8 ms·

The massive gap between UK and US gamedev salaries seems to keep getting larger :(

by bluescrn 5y ago

darknavi 5y ago
Which direction? The article doesn't give me a good sense for how European devs are getting paid.
- bluescrn 5y ago
  Vastly higher in the US (at least 2x, maybe 3x), judging from the #gamedevpaidme hashtag. Yeah, there's cost-of-living factors involved, but gamedev in the UK (and Europe?) just pays poorly. There's certainly money being made, but it's usually buying fancy cars for studio directors, not going into rewarding the dev team.
Nursie 5y ago
I don’t think it’s just games! UK software dev money is terrible, outside of contracting.
- ngngngng 5y ago
  Why in the world is software money so terrible in the UK? I always look up salaries and cost of living when traveling and the UK was one of the more surprising instances of that. It seems like the only way to live comfortably in London is in finance.
  - ck425 5y ago
    Software salaries aren't terrible in the UK, they're just not as crazy as the US. Most decent software engineers I know are comfortable in the 80th percentile of income or higher.
    - Ekaros 5y ago
      I don't think software is terrible anywhere in the world, compared to local pay level. In many parts it's not at top, but it always decent. USA is just outlier. In other places it is comparable or slightly above other engineering disciplines...
  - gambiting 5y ago
    London skews all comparisons though, literally move to any other city in the UK and you'll see rents drop by 50% if not 75% for not a lot less pay in salaries. Try Manchester or Edinburgh, you'll get decent pay and rent a nice place for affordable money.
    - Silhouette 5y ago
      London skews all comparisons though, literally move to any other city in the UK and you'll see rents drop by 50% if not 75% for not a lot less pay in salaries. /cries in Cambridge, Oxford, Bristol...
  - bidirectional 5y ago
    Lawyers too, though there is a similar bimodal salary distribution, so it only applies to the top lawyers. Outside of those two fields nothing in the UK compares to US wages.
  - Philip-J-Fry 5y ago
    Well, that's because you're looking at London, infamous for how expensive it is to live in. It's fairly easy to be on £60k outside of London with a few years of experience. Moving up north towards the Midlands or even further like Manchester or Leeds and you're going to live a very comfortable life on a Software Developer salary. Yeah, it's not the US where people are on £200k at 25. But earning £60k in your 20s puts you so far ahead of almost everyone else in their 20s in the UK.
    - Nursie 5y ago
      > It's fairly easy to be on £60k outside of London with a few years of experience. Yeah, but that is the point isn't it - in the US and some other countries you have the potential to earn a few hundred K per annum. That sort of money just isn't available to software people here. In fact you're more likely to be offered around £50k for a 'senior' role somewhere. IMHO it's partly because here in the UK we don't really regard software engineers as skilled professionals, most management structures seem to treat us as generic office folks, and unruly, childlike ones at that.
      - Philip-J-Fry 5y ago
        The UK does treat SKILLED software engineers as skilled professionals. It's one of the highest earning professions here. What other jobs do you know where there's an earning potential of £80K+ outside of London while working regular 8 hour days? Not many I'll tell you that. If you want to be earning £200-300k then set up your own company. Almost no one is going to be employed by someone else on that money. And those that are, big law firms etc., are working 16 hour days 6-7 days a week. Many US developers are overpaid. That's the reality. The pay floor has been shifted too high and so the ceiling is even higher. We mustn't kid ourselves, the skill floor in software development is relatively low. Why should a graduate front end developer get paid 6 figures? There's some good ones that deserve it, but there's also some really shit ones who will never learn and grow as a professional. I've worked with good graduates and I've worked with shit graduates. The good ones get rewarded. The unskilled ones who don't learn, don't. I think that's fine. 6 figures for entry level grunt work is just an unreasonable amount of money and the only reason the US gets away with it is because of the pay floor.
- ojhughes 5y ago
  I disagree, I get paid a lot more than anyone I know who isn’t in tech and I’m outside of London. Even Doctors in the UK get paid less than a senior engineer at a decent company
  - Nursie 5y ago
    I think you're a rarity, if you're being paid rates comparable to US software folks. I know a bunch of highly paid tech folks doing pretty well for ourselves, but we're all contractors. UK perm roles looking for the sort of experience I have tend to pay somewhere in the region of 33%-50% of what I can make as a contractor. Even in London perm, roles almost never break six figures AFAICT.
- gambiting 5y ago
  Correct. I've had this discussion here with someone saying if you don't make at least $150k/year(or equivalent in local currency) as a dev, leave immediately. I was like.....in UK, that would mean 90% of the programming workforce would leave tomorrow :-P to get that much as a programmer you need to either be in contracting, or few of the companies paying that much in London(but then you're paying London rent so I'm not so sure it's such a great thing). Up here in the North I make about.....let's say half that, and that's a very decent salary up here.
  - ojhughes 5y ago
    I earned very close to that this year outside of London. It’s definitely possible to live up north and earn that (working remotely)
    - gambiting 5y ago
      I don't doubt that, but it's pretty rare. I know several devs in lead/expert positions(not in games, in finance, in consulting companies, in DWP and NHS) and no one breaks £100k/year. It happens, but it's very rare(in my experience).
      - ojhughes 5y ago
        I work for a large US tech company (not a FAANG). Getting in early on the Kubernetes bandwagon has helped me a lot . I used to work for a research consultancy and was paid significantly less then (but the work was a bit more interesting)
  - Silhouette 5y ago
    I agree, except that I don't believe anywhere close to 10% of programmers working in the UK earn that much on salary. You're probably a senior at certain big name employers probably in London or possibly working at a FAANG or similar if you're making that as an employee today. Contracting and freelance work has a much higher ceiling if you're experienced, well connected and working in a high-demand field, but obviously that income is not directly comparable to salary because you have the downtime, overheads and loss of employment benefits to consider as well.
- bluescrn 5y ago
  Londoners can make good money, it seems. But London isn't somewhere you want to be unless you're still in your 20s. And in a post-Covid world, 'being in/near London' may not be able to increase your earning potential in the way it usually has done.
  - Nursie 5y ago
    Don't get me wrong, you can make good money writing software in the UK, particularly in London, but you have to go contracting. I've basically never seen a perm software role come up that pays six figures.
AS_of 5y ago
US salaries also have to include cost of healthcare.
- lotsofpulp 5y ago
  The quoted salaries are 99% of the time excluding the employer paid portion of health insurance, which for an individual is typically at least 50% of the cost (~$2k to $6k depending on your age), but at a white collar tech firm, I would expect even more. For family coverage, the employers that pay well cover the other family members too so that can be added on as well, you might be looking at $20k+ in additional pre tax pay that isn’t mentioned when people state their nominal wages. Plus HSA contributions, 401k matching, dependent care FSA contributions, etc. The US has tons of tax advantage pay options for the well heeled employers. If someone says they’re earning $250k, and doesn’t specify if it’s total comp or not, I assume the employer is kicking in an extra $50k for various benefits.
- munk-a 5y ago
  Not in their dollar amount unless something really weird is going on - the effective cost of US employees is a lot higher than employees elsewhere in the world due to the overhead of health insurance - but US salaries remain pretty much at the top of major nations world-wide even ignoring that cost.
  - labcomputer 5y ago
    > to the overhead of health insurance Not really. The ACA (Obamacare) caps overhead and profits at either 15% or 20% depending on market (google "medical loss ratio"). The dirty secret is that too many doctors go into medicine for the wrong reasons (making money, instead of helping people), and collude to limit the number of new doctors created each year. The AMA is by far the most effective union in the US.
    - munk-a 5y ago
      The profits may be capped but US healthcare is still insanely expensive compared to other first world nations. Articles on the internet seem to say that the US was 4-5 times as expensive in 2019 - but more reliable research from 2010[1] puts that number closer to 2 times as expensive. The issue is that the US's broken healthcare system just costs a lot more per patient than anything else - and a lot of companies take cuts of every dollar that goes into that cost while, in Canada, a lot of types of organizations: PBMs, Payers, Reimbursers - are all just the government, and it doesn't do that work for free, but it's a lot more efficient. 1. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3024588/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3024588/
darth_avocado 5y ago
US cost of living is ridiculous. You shouldn't just compare two numbers one to one. 150k in California is basically just scraping by.
- dv_dt 5y ago
  Plus one carries a huge high side uncertainty in costs from healthcare in the US.
  - fanciestManimal 5y ago
    This is true for people in the middle to the bottom of the pay spectrum in the US. From experience where insurance paid ~1 million for a significant healthcare expense and my out of pocket was $4k -- when you are in a field with such a low unemployment rate and generally good benefits, it's a non issue. The month premium we pay is a non-issue. The maximum out of pocket is a non-issue. That being said, the way healthcare is paid for in the US is complete garbage for basically everyone that doesn't have that same (more or less) guarantee of employment (with benefits) and is a huge problem. It just isn't for upper middle income (and above) workers. Same with college. In my experience most SW engineers in the US make enough money to drop money in some kind of investment account for their children monthly so that college isn't so burdensome unless their children go to the absolutely most expensive places or they have a ton of kids. Again, it's the people in the middle and bottom that are getting screwed. The top 20% of earners in the US come out ahead i think. EDIT: I'm not advocating this as a positive thing or anything, just noting that I think SW engineers in the US have a pretty good gig compared to many other people both globally and at home.
    - dv_dt 5y ago
      I think if you read the fine print, it is quite possible to get hit by high out of pocket costs in surprising circumstances, but also if you have an extended illness. You may very well have had great coverage, but it's all to easy to end up in a uncovered circumstance. Most medical bankruptcies are people who have health insurance. Also as the average age of many high tech companies increases, expect more cost limiting changes from offered benefits.
Raed667 5y ago
I'm struggling with this, I can't find a formula to translate US salaries to European ones (UK, FR, DE, mainly). On the one hand in the US if you save a lot, you can retire early and move somewhere cheap. On the other hand in Europe a lot of things are covered for you without having to deduct them from the salary. If anyone has researched this subject I'd love some links.
- gpm 5y ago
  It seems like you should just be comparing pre-tax salary converted into the same currency?
  - Raed667 5y ago
    Not really, for example in France I can go and do a full-spectrum healthcare check (eyes, dental, physical, mental, name it...) and it would cost me -in total- less than 100€ nothing is deduced from my salary. One year of prestigious university is less than 600€ in fees... Cost of living, education, transportation, etc... also are a factor.
    - gpm 5y ago
      The health check is paid for out of taxes though, in the end money/goods/services aren't free. I mean sure, France's government and health care system is probably a bit more efficient than America's, but I doubt it's order of magnitude different. Maybe more importantly, but in the other direction, as a developer in France you're probably paying more for healthcare than you use (subsidizing the average person who pays less taxes). Quite arguably differences like those are things that you are purchasing with your salary by choosing to live in the US instead of France, I don't think it's either desirable or really possible to eliminate them.
      - Raed667 5y ago
        Hence my inability to compare a 150k$ offer in California to a 62k€ offer in Lyon.

The massive gap between UK and US gamedev salaries seems to keep getting larger :(

darknavi 5y ago

Which direction? The article doesn't give me a good sense for how European devs are getting paid.

bluescrn 5y ago
Vastly higher in the US (at least 2x, maybe 3x), judging from the #gamedevpaidme hashtag. Yeah, there's cost-of-living factors involved, but gamedev in the UK (and Europe?) just pays poorly. There's certainly money being made, but it's usually buying fancy cars for studio directors, not going into rewarding the dev team.

Nursie 5y ago

I don’t think it’s just games! UK software dev money is terrible, outside of contracting.

ngngngng 5y ago
Why in the world is software money so terrible in the UK? I always look up salaries and cost of living when traveling and the UK was one of the more surprising instances of that. It seems like the only way to live comfortably in London is in finance.
- ck425 5y ago
  Software salaries aren't terrible in the UK, they're just not as crazy as the US. Most decent software engineers I know are comfortable in the 80th percentile of income or higher.
  - Ekaros 5y ago
    I don't think software is terrible anywhere in the world, compared to local pay level. In many parts it's not at top, but it always decent. USA is just outlier. In other places it is comparable or slightly above other engineering disciplines...
- gambiting 5y ago
  London skews all comparisons though, literally move to any other city in the UK and you'll see rents drop by 50% if not 75% for not a lot less pay in salaries. Try Manchester or Edinburgh, you'll get decent pay and rent a nice place for affordable money.
  - Silhouette 5y ago
    London skews all comparisons though, literally move to any other city in the UK and you'll see rents drop by 50% if not 75% for not a lot less pay in salaries. /cries in Cambridge, Oxford, Bristol...
- bidirectional 5y ago
  Lawyers too, though there is a similar bimodal salary distribution, so it only applies to the top lawyers. Outside of those two fields nothing in the UK compares to US wages.
- Philip-J-Fry 5y ago
  Well, that's because you're looking at London, infamous for how expensive it is to live in. It's fairly easy to be on £60k outside of London with a few years of experience. Moving up north towards the Midlands or even further like Manchester or Leeds and you're going to live a very comfortable life on a Software Developer salary. Yeah, it's not the US where people are on £200k at 25. But earning £60k in your 20s puts you so far ahead of almost everyone else in their 20s in the UK.
  - Nursie 5y ago
    > It's fairly easy to be on £60k outside of London with a few years of experience. Yeah, but that is the point isn't it - in the US and some other countries you have the potential to earn a few hundred K per annum. That sort of money just isn't available to software people here. In fact you're more likely to be offered around £50k for a 'senior' role somewhere. IMHO it's partly because here in the UK we don't really regard software engineers as skilled professionals, most management structures seem to treat us as generic office folks, and unruly, childlike ones at that.
    - Philip-J-Fry 5y ago
      The UK does treat SKILLED software engineers as skilled professionals. It's one of the highest earning professions here. What other jobs do you know where there's an earning potential of £80K+ outside of London while working regular 8 hour days? Not many I'll tell you that. If you want to be earning £200-300k then set up your own company. Almost no one is going to be employed by someone else on that money. And those that are, big law firms etc., are working 16 hour days 6-7 days a week. Many US developers are overpaid. That's the reality. The pay floor has been shifted too high and so the ceiling is even higher. We mustn't kid ourselves, the skill floor in software development is relatively low. Why should a graduate front end developer get paid 6 figures? There's some good ones that deserve it, but there's also some really shit ones who will never learn and grow as a professional. I've worked with good graduates and I've worked with shit graduates. The good ones get rewarded. The unskilled ones who don't learn, don't. I think that's fine. 6 figures for entry level grunt work is just an unreasonable amount of money and the only reason the US gets away with it is because of the pay floor.
ojhughes 5y ago
I disagree, I get paid a lot more than anyone I know who isn’t in tech and I’m outside of London. Even Doctors in the UK get paid less than a senior engineer at a decent company
- Nursie 5y ago
  I think you're a rarity, if you're being paid rates comparable to US software folks. I know a bunch of highly paid tech folks doing pretty well for ourselves, but we're all contractors. UK perm roles looking for the sort of experience I have tend to pay somewhere in the region of 33%-50% of what I can make as a contractor. Even in London perm, roles almost never break six figures AFAICT.
gambiting 5y ago
Correct. I've had this discussion here with someone saying if you don't make at least $150k/year(or equivalent in local currency) as a dev, leave immediately. I was like.....in UK, that would mean 90% of the programming workforce would leave tomorrow :-P to get that much as a programmer you need to either be in contracting, or few of the companies paying that much in London(but then you're paying London rent so I'm not so sure it's such a great thing). Up here in the North I make about.....let's say half that, and that's a very decent salary up here.
- ojhughes 5y ago
  I earned very close to that this year outside of London. It’s definitely possible to live up north and earn that (working remotely)
  - gambiting 5y ago
    I don't doubt that, but it's pretty rare. I know several devs in lead/expert positions(not in games, in finance, in consulting companies, in DWP and NHS) and no one breaks £100k/year. It happens, but it's very rare(in my experience).
    - ojhughes 5y ago
      I work for a large US tech company (not a FAANG). Getting in early on the Kubernetes bandwagon has helped me a lot . I used to work for a research consultancy and was paid significantly less then (but the work was a bit more interesting)
- Silhouette 5y ago
  I agree, except that I don't believe anywhere close to 10% of programmers working in the UK earn that much on salary. You're probably a senior at certain big name employers probably in London or possibly working at a FAANG or similar if you're making that as an employee today. Contracting and freelance work has a much higher ceiling if you're experienced, well connected and working in a high-demand field, but obviously that income is not directly comparable to salary because you have the downtime, overheads and loss of employment benefits to consider as well.
bluescrn 5y ago
Londoners can make good money, it seems. But London isn't somewhere you want to be unless you're still in your 20s. And in a post-Covid world, 'being in/near London' may not be able to increase your earning potential in the way it usually has done.
- Nursie 5y ago
  Don't get me wrong, you can make good money writing software in the UK, particularly in London, but you have to go contracting. I've basically never seen a perm software role come up that pays six figures.

AS_of 5y ago

US salaries also have to include cost of healthcare.

lotsofpulp 5y ago
The quoted salaries are 99% of the time excluding the employer paid portion of health insurance, which for an individual is typically at least 50% of the cost (~$2k to $6k depending on your age), but at a white collar tech firm, I would expect even more. For family coverage, the employers that pay well cover the other family members too so that can be added on as well, you might be looking at $20k+ in additional pre tax pay that isn’t mentioned when people state their nominal wages. Plus HSA contributions, 401k matching, dependent care FSA contributions, etc. The US has tons of tax advantage pay options for the well heeled employers. If someone says they’re earning $250k, and doesn’t specify if it’s total comp or not, I assume the employer is kicking in an extra $50k for various benefits.
munk-a 5y ago
Not in their dollar amount unless something really weird is going on - the effective cost of US employees is a lot higher than employees elsewhere in the world due to the overhead of health insurance - but US salaries remain pretty much at the top of major nations world-wide even ignoring that cost.
- labcomputer 5y ago
  > to the overhead of health insurance Not really. The ACA (Obamacare) caps overhead and profits at either 15% or 20% depending on market (google "medical loss ratio"). The dirty secret is that too many doctors go into medicine for the wrong reasons (making money, instead of helping people), and collude to limit the number of new doctors created each year. The AMA is by far the most effective union in the US.
  - munk-a 5y ago
    The profits may be capped but US healthcare is still insanely expensive compared to other first world nations. Articles on the internet seem to say that the US was 4-5 times as expensive in 2019 - but more reliable research from 2010[1] puts that number closer to 2 times as expensive. The issue is that the US's broken healthcare system just costs a lot more per patient than anything else - and a lot of companies take cuts of every dollar that goes into that cost while, in Canada, a lot of types of organizations: PBMs, Payers, Reimbursers - are all just the government, and it doesn't do that work for free, but it's a lot more efficient. 1. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3024588/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3024588/

darth_avocado 5y ago

US cost of living is ridiculous. You shouldn't just compare two numbers one to one. 150k in California is basically just scraping by.

dv_dt 5y ago
Plus one carries a huge high side uncertainty in costs from healthcare in the US.
- fanciestManimal 5y ago
  This is true for people in the middle to the bottom of the pay spectrum in the US. From experience where insurance paid ~1 million for a significant healthcare expense and my out of pocket was $4k -- when you are in a field with such a low unemployment rate and generally good benefits, it's a non issue. The month premium we pay is a non-issue. The maximum out of pocket is a non-issue. That being said, the way healthcare is paid for in the US is complete garbage for basically everyone that doesn't have that same (more or less) guarantee of employment (with benefits) and is a huge problem. It just isn't for upper middle income (and above) workers. Same with college. In my experience most SW engineers in the US make enough money to drop money in some kind of investment account for their children monthly so that college isn't so burdensome unless their children go to the absolutely most expensive places or they have a ton of kids. Again, it's the people in the middle and bottom that are getting screwed. The top 20% of earners in the US come out ahead i think. EDIT: I'm not advocating this as a positive thing or anything, just noting that I think SW engineers in the US have a pretty good gig compared to many other people both globally and at home.
  - dv_dt 5y ago
    I think if you read the fine print, it is quite possible to get hit by high out of pocket costs in surprising circumstances, but also if you have an extended illness. You may very well have had great coverage, but it's all to easy to end up in a uncovered circumstance. Most medical bankruptcies are people who have health insurance. Also as the average age of many high tech companies increases, expect more cost limiting changes from offered benefits.

Raed667 5y ago

I'm struggling with this, I can't find a formula to translate US salaries to European ones (UK, FR, DE, mainly). On the one hand in the US if you save a lot, you can retire early and move somewhere cheap. On the other hand in Europe a lot of things are covered for you without having to deduct them from the salary. If anyone has researched this subject I'd love some links.

gpm 5y ago
It seems like you should just be comparing pre-tax salary converted into the same currency?
- Raed667 5y ago
  Not really, for example in France I can go and do a full-spectrum healthcare check (eyes, dental, physical, mental, name it...) and it would cost me -in total- less than 100€ nothing is deduced from my salary. One year of prestigious university is less than 600€ in fees... Cost of living, education, transportation, etc... also are a factor.
  - gpm 5y ago
    The health check is paid for out of taxes though, in the end money/goods/services aren't free. I mean sure, France's government and health care system is probably a bit more efficient than America's, but I doubt it's order of magnitude different. Maybe more importantly, but in the other direction, as a developer in France you're probably paying more for healthcare than you use (subsidizing the average person who pays less taxes). Quite arguably differences like those are things that you are purchasing with your salary by choosing to live in the US instead of France, I don't think it's either desirable or really possible to eliminate them.
    - Raed667 5y ago
      Hence my inability to compare a 150k$ offer in California to a 62k€ offer in Lyon.