[dx034]

That's not true as such. £100k with no experience is very hard to achieve, even with long-term comp. Maybe if you work at an algo trading company and get paid by the performance of your algorithms. But then it's more like being self-employed (they just provide seed money and some basic salary).

Total comp of £200k/year is clearly possible but also just on the investment side (not writing software for support systems) and usually involves some risk (i.e. income is volatile). Finance easily pays 2x that of tech in London but only because tech doesn't pay very well. A lot of startups pay programmers not more than you'd get with any other office job which is clearly not comparable with the US.