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Ask HN: What has been your experience with bigger tech companies in London?

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Re: Ask HN: What has been your experience with bigger tech companies in London?

#81

Post by gpderetta »

Balero wrote: post #78
jen20 wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A household (not individual) income of £100000 is sufficient to be well inside the top 10% by income. Using the standard ratio of 4.5 times income for a mortgage means that you are capped at houses costing around 560k, assuming you have 20% to put down. The following search for 3 bedroom houses [1] provides either flats, maisonettes and a few houses in areas with poor transport links, and many of these are still over…

What's wrong with a decent flat or maisonette? I agree with your general point that housing is too expensive! I'm just curious.

Not as nice as an house, but having lived in one for a 10 years, they are perfectly fine homes.

An usual downside is that technically you never own it.

Re: Ask HN: What has been your experience with bigger tech companies in London?

#82

Post by jokethrowaway »

mettamage wrote: post #17
Chirono wrote: post #5

To get an idea of comp for companies in London, levels.fyi is a good starting point. https://www.levels.fyi/Salaries/Software-Engineer/London/ Bottom line is that comp is way under what you would get for the same job in the US, but better than most other engineering jobs in London outside of certain finance roles. The market seems to have been going up a lot in the past couple of years though. The interview process i…

I still wonder how to adequately prep for system design. I feel leetcode is simply practice, but system design, I can't seem to get a full hang of it. And I've noticed in my day job that I am not getting enough experience with it.

From my experience, system design is not too bad if you have practice building systems.

You may read some of the interview preparation books to get an idea of the concepts and keywords the interviewer want to hear - but it's not too dissimilar to what you would do in practice.

System design correlates to architect level work.

Leetcoding instead requires you to know the basic patterns to use to solve the problems and either A. be a incredibly quick thinker or B. have memorised tons of exercises - especially if you're not super young and age and sleepless nights are starting to catch up with you.

Leetcoding doesn't correlate to work in any way. You just suck it up and spend 2 months preparing for it so you can have a nice looking CV and a truckload of money after you get the job.

I would weigh carefully whether you want to go to a FAANG though. Some people lucks out and they end up in a role where they do very little, others end up overworking.

You can make decent money contracting for less demanding companies (both interview and work-wise) and being tax smart (I would say almost as much as a FAANG, considering half goes in taxes).

Re: Ask HN: What has been your experience with bigger tech companies in London?

#83

Post by jokethrowaway »

hnxs wrote: post #29
hutrdvnj wrote: post #6

Nowadays it's called MAMAA instead of FAANG.[0] [0] https://fortune.com/2021/10/29/faang-mamaa-jim-cramer-tech-f...

no one calls it that i see more and more people dropping the amazon A though

not sure if it's for convenience or because it's the least desirable FANG to work for

Re: Ask HN: What has been your experience with bigger tech companies in London?

#84

Post by mmarq »

If you live in the US, there's no reason to move to the UK. Life is extremely expensive, especially if you are planning to start a family. The UK outside of inner London is a non-place where only the locals can live, with the GDP per capita of an Eastern European country and nothing to do (apart from going to the local pub and taking a train to inner London).

Interviews are relatively easy, salaries have increased significantly in the past 2 years. You should be able to get 90K per annum with minimal effort, but that won't be enough to live like a low middle class German, if you plan to start a family. Housing is third-worldish, unless you can spend 2500-3000£ per month, weather is infernal and food has no flavour (unless you can afford to pay 2£ for an apple).

If you can get a visa to live in the EU, I'd consider Germany. If Brexit had one effect, it was to transform Berlin in a tech hub. It is much cheaper than London, salaries in tech are roughly the same and there's a large community of foreigners, so you don't need to learn German.

Re: Ask HN: What has been your experience with bigger tech companies in London?

#85

Post by throwaway234399 »

This is not directly the question you're asking, but I find that salary info on London isn't very accurate on Hacker News. London has always been a contract-heavy market, and the best money was had while contracting. Since IR35 this may have changed somewhat, but I've mostly found that rates on contracts inside IR35 have gone up to compensate.

I lead the development of a product in an investment bank, and I concentrate almost entirely on frontend web dev. I've been on a contract for 5 years, and currently pull in £900 per day outside IR35 (£200k equiv or $260k). We routinely hire devs for £700-750 per day and we STILL find it difficult to hire.

I can walk into a number of roles tomorrow paying at least £800 per day.

Re: Ask HN: What has been your experience with bigger tech companies in London?

#86

Post by cutthegrass2 »

phphphphp wrote: post #35
tennis_sort wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

£100k London as a single person could definitely buy a flat somewhere. Maybe not a great area but it's doable. A house with a garden, kids, private school etc. 100k won't cut it unfortunately. For some reason I thought FAANGs in London were paid really well but seems like contracting or finance is the only way to get a reasonable income. I have a buddy who was working for a DeepMind and now works for Google (UK). His…

The downside of contracting though is that the work is typically the work full-time employees don't want to do. You gain in flexibility, but lose in enjoyment -- enjoyable contracts are a minority. Specific to the point on finances: there's typically 250 billable days in a UK year so £600/day is £150k/year. There are tax benefits to contracting, so it's not a one-to-one relationship, but £150k/year salaried is better…

I agree. I left £800pd for £150k salaried for work interest reasons mainly, but tbh I haven't noticed the reduction in monthly income at all.

Re: Ask HN: What has been your experience with bigger tech companies in London?

#87

Post by cutthegrass2 »

throwaway234399 wrote: post #85

This is not directly the question you're asking, but I find that salary info on London isn't very accurate on Hacker News. London has always been a contract-heavy market, and the best money was had while contracting. Since IR35 this may have changed somewhat, but I've mostly found that rates on contracts inside IR35 have gone up to compensate. I lead the development of a product in an investment bank, and I concentra…

This rings true with my experience as a contractor in London.

Re: Ask HN: What has been your experience with bigger tech companies in London?

#88

Post by asdadsdad »

colinmhayes wrote: post #13
phphphphp wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A few years ago FAANG salaries in London were pretty weak, but they’re much better now and even within the startup ecosystem — traditionally much lower than FAANG salaries here — £90k is a reasonable base expectation and £100k at a minimum for FAANG (>150k TC is normal). On £100k London is pretty affordable, so I’m curious, how much were you making in London and what do you consider to be a required salary to start a…

£150k is much, much less than non entry level FAANG engineers in the US are making.

150k USD is around what you'll get with 2-3 years of non-FAANG experience in the US, so not that bad for London.

Re: Ask HN: What has been your experience with bigger tech companies in London?

#89

Post by bluehatbrit »

mmarq wrote: post #84

If you live in the US, there's no reason to move to the UK. Life is extremely expensive, especially if you are planning to start a family. The UK outside of inner London is a non-place where only the locals can live, with the GDP per capita of an Eastern European country and nothing to do (apart from going to the local pub and taking a train to inner London). Interviews are relatively easy, salaries have increased si…

> Life is extremely expensive, especially if you are planning to start a family. The UK outside of inner London is a non-place where only the locals can live, with the GDP per capita of an Eastern European country and nothing to do (apart from going to the local pub and taking a train to inner London).

This isn't even remotely true. Have you ever lived outside of London in the UK?

I live a few hours away from London by the fastest train and life is great. Free health care, great neighbours, the software engineer salary compared to many is very good, and there's loads to do. Cinemas, live gigs, local festivals, beautiful landscapes if you like the outdoors. There's just as much in the UK outside of London as there is in London.

There are many people who enjoy living in London, and that's great more power to them but non-London UK is definetely not "a non-place where only locals can live". I've moved around the UK loads and always been welcomed into new areas with friendly neighbours and such.

Re: Ask HN: What has been your experience with bigger tech companies in London?

#90

Post by bojangleslover »

mmarq wrote: post #84

If you live in the US, there's no reason to move to the UK. Life is extremely expensive, especially if you are planning to start a family. The UK outside of inner London is a non-place where only the locals can live, with the GDP per capita of an Eastern European country and nothing to do (apart from going to the local pub and taking a train to inner London). Interviews are relatively easy, salaries have increased si…

I think we found the only non-Brit in this thread who actually lives in the UK (same here).

Today I was listening to a podcast where the host said something to the effect of "sun, stars, trees and open space are all that matters in life". For much of the UK, especially north of the Exe-Tees line, they have literally zero of those things.

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