[golondon]

Speaking for London, if you would like to have £180K+ FAANG or Hedge Funds / Trading is your only option and unfortunately they ask leetcode questions. Some of them go crazy and ask hard, some like Facebook ask easy / mid but want you to be quickly come up with the answer.

There are eng offices of soon to be IPO'd startups such as Stripe or Intercom in London, those don't ask something you don't do in your day to day job, however comp at this stage would be base + maybe bonus + stock options. You can never know when that stock option will turn into something, so in a way it's even worse than lottery, at least in lottery you know the date to check if you get rich or not.

There have been few IPOs from London startups like Deliveroo, but I would say they perform pretty badly and things are not going well for people who relied on the return from there.

So, I would say Yes to this. Unfortunately.

[nvarsj]

I agree with you, although you can get near/past FAANG level TC by contracting/freelancing. Even just being a Java dev, you can make around 650+ a day which is about 150k/year. Plus you can expense almost anything IT related. If you branch out into doing trainings, or become a subject matter expert, you can charge 750, 850+ a day which is basically >= FAANG L5 levels. Probably a lot harder to be honest since you need proven experience and results, but it avoids the leetcode.

[golondon]

Yeah, I was talking for the perm roles. If you go to the contractor route, 600, 650 is quite doable. For higher as you said, it's networking, how people see you and what kind of projects you delivered. Depending on the person, it can be something even harder than the leetcode grind. But overall, I would agree.