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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?

#311

Post by dxm »

Started on £17.5k in Wales and was moved to the London office for £25k, after a year I got a new job for £35k, and a year later took a new job for the same money but for a much better company. At the same company, I've reduced my salary to £32k since the pension law came in, but I take home the same amount as I did at £35k (some loophole).

I hate London, and the company I work for is now allowing me to work remotely so I'm keeping my salary and moving back to Wales, where it is much cheaper to live and I will not have to share a house with people.

I really don't care about money (really) and it's much more about being happy, which I will be once I move out of this city.

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

#312

Post by acchow »

tudorconstantin wrote: post #298
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.

In Romania an entry level dev gets 30% more than the national average and that raises quickly. In 7-8 years he's able to earn 400%+ more than national average. And still be paid less than an entry level in UK. National average net income is about 400 euros

Is this anecdotal or do you have data? If real, it's nice seeing the beginnings of programming jobs crossing arbitrary political lines.

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

#313

Post by Joeri »

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.

The total cost to her employer is probably triple what her pre-tax wage is. It's nearly triple here in belgium as well (very similar taxation system). The net wage people make is maybe a quarter of what they cost to an employer. All those government services have to get funded somehow. This is very different to the US where the gap between net wage and total employee cost is much smaller but you have to spend more of your net wage on things you would get subsidized in western europe.

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

#314

Post by knackers »

twelvechairs wrote: post #278
daven11 wrote: post #267

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We call them brownstones in australia - because they are all made of sandstone

[edit] I think you mean 'sandstone universities' [1]. 'Brownstone' is generally a US word (plus most Australian sandstone is not brown). [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sandstone_Universities

Yeh it's sandstone. Group of 8 is also sometimes used because ANU and Monash wanted to be included :P

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

#315

Post by adrianhoward »

shadchnev wrote: post #259

Having read all comments, I'm somewhat lost. I was hired in London in 2008 on £37K, it was my first programming job after uni, I had clean resume. Today a competent beginner with a few web projects under his belt easily gets around £45K. I'm hiring developers for my startup – http://www.makersacademy.com – and I wish I had more applicants. I'm happy to pay £350-450/day for a decent Ruby dev and or around £60K permane…

I agree. My experience of folk I know in London is that even vague competence is going to get you £35-40k - and being actually good is going to get you a fair bit more than that.

Hell - I live in bloody Dorset and I'd be expecting to pay at least £35k for a decent dev.

I'm confused about what kind of work the 0-30k folk are doing and for whom. If I were in that group I'd be seriously thinking about:

* Switching jobs - I'd be job hunting right now

* I'd be looking at freelancing rates and experimenting with that

* I'd be taking a serious look at my skill set, and the skill set of the job adverts and doing a compare and contrast

* Thinking about whether I'm selling and marketing myself appropriately

Seriously - it's a sellers market in London for dev skills right now. I regularly get folk chasing me for £50-60k jobs - and I'm explicitly not looking, don't live in (or want to live in) London, and have very un-hip skills in the old CVs they have of mine (perl anybody ;-)

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

#316

Post by mori32 »

realtalker wrote: post #270
walshemj wrote: post #201

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think Oxbridge + Edinburgh is closer to Ivy League

no, just oxbridge. in terms of prestige and difficulty of admission Edinburgh is well below other non-oxbridge universities...

Edinburgh is definitely not quite Oxbridge level on those factors. But it certainly is higher than the 'Red brick universities'. There are 24 universities in the Russell Group, and none of the red brick universities fall in the top 5 as it is an outdated term. It could be argued that Edinburgh falls in the top 5, which are comparable to the Ivy League.

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

#317

Post by Joeri »

pointyhats wrote: post #210
mseebach wrote: post #84

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…

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…

I have similar experiences. 900 mails through many layers of management to find out after flying in for an on-site visit they were running our app on unpatched pre-sp1 ie6 which doesn't even support script tag injection properly.

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

#318

Post by adrianhoward »

rb12345 wrote: post #100
egwor wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Direct comparisons are difficult though. Price of living differs dramatically. Taxes are different. The risks of switching jobs are different. (e.g. nobody in the UK has to worry about health insurance costs).

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

#319

Post by adrianhoward »

switch007 wrote: post #310
mrstew wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Yes. Some people actually really dislike London (i.e. won't sacrifice to live/work there) and £50k is probably the minimum to consider commuting.

Heh. That's me. I remember having a very annoying conversation with a recruiter many years back when they were trying to persuade me I should take less money since London was such a cool place, and I was saying that I wanted more money to have to put up with such an awful location ;)

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

#320

Post by adrianhoward »

mseebach wrote: post #84

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…

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.

With contracting you will end up with a lot more the 8 weeks of down time in the year unless you are in long-term engagements...

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