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Poll: Full-time software engineers in London, what's your annual salary?

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Re: Poll: Full-time software engineers in London, what's your annual salary?

#41

Post by polshaw »

lrem wrote: post #33
SandB0x wrote: post #13

The software industry here in London is really badly paid, for salaried jobs outside finance at least. I know plenty of developers who started at £20-25k as graduates from decent universities and whose salary has slowly risen to 40k over quite a few years. PhD graduates making £35-45k too.

Well, my wife recently started in France, with M.Eng. in CS, for what translates to around £25k/year. And that is considered well paid.

France is completely different, she is employed either hourly- a maximum of 35 hours/week- or employed daily, ie. 218 days a year (for starters).

EDIT: @nawitus:

Sorry but your data is totally useless for this purpose. 1) it's the whole economy, not just programmers and 2) it includes part time workers! To imply that full-time programmers in London are working on average less than a 40 hour week is so far from reality.

Re: Poll: Full-time software engineers in London, what's your annual salary?

#43

Post by polshaw »

SandB0x wrote: post #13

The software industry here in London is really badly paid, for salaried jobs outside finance at least. I know plenty of developers who started at £20-25k as graduates from decent universities and whose salary has slowly risen to 40k over quite a few years. PhD graduates making £35-45k too.

The rest of the UK seems much worse.

Re: Poll: Full-time software engineers in London, what's your annual salary?

#44

Post by m0skit0 »

SandB0x wrote: post #13

The software industry here in London is really badly paid, for salaried jobs outside finance at least. I know plenty of developers who started at £20-25k as graduates from decent universities and whose salary has slowly risen to 40k over quite a few years. PhD graduates making £35-45k too.

If you think that's bad paid, come to the wonderful Spain. Graduates start with <= 18K€...

Re: Poll: Full-time software engineers in London, what's your annual salary?

#47

Post by hackerboos »

SandB0x wrote: post #13

The software industry here in London is really badly paid, for salaried jobs outside finance at least. I know plenty of developers who started at £20-25k as graduates from decent universities and whose salary has slowly risen to 40k over quite a few years. PhD graduates making £35-45k too.

I make 25k in Brighton as a graduate. Most of the jobs I applied for were 18-22k.

Re: Poll: Full-time software engineers in London, what's your annual salary?

#48

Post by thruflo »

xSwag wrote: post #17

As someone debating whether to do a Mathematics vs Computer Science vs Joint Honours, I'd really like to hear from graduates what worked out for them. - As a developer, how often are skills from CompSci degree applied on the job? - What do you wish you knew about the job market as an undergrad? - How much part did the prestige of your university play in your current salary?

Choosing a university degree to maximise your salary is a counter productive waste of opportunity. Become a generalist where command line foo is your super power, not your day job.

People hire to get stuff done. They have zero interest in your qualifications. They have every interest in your github repos. One cool project trumps your degree.

Employment offers plenty of scope to increase your salary. What it doesn't offer is much space (unless you work for decades to earn it) to study anything for the sake of it. That's your current opportunity: you can choose to study something for the sake of it, like Mathematics & Philosophy, History of Computing or Smart Geometry.

Don't put yourself in a box. Plenty of other people will be trying to do that for you.

Re: Poll: Full-time software engineers in London, what's your annual salary?

#49

Post by OrsenPike »

xSwag wrote: post #17

As someone debating whether to do a Mathematics vs Computer Science vs Joint Honours, I'd really like to hear from graduates what worked out for them. - As a developer, how often are skills from CompSci degree applied on the job? - What do you wish you knew about the job market as an undergrad? - How much part did the prestige of your university play in your current salary?

To answer you questions...

1. Hardly ever. Then again I am not doing anything amazingly special or complicated. Just standard business apps.

2. That experience is worth double what theoretical education is. So make sure you DO STUFF and stick it up on github. Write a blog about what interests though. Writing a blog is great at improving your language skills. Also take some presentation skills courses while you can as it is all about selling yourself and your MSc won't sell you sorry to say.

3. Zero. Nobody cares what uni you went to unless you are going into fields like medicine. Your experience and previous work (again stick stuff on github!!) will help more than saying you got a first from Cambridge. The exception might be places like Google but I don't know anything about working for Google :)

Re: Poll: Full-time software engineers in London, what's your annual salary?

#50

Post by acangiano »

VexXtreme wrote: post #38
SandB0x wrote: post #13

The software industry here in London is really badly paid, for salaried jobs outside finance at least. I know plenty of developers who started at £20-25k as graduates from decent universities and whose salary has slowly risen to 40k over quite a few years. PhD graduates making £35-45k too.

That tends to be the case mostly everywhere in Europe. For that matter, most places in the world outside the US (and Silicon Valley) tend not to pay software engineers very competitively. I am from a fairly small central European country and programmers there barely make more than other professions; the salaries often amount to the national average.

Remote-work-friendly companies can capitalize on that.
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