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C++ Dev in the UK public sector here. I make 40k a year and so does my boss. I think my boss’s boss might make 50k, or that might only be his boss.

tjpnz 4y ago
Why do you do it? Or are there factors at play besides the money?
- jstx1 4y ago
  There are only so many high paying jobs. When someone on HN says that they have a £100k+ job in the UK, that means that it's possible for some number of people to get those jobs but not everyone who's on £40k can double or triple their salary, there aren't enough opportunities to do so.
  - mkl95 4y ago
    I was a mid level - seniorish engineer at the time. We initially discussed that 6 figure role, but I did not feel ready at all. They said it was fine and that the range for the level below was £75-85k, which I thought was pretty good. It was a big corp in the health industry btw.
    - SamuelAdams 4y ago
      This is interesting. What specific skills are required that made you feel you are not ready for a higher paying role?
      - mkl95 4y ago
        It was a combination of factors such as very specific problems being solved in an industry I was clueless about, a tech stack I had never worked with, etc. In that kind of situation I would rather take an IC role initially and step up later on.
- rprospero 4y ago
  1. I'm working with an amazing team. Experience has taught me that there's no amount of money worth working with a bad one. 2. I have a disabled spouse and the public sector has offered quite a bit of flexibility around this (e.g. work from home pre-COVID). 3. Everything is customer focused. No dark patterns or data collection. Everything is open source. 4. Work I can believe in. I've worked on everything from drug delivery to environmentally safe fire exstinguishers to solar tech. Comparatively, the last private sector job I interviewed with would have mostly served was building b2b middleware for crypto firms. 5. Variety. I get to touch a huge range of tech, so the job never gets boring. Among the tasks on my annual review for next year, I'm touching 3D rendering, parsers, GPU computing (not CUDA - can't guarantee the users have an NVIDIA card), computational chemistry, and transitioning our GUI code to a declarative framework. I declared myself a C++ developer, but I once had a single day where I had to edit code in eight different languages (C++, Python, Racket, Tcl, Labview, IDL Wave, Mathematica, Labtalk) and I've worked with at least as many more in production. 6. The pay isn't that big of a difference. My last job offer in the private sector was £50k, but there were enough caveats that it would have worked out about the same in the end.

tjpnz 4y ago

Why do you do it? Or are there factors at play besides the money?

jstx1 4y ago
There are only so many high paying jobs. When someone on HN says that they have a £100k+ job in the UK, that means that it's possible for some number of people to get those jobs but not everyone who's on £40k can double or triple their salary, there aren't enough opportunities to do so.
- mkl95 4y ago
  I was a mid level - seniorish engineer at the time. We initially discussed that 6 figure role, but I did not feel ready at all. They said it was fine and that the range for the level below was £75-85k, which I thought was pretty good. It was a big corp in the health industry btw.
  - SamuelAdams 4y ago
    This is interesting. What specific skills are required that made you feel you are not ready for a higher paying role?
    - mkl95 4y ago
      It was a combination of factors such as very specific problems being solved in an industry I was clueless about, a tech stack I had never worked with, etc. In that kind of situation I would rather take an IC role initially and step up later on.
rprospero 4y ago
1. I'm working with an amazing team. Experience has taught me that there's no amount of money worth working with a bad one. 2. I have a disabled spouse and the public sector has offered quite a bit of flexibility around this (e.g. work from home pre-COVID). 3. Everything is customer focused. No dark patterns or data collection. Everything is open source. 4. Work I can believe in. I've worked on everything from drug delivery to environmentally safe fire exstinguishers to solar tech. Comparatively, the last private sector job I interviewed with would have mostly served was building b2b middleware for crypto firms. 5. Variety. I get to touch a huge range of tech, so the job never gets boring. Among the tasks on my annual review for next year, I'm touching 3D rendering, parsers, GPU computing (not CUDA - can't guarantee the users have an NVIDIA card), computational chemistry, and transitioning our GUI code to a declarative framework. I declared myself a C++ developer, but I once had a single day where I had to edit code in eight different languages (C++, Python, Racket, Tcl, Labview, IDL Wave, Mathematica, Labtalk) and I've worked with at least as many more in production. 6. The pay isn't that big of a difference. My last job offer in the private sector was £50k, but there were enough caveats that it would have worked out about the same in the end.