4 ms·

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

by Nursie 6y ago

ngngngng 6y 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 6y 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 6y 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 6y 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 6y 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 6y 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 6y 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 6y 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 6y 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 6y 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 6y 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 6y 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 6y 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 6y 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 6y 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 6y 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 6y 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 6y 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.

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

by Nursie 6y ago

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

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 6y 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 6y 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 6y 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 6y 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 6y 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 6y 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 6y 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 6y 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 6y 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 6y 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 6y 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 6y 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 6y 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 6y 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 6y 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 6y 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 6y 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.