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Comment by incog_nit0 | Hacker News Reader

It's not just in the hardware sector, it's across the board.

My (American) wife moved to London years ago and was a manager in a prestigious London museum overseeing 60 people.

She has over 20 years experience in some of our top museums and her salary in 2023 was a paltry £30k.

We just moved to the US and within a couple of months she has a job in museums here but now paying 2.3x the salary (converted back to £) and only managing a team of 20 people.

Less stress, more resources for uniforms and initiatives and annual salary increases here way above inflation.

As a Londoner I feel quite aggrieved by the situation. It's one thing to increase your salary 50% as a lot of engineers do moving to the US. But to 230% increase your salary is just nuts.

Only London's financial sector pay was globally competitive - but now with Brexit's rules fully locked in even that sector is slowly losing its talent and customers to Europe and beyond.

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The culture sector in London is notoriously badly paid. Mostly staffed by the intellectual trophy husbands and wives of the financial sector.

Even similar sized public sector organisations (thinking education) pay far better. A senior headteacher with 50 or 100 staff will do a lot better than a cultural manager.

> Mostly staffed by the intellectual trophy husbands and wives of the financial sector.

Oh so true. Which helps to explain the number of levels of management in UK cultural institutions, because in London there are enough of these people who want a (poorly paid) role that it's better to have 3 layers of management when 1 would do.

The UK pays terribly in a lot of areas when compared to the US, Canada and Australia. In software, the only way to keep up is contracting, preferably in London, preferably in finance.

But my partner also pretty much doubled her pay in retail management when we moved to Australia.

The London financial sector may be losing talent to Europe, but from what I can tell European pay in fintech is not comparable.

Australia’s economy is propped up by the export driven mining industry. It’s not really a fair comparison.

Museum jobs are hideously badly paid. In many cases the real work is done for free by "volunteers" (really poor saps on a 2-5 year job interview) before finding out the actual job went to a buddy of the museum director who doesn't even need to show up most of the time.

Software engineers can usually expect to at least 2x their earnings, the median in the uk is £50k and in the US it is £100k, and that is not acounting for the significantly lower tax burden. (That pay excludes medical benefits, if you include the dollar value of that and bonuses and equity the difference rises).

I'm pretty sure engineers are also 230% increase or more.

If you take advantage of the larger number of tech company jobs in the US and were in a non-tech company in the UK then you can make 500% more.

>> Only London's financial sector pay was globally competitive - but now with Brexit's rules fully locked in even that sector is slowly losing its talent and customers to Europe and beyond.

Citation needed. No-one wants to live in Frankfurt.

A quick Google search will return many: https://www.reuters.com/world/uk/city-london-chief-says-brex...

TLDR: They're not moving to Frankfurt but they are moving out of the UK.

What do you expect the Lord Mayor to say? "Yes we think Brexit was great and that the government is going a good job." They're a lobby, they want to lobby for more concessions.

That's a shame, Frankfurt (am Main) is a pretty nice place

Feels the same. Moved to UK a couple of years ago, can’t find a £25k job. Found some outsourced work at American companies and now suddenly I’m going to hit the higher tax bracket

If your wife used to manage 60 people and now manages a third of that, it seems like her talent is being wasted NOW, not when she was in the UK.

I'll add that 70K is nothing to write home about in the US, especially if you're not in a low COL state.

The article is about people not going in the field that they're talented at, because it's low paid. Clearly it doesn't apply to your wife which is talented and went in the low paid field.

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