[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.