15 ms·

The software industry here in London is really badly paid, for salaried jobs outside finance at least. I know plenty of developers who started at £20-25k as gra

• vallejos 13y ago
  sfghdfgh
• beaumartinez 13y ago
  I'd add that for jobs in startups (a focus for the HN crowd) salaries are particularly low.
  • _progger_ 13y ago
    Indeed. It's a shame to see that they manage to hire some young talented people. I'd rather go to Google. Better experience regardless of future path.
  • yashodhan 13y ago
    Why is this the case? I'm a frontend dev for a startup in London and I make 18k annually (80% of that because I only work 4 days a week). It's peanuts, but luckily I don't mind being poor.
    • ValentineC 13y ago
      Do you mind sharing whereabouts in London you're staying? (Zone x, or slightly outside London...?) I was there for some years, and my rent was always around 8k a year. I find trying to live in an expensive city while on a low salary admirable.
      • Anderkent 13y ago
        I guess it depends on your requirements. If you're young and without dependants it's much cheaper. I live in a flatshare, 40 minute door-to-door commute (via overground, luckily, not the tube) and the rent is about 4k a year.
      • petercooper 13y ago
        In London, it's incredibly popular to live in roommate situations and have just a single room in a house with shared kitchen/bathroom for this reason. I know a lot of people still live with their parents into their late 20s and pay little or no rent, too.
        • gaius 13y ago
          It's common but it doesn't follow that it's popular.
      • yashodhan 13y ago
        Currently way out in the boondocks (zone 8). I'm looking to move into Zone 2/3 East London (Shoreditch/Bethnal Green area) to be closer to work. There are quite a few flat shares available for £500-600 pcm, which is my budget. That leaves me with £400/month to live off, which is good enough I suppose.
        • jamesdeer 13y ago
          I'm a start-up founder, and live in Bethnal Green. It's a lovely place to live (in London). Our office is just off of Brick Lane, and it's a short 15 minutes to work every morning :)
          • _progger_ 13y ago
            No offence, but Bethnal Green looks like an ethnic ghetto. Is it getting better further to the south?
          • jblok 13y ago
            Bethnal Green isn't exactly a lovely place to live. It's saving grace is it's proximity to central London/Shoreditch, but there's nothing stand-out about it at all. It seems like no one respects it - every day I walk home from the station past at least 1 drunk/crackhead and rubbish all over the street.
        • mseebach 13y ago
          It's good that you don't mind being poor, 'cause that's what you're gonna be. I hope that start-up is worth it.
          • yashodhan 13y ago
            Good bunch of guys, and they're helping me add backend development to my skillset. That's how I look at it. Don't care much for equity.
            • SandB0x 13y ago
    • rmc 13y ago
      Damn, ask for a raise.
• OrsenPike 13y ago
  Yeah this is my experience as well. I was fortunate to start on quite a good salary and have managed to maintain that while changing jobs. London certainly isn't the place if you want to make a big career though. Even a start up here is so much harder than in America. People just don't want to invest much until you have a solid business.
• egwor 13y ago
  You have to compare like with like: number of days holiday is different (we have different numbers of public holidays); you don't have to pay for health insurance; the numbers here are in sterling not USD; do we value experienced developers more than very new ones; how many have bonuses as a major part of their salary [which this doesn't show]?
  • SandB0x 13y ago
    Sure, a lot of things here are taken care of. But compared to other jobs for smart graduate in the uk, e.g. law (£35-40k as a graduate trainee), investment banking (£40+k as a graduate, rising very quickly and with significant bonus) it is poorly paid.
    • egwor 13y ago
      With law you have to do a two year training course (so effectively two years of training) where they're usually sponsored. Investment banking is often long hours (9-midnight) plus weekends. Many leave after a year or two or don't make it past 2 years (don't get their contracts renewed after analyst). Also, I'd consider those individuals to be some of the very smart; does this survey really allow one to filter how good they are at their job? There are different levels of software engineer from someone tweaking a wordpress blog template to someone writing assembly code on chips. Also, what about google and facebook? They pay pretty well, don't they? Also, there are other companies like linkedin and oracle here too. No idea if they pay well or not (no info to base it off) Working for government contracts as non permanent employee ?
      • xyzzy123 13y ago
        I've worked at investment banks. People are committed, but they're not there after 7 on the whole. There are smart people, they're the seniors. The juniors are just like everywhere else. There are the actively clueless. The only good thing about investment banks is that they're more agile than consumer banks. That's probably country dependent though. Don't think it's like this special place or some crap. It's really not. On the whole, if you have strong programming skills you're going to be better compensated in the financial sector than at google or facebook. You just have to work with a non software oriented business that doesn't give a shit, and put up with things.
• egwor 13y ago
  also does a PhD really help when programming (serious question)?
  • SandB0x 13y ago
    Maybe not for web or mobile development, but without getting into specifics I'm thinking of friends with PhDs directly using their skills in optimization and machine learning in their jobs.
  • petercooper 13y ago
    Depends what you consider programming, but if it includes getting a job at Microsoft Research or the more interesting jobs at Google, definitely.
  • mkonturek 13y ago
    Yes, it does if you are considering career in scientific computation.
• lrem 13y ago
  Well, my wife recently started in France, with M.Eng. in CS, for what translates to around £25k/year. And that is considered well paid.
  • polshaw 13y ago
    France is completely different, she is employed either hourly- a maximum of 35 hours/week- or employed daily, ie. 218 days a year (for starters). EDIT: @nawitus: Sorry but your data is totally useless for this purpose. 1) it's the whole economy, not just programmers and 2) it includes part time workers! To imply that full-time programmers in London are working on average less than a 40 hour week is so far from reality.
    • nawitus 13y ago
      The average hours worked in France is 1500, UK 1600 and USA 1800[1]. Therefore if you factor in hours worked, a developer in France should be paid 83% of average salary in America and 94% of average salary in the United Kingdom. This of course assumes that everything else is equal (which is untrue). A 30k salary in UK should translate into 28k salary in France when you factor in the number of hours worked. We should really find the difference in hours worked for softare engineers, of course. 1. http://stats.oecd.org/Index.aspx?DatasetCode=ANHRS http://stats.oecd.org/Index.aspx?DatasetCode=ANHRS
      • dragonwriter 13y ago
        > The average hours worked in France is 1500, UK 1600 and USA 1800[1]. Therefore if you factor in hours worked, a developer in France should be paid 83% of average salary in America and 94% of average salary in the United Kingdom. This of course assumes that everything else is equal (which is untrue). Notably, the longer hours worked in the US compared to Europe comes at the expense of less per-hour productivity in most studies I've seen, though not enough to result in less per-worker productivity. If that's true within Europe as well, the value of the time worked would be closer than the number of hours would suggest.
      • deleted 13y ago
• VexXtreme 13y ago
  That tends to be the case mostly everywhere in Europe. For that matter, most places in the world outside the US (and Silicon Valley) tend not to pay software engineers very competitively. I am from a fairly small central European country and programmers there barely make more than other professions; the salaries often amount to the national average.
  • acangiano 13y ago
    Remote-work-friendly companies can capitalize on that.
    • petercooper 13y ago
      They sure do :) Can't name names but I know at least one of the biggest (and wealthiest) companies in the Rails apps scene pays its remote employees a fair wage by where those employees live, not by what would be acceptable in Chicago.
      • auvi 13y ago
        37 Signals it is then.
      • graue 13y ago
        Wait a sec, are you implying the remote employees live somewhere with a lower cost of living than Chicago? In my experience Chicago is pretty darn cheap, comparable to a place like Berlin.
  • shubb 13y ago
    But competitively is the word. They can attract software engineers at those low wages, therefore they are competitive. This seems strange to me, as it takes a few years for someone to get good at software (the supply is constricted), and where I've been involved in recruitment, finding good people is difficult. It's also interesting to see that people get paid so much more in finance, or at American companies. That is, a finance house could probably hire any good 5+ year C++ developer at the 'normal C++ developer' rate of 30k, and get good results. But they choose to pay 50K for a 'finance C++ developer', whether he was earning 30K last week or not. That says to me that pay is not set by supply by labor supply and demand but something else. That is, you don't get rich by having rare skills that make people money, you get them by knowing which industries pay over the odds for labor. I think that's a good thing to realize if you want to be comfortable.
• polshaw 13y ago
  The rest of the UK seems much worse.
  • pointyhats 13y ago
    It's not as bad as you think. The number of applicants is lower per position outside London and the ratio of muppets to positions is higher. If you're not a muppet, it's quite easy to land 50k+ in any major city.
    • beagle90 13y ago
      Not many advertised positions here in Leeds pay 50k. Senior roles seem to top out at 45k.
      • UK-AL 13y ago
        Look at large I.T service companies, e.g Accenture. They don't tend to advertise much, and you have to apply directly via their websites.
        • daywish 13y ago
          I recently saw Accenture advertising for a load of intermediate PHP developers in my region. They were being advertised through third party recruiters, so I got to see the salary, which was around 20K. On this occasion it was even lower than design agencies, who already struggle to find developers on their pay levels.
          • UK-AL 13y ago
            That's odd because their graduate developer scheme pays 32k
• m0skit0 13y ago
  If you think that's bad paid, come to the wonderful Spain. Graduates start with <= 18K€...
  • iaskwhy 13y ago
    Or just cross the border to Portugal and have them for even less. The difference between even similar countries is huge.
    • smartician 13y ago
      At one point we were outsourcing to Portugal. I asked one of the guys when he was visiting here in the Bay Area what a recent grad would be making typically. He said about 1200 Euro per month at one of the Big Four consulting companies. Now we're outsourcing to Romania. I haven't had the heart yet to ask one of them.
      • creativityhurts 13y ago
        It's about 6-800€ for a recent grad with a bit of experience.
• hackerboos 13y ago
  I make 25k in Brighton as a graduate. Most of the jobs I applied for were 18-22k.
  • Nursie 13y ago
    That does really quite grate. I got a 21k graduate software engineering job, when most graduate software jobs were in the 18-22k range, 13 years ago. It's like the salary range has been static for more than a decade, inflation be damned.
    • robeasthope 13y ago
      If you look at the stats over the past two decades nearly all wages have been near static regardless of profession. No wonder there is a credit crisis...
• gaius 13y ago
  It's the legacy of the old class system rearing its ugly head. No matter how well educated, and from what prestigious colleges, (software) engineering is blue-collar work and will never be as well paid as the "graduate management fast-track" type with a sociology degree from a "red brick". Finance isn't highly paid for software work, it's fairly paid, by world standards, only because they contrary to popular belief, don't have any class hangups there and are comfortable with the notion of playing in a free market.
  • michaelochurch 13y ago
    This applies to the US as well, but probably not as severely since software engineers aren't as underpaid in the US. Finance pays a fair market wage, which seems high by comparison to all the unfair players out there, but isn't actually that unreasonable. Startups pay a theoretically fair wage (if you accept valuations at face-value and exclude liquidation preferences). It's when you see the equity/cap table (2% for useless VPs and 0.03% for engineers)-- as well as what the founders have done to ensure their careers no matter what happens to the business-- that you pick out the classism of the well-connected. If you look at salaries alone, though, you won't see it. Outsiders complain about finance "bonuses" (finance salaries are only at-market) while failing to account for the fact that that's a much fairer compensation system than whatever they get at their corporate jobs. Granted, the banking bonus system is horribly corrupt in practice; but in theory there is nothing wrong with it, and I'd rather have a corrupt profit-sharing system like that in finance than none at all.
    • tptacek 13y ago
      This comment nicely captures a misconception about how employment markets work. If, stipulating the dollar value of the whole comp package, a comp package appears fair, it is still fair no matter what that company pays anyone else. Wages are "fair" or "unfair" based on prevailing rates and supply/demand.
      • lawnchair_larry 13y ago
        How employment markets work, and fairness, are not the same thing. It's not a misconception, it's a criticism. And of course in the real world, wages are not based on supply and demand. They're based on leverage and BATNA. Simply put, given two equal employees (hypothetically, if it were possible to measure this), it's not "fair" to give one $50k and one $300k. It's not about the prevailing wage, it's about the contribution relative to what is coming back.
• nicholassmith 13y ago
  £40k is not badly paid. It's significantly less than SV sure, but it's a lot more than the average UK salary.
  • justincormack 13y ago
    Apparently it is about average for London http://www.london24.com/news/business/london_has_uk_s_highest_average_salaries_1_1753415 http://www.london24.com/news/business/london_has_uk_s_highes... - London salaries are much higher than UK average.
    • jmaskell 13y ago
      This is probably skewed by finance and a small number of extremely well paid bankers, hedge fund traders etc.
  • ivix 13y ago
    Yes, see here: http://www.thisismoney.co.uk/money/article-2269520/Best-paid-jobs-2012-Official-figures-national-average-UK-salaries-400-occupations.html http://www.thisismoney.co.uk/money/article-2269520/Best-paid... Some people seem dissapointed that developers are not being paid more than airline pilots: it's just not realistic outside of a boom economy (see: bay area).
    • khuey 13y ago
      Why is that not realistic? An airline pilot can only fly one plane at a time. No matter how much he/she trains there are severe physical limitations on the value they can create. Software engineers can easily write code that generates millions of dollars of ongoing value and scales infinitely.
  • walshemj 13y ago
    It is when compared to other professions a GP (family doctor) earns on average well over £120k very few devs with say 10 years experience earn any where near that.
• mrstew 13y ago
  Hmmm, this is pretty different to my experience (as both employee and employer), perhaps it depends on the skillset and exact location. I have a (non-finance related) start-up in central London and it's pretty difficult to find skilled developers with 4-5 years experience who are asking for less than £50k p/a.
  • ivix 13y ago
    Yeah, that would be the threshold for me to begin to consider commuting to central London (I'm in Cambridge).
  • TeamMCS 13y ago
    And I would expect no less. Considering the travel card (anywhere between 1.6-3k year) and the cost of living (at least 1-1.5K/month. How can anyone honestly expect someone to work for less than 60k, even as a mid tier dev? I hear so many companies that whine about the lack of perm developers then go ahead and hire a contract dev at 500/day. That is the market at play, if our city cannot pay our developers enough to sustain a reasonable standard of living then they wont work. Honestly I'm glad to see it. The more developers that follow the market (contracting) the better. Hopefully that'll wake a few people up and we'll see salaries start hitting the numbers that are needed to live in this over priced city. That said, if I WFH 100% 50-60k would be fantastic but that's not acceptable these days. </rant>
  • switch007 13y ago
    Yes. Some people actually really dislike London (i.e. won't sacrifice to live/work there) and £50k is probably the minimum to consider commuting.
    • adrianhoward 13y ago
      Heh. That's me. I remember having a very annoying conversation with a recruiter many years back when they were trying to persuade me I should take less money since London was such a cool place, and I was saying that I wanted more money to have to put up with such an awful location ;)
• Nursie 13y ago
  Tell me about it. I moved overseas to Australia from London a few years ago. Same job, same company, 60% pay rise. Now I'm back in the UK the permanent salaries on offer seem like an insult. I have to go contracting to match it.
  • growse 13y ago
    But isn't Australia 60% more expensive to live in than London? I know salaries are sky-high, but I'd heard there were living costs to match...
    • Nursie 13y ago
      Sure is! But when you're spending a third on housing, a third on living and the last third goes to savings and international travel, well that last third goes a lot further on an Australian salary than a London one.
• aristidb 13y ago
  That almost makes German/Dutch wages seem good... (average wage for a just-graduated developer is around 35000 euros in both countries).
  • walshemj 13y ago
    is that with or without the 13th Month
    • spockz 13y ago
      I've seen salaries between 2900-3300 per month for university graduates (master). That is without bonusses or 13th which isn't a given.
• jman1 13y ago
  Employers will always have the upper hand because in the western world discussing/knowing salaries of peers is considered taboo( I never understood this as somebody who comes from the east where asking friends and peers their salary is very normal). Level the playing field. Discuss your salary more openly and you will see things get fairer( if that's a word). Not all will make the same but you will get to what you deserve very quickly. It also helps by letting you get an idea of what you need to do to get to the next level. Would love to hear the communities thoughts on this somewhat contrarian view.
• rmc 13y ago
  Never underestimate how little some fresh faced university graduates know and how unscrupulous some employers are. In university you're surrounded by clever people who can programme (if you're in a CS degree). It can make one think that one is nothing special, and everyone can programme.