Are salaries in the UK really that low? I live in the EU, my salary is similar to the OP and I just started working as a developer _this year_, with 5 years of a fairly unrelated career prior to that.
Yes and no. The range for a senior web dev outside of London writing PHP and JS is pretty big - jobs start at about £40k for someone building Wordpress sites and a bit of JS, and go up to £90k for someone working on full stack JS apps in fintech or ecommerce. Inside of London (or remote working for a London company) it goes up to around £110k. Obviously outliers exist too at both ends of the scale. If you want more than that you're looking at 'architect' title, or maybe some sort of leadership or CTO role.
To be honest, the wages are quite low compared to other tech centres. As someone in the UK I'd definitely like them to be higher.
Salaries between countries are hard to compare. You have to take into account that he and his kids have access to the NHS for exemple.
I’m a manager at a consulting company in France. My total comp is a bit shy of €70k which looks ridiculous next to an American but you have to factor in that I have a full medical coverage, access to free education for my family, unemployment insurance and retirement benefits plus a wide array of perks on top of that.
FWIW, typical US professional job, and especially Software Engineering jobs, also include the perks you listed. The “free education” doesn’t include higher educations, but all the other benefits you listed do very much exist and are commonplace in US. We might compare levels of coverage, and i would be interested to do that just out of my curiosity, but, overall, professional Americans mostly enjoy very similar welfare benefits as Europeans, while making more money, especially if you consider taxes (taxation is much more progressive in US than in Europe, and the wealthy bear the most weight of taxation, unlike in Europe, where it is middle class that pays most taxes).
> overall, professional Americans mostly enjoy very similar welfare benefits as Europeans
From having experience with both, that’s simply untrue.
First, education here is free - technically university is a couple euros if you are rich enough but free-adjacent - at all level. Medical coverage is not tied to your job and covers everything properly including chronic disease, heavy procedure and potential long-term inability to work. Unemployment last two years and fully covers your salary for the first six months.
You will win a lot more in the US if you work in IT because the salaries are incredibly high in the US but for anything else I would stay in Europe. Well, I would even stay in Europe for IT personally because I hate the US culture but that’s another story.
Yeah, unemployment benefits are here typically capped at 6 months, and you won’t be getting full salary (not even close if you are a professional). Higher education is indeed not free, and if you’re a professional, your kids will probably be paying a sticker price too (poorer Americans typically only pay much smaller fraction of the quoted price, especially at higher rated schools). Medical coverage here is rather extensive, and I doubt that Europeans are better off here, especially if you consider that medical insurance is paid on top of the quoted salaries, not deducted from them on percentage basis as in Europe.
In my understanding, when you consider total wages and benefits, it’s not only IT professionals that are better off than in Europe, it’s at least everyone above median income. The class of people who’d probably be better off in Europe are low skill, low wage working class people: US welfare system is much less generous towards them, especially compared to people who don’t actually work at all.
They vary immensely. By location, sector, and honestly, quality of employee. Mediocre programmer in the IT department of a low-margin old-economy business in Leeds? 60k could be good money. Good programmer in a growing startup in London? Double it.
I live in Belgium and when I started working as a developer (granted, without a higher education degree or prior experience) I got a bit over 1/3rd that amount.
Belgium has a lot of tax advantages though so just comparing the numbers like that doesn't make sense. Most people in IT get a leasing car for example, sometimes they don't even have to pay for gas.
I know. I can read. It doesn't matter whether it's turnover or profit. No one should stay at a company that's doing that much business with so few people without being paid more than that salary. Even if the company is making a loss then being paid £60k in a company with a £15m turnover is truly terrible. £15m is either a huge amount of work, in which case £60k isn't enough, or it's a reasonable amount of very expensive work, in which case £60k isn't enough.
The profitability of the company that you work for should have absolutely no impact on your salary if it's not making a profit. Do not accept less money for the value you generate just because the company can't sell it at a good price that makes a healthy profit. Your earning potential is not dictated by someone else's ability to sell.
If they are in low margin retail, or the "turnover" is really the turnover of their customers whose money they are handling - like for example an Amazon marketplace kind of thing, then 15m might be just a million of gross profit which is about about 70k per person. "Profit is sanity..."