Base salary only, pre-tax. No options, shares, bonuses, adjustments for inflation, or benefits.
(Don't forget to up-vote the poll to get more data.)
I'm hiring developers for my startup – http://www.makersacademy.com – and I wish I had more applicants. I'm happy to pay £350-450/day for a decent Ruby dev and or around £60K permanent for the same position and I don't get nearly as many candidates as I'd like to. I was hiring devs at Forward Labs (http://www.forwardlabs.co.uk), arguably one of the coolest places in London, and I had the same problems: small number of applicants, qualified candidates asking for £400-£450 or equivalent.
At SiliconmilkRoundabout, the biggest startup job fair in London, dozens of startups are fighting to find a developer, many of them happy to pay more than £40K or £50K. From what I can tell based on my experience and what other entrepreneurs/recruiters are telling me, hiring devs is incredibly hard not because the companies are unwilling to pay but simply because there are not enough devs looking for work.
Occasionally I interview candidates that don't know the basics of software development, e.g. what mocking is or how to use TDD but they are asking for £400+/day because someone is going to pay that.
The data by Adzuna (http://blog.makersacademy.com/what-is-the-demand-for-ruby-de...) shows that the average Ruby salary is over £50K, and top 30% make over £60K. How is that compatible with the results of this poll?
How is it possible that there are so many complaints about low salaries in the comments, while at the same time my experience hiring Ruby devs suggests the low salary isn't a problem at all?
If you're one of those devs who voted £30-39K or £40-49K above and know how to use Ruby/JS at a decent level, drop me a line, I'll have a much better offer for you: evgeny@makersacademy.com.
Hell - I live in bloody Dorset and I'd be expecting to pay at least £35k for a decent dev.
I'm confused about what kind of work the 0-30k folk are doing and for whom. If I were in that group I'd be seriously thinking about:
* Switching jobs - I'd be job hunting right now
* I'd be looking at freelancing rates and experimenting with that
* I'd be taking a serious look at my skill set, and the skill set of the job adverts and doing a compare and contrast
* Thinking about whether I'm selling and marketing myself appropriately
Seriously - it's a sellers market in London for dev skills right now. I regularly get folk chasing me for £50-60k jobs - and I'm explicitly not looking, don't live in (or want to live in) London, and have very un-hip skills in the old CVs they have of mine (perl anybody ;-)
Remember, to attract people you'll also need to attract people who are in jobs already. For that you'll have to offer something better than what they have.
However, if the harsh reality is that I must be paying more to devs, then how come there are so many devs (about 200) in this poll indicating they are getting under 50K? Why these two hundred people don't talk to me and many other companies desperate to hire developers on much better terms?
Perhaps potential applicants think that you, like all companies, are going to pay what everyone else is. If you don't mention salary, they presume (correctly) you're paying about the average. You don't have an opportunity to "wow" them.
if the harsh reality is that I must be paying more to devs, then how come there are so many devs (about 200) in this poll indicating they are getting under 50K? Why these two hundred people don't talk to me and many other companies desperate to hire developers on much better terms?
One potential reason: Fear of the unknown.
Someone in a job for £45K knows what the job is. They know what their co-workers are like, they know how stressful/relaxed it is. They know what their boss is like, they know what the commute is like. Your new job is a big unknown. It's risky. It might be just as good, or it might be crap, the boss might be an asshole, you might be working for a client from hell, it might be very stressful, the technology stack might be horrible.
If someone changes job to you, they are taking a risk. A £15K raise (£45K → £60K) is only about ~ £7K after taxes (right?), which is about £500 per month extra in their pocket. If they have a decent salary already, it might not be worth changing to a potentially crappy job for only that. However if you offer a large salary increase (£100K), then suddenly the equation looks better, maybe that risk might pay off.
The "risk pay off" doesn't have to be salary. Why not offer 40 days annual leave, and a 4 day week for £60K. Again, reward the risk. Applicants might think "Oh the job could be boring and the boss could be an asshole, but it's only a 4 day week, and double the amount of holidays!"
The 40% higher rate tax takes £6000, but the extra National Insurance contribution is just £300 (it is only 2% on earnings above £797 per week).
I'd be happy to consider moving jobs for £80k~+, but £60k would be a huge step down, and yet I voted £40-49k because that's my base salary.
My company knows they can get away with paying me less because I have enough stock+bonus to make it worth it anyway (which I don't agree with, but it's still better than not being paid that at all)
If you have a nice team (which you do, and forward labs is also an awesome place by the way) and offer an average to high salary, then I think your problem won't be so much in attracting good devs, but more in filtering out bad ones. Another thing might be that the developers you want might not come across your offers, since they're not out there looking.
Would it help if you targeted CS students by running web dev workshops? That way you could attract developers who haven't considered applying to a startup and might not otherwise teach themselves web development. Student salaries are also lower.
Maybe you could look further geographically too. We had an ItMegaMeet in Bristol yesterday which sponsor companies used for recruiting.
I too would be surprised at how little some CS students know about web development and testing-- if I hadn't sat through a web tech unit so outdated that those of us with some experience could easily have done a better job. I helped the lecturer improve the course for the next year, but think these kinds of things need a different and more collaborative teaching model.
Thing is though- some things are easier to train on the job than others. So while I would hire my peers, I'd personally see it as a bonus if they used TDD not a prerequisite.
We are looking at ~£13K each.
I am very competent in C, Python and do Racket for fun. Both other guys are competent in Python, one of them have some Android experience, both are competent in modern web stuff. One of the guys just learned PgPL/SQL in a week, on flu, because it was needed.
Do we even live on the same planet?
Also 'coolness' is hard to define, I see many startups think cool is having some beanbags and a pingpong table, whilst working on a standard CRUD RoR app. To most talented engineers, they would much rather be working on interesting technical challenges. This is how hedge funds get them: squeezing a few millis out of an already optimal trading engine by whatever means possible is extremely fun. Same reason game companies, F1 and GCHQ can pay peanuts.
▂▃▇█▄▄▃▁▁▁▁▁▁▁▁▁▁▁▁▄
^ 40k-49k
Note on finance: It's not as bad as some people like to make it sound, and if you're ruling it out wholesale, either for ideology or prejudice, you're doing yourself no favours salary-wise. Banks (by which I mean investment banking, retail is not even on the radar) are by no means a singular working environment, it matters a lot which team you join. Banks works on absolutely massive problems, and have plenty of new work going on. There are tons of opportunities that don't involve sitting in a basement, fiddling with a 20 year old Java 1.1 codebase under a psychopathic boss. The reason banks can pay well is that it's generally pretty easy to follow the money, and if you get yourself in a position where you pretty clearly create value, you can (almost) write your own paycheck.
Alternatively, if you're still not going for the banks, there is a huge cottage industry of companies catering to the banks: financial services. They will be a lot more "normal" than the banks, but they still pay decent money.
EDIT to add: Finally, obviously, contracting. If you have a couple of years of solid experience, you can make £500+/day. Add a good blog, a few conference talks, maybe a book and you can easily 50-100% to that. That's £110-220k/year, with 8 weeks off.
Still has classic ASP deployed, VB6 COM is the backend, "extreme waterfall" is the process and integration via CSV files (using ' as a quote char of course!) over FTP is the mutt's nuts. Add to that a security policy which involves a large brush, a fucking huge rug and a copy of the production SQL Server 2000 database on every laptop.
The system build is the "secure windows XP build" which is XP SP1 with no patches other than to put the company logo on the background, some bastardised IEAK'd up IE7 build, content filters which understand HTTP like Manwell from Fawlty Towers understands English.
The price of muttering Linux, Python or even Windows greater than XP in the office is to be whipped by lengths of state of the art 10base2 with BNC plugs on the end until you submit that there is only Windows.
Management is entirely powered by crack dust and "champers". And the architect to monkey ratio is at least 10:1. The architects don't even know what the hell an HRESULT is.
A good day is when SourceSafe doesn't try and fuck you.
Fortunately we only have to integrate with them...
Stay away. You have been warned.
No, don't work on crap, but also don't write off half the SW engineering job market on the back of an anecdote.
The best opportunity would be a small established business but they get eaten in London instantly.
With contracting you will end up with a lot more the 8 weeks of down time in the year unless you are in long-term engagements...
I find trying to live in an expensive city while on a low salary admirable.
I live in a flatshare, 40 minute door-to-door commute (via overground, luckily, not the tube) and the rent is about 4k a year.
Our office is just off of Brick Lane, and it's a short 15 minutes to work every morning :)
I live in Scotland near Edinburgh, my first dev job I was earning £13k. It isn't super easy to break into development in the UK but within a year that had about doubled and that and learnt enough to be able to jump ship, which I did.
Now years later, I've happily earning more than the London average by contracting. I ate shit early on because I wanted to get somewhere in an economic time where the young are being screwed. I think it was probably worth it, but only until your experience and talent matures a bit.
I made very nearly that as a fresh graduate with an unremarkable degree and no relevant experience. Out in the sticks with more reasonable living expenses. Thirteen years ago, and I'd come close on several better paying positions. (Tip BTW, £400/mo after rent won't be enough for independent living.)
You're letting loyalty cloud your judgement; you can do better for yourself. Counting pennies isn't fun and you don't need to.
Investment banking is often long hours (9-midnight) plus weekends. Many leave after a year or two or don't make it past 2 years (don't get their contracts renewed after analyst). Also, I'd consider those individuals to be some of the very smart; does this survey really allow one to filter how good they are at their job? There are different levels of software engineer from someone tweaking a wordpress blog template to someone writing assembly code on chips.
Also, what about google and facebook? They pay pretty well, don't they? Also, there are other companies like linkedin and oracle here too. No idea if they pay well or not (no info to base it off)
Working for government contracts as non permanent employee ?
There are smart people, they're the seniors. The juniors are just like everywhere else. There are the actively clueless.
The only good thing about investment banks is that they're more agile than consumer banks. That's probably country dependent though.
Don't think it's like this special place or some crap. It's really not.
On the whole, if you have strong programming skills you're going to be better compensated in the financial sector than at google or facebook. You just have to work with a non software oriented business that doesn't give a shit, and put up with things.
EDIT: @nawitus:
Sorry but your data is totally useless for this purpose. 1) it's the whole economy, not just programmers and 2) it includes part time workers! To imply that full-time programmers in London are working on average less than a 40 hour week is so far from reality.
Notably, the longer hours worked in the US compared to Europe comes at the expense of less per-hour productivity in most studies I've seen, though not enough to result in less per-worker productivity. If that's true within Europe as well, the value of the time worked would be closer than the number of hours would suggest.
Imperfect doesn't mean totally useless.
I am from a fairly small central European country and programmers there barely make more than other professions; the salaries often amount to the national average.
This seems strange to me, as it takes a few years for someone to get good at software (the supply is constricted), and where I've been involved in recruitment, finding good people is difficult.
It's also interesting to see that people get paid so much more in finance, or at American companies. That is, a finance house could probably hire any good 5+ year C++ developer at the 'normal C++ developer' rate of 30k, and get good results. But they choose to pay 50K for a 'finance C++ developer', whether he was earning 30K last week or not.
That says to me that pay is not set by supply by labor supply and demand but something else. That is, you don't get rich by having rare skills that make people money, you get them by knowing which industries pay over the odds for labor. I think that's a good thing to realize if you want to be comfortable.
Banks, finance etc do tend think in supply and demand terms. Can't find good people? Raise the price. Hardly ever happens in other industries.
The sort of developers that get well paid in finance (it should be noted that there's a vast range of dev salaries in banking depending on the sort of roles being worked in with Quants, Quant/Devs and Front Office developers being very much at the top of the pile) are those that have Masters or PhDs in Maths and work on pricing algorithms, those who work on high frequency type applications, those who have enough maths that they can turn algorithms into solid applications that can't fall over during the trading day (i.e. solid, highly optimised software), or those who can interact with the trading desks and build anything which helps the desk make more money. One thing they'll all have in common as well is a large amount of domain knowledge about the (financial) products that they work on, as well as the ability to work in environment which are often noisy and stressful. Anyone who needs their own office and a quiet environment in order to get into the zone and hack on some code is not going to thrive at a bank.
Edit: Forgot to mention the country - Poland
Ukraine is in Europe.
Google (or books) are your friend :)
By any reasonable definition, Ukraine is in Eastern Europe, whether you use geographical, political or historical definitions. This is what Wikipedia says, as do most atlases and the CIA world factbook, in fact I've yet to see a source saying otherwise, but you can surely provide links to one. The EU is not the same as Europe, by that narrow definition, Switzerland is not Europe. Your statement that nobody in/from Europe or Ukraine would say it's in Europe can be disproved with a simple counterexample: I'm from/in Europe and I say so, just as a random sample of my Ukrainian acquaintances.
No comment on Russia being "by no means" European. I guess you'll need to do a lot of Wikipedia editing to remove all references to Tolstoy from the pages on European literature.
In my experience it's only people from the US and possible the UK and/or Scandinavia that only think "Western Europe" when they say "Europe".
However I would say this type of shorthand is far more widespread than UK and Scandinavia. My German friends adds Eastern Europe when speaking of Ukraine, too, as does my Italian friends.
The cultural differences in Europe are far more complex than an East-West divide. Saying that Ukraine has a European culture is like saying India and Japan have "Asian" cultures. It sure doesn't make them the same and frankly, it does not even very similar.
Politically and culturally, it's in Europe. Greek Orthodoxy and Greek-derived scripts are something you find in Europe since the Middle Ages.
Not really. I don't know of anyone who identifies by EU citizenship. Not even EU top level politicians. We're all nationals, and even 3rd world refugees becomes citizen of a nation rather than EU.
When speaking to people from US, I usually identify by from [country] or "from Europe". The latter seem to be enough for most mericans that think of EU countries as US states.
Of course the cost of living is alsop very high.
National average net income is about 400 euros
Regarding payments to juniors and interns, I know it from the market - I know some salaries of my colleagues. When I started in IT - in 2006, I started with about 230 euros net, which was also decent.
I am talking here about Cluj-Napoca (the second largest city in the country), not the capital, where salaries are better.
So, if you want to live in a place and earn 4-5 times the national average income while doing what you like (programming), come to Romania :))
In the US, my experience is that software developers generally are paid competitively. CS and chemical engineering graduates routinely get the highest starting salaries all around the country when it comes to four year degrees.
That starting salary may be $100k in Silicon Valley, $80k in Chicago, and $60k in Nashville, but all three numbers are competitive relative to the local market. In fact, you will find that in comparison to the cost of housing $100k in Silicon Valley is not quite as well paid as you think.
If you're not a muppet, it's quite easy to land 50k+ in any major city.
Now we're outsourcing to Romania. I haven't had the heart yet to ask one of them.
Finance isn't highly paid for software work, it's fairly paid, by world standards, only because they contrary to popular belief, don't have any class hangups there and are comfortable with the notion of playing in a free market.
Finance pays a fair market wage, which seems high by comparison to all the unfair players out there, but isn't actually that unreasonable.
Startups pay a theoretically fair wage (if you accept valuations at face-value and exclude liquidation preferences). It's when you see the equity/cap table (2% for useless VPs and 0.03% for engineers)-- as well as what the founders have done to ensure their careers no matter what happens to the business-- that you pick out the classism of the well-connected. If you look at salaries alone, though, you won't see it.
Outsiders complain about finance "bonuses" (finance salaries are only at-market) while failing to account for the fact that that's a much fairer compensation system than whatever they get at their corporate jobs. Granted, the banking bonus system is horribly corrupt in practice; but in theory there is nothing wrong with it, and I'd rather have a corrupt profit-sharing system like that in finance than none at all.
If, stipulating the dollar value of the whole comp package, a comp package appears fair, it is still fair no matter what that company pays anyone else. Wages are "fair" or "unfair" based on prevailing rates and supply/demand.
And of course in the real world, wages are not based on supply and demand. They're based on leverage and BATNA.
Simply put, given two equal employees (hypothetically, if it were possible to measure this), it's not "fair" to give one $50k and one $300k. It's not about the prevailing wage, it's about the contribution relative to what is coming back.
You're a $100k/yr FTE dev. A VP above you makes $200k/yr. You believe that VP should be making $50k/yr. But your position isn't improved at all if they do. You're still making $100k/yr, and someone else is taking the $150k/yr premium.
So you say, "no, I should get a share of that $150k/yr premium." Well, OK, why aren't you? What you're saying is that you're worth more than $100k/yr. You already have a way of demonstrating that: demand a raise, then start interviewing.
The flip side of this, if it helps make the point clearer: you're a $100k/yr dev. The VP at your company is already making $50k/yr. This is good how? By any logic you could employ in the above scenario, you're worth more than $100k/yr in this scenario too.
What other people in your firm make is an orthogonal concern to what you make. Clinging to the belief that pay equity is an important part of your compensation is as likely to harm you as help you; stipulating that we are all especially high-functioning professionals, the notion of pay equity is part of what puts a ceiling on what you earn now.
The difference is in one scenario you're talking about a company that can pay out 300k a year, and in the other it's only 150k. Fairness is not about absolute numbers, but relative numbers in proportion to the total available.
What other people make is definitely not an orthogonal concern, and is hugely relevant. Your justification of not caring about other people earning more is incredibly short-sighted. Yes, it does improve my position if other people earn less, because that money is then available for the company to use on other things, such as paying me.
Furthermore, to suggest that this is "irrational" is offensive and irrational in itself, and would not be inconsistent with psychological propaganda.
The word "irrational" doesn't mean "idiotic", by the way.
Ah, I think this explains the disagreement. That kind of "rational" has nothing to do with fairness, and everything to do with maximizing individual payoff. I think you've conflated the two, when they're almost completely incompatible. I knew you were a closet republican ;)
This is why I get supremely annoyed at claims that a specific non-mathematical argument is "irrational".
(Examples of non-computable things: company spends resources on R&D and makes more long-term profit; company spends resources on higher pay for everyone else and boosts morale; reputation of company increases and you attract a wider pool of potential employees; etc.)
In more mathematical terms, greedy optimisation algorithms in the name of short-term "rationality" most often lead you to a local, not global, maximum.
Here is an analogy: the business has $150k to spend. Would you rather have it spent on a pair of paintings for the meeting room, or in company-wide renovations? I think it's rational to choose the latter, though it doesn't immediately affect your bottom line.
If a company has 5% to give to employees in a certain year, VPs getting 1% does increase the odds an engineer will get 0.03% instead of 0.1%.
For what it's worth, I have made substantially more than my coworkers in almost all of my jobs (based on what I could infer from watercooler talk after being around a while), and I don't think that's fair either. I actually chewed out one of my managers once when I found out a coworker was making half of what I was.
Why wasn't he paying him more? Because he could get away with it, not because it was fair. He was a hard worker, very smart, but rather timid. Put this guy against the alpha male manager, and unless the manager wants to be charitable, that guy is not getting a dime more than the manager can bully him into taking. What's worse, the guy will probably come out thinking he got a good deal.
Because the market cannot operate, it is suppressed by the class system.
If you're smart enough to be an engineer, you're smart enough to realize the only way to win is not to play. So you either go into finance, or leave the UK, or grit your teeth and accept that in order to do the work you enjoy, you're going to be poor compared to someone who couldn't do your job in a month of Sundays, but has the "right" connections.
Is the UK class system still that bad? (I'd heard horror stories but assumed they were at least somewhat overblown).
Same in out politics too actually. Might not be Lord-this or Lady-that running the show, but they all graduated in PPE from Oxford...
I presume the US wouldn't have as strong a class system as the UK. There's a bit in Mad Men, where the British character (Lane Pryce) complains to his wife that "I've been here over a year and no-one's asked me what university I went to!"
One of 6 particular universities.
A similar term in the USA would be something like Ivy League:
It's a phrase that someone from the associated region of the world can generally go "Oh, you attended a <terminology> school?" and immediately have certain stereotypes and assumptions (accurate or not) come to mind.
But it's quite strong for CS/AI, as they have the largest CS department in Europe, producing the largest amount of world-leading research (according to the latest government-organised Research Assessment Exercise).
For undergrads that means there is an unparalleled variety of courses you can take, both in depth and breadth. I remember I had a choice of about 25 courses in my 3rd year and over 50 in my final year. For most British universities, your choice is rather limited - usually between 8-12 courses each year. Another bonus is that you get to work with leading researchers on your final year project. E.g. some of my friends were supervised by Phil Wadler - the guy was one of the principal inventors of Haskell and, with Gilad Bracha and Martin Odersky, designed Java generics and the extensions of the Collections framework.
So, Edinburgh is quite special and CS/AI is a particular focus at the University, so it's a shame not enough people know it.
Martelsham is the place where Tommy flowers used to work its the equivalent of ATT labs.
You like it or not, breeding matters a lot. What all those companies buy is not grades, it is not even a particular phenotype, it is a few generations of fine breeding, well-educated parents and relatives, etc.
So, most of those guys "with a sociology degree" worth it, you like it or not. It is just one of these small unpleasant truths about life.
In general, people with well-off, well-educated parents tend to do better than people who have undereducated poor parents. If you ask me, that's an argument for making sure we have less poor parents and for making sure that more people have a proper education, and not an argument for unfounded admiration for supposedly superior genes.
It's an argument for socialism, not for elitism.
Of course, "genes" does not mean the destiny, even if preferences and abilities are "encoded" there. There are long and boring debate about role of genes and IQ score and the consensus is that "almost everything is inherited but without proper environment, training and fertilizing the potential could not be fully expressed".
Well-off, well-educated parents, in a few generations back, is what could be called the environment. And what it amounts for is not just self-esteem and developed, refined mind, but also non-verbal behavior, which, like looks (a signal of good genes) are much more powerful drive that people like to admit to themselves.
As for ideas of so-called equality, be it socialism or equality between men and women, these are just theories. In reality (at least what we could see in labs) genes are the vehicle of evolution process, which is all about inequality.
It is correct to say that these theories, being intellectually attractive, are in contradiction with the very process which made us. So, it is better to check ones premises.)
For example, people might like it or not, a good-looking person (due to genes) will receive much more attention from people in all his endeavors, be it studying or carer building, or simply having a good time. Too much attention could ruin, and it is well-known in the field of personality disorders.
Please, do not even mention that nonsense that what is considered good-looking varies from culture to culture, from age to age. Good looks are youth, health and lack of deformations ("average" face considered the most beautiful) or signs of good genes.
Actually, any modern psychology textbook treats those subjects is very clear.
Some people seem dissapointed that developers are not being paid more than airline pilots: it's just not realistic outside of a boom economy (see: bay area).
They also have to go through a five or six year medical school and five years of post-graduate training along with profesional exams (MRCGP exams). They're also bit of an anomaly compared to other doctors in the UK - consultant salaries are between 75k and 100k according to the official pay bands [2]. The only way that most doctors can make serious money is by having a private practice along with the risks and costs that come with it (for point of reference, my other half is an obs and gynae surgeon and in that field the private insurance is £150k a year).
[1] http://www.telegraph.co.uk/health/9300823/Most-doctors-are-n... [2] http://www.nhscareers.nhs.uk/explore-by-career/doctors/pay-f...
I bet the average Ceng doesn't earn anywhere near 100k.
And your forgetting that consultants often have a private practice on the side from thier NHS gig.
I have a (non-finance related) start-up in central London and it's pretty difficult to find skilled developers with 4-5 years experience who are asking for less than £50k p/a.
I hear so many companies that whine about the lack of perm developers then go ahead and hire a contract dev at 500/day. That is the market at play, if our city cannot pay our developers enough to sustain a reasonable standard of living then they wont work.
Honestly I'm glad to see it. The more developers that follow the market (contracting) the better. Hopefully that'll wake a few people up and we'll see salaries start hitting the numbers that are needed to live in this over priced city.
That said, if I WFH 100% 50-60k would be fantastic but that's not acceptable these days.
</rant>
I moved overseas to Australia from London a few years ago. Same job, same company, 60% pay rise.
Now I'm back in the UK the permanent salaries on offer seem like an insult. I have to go contracting to match it.
In university you're surrounded by clever people who can programme (if you're in a CS degree). It can make one think that one is nothing special, and everyone can programme.
Graduated ( computer network management and design ) working in Portsmouth started on £16k (software developer).
Three years with the same company progressed to £25k.
Moved to London salary £33k
Two years with the same company salary rose to £40k
Went travelling, came back, started freelancing/consulting earned ~£50k last year.
I have been interested in moving to a hedge fund for a while and even had a telephone interview with one of them. I thought I did really well and it did seem like they agreed with me in their feedback to my recruiter but they also declared that "while I was an outstanding candidate, I was not what they are looking for and will come back to me once they have a more suitable role". I just don't understand what that means. From chatter with recruiters and friends, your best change of getting into a hedge fund is through personal contacts. Can you confirm this theory?
During the period I worked for a hedge fund, no one we employed came from a personal connection. They did have stellar CVs with very good academic or industrial track records though.
I am deeply ignorant here and will gladly learn from relevant links or responses.
London also has a large supply of people coming from other countries as the job market is much better here, and these people will often accept fairly low pay as it is higher than what they would have got at home.
So being the type of developer who can get up to speed on new technology is not necessarily so useful as it might be in the US.
I would say that salaries like this are pretty much on par with most major metro areas in the U.S. (not just silicon valley)
In any case, this and other polls indicate that programmer salaries in London are also lower than in many other large American metropolitan areas, not only SV. I did a quick search on Indeed for software engineer salaries in several American cities (NYC, Seattle, Chicago, Boston, Houston, Austin, Portland, Miami, whatever came to my mind) and in all of them the average salary is over U$85k. In fact I also searched for junior software engineer and in all of them it's at least U$60k, still within the £40~45k range which is the mode of the poll (and presumably filled with mostly non-junior developers).
If you look at average programming salaries in Tokyo or Paris you'll see a similar thing. The interesting question is not why London salaries are "low", but how come American salaries are so high.
As for how this happens, I'd say it's a combination of two things. Firstly, salaries in the software industry are mostly determined by market forces rather than actual value generated, because there isn't any driving force, union-based or otherwise, to give individual developers leverage to set rates based on value instead. Secondly, incompetent middle management is a speciality here in the UK, and a lot of the people responsible for hiring software guys wouldn't know a good developer if he single-handedly displaced Google in his spare time. Therefore many businesses that need software wind up hiring poor developers and then complaining about the results.
I concluded after a while that the solution to this problem almost always involves founding your own company, even if it's just a vehicle for freelance contracting. That way you are negotiating with clients on a business-to-business basis and typically dealing with senior managers who have a real problem to solve and will pay for the actual value they get if you can solve it for them, bypassing all the PHBs in middle management and their foot soldiers in HR, accounting, legal, etc.
The result is that companies don't actually make a huge amount of money from each programmer so they often genuinely can't afford to pay good salaries.
On the bright side, if you are a competent manager or willing to learn to be one, and willing to either stomach European employment legislation or hire remotely, you could treat our continent as a bounty of little-used resources.
Education is cheap so there are less student loans to pay back and more people get a degree saturating the market. Having a degree simply isn't that special.
Healthcare and other public services are cheap, you don't have to pay expensive health insurances which lowers the salary level for everybody, not only engineers.
Tech: Primarily Java with some C, C++ and more recently Go (although Go is only in our code playground, nothing even close to production yet)
Location: West London
Company: Small but well established (since 1996). There are 4 developers including myself. One software is one part of what we offer.
Edit: I know you said without benefits, etc. but I included it for others as well. Just look at the £85k figure if you want a hard number.
I certainly feel valued as an intellectual everywhere I have worked but I may just be lucky?
The UK as a whole has long had a reputation for having low wages relative to the US. Anecdotally, I recall coming across a mention here on HN where certain dev jobs were being classified as "clerical" and offered at around ~$20k - $25k USD equivalent.
Working anywhere else in the UK, I'd struggle to get half that.
- As a developer, how often are skills from CompSci degree applied on the job?
- What do you wish you knew about the job market as an undergrad?
- How much part did the prestige of your university play in your current salary?If money is your goal, knowing how to sell yourself (in job applications and interviews) is very important. For job security and progression in general, people skills are essential.
My advice? Don't bother with university, start work ASAP, and keep learning in your spare time.
Maybe also consider getting your foot in the door via QA?
One think I wish I knew about the job market before I started: you'll be more successful using programming as your "secret weapon" in some other domain than as line-engineer elsewhere. of course, "success" here is defined in terms of what I like, and may not match you.
I found my personal development and existing work mattered a lot more than my university.
this may not matter for some CRUD website, but does when you're pushing the limits...
On the other hand, skills schools and engineering programs churn out better programmers by far. They are trained to know how to dive into other peoples code, work with a project team and generally apply methodologies to improving code wherever they encounter it. From day 1.
And yet some how managers still cling to the dated notion that a university degree guarantees return on investment.
Basically diploma level or accredited degree programs. Most of these programs tend to focus on software development at a practical level, less on abstract concepts traditionally studied in Computer Science programs. The good ones focus specifically on developing software in one or two main technologies rather then a smattering of random stuff (:cough: Devry :cough:)
People hire to get stuff done. They have zero interest in your qualifications. They have every interest in your github repos. One cool project trumps your degree.
Employment offers plenty of scope to increase your salary. What it doesn't offer is much space (unless you work for decades to earn it) to study anything for the sake of it. That's your current opportunity: you can choose to study something for the sake of it, like Mathematics & Philosophy, History of Computing or Smart Geometry.
Don't put yourself in a box. Plenty of other people will be trying to do that for you.
This seems to be a massive oversimplification. For a recent example, note how Yahoo is changing their recruiting to favour applicants that have a degree from a "prestigious" university.
1. Hardly ever. Then again I am not doing anything amazingly special or complicated. Just standard business apps.
2. That experience is worth double what theoretical education is. So make sure you DO STUFF and stick it up on github. Write a blog about what interests though. Writing a blog is great at improving your language skills. Also take some presentation skills courses while you can as it is all about selling yourself and your MSc won't sell you sorry to say.
3. Zero. Nobody cares what uni you went to unless you are going into fields like medicine. Your experience and previous work (again stick stuff on github!!) will help more than saying you got a first from Cambridge. The exception might be places like Google but I don't know anything about working for Google :)
the data I have shows me that my (non first) Cambridge degree allows me to command a 10-20% higher salary than my non-Oxbridge colleagues.
2. Big companies pay more, and give you access to an internal job market. Getting work is easier than you'd think, so don't worry all that much. Your first pay settlement plays a big part in your subsequent pay deals.
3. In the UK, elite graduates (oxford etc) that I work with tend to get about 1/3rd more to do the same job. They find it much easier to get onto elite graduate programmes, e.g. in finance, so I guess the employer must compete with that. STEM graduates with a 2.1 or better from a top 50 university do not have a problem finding 'graduate' work. Anything less than that, and you may as well not have a degree (i.e. you can get good jobs, but have to work your way in as you would without a degree).
Since our quirky grading system leaves most students' accomplishments indistinguishable, it's the reputation of the university you studied in that matters.
All the above is, however, a massive generalisation.
I hate London, and the company I work for is now allowing me to work remotely so I'm keeping my salary and moving back to Wales, where it is much cheaper to live and I will not have to share a house with people.
I really don't care about money (really) and it's much more about being happy, which I will be once I move out of this city.
Or maybe, like New York, you actually can live there fairly reasonably if you really know the place and know how to do it. As a visitor maybe I was paying tourist prices.
Public transport is cheap and abundant, competition keeps prices down for restaurants and shops, and there are a lot of free events to keep you busy.
The main expense is in the accomodation, which most people in their 20s combat by sharing houses in undesirable areas. (This is a problem UK wide though as they have managed to keep our housing bubble inflated unlike in the US.)
London is expensive for tourists though. A ride on the Heathrow Express, a few nights in a 3* hotel, and a spin on the London Eye would be enough to make Zuckerberg wince.
BTW I work/have worked in other companies in the Forward group, the parent of Forward Labs, and can confirm it really is a great place to work
In many towns and cities outside of London you would need a car to get to work which would cost much more, even without the London uplift in salary.
Really? London has the highest rent and house prices in the UK.
The average rental for a 1 bedroom flat is about £1200 a month, if you attribute that to the average UK salary of about £26k that's about 70% of your take home (monthly) pay.
I agree that the other costs are mainly in line with the rest of the country, although the tube is very expensive (buses are much cheaper)
London housrhold incomes (rather than salaries) are much higher than UK average so calculating as a percentage of that £26k is misleading.
You'll be fine doing a flat share etc in some of the nicer metropolitan bits, but if you have 3 children like myself, things get expensive awfully quickly.
You have to fish out £1500/month for a 3 bedroom house in a suburban area (zone 5/6) which you won't get stabbed in.
If you want something really nice, say Richmond/Strawberry Hill, try £2250 for the same.
Ironically I had a 70 mile commute and I got into work before the ones who lived in London 90% of the time :-)
Aside from travel (~£120/month), other costs are similar to elsewhere in the UK. There are decent, well priced (<£10-15 per head) places to eat, drink etc.
A salary in the £20-30k range would require careful money management, but you can live comfortably on £30k+.
2008-2011: 60k ( including bonus ) in finance.
2011-2012: <20k freelancing as a creative coder for museums and advertising, lost half my savings doing this...
2013: 68k in educational software used by millions of kids.
As a lot of people mention here, only finance pays well in the UK. If you don't mind working in that you can earn quite a lot. The other route is contracting, but that works if you have a skill that is in demand.
I am very happy with my current job though I make roughly half what I could potentially get if I went back to finance.
In [348]: %run salary.py "London" "graduate developer"
Job Title: Graduate Developer
Location: London
Salaries:
20000 - 794
40000 - 288
60000 - 85
80000 - 25
100000 - 19
Number of jobs: 1,211
Average salary: £30,057
In [349]: %run salary.py "London" "software developer"
Job Title: Software Developer
Location: London
Salaries:
30000 - 5762
50000 - 3303
70000 - 1298
90000 - 590
110000 - 345
Number of jobs: 11,298
Average salary: £46,018
In [350]: %run salary.py "London" "cobol developer"
Job Title: Cobol Developer
Location: London
Salaries:
50000 - 7
80000 - 4
260000 - 3
Number of jobs: 14
Average salary: £103,571
http://www.expatistan.com/cost-of-living/comparison/san-fran...
See here:
http://jobs.efinancialcareers.co.uk/Information_Technology.h...
That's because Finance is not grounded in Reality. Destroying the world's economies and the wealth of us little folks everywhere is massively lucrative, who knew?!
If you're fine living in Zone 2 or 3 ( the grey concentric circles on this map: http://www.tfl.gov.uk/assets/downloads/oyster-rail-services-... ).
Then rent in London: Shared house/apt = ~£650 per month, private apt = ~£1.2k per month. Deals are to be had if you can wait for them and do the legwork... those are the averages my friends pay.
Now... on a £40k salary, the PAYE tax calculator here: http://www.listentotaxman.com/ shows that you'll be taking home £2.5k per month.
You can definitely afford London rent on £40k.
You can support someone else, on a single £40k wage, in London, in an 1-bed place (assumes you're supporting a partner).
Maybe you can't afford a car, or to eat out several times a week, or to take lots of holidays... but £40k goes pretty far and providing money isn't being spent frivolously it easily supports 2 people in 1 flat in London.
When ~£13k per annum can support 2 people, £40k is a very high standard of living for 2 people.
Ex: City (finance) contract rates of £500-£700 per day are far from uncommon, if you have finance experience. Non finance, £400+ per day is not hard to find.
What I also don't understand is that salaries are getting lower, and hiring is getting harder. Anyone that has hired will appreciate how difficult it can be to get good developers. Given the long hours and need for learning in development it's shocking how low the salaries are, and how it's not talked about more often by UK developers.
The last time I was solely responsible for hiring was at a start-up that had just been acquired. I said that £25k was the bare minimum we should be offering for a junior to mid-level developer. We hired a really good developer, who now leads that team and landed another couple of pay rises (probably now earning a fair bit more than me). The start-up was acquired based on a product largely created by the developers, so we needed a strong developer to take over and I guarantee that if we offered the same low salary that others were offering the product would have been run into the ground.
It's really bad. In my mind, developers across the board should be on £5-10k more than they are, across the country. Hopefully within the next few years the tech industry will push towards better compensation, instead of thinking a drinks fridge and a ping pong table will win other twenty-somethings with no other commitment in life than to they hand their rent to.
You might want to also ask daily rates for contractors... most of the salary rates I've seen are around 60-75% of what contractors go for, and London has a crazy number of contractors (I'd guess 75% contract, 25% full time?)
Pay in London is a lot less then SV but that's acceptable we don't have as much VC funding for start ups. One issue allot UK companies/starts ups have is that they all think they can offshore all devolopment work, allot companies are slowly learning that having in-house devs are the way forwards. But the UK has got that dev is somthing we can off shore mentality an due to that pay for dev is substantially lower then some area's in the US.
Also don't let some of the high flyers pay( from the banking industryy ) fool you into understanding the average wage in the UK. The average wage in the UK is fairly low.
UK recruiters are very active here (most my fellow developers are regularly contacted), but even though I was considering moving to London or SF, it has to be something really exciting - majority of well paid s/w engineering here is boring "typical" business stuff.
I wouldn't expect any significant financial boost, but possibility to work for LinkedIn, eBay (Google maybe :) is an advantage.
Having said that, food is mostly more expensive in SF, and the results there are skewed by the cost of cigarettes being much lower.
Rent appears to be higher, which I've also been told by a three or four ex-Londoners who've moved to SF.
Last year I quit to work for a friend's startup and was offered nearly double that, before I left they offered me £55k to stay. Afterwards I found one of the guys doing pretty much the same as me was getting £60k, so I made the right choice :-)
Apparently this was eventually fixed, but not before about 80% of my ex-colleagues (I left for the Bay Area) ended up in... financial companies. Go figure. If you want the talent - put up the cash.
Something to cope with it: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heckman_correction
Raised in one year up to £55K
Next job in another year £63K
Raised in one more year to £70K
Plus bonus (financial industry)
C#, Java, Matlab, real-time trading
Now quit the whole thing and doing my startup
As others have said, finance is the way in London. Better salaries, better perks.
I can live without be thinking about money. I pay £700 for my flat and £170 for transport (zone 4) and I can save about £250.
Since then I've moved on, and am on £48K.
Full stack developer, using mostly ruby and related tech atm, was .NET based mostly before that, but could have been thrown into a project doing anything.
In London? Sure, you could be laid off anytime, but if you can't land a new contract in two weeks then there's something wrong with you. Contract market in London is buzzing.
I DO spending a bit of time saying "no, I have a contract" to recruiters tho.
My current contract is for a year and I invoice monthly. If I doubled my rate I'd be out of work.
Burner phones and email addresses for recruiters is certainly a thing, though.
When I was doing contract from 2004-2007, a shit Nokia and an O2 PAYG phone was a good investment. Many times did I just chuck the thing in the bin.
Recruiters will suck up to you even if you've ignored them for months. Commission vampires - that's all they are. You're just a line in a spreadsheet to them.
Because they're not going to go in and cause a huge increase in revenues like Patrick does.
Unlikely.
The salary disparity between London and the Valley is absolutely shocking, all the more so given that London is not at all a cheap place to live.
My colleagues who are mainly contractors keep saying I should leave and become a contractor but I'm not sure about the uncertainty.
The uncertainty is a problem, particularly when you end up getting booted early (it does happen), but occasionally you get to sit on your arse for the last 3 months of a say a 6 month fixed term contract being paid to play solitaire because they can't get rid of you early.
The agents are all asshats and will screw you for a penny if you're not careful.
The hiring companies treat you like a disposable tool. Don't expect to make any friends at the companies - the permanent staff know you're making more than they are.
This is a key reason I got out of consulting. At least, consulting on the same things that the full-time staff were working on (so training is good because it's obviously temporary in nature and no-one in-house does it). The money might be good but there's more to life than that.
I was paying £250 a week rent for a one bedroom flat in a complex with gym + pool in zone 2.
Rent prices are a little higher than they were two years ago now though!
In the summer I used to walk which took around 40 minutes so I spent a little less.
I would say you could get by on 35k but you wouldn't have much left over. Could do it for a year or two in a grind if you really had to though. Anything less and you will probably get pissed off with yourself as you will most likely feel under valued quite quickly. Especially if you have to pay anything at all for travel.
I live in Zone 4 in a 1 bedroom flat for £910 a month and I only earn £42k.
Myself, my wife, 3 children, a car in a 2 bedroom maisonette with two gardens in zone 5.
No problems. Apart from the incurred debt from having to live on a much lower salary for several years beforehand. That is the biggest problem for me.
(I assume people answered poll in GBP?)
It's hard to compare directly between SV and London because they're very different economically. SV is full of huge pure tech companies (the googles, apples, facebooks) that are hugely profitable and HAVE to spend heavily on R&D. Their product is literally technology and so they need 'high end' engineers. This therefore attracts 'high end' engineers from around the world, and the large number of these companies created a bidding war, hence wages rise.
The majority of developer jobs in London (and for that matter everywhere except SV) are at enterprises where they are slogging out backend code - think projects to integrate internal systems. Most of these roles aren't particularly 'high end' and don't need guru 99 percentile programmers, and hence they can pay less. Most of these companies see tech as a necessary evil and not a competitive advantage.
For these enterprise roles, base salary is also meaningless as nearly everyone contracts. A typical 'senior java dev' that pays £60k permanent, would contract for £500/day which is the equivalent of £115k [1]. Rates upto £700 are common, and £1000 isn't unheard-of for rare skills in vogue. Junior programmers should expect £350+
So comparing like-for-like skill set, London programmers are actually paid pretty well - There are many making the equivalent of $150k+ who wouldn't even pass a phone screen for Google. Now London has a few 'high end' roles that pay very well, the majority of which are in finance, with notable exceptions being the London engineering offices of big SV tech companies. Don't be mislead that all of finance is high paying, only the front office roles at the 'computationally intensive' desks are. There are also 'high end' but relatively low paying roles at game companies, F1 and GCHQ.
Another factor is the financial crisis, which has hit London severely. Since 2008 a huge number of jobs have gone, and wages have been essentially flat. If you include the fact the the GBP:USD rate went from $2.10 to under $1.4 at the lowest [2], UK wages actually declined 40% in USD equivalent. This is in stark contrast to SV which in the same period saw huge growth.
The funny thing is that almost the opposite was happening just a few years ago. I graduated in 2006, and London was in the middle of a huge boom. I was at Imperial College, and all the major firms would come to campus and have big flashy recruitment drives. There just weren't enough quality engineers and so starting packages for fresh graduates were literally twice what ANYONE else was paying. Also many of these roles were extremely interesting, working on real problems with cutting edge tech and brilliant people, and the firms had enough money to invest in training, extravagant grad programs etc. This has changed quite a bit now!
[1] http://www.contractorcalculator.co.uk/ContractorFinancialPro...
Maybe it was for him?
You shouldn't be so hard on someone else. I'm sure there are people here way smarter than you or I, and they don't call us "retard programmers".
Unbelieveable, pulp fiction or Jackie Brown if you really must, but really why bother?
In general I think it is a good thing, although I dislike the biggest one (Tekna) (that I was formerly a member of) because they supported the DRD[0]. I have since become a member of a different union (NITO).