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I hate to break it to you, but if you are making £400/£450 per day as a Ruby contractor in London with less than 1 year of development experience, you are eithe

I hate to break it to you, but if you are making £400/£450 per day as a Ruby contractor in London with less than 1 year of development experience, you are either insanely good or insanely lucky (probably both). Although I'm working on contract in Japan at the moment, I spent the last 2 years working in London and interviewing people for positions almost every day. Entry level for a good Ruby dev is £30-40K for a full time position. Some companies pay higher (some significantly higher), but they will only hire one in 1000 applicants, probably. There are still people in London making £22K per year as a full time Ruby dev. And, no, you can not live on £22K per year in London :-P

lhnz 11y ago
It's not an entry-level salary certainly, however you probably only need 4-5 years of experience to achieve it. Skill-level, signalling ability and confidence are all you need. Entry-level for a good junior engineer is what you say it is, however senior/lead probably reaches around £100k for particularly impressive candidates, and finishes at around £60-80K for other engineers. Contracting on the other hand seems to top out at about £650 pd. There £300-400 is entry-level, £400-450 is mid-level or low-end senior, and £500+ is high-end senior, architect or lead. Generally you get more if you work for financial institutions and have a skill that is extremely difficult to recruit for. Basically it's generally not about how good you are - that is the wrong frame. It's about how cleverly you have fit a pain point within the market. My numbers might be a little wrong but it should give a general feel. It's certainly unfortunate that there are engineers that are only making £22K but ultimately in many cases it's low confidence in testing the market. They can get more.
UK-AL 11y ago
Your comparing permanent and self employed temporary jobs. Contracting jobs pay a lot more, even for juniors. They're paying for the ability to easily get rid of you, paying no employee crap(NI, etc) etc So it is justified. 400 GBP is low end dev. Companies such as Accenture rent out juniors for a lot more than that.

lhnz 11y ago

It's not an entry-level salary certainly, however you probably only need 4-5 years of experience to achieve it. Skill-level, signalling ability and confidence are all you need. Entry-level for a good junior engineer is what you say it is, however senior/lead probably reaches around £100k for particularly impressive candidates, and finishes at around £60-80K for other engineers. Contracting on the other hand seems to top out at about £650 pd. There £300-400 is entry-level, £400-450 is mid-level or low-end senior, and £500+ is high-end senior, architect or lead. Generally you get more if you work for financial institutions and have a skill that is extremely difficult to recruit for. Basically it's generally not about how good you are - that is the wrong frame. It's about how cleverly you have fit a pain point within the market. My numbers might be a little wrong but it should give a general feel. It's certainly unfortunate that there are engineers that are only making £22K but ultimately in many cases it's low confidence in testing the market. They can get more.

UK-AL 11y ago

Your comparing permanent and self employed temporary jobs. Contracting jobs pay a lot more, even for juniors. They're paying for the ability to easily get rid of you, paying no employee crap(NI, etc) etc So it is justified. 400 GBP is low end dev. Companies such as Accenture rent out juniors for a lot more than that.