6 ms·

Precisely. The article quotes the average starting salary at google to be $125,000. After converting that into GBP (for the UK where I live) you get to 77,613.

by jiggy2011 14y ago

Precisely. The article quotes the average starting salary at google to be $125,000. After converting that into GBP (for the UK where I live) you get to 77,613. Whenever I look around at local programming jobs, a salary of 77K would be attainable mainly only by people who were project leaders/architects for large corporate systems. Most entry level jobs are .Net, PHP or Java programming and will net you a salary of 18-25K. A programmer with 4-10 years experience can maybe expect to get paid 30-35K. Basically a similar payscale to a plant fitter , electrician or teacher and quite a way off what you would expect for a doctor or lawyer.

lnanek2 14y ago
125k/year is pretty standard for a senior programmer who doesn't lead teams, etc. in SF/NYC where I frequent. Bump that up an extra 20k if they are willing to program something undesirable like ads or they have finance experience as well. Other locations will pay less, of course, because they aren't where all the hot tech companies are and they don't have the same cost of living. If you network a lot it is pretty easy to pull in 10k/month contracting, though.
- jiggy2011 14y ago
  Geography definitely matters. My numbers were based on non-London UK for example. If you were looking at jobs in London you could probably add 5-10K to each of the figures I quoted. I assume that those 125k/year jobs are for either large companies or profitable/highly financed startups? I'm guessing that there are lots of startup programmers out there on very low salaries who are working mainly for equity which is a much harder thing to value.
  - mattmanser 14y ago
    I just checked jobserve for C# and Java in Birmingham, Bristol, Leeds, Nottingham and Manchester. All have plenty of jobs going up to £45k-£50k, and that's what they're offering before you even walk in the room and they find out they like you. £35k seemed to be the ceiling about 2 years ago, I think demand is really starting to push it up.
- seanmcdirmid 14y ago
  10k/month contracting isn't that much if you aren't taking into account taxes, insurance, being on the beach, etc...you'd have to pull in around 20k/month to match a 120k salary.
  - ryanwaggoner 14y ago
    This is an exaggeration, at least for the US. Yes, it's true that taxes will take a big chunk out of your $10k / month, but they'll take a pretty big chunk out of your $120k / yr salary, too. The only real tax "savings" you get by being employed is that your employer pays the other half of your Social security and medicare taxes (12.4% total for 2012), which means that you'll have to pay an "extra" 6.2% if you're self-employed. And most of that is SS, which caps at $106k or something. Couple this with the fact that self-employed folks have a variety of deductions that employees usually don't get (home office, special retirement options, lots of business expenses), and it starts to look a little more even. It's true that you don't get paid time off, but I can tell you from experience that a decent and determined freelance programmer can easily make $10k / month and leave plenty of time for relaxation. The biggest thing most self-employed folks have to deal with that they wouldn't normally is health insurance, but if you're young and healthy, decent insurance is a few hundred bucks a month, at most. And you can deduct the premiums. If you're not young and/or not healthy...that's another story. Bottom line, if you want to match a $120k / yr job as a freelancer, you need to make something like $12k - $14k / month. Source: personal experience and a fascination with legal tax avoidance strategies.
nodemaker 14y ago
I dont think we can compare salaries in Silicon Valley and UK like that. In the end its about how much you have after you pay all your basic expenses and I think the person with GBP 77K has much more left than the person with $125K in California. Edit: Apparently living in the UK aint too cheap either. Did not know that!
- seanmcdirmid 14y ago
  Don't you mean the other way around???? I mean, the UK aint a cheap place to live!
- thereallurch 14y ago
  I think you underestimated the cost of major cities in UK.
- jiggy2011 14y ago
  Not sure what tax rates are like in San Francisco however if you that kind of money in the UK you are going to be paying 40% income tax on a pretty large chunk of it. So after income tax you are left with maybe 50K. We also have council tax which in some places will make your eyes pop out. Not to mention VAT which is going to be 20% of pretty much everything you buy. On top of that house prices can be very high here for a family sized home even in a modest area so you're going to be paying a lot for your mortgage. Plus we have a huge amount of tax on stuff like fuel and anything to do with cars, not to mention that food prices are generally higher here than in the USA. OTOH medical insurance isn't really an issue as well as other things like more help available from govt to cover higher education.
  - raverbashing 14y ago
    Exactly that I'm thinking the 125k in California may be a better deal, except the cost of living may be higher there (not much public transport, housing is expensive as well, etc) But the UK income taxes are huge. Ireland taxes are similar. Continental Europe has smaller taxes (but then salaries may be smaller, so 'take home money' can be similar)
- 14y ago
ef4 14y ago
I've noticed weird cultural differences between the UK and US in terms of how programmers are perceived by businesses. I interviewed with a major UK software consulting business that was trying to open their first US office, and it was immediately apparent that their expectations were way off from the local conditions. The interview included a programming test, which I was "not expected to finish, we just want to see how far you can get". I finished in half the allotted time, and they didn't seem to know what to do with me. Then they offered half the salary that I was concurrently being offered by another company in the same location, and they weren't willing to negotiate upward when I pointed out that fact. They clearly weren't interested in hiring someone who could be trusted with serious responsibility. They wanted that mythical creature: the programmer who can operate like an assembly line worker, cranking specs into code in a repeatable and easily replaceable way. I've seen the insides of many US software companies, and I've never seen one that seemed to take such a dim view of their programmers. You might see that attitude in non-software companies that begrudgingly spend some money on internal programmers, but not in the companies that make their money directly with software.
- jiggy2011 14y ago
  There are more progressive software companies in the UK with better culture, although they seem to be mainly doing that by cargo-culting what google and other SV companies are doing. Salaries paid aren't that much better in these companies though. Expectations of programmer aptitude are all over the map also, companies do like administering those "programming tests" which can vary from very tricky math problems to stuff like "What is the keyword for inheritance in Java?". Thing is that salaries in both types of jobs tend to be similar. Another problem with these tests is that they are often administered by recruiters who don't even bother to bring them upto date, a friend had a test for a C# programming position which asked him mostly questions about VB6. It's quite a shame because the government likes to talk about how they want tech innovation to happen in the UK as it does with the US. However most of the top programmers seem to either end up going abroad or getting assimilated into finance or into various gigantic consulting corps.
  - bowyakka 14y ago
michaelochurch 14y ago
The article quotes the average starting salary at google to be $125,000. After converting that into GBP (for the UK where I live) you get to 77,613. Europeans quote salaries (usually monthly) after taxes, and Americans use pre-tax numbers. They also pay a higher tax rate (and get more, like real health coverage). So when you hear a European say that he makes 4000 Euros per month, that's an after-tax number and it's actually comparable to about $80,000 pre-tax salary in the US.
- to3m 14y ago
  UK salaries are always stated gross. BTW while I am correcting people, I will also point out that the UK is very rarely described as "European", though nobody would (or can) deny that it's part of Europe, geographically speaking.
- grimlck 14y ago
  That is not the case in the UK.
- bowyakka 14y ago
  No that will be gross values, the statement about ~77K being on the high end for the UK is right. Easy experiment I went to jobserve.com a well known UK programmer job site and did a search for the word "programmer" its breakdown of offered gross salaries is this Not stated on job 39 Below £15K 1 £15K-£20K 28 £20K-£25K 79 £25K-£30K 173 £30K-£40K 286 £40K-£50K 247 £50K-£75K 166 £75K-£100K 27 Above £100K 11 Suggests a bell curve to me with the median being £35000
- jk4930 14y ago
  Not the case in Germany.
greenyoda 14y ago
One difference between programmers and doctors is that there is an artificially imposed scarcity of doctors. Nobody can be licensed to practice medicine (at least in the U.S.) without completing medical school and a residency, and the number of openings is controlled by the medical schools. In contrast, you can become a very good programmer without having any formal education in the field (I know a few such people). This allows the supply of programmers to increase more quickly than the supply of doctors.

lnanek2 14y ago

125k/year is pretty standard for a senior programmer who doesn't lead teams, etc. in SF/NYC where I frequent. Bump that up an extra 20k if they are willing to program something undesirable like ads or they have finance experience as well. Other locations will pay less, of course, because they aren't where all the hot tech companies are and they don't have the same cost of living. If you network a lot it is pretty easy to pull in 10k/month contracting, though.

jiggy2011 14y ago
Geography definitely matters. My numbers were based on non-London UK for example. If you were looking at jobs in London you could probably add 5-10K to each of the figures I quoted. I assume that those 125k/year jobs are for either large companies or profitable/highly financed startups? I'm guessing that there are lots of startup programmers out there on very low salaries who are working mainly for equity which is a much harder thing to value.
- mattmanser 14y ago
  I just checked jobserve for C# and Java in Birmingham, Bristol, Leeds, Nottingham and Manchester. All have plenty of jobs going up to £45k-£50k, and that's what they're offering before you even walk in the room and they find out they like you. £35k seemed to be the ceiling about 2 years ago, I think demand is really starting to push it up.
seanmcdirmid 14y ago
10k/month contracting isn't that much if you aren't taking into account taxes, insurance, being on the beach, etc...you'd have to pull in around 20k/month to match a 120k salary.
- ryanwaggoner 14y ago
  This is an exaggeration, at least for the US. Yes, it's true that taxes will take a big chunk out of your $10k / month, but they'll take a pretty big chunk out of your $120k / yr salary, too. The only real tax "savings" you get by being employed is that your employer pays the other half of your Social security and medicare taxes (12.4% total for 2012), which means that you'll have to pay an "extra" 6.2% if you're self-employed. And most of that is SS, which caps at $106k or something. Couple this with the fact that self-employed folks have a variety of deductions that employees usually don't get (home office, special retirement options, lots of business expenses), and it starts to look a little more even. It's true that you don't get paid time off, but I can tell you from experience that a decent and determined freelance programmer can easily make $10k / month and leave plenty of time for relaxation. The biggest thing most self-employed folks have to deal with that they wouldn't normally is health insurance, but if you're young and healthy, decent insurance is a few hundred bucks a month, at most. And you can deduct the premiums. If you're not young and/or not healthy...that's another story. Bottom line, if you want to match a $120k / yr job as a freelancer, you need to make something like $12k - $14k / month. Source: personal experience and a fascination with legal tax avoidance strategies.

nodemaker 14y ago

I dont think we can compare salaries in Silicon Valley and UK like that. In the end its about how much you have after you pay all your basic expenses and I think the person with GBP 77K has much more left than the person with $125K in California. Edit: Apparently living in the UK aint too cheap either. Did not know that!

seanmcdirmid 14y ago
Don't you mean the other way around???? I mean, the UK aint a cheap place to live!
thereallurch 14y ago
I think you underestimated the cost of major cities in UK.
jiggy2011 14y ago
Not sure what tax rates are like in San Francisco however if you that kind of money in the UK you are going to be paying 40% income tax on a pretty large chunk of it. So after income tax you are left with maybe 50K. We also have council tax which in some places will make your eyes pop out. Not to mention VAT which is going to be 20% of pretty much everything you buy. On top of that house prices can be very high here for a family sized home even in a modest area so you're going to be paying a lot for your mortgage. Plus we have a huge amount of tax on stuff like fuel and anything to do with cars, not to mention that food prices are generally higher here than in the USA. OTOH medical insurance isn't really an issue as well as other things like more help available from govt to cover higher education.
- raverbashing 14y ago
  Exactly that I'm thinking the 125k in California may be a better deal, except the cost of living may be higher there (not much public transport, housing is expensive as well, etc) But the UK income taxes are huge. Ireland taxes are similar. Continental Europe has smaller taxes (but then salaries may be smaller, so 'take home money' can be similar)
14y ago

ef4 14y ago

I've noticed weird cultural differences between the UK and US in terms of how programmers are perceived by businesses. I interviewed with a major UK software consulting business that was trying to open their first US office, and it was immediately apparent that their expectations were way off from the local conditions. The interview included a programming test, which I was "not expected to finish, we just want to see how far you can get". I finished in half the allotted time, and they didn't seem to know what to do with me. Then they offered half the salary that I was concurrently being offered by another company in the same location, and they weren't willing to negotiate upward when I pointed out that fact. They clearly weren't interested in hiring someone who could be trusted with serious responsibility. They wanted that mythical creature: the programmer who can operate like an assembly line worker, cranking specs into code in a repeatable and easily replaceable way. I've seen the insides of many US software companies, and I've never seen one that seemed to take such a dim view of their programmers. You might see that attitude in non-software companies that begrudgingly spend some money on internal programmers, but not in the companies that make their money directly with software.

jiggy2011 14y ago
There are more progressive software companies in the UK with better culture, although they seem to be mainly doing that by cargo-culting what google and other SV companies are doing. Salaries paid aren't that much better in these companies though. Expectations of programmer aptitude are all over the map also, companies do like administering those "programming tests" which can vary from very tricky math problems to stuff like "What is the keyword for inheritance in Java?". Thing is that salaries in both types of jobs tend to be similar. Another problem with these tests is that they are often administered by recruiters who don't even bother to bring them upto date, a friend had a test for a C# programming position which asked him mostly questions about VB6. It's quite a shame because the government likes to talk about how they want tech innovation to happen in the UK as it does with the US. However most of the top programmers seem to either end up going abroad or getting assimilated into finance or into various gigantic consulting corps.
- bowyakka 14y ago

michaelochurch 14y ago

The article quotes the average starting salary at google to be $125,000. After converting that into GBP (for the UK where I live) you get to 77,613. Europeans quote salaries (usually monthly) after taxes, and Americans use pre-tax numbers. They also pay a higher tax rate (and get more, like real health coverage). So when you hear a European say that he makes 4000 Euros per month, that's an after-tax number and it's actually comparable to about $80,000 pre-tax salary in the US.

to3m 14y ago
UK salaries are always stated gross. BTW while I am correcting people, I will also point out that the UK is very rarely described as "European", though nobody would (or can) deny that it's part of Europe, geographically speaking.
grimlck 14y ago
That is not the case in the UK.
bowyakka 14y ago
No that will be gross values, the statement about ~77K being on the high end for the UK is right. Easy experiment I went to jobserve.com a well known UK programmer job site and did a search for the word "programmer" its breakdown of offered gross salaries is this Not stated on job 39 Below £15K 1 £15K-£20K 28 £20K-£25K 79 £25K-£30K 173 £30K-£40K 286 £40K-£50K 247 £50K-£75K 166 £75K-£100K 27 Above £100K 11 Suggests a bell curve to me with the median being £35000
jk4930 14y ago
Not the case in Germany.

greenyoda 14y ago

One difference between programmers and doctors is that there is an artificially imposed scarcity of doctors. Nobody can be licensed to practice medicine (at least in the U.S.) without completing medical school and a residency, and the number of openings is controlled by the medical schools. In contrast, you can become a very good programmer without having any formal education in the field (I know a few such people). This allows the supply of programmers to increase more quickly than the supply of doctors.