6 ms·

anything with the headline of 'shortage' can be distilled into this translation: employers want people with high tech 'digital skills' for less pay. The UK is

anything with the headline of 'shortage' can be distilled into this translation: employers want people with high tech 'digital skills' for less pay. The UK is infamously known for not appreciating programming skills.

emteycz 6y ago
Is it? They still have best earnings (post-tax) in Europe... You have to count in contractors though. Where are better offers than in the UK? I didn't find any better even in Switzerland.
- colesantiago 6y ago
  > Where are better offers than in the UK? I didn't find any better even in Switzerland. India. Uber's doing very well there, lay the best engineers off and go there instead.
  - deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
  - iagovar 6y ago
    No offense, but you have to be quite adventurous for living in India.
- noir_lord 6y ago
  It's very heavily dependent on where you are in the UK though (as with most countries) the delta between best/worse places is quite large.
- lmm 6y ago
  > You have to count in contractors though. Who the UK government made a very deliberate effort to squeeze with the IR35 changes. Now they're shocked-pikachu-face-ing that those contractors are leaving.
- yrgulation 6y ago
  My thoughts exactly. No other european country pays as much as the uk for experienced tech workers. Although ir35 is taking a bite, from what i hear daily rates are going up to counterbalance the issue. However, the risk of outsourcing is real thanks to some silly measures.
- goatinaboat 6y ago
  Is it? They still have best earnings (post-tax) in Europe. This is skewed by the financial sector which out of necessity pays comparable wages to New York. The average programmer in the UK is just another office worker in terms of pay and status.
  - burntoutfire 6y ago
    What is the necessity? In most of finance tech jobs you don't need domain knowledge. The UK financial companies are competing for devs with non-finance UK companies, not with Wall Street. I'm under the impression that they pay more than the rest of the UK because they can easily afford it and also to make sure the other silly industries don't get in their way of hiring the best people.
  - colesantiago 6y ago
    This. If you're not FAANG, FTSE 100 or an engineer in the finance sector, your pay is similar to an entry level office IT worker.
    - bloqs 6y ago
      Pretty much this. Id say half the time in the FTSE100 its the same also
    - cameronh90 6y ago
      There are plenty of permanent individual contributor jobs in the £70-120k range in London. Not just FAANG/FTSE/finance either, plenty of funded start-ups and non-finance tech companies if you can't stomach finance. Outside of London, your statement is much closer to the truth. Lots of employers in Manchester for example are there principally to avoid paying London salaries. Honestly though, the day to day reality of programming in fintech is about the same as working in any other industry.
      - Nextgrid 6y ago
        120k permanent salary is meaningless because you’d fall into the higher tax brackets. Permanent employment tax is insane here.
- fx32s 6y ago
  Unsure where you get your quotes but Switzerland beats UK in post tax earnings by quite a margin according to data I found. Note that Switzerland has only a 20-25% effective tax. If you want decent money (not even NYC or Silicon Valley money which is not possible) you need to move to London at which point even 80-100k pounds (usually terminal salary for software engineers) does not give you the same savings rate or quality of life you'd get elsewhere. The same problem can be highlighted for many expensive places in europe which is why there is such a brain drain for top talent.
  - gpderetta 6y ago
    You can get significantly more than 100k in London. And even at that price, life would be quite comfortable (but of course COL is still significantly higher than many other places).
    - cutler 6y ago
      A handful of 10x devs earning 100k doesn't address the general skills shortage. In fact I'd say the overemphasis on top-tier talent in the tech sector exacerbates the problem.
    - Nextgrid 6y ago
      Life can be comfortable but it’s not sustainable. You can indeed be comfortable if you spend all that money on rent + lifestyle, but it’s just not enough to actually buy a property in a reasonable amount of time.
goatinaboat 6y ago
The UK is infamously known for not appreciating programming skills. Any technical skills at all really. In Italy or Germany an engineer is a respected and protected profession. In the UK an "engineer" is the person who swaps a toner cartridge or replaces a washer in a tap, the word gets used for anyone regardless of their qualifications or role, devaluing it in the public consciousness.
- allendoerfer 6y ago
  > In Italy or Germany an engineer is a respected and protected profession. So much so, that in fact a software developer is definitely not seen as an engineer in Germany, which is a protected word you can only call yourself, when you actually have an engineering degree (similar to lawyer or doctor). It also does not mean, that you can earn more over here. I am hoping that this will change due to the car manufacturers investing massively in vehicle software.
  - qsort 6y ago
    It's exactly the same in Italy. I self-describe as a "software engineer" in English-speaking contexts because the word "engineer" in English doesn't have the same connotation, but I'm very careful never to use the Italian or German equivalents. It's considered a very serious lie that could (unlikely, but potentially) even get you in legal trouble.
    - gpderetta 6y ago
      Yes. In Italy you can actually get an Engineering degree in CS, but you still need to take an habilitation exam to call yourself an Engineer (and in fact even pure CS graduates can take the exam). Most don't bother though as it is not really needing for anything other than calling yourself an actual Ingegnere.
    - lifeisstillgood 6y ago
      This rather begs the question - can we ever migrate coding to be come a profession like 'real' engineering? I think its the strongest argument for 'software literacy' I can come up with - no we cannot.
alibarber 6y ago
But this quote from the article > "We need digital literacy and common sense, not someone who can program a Raspberry Pi to control a robot," Mr Howell told the BBC. I'm getting the impression that this is not about programming or SEs being paid SV salarys - I think it's the age old 'how do computers think? - how can I leverage them in my job?' kind of skills.
- colesantiago 6y ago
  It's actually both someone who can program AND has digital literacy, but for less pay.
- tomatocracy 6y ago
  Yes I think that's right. But I think that quote misses the point that there's a connection - if someone has been taught roughly how to program a Raspberry Pi to control a robot (even if they did it at school 10+ years ago), that might give them enough confidence to go and work out how to script whatever monotonous Excel task they do in VBA etc with a little help from Google.
- unishark 6y ago
  I thought that quote was silly. If there's a useful point in there I'm missing it. Someone who can program a raspberry pi to control a robot may not be able to instantly debug your legacy spaghetti code with zero supervision on day one of the job. But I think robot programmers meet a pretty solid standard already if we only had enough such graduates.
  - alibarber 6y ago
    I dunno - I read it as more of: "The History of Art Grad from Prestigious University who is on Grad Scheme at $BIG_BANK fails to grasp that instead of emailing 100 people individually and copy pasting responses into a spread sheet, he/she could just use Google Forms or something", so, more fundamental skills. Our hypothetical humanities graduate here didn't explicitly study this as a degree, and shouldn't have to, any more than they didn't need a degree in maths to count.
rovek 6y ago
> The UK is infamously known for not appreciating programming skills. Not sure what the basis is for this. I'm a SWE with 10 years experience and I've been shopping around for countries to escape to for more than a year, I didn't really want to consider the US but currently my options based on salary expectations are only the major US cities. Nowhere in the world that I've seen offers comparable rates to London/NYC/Bay area. You could include the rest of the UK in the statement I quoted, but then you'd have to also include the rest of every other country. I doubt you'll find a competitive tech salary for a non-remote job in Arkansas or Düsseldorf. edit: Someone else mentioned finance salaries in this thread, I haven't worked for a company anyone here would likely know and this was all true before I moved to a finance-adjacent business
- varispeed 6y ago
  If you account for the cost of living, it suddenly doesn't look that great. Then in the UK chances are that you'll work for an agency - they'll charge the client £1500 per day for your service and you'll get fraction of that and there is a system around that there is always some intermediary that pockets money for nothing.
- allendoerfer 6y ago
  Start freelancing right now and increase your pay by one third.
phenkdo 6y ago
"less pay" isn't something you get to define all on your own, it is a 2-way street. Programmers are already among the highest paid professions anywhere, so it's laughable that they complain about "less pay". Who's next? hedge fund managers and investment bankers complaining about low bonuses?
- bloqs 6y ago
  This is not entirely true in the UK. The relative pay ratio for skill difficulty to pay is very low. Programmers get paid like plumbers.
  - cameronh90 6y ago
    https://uk.jobted.com/salary https://uk.jobted.com/salary According to here, software engineers are paid roughly the same as other types of engineer, and a lot more than plumbers. There are some very low paid development related job titles. For example, "Web Developer" salaries are always awfully low - but that's a job title you only ever really see at tech-phobic companies or design agencies. Speaking as someone who does a fair amount of hiring in London, a decent software engineer commands a high salary - around the six figure mark. I don't mean FAANG "can invert a binary tree on a whiteboard" level, just "knows what a mutex is". There really aren't many other careers in this country that you can be paid six figures in a non-management job without a degree.
    - andyjohnson0 6y ago
      For those of us who don't live or work in London, the salary situation is very different. I've been a developer for 30+ years and I have never met anyone who earns that kind of money for developing software.
      - cameronh90 6y ago
        You can get £60-90k in places like Manchester and Edinburgh, which does afford a pretty nice lifestyle given that the average salary in those places is less than half that. The best way to get a high salary in the UK seems to be to either work in London, work remotely for a London based office, or work in London then transfer to another part of the UK. I'm not a London native, but there's a phrase people in my home town use, "doing your London time" - meaning working in London for a few years then moving back home. Reason being that once you've worked in London, your salary is permanently much higher once you move back than it would otherwise have been.

emteycz 6y ago

Is it? They still have best earnings (post-tax) in Europe... You have to count in contractors though. Where are better offers than in the UK? I didn't find any better even in Switzerland.

colesantiago 6y ago
> Where are better offers than in the UK? I didn't find any better even in Switzerland. India. Uber's doing very well there, lay the best engineers off and go there instead.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
- iagovar 6y ago
  No offense, but you have to be quite adventurous for living in India.
noir_lord 6y ago
It's very heavily dependent on where you are in the UK though (as with most countries) the delta between best/worse places is quite large.
lmm 6y ago
> You have to count in contractors though. Who the UK government made a very deliberate effort to squeeze with the IR35 changes. Now they're shocked-pikachu-face-ing that those contractors are leaving.
yrgulation 6y ago
My thoughts exactly. No other european country pays as much as the uk for experienced tech workers. Although ir35 is taking a bite, from what i hear daily rates are going up to counterbalance the issue. However, the risk of outsourcing is real thanks to some silly measures.
goatinaboat 6y ago
Is it? They still have best earnings (post-tax) in Europe. This is skewed by the financial sector which out of necessity pays comparable wages to New York. The average programmer in the UK is just another office worker in terms of pay and status.
- burntoutfire 6y ago
  What is the necessity? In most of finance tech jobs you don't need domain knowledge. The UK financial companies are competing for devs with non-finance UK companies, not with Wall Street. I'm under the impression that they pay more than the rest of the UK because they can easily afford it and also to make sure the other silly industries don't get in their way of hiring the best people.
- colesantiago 6y ago
  This. If you're not FAANG, FTSE 100 or an engineer in the finance sector, your pay is similar to an entry level office IT worker.
  - bloqs 6y ago
    Pretty much this. Id say half the time in the FTSE100 its the same also
  - cameronh90 6y ago
    There are plenty of permanent individual contributor jobs in the £70-120k range in London. Not just FAANG/FTSE/finance either, plenty of funded start-ups and non-finance tech companies if you can't stomach finance. Outside of London, your statement is much closer to the truth. Lots of employers in Manchester for example are there principally to avoid paying London salaries. Honestly though, the day to day reality of programming in fintech is about the same as working in any other industry.
    - Nextgrid 6y ago
      120k permanent salary is meaningless because you’d fall into the higher tax brackets. Permanent employment tax is insane here.
fx32s 6y ago
Unsure where you get your quotes but Switzerland beats UK in post tax earnings by quite a margin according to data I found. Note that Switzerland has only a 20-25% effective tax. If you want decent money (not even NYC or Silicon Valley money which is not possible) you need to move to London at which point even 80-100k pounds (usually terminal salary for software engineers) does not give you the same savings rate or quality of life you'd get elsewhere. The same problem can be highlighted for many expensive places in europe which is why there is such a brain drain for top talent.
- gpderetta 6y ago
  You can get significantly more than 100k in London. And even at that price, life would be quite comfortable (but of course COL is still significantly higher than many other places).
  - cutler 6y ago
    A handful of 10x devs earning 100k doesn't address the general skills shortage. In fact I'd say the overemphasis on top-tier talent in the tech sector exacerbates the problem.
  - Nextgrid 6y ago
    Life can be comfortable but it’s not sustainable. You can indeed be comfortable if you spend all that money on rent + lifestyle, but it’s just not enough to actually buy a property in a reasonable amount of time.

goatinaboat 6y ago

The UK is infamously known for not appreciating programming skills. Any technical skills at all really. In Italy or Germany an engineer is a respected and protected profession. In the UK an "engineer" is the person who swaps a toner cartridge or replaces a washer in a tap, the word gets used for anyone regardless of their qualifications or role, devaluing it in the public consciousness.

allendoerfer 6y ago
> In Italy or Germany an engineer is a respected and protected profession. So much so, that in fact a software developer is definitely not seen as an engineer in Germany, which is a protected word you can only call yourself, when you actually have an engineering degree (similar to lawyer or doctor). It also does not mean, that you can earn more over here. I am hoping that this will change due to the car manufacturers investing massively in vehicle software.
- qsort 6y ago
  It's exactly the same in Italy. I self-describe as a "software engineer" in English-speaking contexts because the word "engineer" in English doesn't have the same connotation, but I'm very careful never to use the Italian or German equivalents. It's considered a very serious lie that could (unlikely, but potentially) even get you in legal trouble.
  - gpderetta 6y ago
    Yes. In Italy you can actually get an Engineering degree in CS, but you still need to take an habilitation exam to call yourself an Engineer (and in fact even pure CS graduates can take the exam). Most don't bother though as it is not really needing for anything other than calling yourself an actual Ingegnere.
  - lifeisstillgood 6y ago
    This rather begs the question - can we ever migrate coding to be come a profession like 'real' engineering? I think its the strongest argument for 'software literacy' I can come up with - no we cannot.

alibarber 6y ago

But this quote from the article > "We need digital literacy and common sense, not someone who can program a Raspberry Pi to control a robot," Mr Howell told the BBC. I'm getting the impression that this is not about programming or SEs being paid SV salarys - I think it's the age old 'how do computers think? - how can I leverage them in my job?' kind of skills.

colesantiago 6y ago
It's actually both someone who can program AND has digital literacy, but for less pay.
tomatocracy 6y ago
Yes I think that's right. But I think that quote misses the point that there's a connection - if someone has been taught roughly how to program a Raspberry Pi to control a robot (even if they did it at school 10+ years ago), that might give them enough confidence to go and work out how to script whatever monotonous Excel task they do in VBA etc with a little help from Google.
unishark 6y ago
I thought that quote was silly. If there's a useful point in there I'm missing it. Someone who can program a raspberry pi to control a robot may not be able to instantly debug your legacy spaghetti code with zero supervision on day one of the job. But I think robot programmers meet a pretty solid standard already if we only had enough such graduates.
- alibarber 6y ago
  I dunno - I read it as more of: "The History of Art Grad from Prestigious University who is on Grad Scheme at $BIG_BANK fails to grasp that instead of emailing 100 people individually and copy pasting responses into a spread sheet, he/she could just use Google Forms or something", so, more fundamental skills. Our hypothetical humanities graduate here didn't explicitly study this as a degree, and shouldn't have to, any more than they didn't need a degree in maths to count.

rovek 6y ago

> The UK is infamously known for not appreciating programming skills. Not sure what the basis is for this. I'm a SWE with 10 years experience and I've been shopping around for countries to escape to for more than a year, I didn't really want to consider the US but currently my options based on salary expectations are only the major US cities. Nowhere in the world that I've seen offers comparable rates to London/NYC/Bay area. You could include the rest of the UK in the statement I quoted, but then you'd have to also include the rest of every other country. I doubt you'll find a competitive tech salary for a non-remote job in Arkansas or Düsseldorf. edit: Someone else mentioned finance salaries in this thread, I haven't worked for a company anyone here would likely know and this was all true before I moved to a finance-adjacent business

varispeed 6y ago
If you account for the cost of living, it suddenly doesn't look that great. Then in the UK chances are that you'll work for an agency - they'll charge the client £1500 per day for your service and you'll get fraction of that and there is a system around that there is always some intermediary that pockets money for nothing.
allendoerfer 6y ago
Start freelancing right now and increase your pay by one third.

phenkdo 6y ago

"less pay" isn't something you get to define all on your own, it is a 2-way street. Programmers are already among the highest paid professions anywhere, so it's laughable that they complain about "less pay". Who's next? hedge fund managers and investment bankers complaining about low bonuses?

bloqs 6y ago
This is not entirely true in the UK. The relative pay ratio for skill difficulty to pay is very low. Programmers get paid like plumbers.
- cameronh90 6y ago
  https://uk.jobted.com/salary https://uk.jobted.com/salary According to here, software engineers are paid roughly the same as other types of engineer, and a lot more than plumbers. There are some very low paid development related job titles. For example, "Web Developer" salaries are always awfully low - but that's a job title you only ever really see at tech-phobic companies or design agencies. Speaking as someone who does a fair amount of hiring in London, a decent software engineer commands a high salary - around the six figure mark. I don't mean FAANG "can invert a binary tree on a whiteboard" level, just "knows what a mutex is". There really aren't many other careers in this country that you can be paid six figures in a non-management job without a degree.
  - andyjohnson0 6y ago
    For those of us who don't live or work in London, the salary situation is very different. I've been a developer for 30+ years and I have never met anyone who earns that kind of money for developing software.
    - cameronh90 6y ago
      You can get £60-90k in places like Manchester and Edinburgh, which does afford a pretty nice lifestyle given that the average salary in those places is less than half that. The best way to get a high salary in the UK seems to be to either work in London, work remotely for a London based office, or work in London then transfer to another part of the UK. I'm not a London native, but there's a phrase people in my home town use, "doing your London time" - meaning working in London for a few years then moving back home. Reason being that once you've worked in London, your salary is permanently much higher once you move back than it would otherwise have been.