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

Yeah. I am in zone 3 (15 minute walk from the office which is awesome) at £1200 a month for a very nice (large) one bed room flat. I could get a two bedroom with a little more space for the same price but this flat is gorgeous and I love the lay out plus location to work is perfect. Close enough but not too close ;)

I would say you could get by on 35k but you wouldn't have much left over. Could do it for a year or two in a grind if you really had to though. Anything less and you will probably get pissed off with yourself as you will most likely feel under valued quite quickly. Especially if you have to pay anything at all for travel.

Sample size=1, I've found that the "idols" of the developer community in London work for gov.uk or the BBC. I respect both very much, but you can't optimize for "soft" values and cash at the same time. It's a bit tautological, but if you want to make a lot of money, you have to go do that. You can't optimize for a fun, "meaningful" (hugely subjective, obviously) job with short hours and expect the money to just come rolling in.

Note on finance: It's not as bad as some people like to make it sound, and if you're ruling it out wholesale, either for ideology or prejudice, you're doing yourself no favours salary-wise. Banks (by which I mean investment banking, retail is not even on the radar) are by no means a singular working environment, it matters a lot which team you join. Banks works on absolutely massive problems, and have plenty of new work going on. There are tons of opportunities that don't involve sitting in a basement, fiddling with a 20 year old Java 1.1 codebase under a psychopathic boss. The reason banks can pay well is that it's generally pretty easy to follow the money, and if you get yourself in a position where you pretty clearly create value, you can (almost) write your own paycheck.

Alternatively, if you're still not going for the banks, there is a huge cottage industry of companies catering to the banks: financial services. They will be a lot more "normal" than the banks, but they still pay decent money.

EDIT to add: Finally, obviously, contracting. If you have a couple of years of solid experience, you can make £500+/day. Add a good blog, a few conference talks, maybe a book and you can easily 50-100% to that. That's £110-220k/year, with 8 weeks off.

1. My job requires software engineering skills more than compsci skills, i.e. designing a program in UML, or writing elegant code is important, but most actual algorithms are pre-implimented, e.g. container classes implement sorting.

2. Big companies pay more, and give you access to an internal job market. Getting work is easier than you'd think, so don't worry all that much. Your first pay settlement plays a big part in your subsequent pay deals.

3. In the UK, elite graduates (oxford etc) that I work with tend to get about 1/3rd more to do the same job. They find it much easier to get onto elite graduate programmes, e.g. in finance, so I guess the employer must compete with that. STEM graduates with a 2.1 or better from a top 50 university do not have a problem finding 'graduate' work. Anything less than that, and you may as well not have a degree (i.e. you can get good jobs, but have to work your way in as you would without a degree).

I won't talk about grades. Getting a 2:1 or better is a given when applying in the UK. My experience is mainly London, Finance/Tech. The hardest class was my algorithms class in my second year and it turned out to be the most useful. The rest of the degree was too unfocused. The school you go to does matter. It counts a lot. People tend to hire from Universities that they are familiar with. Not out of any elitism but it often boils down to being familiar with that university's curriculum. The biggest piece of advice is that you shouldn't expect your Computer Science degree to teach you how to develop software. You should be advancing this skill alongside your course in popular languages, by yourself in your own time. This will ensure that you can talk intelligently about technical topics. Finally, your extra-curricular activities count for a lot more than you realise.

Why are the salaries so much lower than in the States? I know part of it is that demand outstrips supply here, so perhaps my question resolves to why there is less demand. I assume that the point of software is that it can be an efficiency multiplier, so if you hire someone to automate a process, that is either reducing costs or increasing revenue, which should be fundamentally valuable.

I am deeply ignorant here and will gladly learn from relevant links or responses.