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Comment by jiggy2011 | Hacker News Reader

jiggy2011

Precisely.

The article quotes the average starting salary at google to be $125,000. After converting that into GBP (for the UK where I live) you get to 77,613.

Whenever I look around at local programming jobs, a salary of 77K would be attainable mainly only by people who were project leaders/architects for large corporate systems.

Most entry level jobs are .Net, PHP or Java programming and will net you a salary of 18-25K. A programmer with 4-10 years experience can maybe expect to get paid 30-35K.

Basically a similar payscale to a plant fitter , electrician or teacher and quite a way off what you would expect for a doctor or lawyer.

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I've noticed weird cultural differences between the UK and US in terms of how programmers are perceived by businesses.

I interviewed with a major UK software consulting business that was trying to open their first US office, and it was immediately apparent that their expectations were way off from the local conditions.

The interview included a programming test, which I was "not expected to finish, we just want to see how far you can get". I finished in half the allotted time, and they didn't seem to know what to do with me. Then they offered half the salary that I was concurrently being offered by another company in the same location, and they weren't willing to negotiate upward when I pointed out that fact.

They clearly weren't interested in hiring someone who could be trusted with serious responsibility. They wanted that mythical creature: the programmer who can operate like an assembly line worker, cranking specs into code in a repeatable and easily replaceable way.

I've seen the insides of many US software companies, and I've never seen one that seemed to take such a dim view of their programmers. You might see that attitude in non-software companies that begrudgingly spend some money on internal programmers, but not in the companies that make their money directly with software.

There are more progressive software companies in the UK with better culture, although they seem to be mainly doing that by cargo-culting what google and other SV companies are doing.

Salaries paid aren't that much better in these companies though. Expectations of programmer aptitude are all over the map also, companies do like administering those "programming tests" which can vary from very tricky math problems to stuff like "What is the keyword for inheritance in Java?". Thing is that salaries in both types of jobs tend to be similar.

Another problem with these tests is that they are often administered by recruiters who don't even bother to bring them upto date, a friend had a test for a C# programming position which asked him mostly questions about VB6.

It's quite a shame because the government likes to talk about how they want tech innovation to happen in the UK as it does with the US. However most of the top programmers seem to either end up going abroad or getting assimilated into finance or into various gigantic consulting corps.

I can attest to the going abroad thing, I made the move and have been astonished by the jump in salary and autonomy in the US over the UK.

What makes it weirder is I didn't change company only location

125k/year is pretty standard for a senior programmer who doesn't lead teams, etc. in SF/NYC where I frequent. Bump that up an extra 20k if they are willing to program something undesirable like ads or they have finance experience as well. Other locations will pay less, of course, because they aren't where all the hot tech companies are and they don't have the same cost of living. If you network a lot it is pretty easy to pull in 10k/month contracting, though.

Geography definitely matters. My numbers were based on non-London UK for example. If you were looking at jobs in London you could probably add 5-10K to each of the figures I quoted.

I assume that those 125k/year jobs are for either large companies or profitable/highly financed startups?

I'm guessing that there are lots of startup programmers out there on very low salaries who are working mainly for equity which is a much harder thing to value.

I just checked jobserve for C# and Java in Birmingham, Bristol, Leeds, Nottingham and Manchester.

All have plenty of jobs going up to £45k-£50k, and that's what they're offering before you even walk in the room and they find out they like you.

£35k seemed to be the ceiling about 2 years ago, I think demand is really starting to push it up.

10k/month contracting isn't that much if you aren't taking into account taxes, insurance, being on the beach, etc...you'd have to pull in around 20k/month to match a 120k salary.

This is an exaggeration, at least for the US. Yes, it's true that taxes will take a big chunk out of your $10k / month, but they'll take a pretty big chunk out of your $120k / yr salary, too. The only real tax "savings" you get by being employed is that your employer pays the other half of your Social security and medicare taxes (12.4% total for 2012), which means that you'll have to pay an "extra" 6.2% if you're self-employed. And most of that is SS, which caps at $106k or something. Couple this with the fact that self-employed folks have a variety of deductions that employees usually don't get (home office, special retirement options, lots of business expenses), and it starts to look a little more even.

It's true that you don't get paid time off, but I can tell you from experience that a decent and determined freelance programmer can easily make $10k / month and leave plenty of time for relaxation.

The biggest thing most self-employed folks have to deal with that they wouldn't normally is health insurance, but if you're young and healthy, decent insurance is a few hundred bucks a month, at most. And you can deduct the premiums. If you're not young and/or not healthy...that's another story.

Bottom line, if you want to match a $120k / yr job as a freelancer, you need to make something like $12k - $14k / month.

Source: personal experience and a fascination with legal tax avoidance strategies.

One difference between programmers and doctors is that there is an artificially imposed scarcity of doctors. Nobody can be licensed to practice medicine (at least in the U.S.) without completing medical school and a residency, and the number of openings is controlled by the medical schools. In contrast, you can become a very good programmer without having any formal education in the field (I know a few such people). This allows the supply of programmers to increase more quickly than the supply of doctors.

I dont think we can compare salaries in Silicon Valley and UK like that. In the end its about how much you have after you pay all your basic expenses and I think the person with GBP 77K has much more left than the person with $125K in California.

Edit: Apparently living in the UK aint too cheap either. Did not know that!

Don't you mean the other way around???? I mean, the UK aint a cheap place to live!

I think you underestimated the cost of major cities in UK.

Not sure what tax rates are like in San Francisco however if you that kind of money in the UK you are going to be paying 40% income tax on a pretty large chunk of it. So after income tax you are left with maybe 50K.

We also have council tax which in some places will make your eyes pop out. Not to mention VAT which is going to be 20% of pretty much everything you buy. On top of that house prices can be very high here for a family sized home even in a modest area so you're going to be paying a lot for your mortgage.

Plus we have a huge amount of tax on stuff like fuel and anything to do with cars, not to mention that food prices are generally higher here than in the USA.

OTOH medical insurance isn't really an issue as well as other things like more help available from govt to cover higher education.

Exactly that

I'm thinking the 125k in California may be a better deal, except the cost of living may be higher there (not much public transport, housing is expensive as well, etc)

But the UK income taxes are huge. Ireland taxes are similar. Continental Europe has smaller taxes (but then salaries may be smaller, so 'take home money' can be similar)

Living in London was already not cheap before the US civil war. Part of the US advantage during the 20th century was that the cost of living and labour was less than most of the rest of the industrialized world.

Not sure about this. In my experience accommodation in the UK is more than in the US (possibly not in the big cities or SV, though it was true of SF last time I visited), gas and electricity are a lot more expensive, and food is about the same price.

  Average annual salary of software developer in US: $93,000
  Average annual salary of software developer in UK: £35,000 = $56,000 approx

  Average house price in the US: $181,500  
  Average house price in the UK: £234,000 = $376,014

Ever feel like you're in the wrong country?

(the 93k figure from this recently front-paged article: <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4696113>; all other figures from a randomly-selected page from the first few Google results, but the UK figures seem reasonable to me - I'm in the south of England but outside London, and houses here are all above 250k but most programming jobs I see offer 30-35k. Of course using nationwide averages isn't necessarily an accurate picture as the places with most tech jobs available are probably not the ones with most houses on the market)

Average SF single bedroom apartment is more than 2k per month. You'd be hard pressed to find a decent 2 bedroom house for less than a million.

To be fair, "average" is a weird measurement for comparing the US to the UK. The average density of development in the UK is far higher than in the US,a nd housing prices are higher accordingly.

Apparently living in the UK aint too cheap either. Did not know that!

The house-price plague is a worldwide problem and it's still in force. The "crash" was not as much of one as the world needed; brownstones in Manhattan are still over a million.

The article quotes the average starting salary at google to be $125,000. After converting that into GBP (for the UK where I live) you get to 77,613.

Europeans quote salaries (usually monthly) after taxes, and Americans use pre-tax numbers. They also pay a higher tax rate (and get more, like real health coverage). So when you hear a European say that he makes 4000 Euros per month, that's an after-tax number and it's actually comparable to about $80,000 pre-tax salary in the US.

UK salaries are always stated gross.

BTW while I am correcting people, I will also point out that the UK is very rarely described as "European", though nobody would (or can) deny that it's part of Europe, geographically speaking.

That is not the case in the UK.

No that will be gross values, the statement about ~77K being on the high end for the UK is right.

Easy experiment I went to jobserve.com a well known UK programmer job site and did a search for the word "programmer"

its breakdown of offered gross salaries is this

  Not stated on job 39
  Below £15K  1
  £15K-£20K  28
  £20K-£25K  79
  £25K-£30K  173
  £30K-£40K  286
  £40K-£50K  247
  £50K-£75K  166
  £75K-£100K 27
  Above £100K  11

Suggests a bell curve to me with the median being £35000

Not the case in Germany.

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