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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

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.

albertgoeswoof 6y ago
For someone in their early 20s in the UK, that is a massive salary
- kowlo 6y ago
  For someone of any age, that is a massive salary. Average salary in UK is £36k
  - gambiting 6y ago
    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).
    - OJFord 6y ago
      > 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.)
      - gambiting 6y ago
        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.
        winterismute 6y ago
        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.
        sweeneyrod 6y ago
        You absolutely can find a 1-bed in super-central London for well under £2000/month, e.g. it took 2 minutes searching to find this one https://ww2.zoopla.co.uk/to-rent/details/57988484/?search_identifier=4e794b541d048312b8447ff2c1da50d1 https://ww2.zoopla.co.uk/to-rent/details/57988484/?search_id... 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?
        deleted 6y ago
    - beforeolives 6y ago
      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.
      - ghaff 6y ago
        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.
        ryandrake 6y ago
        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.
        deleted 6y ago
        [deleted]
        TheCoelacanth 6y ago
        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). [1] https://www.bls.gov/ooh/computer-and-information-technology/software-developers.htm https://www.bls.gov/ooh/computer-and-information-technology/...
    - jcadam 6y ago
      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.
      - javcasas 6y ago
        > came to the conclusion the UK has the worst software engineering salaries in the developed world You should check Spain. I'm paying more to the hires in latin america than I got offered while trying to work in Spain
        jcadam 6y ago
        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.
        Sebb767 6y ago
        Two factors, I think: - 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.
        arcturus17 6y ago
        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.
    - richardknop 6y ago
      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.
    - AdrianB1 6y ago
      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.
      - sonthonax 6y ago
        > 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.
    - sonthonax 6y ago
      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.
  - noir_lord 6y ago
    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.
    - kowlo 6y ago
      I agree. If someone tells me they're on £36k, I think they're on a decent salary in the UK.
- 0xy 6y ago
  No it's not, it's barely above minimum wage when you consider hours worked. Not to mention the job dangers (stress/burnout/health impacts).
  - beojan 6y ago
    It would be more than £10 per hour even if you worked 168 hours a week.
  - beforeolives 6y ago
    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.
    - notahacker 6y ago
      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...
      - beforeolives 6y ago
        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).
      - sweeneyrod 6y ago
        "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.
      - dan-robertson 6y ago
        £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.
- alexc05 6y ago
  I was a teacher in England in my 30's and my starting salary was something like £18k. £90k was something that you'd take 10 or 20 years to get to.
  - arcturus17 6y ago
    You can make £90k as a teacher in England?
    - alexc05 6y ago
      IIRC it was what you'd get to as an assistant headteacher with headteacher at just over 100k at the top of the scale. Though this was nearly 15 years ago so I could be misremembering
- exdsq 6y ago
  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!
fakedang 6y ago
I know of elite boutiques that pay at around $70k. Efinancialcareers has a habit of mixing up numbers and overestimating.

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.

albertgoeswoof 6y ago

For someone in their early 20s in the UK, that is a massive salary

kowlo 6y ago
For someone of any age, that is a massive salary. Average salary in UK is £36k
- gambiting 6y ago
  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).
  - OJFord 6y ago
    > 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.)
    - gambiting 6y ago
      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.
      - winterismute 6y ago
        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.
      - sweeneyrod 6y ago
        You absolutely can find a 1-bed in super-central London for well under £2000/month, e.g. it took 2 minutes searching to find this one https://ww2.zoopla.co.uk/to-rent/details/57988484/?search_identifier=4e794b541d048312b8447ff2c1da50d1 https://ww2.zoopla.co.uk/to-rent/details/57988484/?search_id... 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?
        deleted 6y ago
  - beforeolives 6y ago
    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.
    - ghaff 6y ago
      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.
      - ryandrake 6y ago
        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.
        deleted 6y ago
        [deleted]
      - TheCoelacanth 6y ago
        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). [1] https://www.bls.gov/ooh/computer-and-information-technology/software-developers.htm https://www.bls.gov/ooh/computer-and-information-technology/...
  - jcadam 6y ago
    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.
    - javcasas 6y ago
      > came to the conclusion the UK has the worst software engineering salaries in the developed world You should check Spain. I'm paying more to the hires in latin america than I got offered while trying to work in Spain
      - jcadam 6y ago
        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.
        Sebb767 6y ago
        Two factors, I think: - 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.
      - arcturus17 6y ago
        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.
  - richardknop 6y ago
    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.
  - AdrianB1 6y ago
    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.
    - sonthonax 6y ago
      > 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.
  - sonthonax 6y ago
    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.
- noir_lord 6y ago
  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.
  - kowlo 6y ago
    I agree. If someone tells me they're on £36k, I think they're on a decent salary in the UK.
0xy 6y ago
No it's not, it's barely above minimum wage when you consider hours worked. Not to mention the job dangers (stress/burnout/health impacts).
- beojan 6y ago
  It would be more than £10 per hour even if you worked 168 hours a week.
- beforeolives 6y ago
  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.
  - notahacker 6y ago
    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...
    - beforeolives 6y ago
      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).
    - sweeneyrod 6y ago
      "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.
    - dan-robertson 6y ago
      £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.
alexc05 6y ago
I was a teacher in England in my 30's and my starting salary was something like £18k. £90k was something that you'd take 10 or 20 years to get to.
- arcturus17 6y ago
  You can make £90k as a teacher in England?
  - alexc05 6y ago
    IIRC it was what you'd get to as an assistant headteacher with headteacher at just over 100k at the top of the scale. Though this was nearly 15 years ago so I could be misremembering
exdsq 6y ago
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!

fakedang 6y ago

I know of elite boutiques that pay at around $70k. Efinancialcareers has a habit of mixing up numbers and overestimating.