I'm assuming GBP, you should probably specify that.
Poll: Full-time software engineers in London, what's your annual salary?
91–100 of 420 posts
Re: Poll: Full-time software engineers in London, what's your annual salary?
#92The 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.
£40k is not badly paid. It's significantly less than SV sure, but it's a lot more than the average UK salary.
Re: Poll: Full-time software engineers in London, what's your annual salary?
#93The 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.
Hmmm, this is pretty different to my experience (as both employee and employer), perhaps it depends on the skillset and exact location.
I have a (non-finance related) start-up in central London and it's pretty difficult to find skilled developers with 4-5 years experience who are asking for less than £50k p/a.
Re: Poll: Full-time software engineers in London, what's your annual salary?
#94Wow, I am shocked at the low salaries. There go my fantasies of doing software development in London. From what I've read about there's no way I could afford rents there on that salary.
Re: Poll: Full-time software engineers in London, what's your annual salary?
#95Curios about the 200k group - what kind of things do people who earn so much do?
Re: Poll: Full-time software engineers in London, what's your annual salary?
#96Earlier quoted context omitted.
As a contractor you can spend a lot of time just marketing yourself, invoicing, etc. I'd imagine this is more like 50k per year in practice.
I'm calling BS on this, being a contractor. I spend around 10 mins a week invoicing. Nearly no time "marketing myself". I DO spending a bit of time saying "no, I have a contract" to recruiters tho.
How many billable hours a week do you tend to work, and what's the average number of working hours for employees in your locality?
Re: Poll: Full-time software engineers in London, what's your annual salary?
#97The 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.
It's the legacy of the old class system rearing its ugly head. No matter how well educated, and from what prestigious colleges, (software) engineering is blue-collar work and will never be as well paid as the "graduate management fast-track" type with a sociology degree from a "red brick". Finance isn't highly paid for software work, it's fairly paid, by world standards, only because they contrary to popular belief,…
This applies to the US as well, but probably not as severely since software engineers aren't as underpaid in the US.
Finance pays a fair market wage, which seems high by comparison to all the unfair players out there, but isn't actually that unreasonable.
Startups pay a theoretically fair wage (if you accept valuations at face-value and exclude liquidation preferences). It's when you see the equity/cap table (2% for useless VPs and 0.03% for engineers)-- as well as what the founders have done to ensure their careers no matter what happens to the business-- that you pick out the classism of the well-connected. If you look at salaries alone, though, you won't see it.
Outsiders complain about finance "bonuses" (finance salaries are only at-market) while failing to account for the fact that that's a much fairer compensation system than whatever they get at their corporate jobs. Granted, the banking bonus system is horribly corrupt in practice; but in theory there is nothing wrong with it, and I'd rather have a corrupt profit-sharing system like that in finance than none at all.
Re: Poll: Full-time software engineers in London, what's your annual salary?
#98As 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?
I find that skills from more traditional, hard degrees (maths, physics, chem, history, philosophy) translate into high-level employable skills more than raw computer science. raw comp sci (and basic programming jobs) is a useless skill without advance business domain knowledge (and the traditional hard subjects provide the scaffolding, if you will, to pick that up more quickly.) One think I wish I knew about the job…
and my experience is that the people with hard degrees tend to write bad code, as a result of not really understanding what's going on.
this may not matter for some CRUD website, but does when you're pushing the limits...
Re: Poll: Full-time software engineers in London, what's your annual salary?
#99Curios about the 200k group - what kind of things do people who earn so much do?
Lie on polls and/or work in finance at companies with generous bonus packages.
Re: Poll: Full-time software engineers in London, what's your annual salary?
#100The 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.
You have to compare like with like: number of days holiday is different (we have different numbers of public holidays); you don't have to pay for health insurance; the numbers here are in sterling not USD; do we value experienced developers more than very new ones; how many have bonuses as a major part of their salary [which this doesn't show]?
All of that's true except possibly the bonuses. It's probably still worth noting that £50k is worth about $76k at the moment, so most of the London responses so far would be lumped together in the bottom category on the previous poll.