[piltdownman]

Truck (Lorry) Driving in the UK paying what it does is an economic aberration caused by Brexit and Covid 19 - e.g. 16,000 fewer EU nationals working as HGV drivers in the year ending March 2021.

In the end they had a shortage of nearly 100,000 drivers and had to massively incentivise new entrants to the industry. It's a complete outlier as far as blue collar vs white collar jobs in the UK/EU for the most part.

https://www.bbc.com/news/57810729

That said, overall the EU is paying somewhere around €80-120k for Senior Developers in the HCOL areas and as low as €45k in places like Spain. Overall, individual Contributor salaries outstripping even minor middle management is rare below architect or principal outside of FAANG.

This leads to the situation the commenter above identifies - that fairly vacuous softer-skill based IT Roles like Scrum Master or ART or Release Manager out-earn the median Engineer and are seen as a viable alternative for motivated people.

[gadders]

IR35 rules were a big factor as well, making it less lucrative for people to be self-employed truck drivers. It also paid better to be a delivery driver for Amazon than a truck driver.

[psunavy03]

Those "vacuous" roles exist to ensure that the dev team isn't lighting company money on fire working on the wrong thing, or crippled by inefficient bureaucracy which is also lighting money on fire. Which isn't "vacuous;" there is value in saving the company money.

[brailsafe]

If that's what they do

[psunavy03]

Some strong "junior developer" vibes here . . . nontechnical roles are not automatically fluff, and meetings are not automatically wastes of time.

[brailsafe]

> Some strong "junior developer" vibes here

How defensive. It seems to me like it would take someone with a rather fragile ego and low level of maturity to infer and write such a thing. I didn't call you or anyone else a bootlicker, so maybe save the personal attacks for your next sprint review or Reddit.

> nontechnical roles are not automatically fluff, and meetings are not automatically wastes of time.

If this had been your interpretation of my comment, then you'd have been right, but it's a choice to hold back and interpret a comment maliciously or charitably, and it's a choice to put people down. Non-technical roles do have value, as long as they aren't themselves an embodiment of their crippled inefficient bureaucracy.