Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

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

news.ycombinator.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

181–190 of 420 posts

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

#181

Post by benjaminwootton »

DrJokepu wrote: post #154
benjaminwootton wrote: post #140

Earlier quoted context omitted.

London cost of living isn't so bad. Public transport is cheap and abundant, competition keeps prices down for restaurants and shops, and there are a lot of free events to keep you busy. The main expense is in the accomodation, which most people in their 20s combat by sharing houses in undesirable areas. (This is a problem UK wide though as they have managed to keep our housing bubble inflated unlike in the US.) Londo…

Public transport in London is anything but cheap. It is simply the most expensive urban public transport system I know of in terms of cost of monthly passes (or travelcards). Currently a monthly travelcard in zones 1-2 is £116.80 ($177.30). In comparison, a similar monthly pass in New York costs $112, $74 in San Francisco, $167 in Tokyo, $84.50 in Paris, $99.95 in Berlin, $100 in Chicago, $67.96 in Melbourne and so o…

£116 a month for unlimited travel around the city really pales into insignificance against even the average IT salary.

In many towns and cities outside of London you would need a car to get to work which would cost much more, even without the London uplift in salary.

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

#182

Post by jiggy2011 »

justincormack wrote: post #107
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…

Outside of finance most profitable businesses do not have a culture of paying out those profits to the workforce, they pay management a lot and everyone else as little as they can. And don't forget that most businesses are not very profitable anyway. Europe has very few large profitable internet businesses, and not many small ones either. Bootstrapped businesses like to invest in growth not salaries. Many non startup…

UK Business also seems to be somewhat more conservative about technology choices from what I can tell.

So being the type of developer who can get up to speed on new technology is not necessarily so useful as it might be in the US.

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

#183

Post by sandover »

benjaminwootton wrote: post #140
api wrote: post #134

This surprises me given how god-awful expensive London is. I remember it being one of those cities I've visited where I was like "how do people live here? what do all these people do?" Or maybe, like New York, you actually can live there fairly reasonably if you really know the place and know how to do it. As a visitor maybe I was paying tourist prices.

London cost of living isn't so bad. Public transport is cheap and abundant, competition keeps prices down for restaurants and shops, and there are a lot of free events to keep you busy. The main expense is in the accomodation, which most people in their 20s combat by sharing houses in undesirable areas. (This is a problem UK wide though as they have managed to keep our housing bubble inflated unlike in the US.) Londo…

A US HR consulting firm called Mercer ranks cities by their cost of living for expats -- what a professional-class resident would expect to pay. They rated London in 2012 at #25 in the world, and more expensive than any US city.

http://www.mercer.com/costoflivingpr#City_rankings

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

#184

Post by benjaminwootton »

djhworld wrote: post #170
benjaminwootton wrote: post #140

Earlier quoted context omitted.

London cost of living isn't so bad. Public transport is cheap and abundant, competition keeps prices down for restaurants and shops, and there are a lot of free events to keep you busy. The main expense is in the accomodation, which most people in their 20s combat by sharing houses in undesirable areas. (This is a problem UK wide though as they have managed to keep our housing bubble inflated unlike in the US.) Londo…

> London cost of living isn't so bad. Really? London has the highest rent and house prices in the UK. The average rental for a 1 bedroom flat is about £1200 a month, if you attribute that to the average UK salary of about £26k that's about 70% of your take home (monthly) pay. I agree that the other costs are mainly in line with the rest of the country, although the tube is very expensive (buses are much cheaper)

As mentioned, people get around this by house sharing in dodgy areas with a commute on top. This isn't great from quality of life perspective but that's another conversation.

London housrhold incomes (rather than salaries) are much higher than UK average so calculating as a percentage of that £26k is misleading.

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

#185

Post by white_devil »

xefer wrote: post #55
beaumartinez wrote: post #6

"At least 200k" full-time , wow. For anyone who's on that type of salary, what role and industry is it? CTO-level?

Finance is like its own universe. The salaries for software are like nothing I've seen anywhere else. I get the sense there's so much money sloshing around it doesn't seem that out of wack to anybody. The investment guys probably can't even figure out how anyone could even live on 250K a year.

> Finance is like its own universe. The salaries for software are like nothing I've seen anywhere else.

That's because Finance is not grounded in Reality. Destroying the world's economies and the wealth of us little folks everywhere is massively lucrative, who knew?!

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

#186

Post by smartician »

iaskwhy wrote: post #79
m0skit0 wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Or just cross the border to Portugal and have them for even less. The difference between even similar countries is huge.

At one point we were outsourcing to Portugal. I asked one of the guys when he was visiting here in the Bay Area what a recent grad would be making typically. He said about 1200 Euro per month at one of the Big Four consulting companies.

Now we're outsourcing to Romania. I haven't had the heart yet to ask one of them.

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

#187

Post by hnriot »

lkozma wrote: post #169
draugadrotten wrote: post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I am from Europe but have friends in Ukraine among other places. In Ukraine, programmers are paid very well compared to the national average. So well paid that the 20-something programmers gets rockstar status with girls, and rockstar habits with vodka and drugs. This isn't very good for Ukraine startups.

> I am from Europe but have friends in Ukraine.. Ukraine is in Europe.

Maybe geographically, but it's not in the EU and nobody in/from Europe or the Ukraine would ever say it's in Europe. Just like Russia is also geographically (at least in part) in Europe, but it's by no means European.

Google (or books) are your friend :)

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

#188

Post by jamesdeer »

yashodhan wrote: post #171
ValentineC wrote: post #131

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do you mind sharing whereabouts in London you're staying? (Zone x, or slightly outside London...?) I was there for some years, and my rent was always around 8k a year. I find trying to live in an expensive city while on a low salary admirable.

Currently way out in the boondocks (zone 8). I'm looking to move into Zone 2/3 East London (Shoreditch/Bethnal Green area) to be closer to work. There are quite a few flat shares available for £500-600 pcm, which is my budget. That leaves me with £400/month to live off, which is good enough I suppose.

I'm a start-up founder, and live in Bethnal Green. It's a lovely place to live (in London).

Our office is just off of Brick Lane, and it's a short 15 minutes to work every morning :)

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

#189

Post by arkades »

blindhippo wrote: post #109
blibble wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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...

This is entirely anecdotal so take it for what its worth. In Canada I've noticed that graduates of Computer Science programs can barely operate a computer by the end of things. They can write and explain some pretty cool advanced algorithms and explain it in Big O notation - yet the business value of this knowledge is almost nil. On the other hand, skills schools and engineering programs churn out better programmers…

What is a "skill school" for software development? I'm not from Canada, and unfamiliar with this.

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

#190

Post by nawitus »

polshaw wrote: post #41
lrem wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 realit…

>Sorry but your data is totally useless for this purpose

Imperfect doesn't mean totally useless.

Post reply on HN