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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?

#221

Post by aphro »

nicwise wrote: post #69

If you live in London and do software for a salary, you better LOVE what you are doing and where you are doing it, 'cos you aint doing it for the money. You might want to also ask daily rates for contractors... most of the salary rates I've seen are around 60-75% of what contractors go for, and London has a crazy number of contractors (I'd guess 75% contract, 25% full time?)

A lot of my colleagues have said it's not just about the money. That is important, and OK when your on your own, <30 and trying to make a name for yourself. But I know of some SHIT and I mean AWFUL programmers who get paid thrice as much as I and some colleagues, it often seems experience, or years count more than actual talent sometimes. I'm between 20-29k.

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

#222

Post by white_devil »

tome wrote: post #141
stevenwilkin wrote: post #139

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ditto, I don't need to put a huge amount of time into the admin side of things. The volume of recruiter emails & calls can be oppressing at times haha

Well it's genuinely great to hear you two have got so much work on. May I ask why you have not doubled your rates?

> May I ask why you have not doubled your rates?

Because they're not going to go in and cause a huge increase in revenues like Patrick does.

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

#224

Post by pointyhats »

djhworld wrote: post #174

I'm on about £42k + a 12% bonus, not sure if I'm going to get one this year though. My colleagues who are mainly contractors keep saying I should leave and become a contractor but I'm not sure about the uncertainty.

You need a big stock of cash, a hard skin and a good accountant.

The uncertainty is a problem, particularly when you end up getting booted early (it does happen), but occasionally you get to sit on your arse for the last 3 months of a say a 6 month fixed term contract being paid to play solitaire because they can't get rid of you early.

The agents are all asshats and will screw you for a penny if you're not careful.

The hiring companies treat you like a disposable tool. Don't expect to make any friends at the companies - the permanent staff know you're making more than they are.

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

#225

Post by kenshiro_o »

sbanach wrote: post #40

80k base, 130k last bonus. I'm 2 years into doing mostly Java, Python and C++ in a hedge fund. I left a small non-finance software firm where after a few years I was on 25k.

That's quite impressive! I work in an investment bank (my team is the only one that sits on the trading floor) developing low latency systems in Java. I get around 65K pre-tax in salary and bonus is not even 10K (I have about 4.5 years of Java experience and started working on this job about 2 years ago).

I have been interested in moving to a hedge fund for a while and even had a telephone interview with one of them. I thought I did really well and it did seem like they agreed with me in their feedback to my recruiter but they also declared that "while I was an outstanding candidate, I was not what they are looking for and will come back to me once they have a more suitable role". I just don't understand what that means. From chatter with recruiters and friends, your best change of getting into a hedge fund is through personal contacts. Can you confirm this theory?

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

#226

Post by Silhouette »

sopooneo wrote: post #90

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…

I think perhaps you're looking at this backwards: it's not that salaries in London are much lower than the US, it's that salaries in certain specific parts of the US that get mentioned a lot on HN are much higher than just about anywhere else in the world.

As for how this happens, I'd say it's a combination of two things. Firstly, salaries in the software industry are mostly determined by market forces rather than actual value generated, because there isn't any driving force, union-based or otherwise, to give individual developers leverage to set rates based on value instead. Secondly, incompetent middle management is a speciality here in the UK, and a lot of the people responsible for hiring software guys wouldn't know a good developer if he single-handedly displaced Google in his spare time. Therefore many businesses that need software wind up hiring poor developers and then complaining about the results.

I concluded after a while that the solution to this problem almost always involves founding your own company, even if it's just a vehicle for freelance contracting. That way you are negotiating with clients on a business-to-business basis and typically dealing with senior managers who have a real problem to solve and will pay for the actual value they get if you can solve it for them, bypassing all the PHBs in middle management and their foot soldiers in HR, accounting, legal, etc.

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

#227

Post by pointyhats »

mseebach wrote: post #215
tome wrote: post #141

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well it's genuinely great to hear you two have got so much work on. May I ask why you have not doubled your rates?

Recruiters generally aren't interested in you at any advertised rate, or even for any particular skill. They just see Java (substitute as necessary) and contracter in the general vicinity of each other and decide to call you up and smooch you, even if the job is not a good fit and pays half what you charge. Problem is, you often have to keep in touch with recruiters to keep the flow of work, so you can't just cut the…

This times a million.

When I was doing contract from 2004-2007, a shit Nokia and an O2 PAYG phone was a good investment. Many times did I just chuck the thing in the bin.

Recruiters will suck up to you even if you've ignored them for months. Commission vampires - that's all they are. You're just a line in a spreadsheet to them.

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

#228

Post by pointyhats »

Stevens wrote: post #51

is £50k enough to live in London on your own? (i.e. a one br flat)

Yes.

Myself, my wife, 3 children, a car in a 2 bedroom maisonette with two gardens in zone 5.

No problems. Apart from the incurred debt from having to live on a much lower salary for several years beforehand. That is the biggest problem for me.

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

#229

Post by pointyhats »

mseebach wrote: post #219
pointyhats wrote: post #210

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Financial services? A typical financial services company in London this fine day (no names mentioned): Still has classic ASP deployed, VB6 COM is the backend, "extreme waterfall" is the process and integration via CSV files (using ' as a quote char of course!) over FTP is the mutt's nuts. Add to that a security policy which involves a large brush, a fucking huge rug and a copy of the production SQL Server 2000 databa…

These companies exist outside of finance too, which is why I made a point out of how it's not a homogeneous job market. No, don't work on crap, but also don't write off half the SW engineering job market on the back of an anecdote.

I've done contract work in London and had several permanent positions over the last 15 years. That's a BIG chunk of it unfortunately. The rest is "big names", "trendy startups" and high finance. There is literally nothing else.

The best opportunity would be a small established business but they get eaten in London instantly.

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

#230

Post by UK-AL »

shubb wrote: post #71
VexXtreme wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

But competitively is the word. They can attract software engineers at those low wages, therefore they are competitive. This seems strange to me, as it takes a few years for someone to get good at software (the supply is constricted), and where I've been involved in recruitment, finding good people is difficult. It's also interesting to see that people get paid so much more in finance, or at American companies. That i…

In reality pay is not set by supply and demand. People have fixed ideas about what a job is worth, and refuse to pay above this. When everyone thinks like this, you have implicit collusion.

Banks, finance etc do tend think in supply and demand terms. Can't find good people? Raise the price. Hardly ever happens in other industries.

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