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Ask HN: How much do you make in London?

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Re: Ask HN: How much do you make in London?

#71

Post by gringofyx »

gokhan wrote: post #65
gringofyx wrote: post #63

Reading some of the amounts listed is a bit depressing, I thought that the increased cost of living in London would justify salaries and rates much higher than the average. By contrast I know from personal experience you can earn the same or better than what's listed here outside of London and enjoy the lower cost of living.

Any recommended locations to look at?

Manchester, Leeds, Newcastle, Bristol, Liverpool... probably in that order. I've heard good things about Glasgow, Birmingham and Cardiff too. The North West has been good to me and I've never really had to leave the area because there's pretty good transportation links over a wide area with a large population.

And I've lived and worked in Berlin too, it's nice, but by no means the perfect solution. And y'know... it means I can live close to family by being in the UK.

Re: Ask HN: How much do you make in London?

#72

Post by Peroni »

throwawayberlin wrote: post #64

Degree in Graphic Design, 8 years industry experience, started with Flash / ActionScript and moved to JavaScript about 5 years ago. Freelance Flash animation / dev for big digital agencies and ad companies (5 years ago) - £250 p/h, with 3 years experience. Tech Lead - Digital Agency in Shoreditch (1.5 years ago) doing Node / Ember / Angular / DevOps - £45k, however I chose a lower salary for more leave and flexible w…

>Freelancing JavaScript dev (Node, Angular etc), digital agencies - aprox £300-350 p/h

I assume you mean per day and not per hour right?

Re: Ask HN: How much do you make in London?

#73

Post by Peroni »

thrwwyldn777 wrote: post #42

"Lead Developer" with a startup, £55k (I refused options in preference of salary). I have a PhD (4 years programming), and ~4 years professional experience as well. Previous roles: Fresh Graduate: "Developer" £28k + £3k bonus. Fresh PhD Graduate: "Senior Developer" £40k.

Mind if I ask what the tech stack is? I wonder if there's significant disparity in relation to the tech stack.

Re: Ask HN: How much do you make in London?

#74

Post by TamDenholm »

1_player wrote: post #22
TamDenholm wrote: post #2

Contractor, PHP/Full stack, 11 years exp, £350 - £400 a day in London. Not risen much in 5-6 years which is why i started doing other things like business consultancy.

How's business consultancy doing for you? Seems it's better paid, but I prefer the technical side personally. You surely have more experience than me, but what I personally do is increase my rate by X% every 6 months or so, non-negotiable for new clients, with fair warning for existing ones. I often start a contract on tech X, and after some time I'm touching other parts of the business, so the rate increase makes se…

I actually prefer the business consultancy now. I got bored of writing code all the time, i still do it for fun, but only about 1/3rd of my time for my business is coding now.

Re: Ask HN: How much do you make in London?

#75

Post by Throwaway33333 »

ionwake wrote: post #56
Throwaway33333 wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I had 15 unpaid weeks this year wrapped around the referendum. Last year I had 7 unpaid weeks.

Do you rely on random calls from agents throughout the day to setup your next role or do you have a couple you rely on? How many calls / emails do you get a day?

Half my contracts are through agents, I spend a lot longer than I'd like to admit on my LinkedIn profile. One agent has admitted they have a 30% margin which explains the ~1,000 phone calls and emails I got last year.

I run a blog, I'm active on Twitter and I've worked with a lot of different businesses and coworkers since I started my career so this is where the other half of my contracts come from.

I've heard from someone at (Big Hadoop Consultancy) that they send consultants out to train and do POVs paying the consulant £1,200 / day so there should be some growth in my day rate to come.

It's probably worth mentioning I only sell my time in one week blocks. I had two contracts this year where a client was having some troubles with Kafka on AWS. The first problem was taken care of in an hour in a half but they were still billed for a week. Same thing a few weeks later when Zookeeper was feeling upset.

Re: Ask HN: How much do you make in London?

#76

Post by jakub_g »

andyjohnson0 wrote: post #59
jakub_g wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I mean, for example in France, the salaries might be advertised as "€35k", but from this you deduct social charges etc., and you pay tax from the "taxable income" which would be for example "€27k". Does this work the same in UK, or do I pay tax exactly from what the job offer says?

In the UK you pay National Insurance (NI) on your gross earnings. NI pays for things like the National Health Service. The amount you pay depends on your employment status and how much you earn [2]. I assume this is similar to "social charges" in France. After deducting NI and the tax-free allowance [3], you pay income tax on whats left. And whats left after that is yours to keep. Most regular employees have tax and…

Great, thanks!

Re: Ask HN: How much do you make in London?

#77

Post by throwawayPayLdn »

throwaway64928 wrote: post #53
throwawayPayLdn wrote: post #31

Just switched roles so can give two: Small Investment Bank - 61k + ~30% Bonus (3-5years experience) Java / Angular - Back Office Developer - Permanent Small Hedge Fund - 65k + 50%+ Bonus (expected/promised) - .Net / WPF (5years experience although not in .Net) - Permanent

What are the hours?

Not bad to be honest, 8-7 but I do get out for an hour or so at lunch.
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