Already disproved it (and many many many others), First 4 years of my relationship spent living in different countries. After college we moved in together.
I think proximity is only a small part of it at least in a Facetime enabled world.
According to a website "efinancialcareers" or something, I think first could be getting £90k, and that before the bonus. And yes that is very IMO but in their career trajectory it seems to be small.
Literally on another thread someone(American) was trying to tell me that if you don't make at least $150k/year as a dev you should immediately quit and find another job. I was just like.....are you familiar with the pay levels in the UK lol? It's incredibly hard to cross the £100k/year barrier as a dev, with some very rare exceptions, nearly all of them in the financial industry and down in London(and yes, then you're paying £3k/month for a flat, so I'm not sure it's such a lavish salary as people think it is).
Yes. Some things that are taken for granted in the US that I haven't seen in the UK:
- Being in high demand, especially after your first job in the industry. Nope, every job search is as difficult as the first one and there are no companies competing to have me on.
- Being able to get a FAANG job as long as you're great at algorithm problems. Nope, those companies have limited presence in the UK, their salaries aren't nearly as good as in the US, it's tough to get an interview and there are no UK equivalents to them. So even if I'm the best at whiteboard problems, that makes no difference to my career.
- High salaries, both right out of university and later in one's career. Or tech salaries being much higher than other industries. In the UK tech is just another group of okay-ish white-collar jobs.
It's not taken for granted in "the US" either except for maybe a tiny slice of people in a tiny slice of industry. The number of people who can quit their job on Monday and have their choice of six-figure offers by Friday--as some seem to think any developer who is half-trying can do--is miniscule.
There is a lot of mythology on HN that everyone writing software is making $300K TC, has $2M in their retirement account, drives a brand new Porsche, and has a supermodel partner. This is an outlier group of high-level engineers at an outlier set of top companies, in an outlier set of high cost of living locales.
The time-frame is the only hard part there. A majority of software developers in the US make six figures[1] (this is BLS reported data, so it's far more reliable than the self-reported data from somewhere like Glassdoor).
So the median salary for people actually working is just over $100K for all levels of experience. Which means that basically half of employed software developers in the US make <$100K. Yes, it's above the norm but less than a lot of people seem to think is easy to get.
Working for a company that also has offices in UK and with team mates in London, the problem is that UK is expensive versus countries relatively close (Eastern Europe) and London is very expensive versus Warsaw, for example, so the demand is not high because companies moved a lot of business out of UK and Western Europe due to cost. In a global world where India and China are cheaper and business can move where they are treated best (taxes and cost of labor), UK is in a very bad spot. Warsaw, Budapest, Bucharest, Ljubljana are close enough and cheap enough to be preferred by companies instead of London.
When I was younger I briefly flirted with the notion (and eventually decided against) of working abroad as a dev and came to the conclusion the UK has the worst software engineering salaries in the developed world. For an American, finding a low COL area to settle in and working remotely seems like the winning play.
I was stationed in Germany while in the Army and always wondered how Europeans manage to make ends meet. Compared to the US, prices are higher (since adopting the Euro, at least), taxes are higher, but salaries are lower.
US troops are given a cost of living allowance (COLA) while stationed in Germany. It is (or was while I was there) tied to the USD/Euro exchange rate. Even so, we always tried to avoid shopping "on the local economy" and stick to base facilities for groceries and such as much as possible.
- Social security is far better. You of course need to save for bad times, but getting sick will cost you practically nothing (you're always insured and the insurance will pay you 2/3rds of your wage) and when loosing your job (which is already far harder than in the US) you'll be covered quite good for 18 months and fall back to basic social support after that
- Generally a bit lower standard of living. It's not bad, of course, but 100k$+ cars, for example, are usually only leased via work, and 2k$+ laptops are a rather large expense to many people.
I don't think the salaries here in Spain are anything to write home about compared to other developed countries, but they've gotten significantly better over the years.
I consistently see JavaScript SEng roles at startups and large companies going for 40-60k.
The big cities are quite expensive, and you're not going to buy a mansion with that kind of money but it's still pretty good, especially compared to the national median.
> in London(and yes, then you're paying £3k/month for a flat, so I'm not sure it's such a lavish salary as people think it is).
A £3k/month flat is certainly lavish. Or at least sized for two incomes.
(And even then, probably a nice a place in zone 1. Did that figure come from actually looking for places, or just exaggeration to make a point? I mean, of course you can spend that much and far more, but it's by no means the entry point is all I'm saying.)
No, I have friends living in London. Yes the prices drop down quickly further out, but if you're doing 14 hour days you don't want to commute for an hour each way.
I have a friend who used to rent a flat pretty much opposite Facebook's office, paid £2800/month for a 1-bed studio. Know someone else who works for a law firm in the City, he pays dead on £3000/month for a flat but he's 2 minutes away from the office and pays for that convenience. And yes, I know someone who lives in Ealing, but a 2-bed flat(not a house) is still £1900/month, and the commute was 45 minutes each way on the tube.
I live in London as well and what you are depicting is more or less correct but a bit distorted in the general view imho: for example, you can live near the West Hampstead area and be in the city (city thameslink or farringdon thameslink stations) in 20 mins, however a good flat with one bedroom would cost you 1400 (even less after covid) and you would be in a quiet street next to lively areas, well connected and with a lot of green spaces at reach. And this is only an example.
The 2.6-3k flats in the "center" are fundamentally "laziness-scams" for people who don't want or don't like to search for alternatives and are ok with living next to no real green spaces and with the constant background noises of cranes and construction works; the 3k/mo "luxury flat" costs little more than 2k, plus 90? per month of communiting in a nice area in zone 2, you don't need to go to ealing.
But furthermore, you can find 2-beds in the same location for around £2000/month (I live in one). Suggestions that an analyst at GS or an E3 at FB earning 70-100k isn't actually that well off because rents are high are silly, if they're struggling how is someone on a more normal grad salary of 35k supposed to be coping?
That's not what I'm suggesting at all :-) I just know some people who were on 50k in the North East and moved down to London to be on 80k - well, after the increase in costs it was pretty much a wash, the biggest upside is living in London, but also the biggest downside is living in London. But if you can swing 100k salary in London then yes, you're very well off regardless.
Just for info, I know 2 people in London that make more than £100k/year and they are both contractors; they reached around £60k/year at max as employees before changing to contractors. One works for the government doing mostly nothing (not kidding, he explained what he did in his first 6 months - probably worked 30-40 hours in total), one works from London for some companies abroad. If you want to get 100k as an employee it's very tough or closes to impossible, but it is doable if you switch.
> One works for the government doing mostly nothing
What department? I couldn't stomach working at a particular 'international trade' department, because they managed to hire the most awful team of over-engineers to build a CMS.
I couldn't understand what the fuck they did there, other than force me to do superfluous shite for months after I delivered what they wanted. That superfluous shite being the bifurcation of a PDF generator Django application to a 'server' and 'client' micro-service that communicated over an HTTP API; which they also demanded that I write a pip installable client for (a client for an API that had one endpoint!)
This was years ago, and I still have no qualms about deriding these jackanapes who work in the insular world of government Python development in London. I felt like a proper whore working for the government, extremely easy work, good pay; but a terrible inability to see how mediocre what they were doing was.
It's not that hard really in the UK. Salaries are shit, and my advice to anyone looking for work into the UK is to be a contractor. I was effectively on £100'000+ at 23 in the UK as a contractor.
British and American companies are structured quite differently. As a contractor in the UK, you effectively have the same rights as an American employee.
If you look on the job boards for contract work, hardly any of it (prior to corona) was under £500pd.
You don't need 3k per month that is certainly lavish and I would expect that to be supported by 2 incomes so a couple living together and splitting rent and bills 50/50. If you are living alone you should aim for about half of that in central London.
And even that average paints a strange picture (it's distorted by high earners).
Median household income is £29.9K (and some households have two or more earners).
Full time minimum wage is ~£15K a year.
I look over the pond and see what people with my level of experience are earning and think "damn, I'm under paid" then I look at at the median household income and think damn I'm way over paid.
To be fair I reached £130k at 26 without a degree by working remotely for a company in the Bay Area - it’s not impossible but you do have to prioritise money. Ended up giving it up for a lower salary that’s more interesting work anyway; ended up money wasn’t everything!
Your calculation is way off. The living wage in London (not minimum for the UK) is £10.85 per hour. That's £45136 at 80 hours a week (the cap they're asking for in the article) and £53599 at 95 hours a week (which they are supposedly averaging now). £90k is a long way to go from there.
Glassdoor puts Goldman's junior analyst basic salary at just over £50k though, which actually is below minimum wage at the hours quoted in this article...
"analyst" covers all entry-level roles. The analysts with total compensation close to the base salary of 50k (e.g. developers) won't work crazy hours. The bankers who do have crazy hours also get bonuses with order of magnitude equal to the base salary.
£50k base for a random IB in London doesn’t sound shockingly low to me. There’s two things there:
1. Pay in general is lower in the UK than the US. The bank will pay what they can get away with and there isn’t enough competition between banks/consultancies/tech/law to drive pay up. I wouldn’t be surprised if more competitive candidates got higher offers.
2. A lot of compensation can be made up in bonuses, though I don’t know what kind of bonus a junior analyst might get.
That's a good point. I have no idea what their actual salaries are. I was responding to the suggestion that £90k a year is just above minimum wage when you adjust for the hours worked (which is false).
So at a bare minimum (before perks / generous pension / very generous bonus) they are getting three times the minimum wage.
That's still not great, but they are suffering far less than millions of cleaners and other essential workers, not to mention the millions of people on zero hour contracts who are unable to get minimum wage and the thousands of people in forced labour conditions aka slavery (ie migrant Labour).
Which is mostly to say that the condition of most people is a lot lot worse than most of us stop to think about most of the time.
The rules and regulations are changing. More big companies need people to make more ADA compliant and GDPR compliant CRUD apps now, all these web apps will either be maintained or die, and another take it's place.
So until some major patterns are agreed upon by software vendors/browsers/frameworks or whatever, I don't think it will change much.
How "lucrative" it will be at the end only seems to play a small factor, it's all just too abstract for some people to understand how they can go from Hello World to 100k a year.
Out of 2 college classes of pure cs and cs/business students 200 or so students (graduated 2017), I only think 25% (maybe less) went on to actually write build software/web/apps.
Also once machines smart enough to writing their code i'm sure we will have much bigger societal issues then just us programmers. I see that point written/said so much it's the biggest platitude of the decade.
Isn't that true of anything you don't understand? That is to say it's not always easy to connect a -> b -> c with only a cursory understanding of something. But trivially we can see that technical expertise is valuable - and surprisingly (still) increasingly so at that. Furthermore, knowing how to solve problems will always be valuable. As far as your statistic goes, that's quite a hand-wavy and unsupported assertion. To what population does this generalize? What is the source? And if only 25% are going on to careers as developers, does that not imply that the labor market isn't necessarily growing fast enough to outstrip available need and thus lower salaries?
Very true, all the managers and their managers.. and theirs, who's technical skills have since atrophied, live in these hierarchies and its a great place for good and bad programmers (mostly bad programmers), to hide, get paid, be lazy, nice pension and not talk to anyone much, project gets binned, move onto another one. The large non-tech companies usually have this issue.
True that, but even managers who were good programmers sometimes don't have a great ability to figure out which features, either user-facing or architectural, are a good idea and which are not really going to impact the bottom line. I saw it at tech companies as well. In at least some cases it was based on a need to impress VC's more than to get things done.
If countries do stuff like this tho, it would actually undermine.
really hope to see other countires follow suit.