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Okay London is awesome, and good for this guy for moving there. WOW though, "Above £60,000" salary. Despite the exchange rate, £1 pretty much buys you the same

by Dig1t 5y ago

Okay London is awesome, and good for this guy for moving there. WOW though, "Above £60,000" salary. Despite the exchange rate, £1 pretty much buys you the same goods as $1 in the US (£5 coffee anyone?). For such a high cost city, this pay sounds atrocious. You could live in SF and make literally triple that easily. Plus the taxes are super high in London too. I don't really buy the idea that having the NHS makes this all worth it either. Working in California you can get an employer health plan (Kaiser, etc) for $50 a month pre-tax that is in fact better in quality (no wait times, no need to get referrals to see any kind of doctor you want) than the NHS and never have to pay more than a $20 copay for any service. It sounds like a super fun life experience, money isn't everything, I would absolutely love to do this but I don't know how I could ever justify cutting my pay from 350k -> 115k AND paying super high tax just to live in a specific city.

Traster 5y ago
As an engineer in the UK this is probably true. I’m currently in finance which to some extent defies gravity, but in general it’s true that a good Software engineer salary in London is 50-100k pounds. FANG probably 100-150. And your effective rate of tax will be 30%ish and a decent place to live will be 2-3k. It’s definitely better being in the US for software. You could argue this is why companies in the UK are recruiting from lower cost countries - because they don’t compete with higher cost countries in terms of compensation.
intricatedetail 5y ago
If someone gets 60k in London, it's probably they have not even tried to negotiate. However even if you get 100k, then good chunk of that is eaten by taxes. Only way to get reasonable money was b2b, but recent changes to IR35 made it difficult. If you get caught by the rules you may pay over 50% of tax. UK for IT is over. The NHS indeed is underwhelming. I have to use private doctors because in my case NHS was useless.

by Dig1t 5y ago

Traster 5y ago

As an engineer in the UK this is probably true. I’m currently in finance which to some extent defies gravity, but in general it’s true that a good Software engineer salary in London is 50-100k pounds. FANG probably 100-150. And your effective rate of tax will be 30%ish and a decent place to live will be 2-3k. It’s definitely better being in the US for software. You could argue this is why companies in the UK are recruiting from lower cost countries - because they don’t compete with higher cost countries in terms of compensation.

intricatedetail 5y ago

If someone gets 60k in London, it's probably they have not even tried to negotiate. However even if you get 100k, then good chunk of that is eaten by taxes. Only way to get reasonable money was b2b, but recent changes to IR35 made it difficult. If you get caught by the rules you may pay over 50% of tax. UK for IT is over. The NHS indeed is underwhelming. I have to use private doctors because in my case NHS was useless.