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> Especially since it includes Microsoft. FAANG includes Netflix, which everyone keeps repeating does not belong in this acronym.
Why don't they belong..? Their salaries are known to be among the highest of all.
[0] For example: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29785526
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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.
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It's really out of the ordinary when you're in the top 1% and can't afford a decent life - meanwhile lower middle class people who bought before QE (15 years ago) can afford a decent life. We shouldn't be lowering our "unreasonable" standards. If you're in the top 1% in income - you should have an complementary lifestyle. Not just be grateful that you're not in complete financial misery like everyone else your age.
You should pay more attention to household incomes than individual incomes, because housing is a per-household expense. Even if you are a high-income individual, you may still live in a mid-income household. In most large cities, being mid-income means you can afford to rent in most areas or buy in cheap areas.
Assuming you're single and in the top 3% of HH income (top 1% personal) - you have 2.1 less persons to provide for. You should probably be better off than two people with a kid. You need less bedrooms and floor space, that's for sure.
If you can't find a decent 1 bedroom in town - I feel sorry for the family shopping for a 3 bedroom on a slightly higher income that has most of that extra income going directly to the tax man.
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…
You’ll barely find a pub still open at 11PM in Westminster (where I live), let alone Mortlake or Brentford. And don’t make me start on the beer selection. It’s hard to get a decent espresso in London and there are at best 10 places where you can get a edible pizza, I’d be surprised if there were any in the rest of the country. In Westminster I don’t have a single cinema at walking distance (it’s a 20 minute walk to Leicester Square), and I live in the area with more cinemas and theatres in the entire country. I want to reiterate that I live in what is probably the most expensive and most active area of the country, and compared to Rome or Berlin sometimes it feels like living in the middle of nowhere.
Outside of inner London, the UK is a gigantic periphery, with square kilometres of houses and not even a church or a café in a 10km radius. At best you get a shopping mall and a pub that closes at 9PM.
A lot of non-sense in the comments about TC/ money. I have worked at FAANG for a long time, both in the Bay Area and in London. My experience is: - TC is lower, but how much lower is highly dependent on your level as the multiplier on base is smaller than the multiplier on stock refreshers. If you are very senior, then the total difference will be ~10-15% (TC), which is arguably not that large. - Private schools are…
> The UK does not have a property tax (!). It most certainly does, and is called council tax, based on the value of your property, plus other factors
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It's interesting that you have lived in both and can do a fair comparison. There was a reddit thread a while back that compared US and UK salaries.[1] The consensus seemed to be, that if you compared the cost of living, you would need a considerably higher income in the US to have the same standard of living as the UK. One person said that 130K USD salary in the Bay Area would be equivalent to 50K GBP in London.[2] A…
I moved from SF to London in 2010 and back in 2014. I was working for a startup at the time, so not FAANG, but also salaries weren't anywhere near what they are today. My experience is you can't really compare salaries directly, you really need to think about your personal lifestyle. First, if you care primarily about money then there's no substitute for being in Silicon Valley. After that it gets more complicated, b…
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£150k is much, much less than non entry level FAANG engineers in the US are making.
£150k is ~$196k base. I don't really see how that's much much less? My friend is an L6 at 220k base (with a shitload of equity). Definitely within the range.
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…
I spoke to a recruiter about a role at a food delivery app, and he said almost all of their new contractors (rates advertised were £650/day) are working remotely in Europe to avoid IR35.
There's a massive skills shortage in London, to make matters worse the government penalised the self-employed and IT contractors were particularly hit hard because alot of them choose to work this way. Ironic because I know a few recruitment agents that have said IR35 have made things increasingly difficult in an already scarce market, alot of the clients they recruit for are in public and government sectors. With th…
Penalised employees pretending to be self-employed in order to evade tax and national insurance.
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> 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…
I’m not saying that a Briton will be unhappy in Manchester or in Coventry, I’m saying that for me, a European that lived in Rome and Berlin and Dublin, these are non-places where nothing happens and where there’s nothing to do. When I say that only locals can live there I’m not referring to xenophobia (even if that’s a thing), but to the fact that in places like Harrow or Newcastle there is literally nothing to do, a…
It can't be all rollercoasters and silicon geography everywhere all the time.
Anyway, the UK has some of the most dense proportion of pubs per capita in the world. (Since that appears to be a concern in your comments)