most tech grads don't go to those schools.

Just want to echo the other replies and say i think this is rare. It happens, but it's rare. I have >15 years experience, and currently work in finance making plenty. A while ago, i spoke to a recruiter about opportunities outside finance; everything he had topped out at ~90k for engineers, a bit higher for team leads.

But then, i also have friends working at a few non-finance companies on 100-150k. Small places, willing to pay for quality. Seems to be unusual though!

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