[gambiting]

Literally on another thread someone(American) was trying to tell me that if you don't make at least $150k/year as a dev you should immediately quit and find another job. I was just like.....are you familiar with the pay levels in the UK lol? It's incredibly hard to cross the £100k/year barrier as a dev, with some very rare exceptions, nearly all of them in the financial industry and down in London(and yes, then you're paying £3k/month for a flat, so I'm not sure it's such a lavish salary as people think it is).

[beforeolives]

Yes. Some things that are taken for granted in the US that I haven't seen in the UK:

- Being in high demand, especially after your first job in the industry. Nope, every job search is as difficult as the first one and there are no companies competing to have me on.

- Being able to get a FAANG job as long as you're great at algorithm problems. Nope, those companies have limited presence in the UK, their salaries aren't nearly as good as in the US, it's tough to get an interview and there are no UK equivalents to them. So even if I'm the best at whiteboard problems, that makes no difference to my career.

- High salaries, both right out of university and later in one's career. Or tech salaries being much higher than other industries. In the UK tech is just another group of okay-ish white-collar jobs.

[ghaff]

It's not taken for granted in "the US" either except for maybe a tiny slice of people in a tiny slice of industry. The number of people who can quit their job on Monday and have their choice of six-figure offers by Friday--as some seem to think any developer who is half-trying can do--is miniscule.

[ryandrake]

There is a lot of mythology on HN that everyone writing software is making $300K TC, has $2M in their retirement account, drives a brand new Porsche, and has a supermodel partner. This is an outlier group of high-level engineers at an outlier set of top companies, in an outlier set of high cost of living locales.

[TheCoelacanth]

The time-frame is the only hard part there. A majority of software developers in the US make six figures[1] (this is BLS reported data, so it's far more reliable than the self-reported data from somewhere like Glassdoor).

[1] https://www.bls.gov/ooh/computer-and-information-technology/...

[ghaff]

So the median salary for people actually working is just over $100K for all levels of experience. Which means that basically half of employed software developers in the US make <$100K. Yes, it's above the norm but less than a lot of people seem to think is easy to get.

[AdrianB1]

Working for a company that also has offices in UK and with team mates in London, the problem is that UK is expensive versus countries relatively close (Eastern Europe) and London is very expensive versus Warsaw, for example, so the demand is not high because companies moved a lot of business out of UK and Western Europe due to cost. In a global world where India and China are cheaper and business can move where they are treated best (taxes and cost of labor), UK is in a very bad spot. Warsaw, Budapest, Bucharest, Ljubljana are close enough and cheap enough to be preferred by companies instead of London.

[jcadam]

When I was younger I briefly flirted with the notion (and eventually decided against) of working abroad as a dev and came to the conclusion the UK has the worst software engineering salaries in the developed world. For an American, finding a low COL area to settle in and working remotely seems like the winning play.

[javcasas]

> came to the conclusion the UK has the worst software engineering salaries in the developed world

You should check Spain. I'm paying more to the hires in latin america than I got offered while trying to work in Spain

[jcadam]

I was stationed in Germany while in the Army and always wondered how Europeans manage to make ends meet. Compared to the US, prices are higher (since adopting the Euro, at least), taxes are higher, but salaries are lower.

US troops are given a cost of living allowance (COLA) while stationed in Germany. It is (or was while I was there) tied to the USD/Euro exchange rate. Even so, we always tried to avoid shopping "on the local economy" and stick to base facilities for groceries and such as much as possible.

[Sebb767]

Two factors, I think:

- Social security is far better. You of course need to save for bad times, but getting sick will cost you practically nothing (you're always insured and the insurance will pay you 2/3rds of your wage) and when loosing your job (which is already far harder than in the US) you'll be covered quite good for 18 months and fall back to basic social support after that

- Generally a bit lower standard of living. It's not bad, of course, but 100k$+ cars, for example, are usually only leased via work, and 2k$+ laptops are a rather large expense to many people.

[arcturus17]

I don't think the salaries here in Spain are anything to write home about compared to other developed countries, but they've gotten significantly better over the years.

I consistently see JavaScript SEng roles at startups and large companies going for 40-60k.

The big cities are quite expensive, and you're not going to buy a mansion with that kind of money but it's still pretty good, especially compared to the national median.

[OJFord]

> in London(and yes, then you're paying £3k/month for a flat, so I'm not sure it's such a lavish salary as people think it is).

A £3k/month flat is certainly lavish. Or at least sized for two incomes.

(And even then, probably a nice a place in zone 1. Did that figure come from actually looking for places, or just exaggeration to make a point? I mean, of course you can spend that much and far more, but it's by no means the entry point is all I'm saying.)

[gambiting]

No, I have friends living in London. Yes the prices drop down quickly further out, but if you're doing 14 hour days you don't want to commute for an hour each way.

I have a friend who used to rent a flat pretty much opposite Facebook's office, paid £2800/month for a 1-bed studio. Know someone else who works for a law firm in the City, he pays dead on £3000/month for a flat but he's 2 minutes away from the office and pays for that convenience. And yes, I know someone who lives in Ealing, but a 2-bed flat(not a house) is still £1900/month, and the commute was 45 minutes each way on the tube.

[winterismute]

I live in London as well and what you are depicting is more or less correct but a bit distorted in the general view imho: for example, you can live near the West Hampstead area and be in the city (city thameslink or farringdon thameslink stations) in 20 mins, however a good flat with one bedroom would cost you 1400 (even less after covid) and you would be in a quiet street next to lively areas, well connected and with a lot of green spaces at reach. And this is only an example. The 2.6-3k flats in the "center" are fundamentally "laziness-scams" for people who don't want or don't like to search for alternatives and are ok with living next to no real green spaces and with the constant background noises of cranes and construction works; the 3k/mo "luxury flat" costs little more than 2k, plus 90? per month of communiting in a nice area in zone 2, you don't need to go to ealing.

[sweeneyrod]

You absolutely can find a 1-bed in super-central London for well under £2000/month, e.g. it took 2 minutes searching to find this one https://ww2.zoopla.co.uk/to-rent/details/57988484/?search_id...

But furthermore, you can find 2-beds in the same location for around £2000/month (I live in one). Suggestions that an analyst at GS or an E3 at FB earning 70-100k isn't actually that well off because rents are high are silly, if they're struggling how is someone on a more normal grad salary of 35k supposed to be coping?

[gambiting]

That's not what I'm suggesting at all :-) I just know some people who were on 50k in the North East and moved down to London to be on 80k - well, after the increase in costs it was pretty much a wash, the biggest upside is living in London, but also the biggest downside is living in London. But if you can swing 100k salary in London then yes, you're very well off regardless.

[switch007]

For anyone not familiar with the UK, you can find cheaper but you get exactly what you pay for. And you’ll be commuting. And the tube is not fun.

Our standard of housing is extremely low here. And small.

[shawabawa3]

3 years ago I rented a flat in zone 1 for £1300/month, 10minute cycle to bank. It was small (50m2) but nice

[AdrianB1]

Just for info, I know 2 people in London that make more than £100k/year and they are both contractors; they reached around £60k/year at max as employees before changing to contractors. One works for the government doing mostly nothing (not kidding, he explained what he did in his first 6 months - probably worked 30-40 hours in total), one works from London for some companies abroad. If you want to get 100k as an employee it's very tough or closes to impossible, but it is doable if you switch.

[sonthonax]

> One works for the government doing mostly nothing

What department? I couldn't stomach working at a particular 'international trade' department, because they managed to hire the most awful team of over-engineers to build a CMS.

I couldn't understand what the fuck they did there, other than force me to do superfluous shite for months after I delivered what they wanted. That superfluous shite being the bifurcation of a PDF generator Django application to a 'server' and 'client' micro-service that communicated over an HTTP API; which they also demanded that I write a pip installable client for (a client for an API that had one endpoint!)

This was years ago, and I still have no qualms about deriding these jackanapes who work in the insular world of government Python development in London. I felt like a proper whore working for the government, extremely easy work, good pay; but a terrible inability to see how mediocre what they were doing was.

[sonthonax]

It's not that hard really in the UK. Salaries are shit, and my advice to anyone looking for work into the UK is to be a contractor. I was effectively on £100'000+ at 23 in the UK as a contractor.

British and American companies are structured quite differently. As a contractor in the UK, you effectively have the same rights as an American employee.

If you look on the job boards for contract work, hardly any of it (prior to corona) was under £500pd.

[richardknop]

You don't need 3k per month that is certainly lavish and I would expect that to be supported by 2 incomes so a couple living together and splitting rent and bills 50/50. If you are living alone you should aim for about half of that in central London.