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Most universities allow for cheap or free study for employees, and will be culturally flexible to let you take advantage of it.
Another option is to start some mental health counseling and get some tools to disconnect emotionally from work, then begin to renegotiate work conditions. Having a note from a professional helps to make your case you are doing your job but can obtain more flexibility for work-life-balance and overall health. This sets a good baseline for the next 20 years of your working career!
Personally I love a fresh start. I occasionally re arrange my furniture just for change. It also is a chance to go into a negotiation with a good list of real priorities that may have been different 10 years ago. Mine sure were. In the US in my field, the tone has changed and they want happy healthy vaccinated employees, and are willing to change their structure (more remote, 40 hours ‘whenever it works and gets it done and the team is good’) and the only way to get it is hit the market as a free agent. The last place I did a gig willingly underpaid me $10k in salary I have realized, and I’m angry at them for it but aiming for $20k more now and will likely get it.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
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.
Good luck! Though I'm sure you won't need luck, sounds to me like you have a world of opportunity ahead of you.
My advice, go on indeed.com and type in "[your favorite language] remote". Take 1 hour daily and apply for jobs over $100k you think you would be a good fit for. You'll find out very quickly how in demand your skills are.
Good luck to you brotha.
- get a new job - it's easy for me to recommend this because I don't have a family to support, and I don't have to deal with the same amount of risk/uncertainty of potentially landing at a worse company - £60k is low for 15 years of experience - 13 employees = tiny company, not not even close to calling it medium-sized - find a new job first, then quit the current one
I'm not knowledgeable enough about the UK job market, but across the North Sea, in Denmark, you can still more or less pick and choose, there are tons of companies lacking developers and operations people. Not as many as last year, but still more than enough that you don't have to fear unemployment.
Get a new job. You can get a contract job paying £500 a day quite easily in the UK. Do a 6 month contract, save up some runway, work on your own thing for a while, doing whatever interests you. Repeat.
Is this is what you are doing? Please tell me more about it.
Anyhow, I am just coming back from a 5 month break and it's normal for me to take a few months off every year inbetween contracts. I never take a contract longer than 6 months, otherwise I can't take 1-2 months off at a time. Doesn't mean I never extend a contract after 6 months, but before I extend I communicate clearly that I would like to take some time off and then basically line up the continuation at the same place for when I come back.
That being said, if you want to retain the stability of your current environment, one way to mitigate the precedent/reputation hit of going "hi, pay me more plz" might be to shift the responsibility of the suggestion to a skills guidance counselor, life coach, therapist or similar position (I'm sure I've heard of more technically-oriented roles supporting this sort of thing, I just can't remember them right now).
If *that* person were to hear out your situation, go back and forth on various sundry details and then happen to hear about the pay bracket bit and flat-out tell you you weren't being paid nearly enough... well, you were just going to see them because you were a bit depressed (the circumstances you describe line up perfectly for mild depression), and oh no, this happened. Woops.
For your consideration:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29336234 - hiring a good EA/PA; a guidance counselor needs to be similarly supportive so maybe is relevant
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 t…