Great comment. Only thing I'd add is a bit of clarity on "Software engineer salaries are generally capped at around £150k if you're a lucky" -- in 20 years I've never met a software engineer on that figure. They exist, but I'd call that extremely lucky, and suggest a more realistic cap is not even half that. I welcome stats.
Secondly a pretty average contractor day rate is 500pd, which is over 100k, and there are a lot of contractors. I think it makes eng salaries in the UK seem lower than they are. Many of my friends went contract and would never go back. The senior market is therefore hard to hire for, outside trendy/exciting companies, unless you pay for contractors.
That said, we should all be asking for raises <3! By all I mean everyone apart from the C suites of public companies
I've been contracting for just over a year in London as a JS dev. £500 is a good day rate, I've seen as low as £250 advertised. It also varies a little, for example front-end gigs using React will generally pay better than Vue (a shame for me in particular as I prefer Vue).
With the IR35 changes I've been looking at switching back to full-time, but the salary ranges are just so low in comparison, it's quite disheartening really. Most comparable full-time positions offer about a third of what I make contracting.
I also expected contractors to be more highly skilled, but in my experience it's almost the opposite. I recently worked with a devops contractor earning probably around £100k who had set the organisation wide SSO administrator password to "Password1".
If I didn't have so many commitments in the UK I would seriously consider trying to move to the US. The market here seems completely bizarre.
Seconding this comment. Equal Experts, which is a large consultancy / contracting firm pays around £500 per day or a bit higher if my info is correct. I know people working in finance whose rates range up to around £1000 per day. Earning around £200K per year as a contractor is not unusual. I know many people who do this.
Sure, but since that’s a median not a cap, doesn’t that point to ‘a more realistic cap is not even half that’ (75k) being a bit pessimistic?
There are a lot of people in finance in London, also a lot of big tech (seen the current, and new, Google buildings at KGX?), quite aside from a lot of contractors :)
Please. 75k is the package good people can get 1-2 years after moving to London, basically when leaving their first company -whatever job they could get really- to move to an actual company that doesn't screw them over.
It's true that there are startups that try to get away with hiring people out of school for peanuts, from all across Europe. They often have a turnover of half the staff leaving within a year and it's no coincidence.
That hasn't been my experience. 75k is not earth-shaking, but also not something that i would expect someone with 2 years of experience to get in London. What companies do you think would pay that to such a person?
How about every single company? The better ones give 10% or 20% bonus annually, so really easy to get there, even while unaware of it.
I worked in startups. I've seen first hands employees being abused and leaving in drove after 1-2 years to get significantly more, literally anywhere else. Name any company in London, probably have some ex colleagues there.
That being said, I am talking about developers who can handle a HackerRank test and a coding interview on the whiteboard. It's not a high bar by any means but it is something.
Not really. My intention was to clarify that's not what most people should think of as potential earnings. ~1 000 000 businesses in London - how many are big tech or finance? Even ftse 100 which are not big tech/finance don't pay as high as median. Others on that board: C# £65, python £60, php £60, erlang £80. In fact, the more I think about it the more I think there's something fishy about that site.
edit: ah, those stats are based on advertised salaries, not actual salaries after the bait and switch - so they're all inflated.
The answer to how many places are big tech or finance is a truckload.
There are 10 000 employees in every building in canary wharf (the financial center with tens of banks). There are a similar amount of employees in the new buildings of Google, Apple and co. Plus multiple large companies but not necessarily as great. That's tens of thousands of roles to fill.
Of course no building is full of a single thing. The one I worked in had full floors full of developers, that adds up to quite a decent amount.
Ironically, accountants and finance folks eat at their desks, so if you see people outside at lunch time, they might very well be technology folks. They'd be wearing shirts though, easily confused with business people.
The big tech companies will pay this to engineers with 5+ YOE when you include stock. Financial firms can be within this range too, and be a lot higher for quants.
I’d suspect 20% of my engineering colleagues make in excess of £150k a year.
I'd say it depends on what industry you're in as well. In finance for example you can quite easily land a >£100k salary, especially if contracting, even if you're not with one of the top tier institutions. (Though I suppose IR35 makes the contracting trickier.)
Not sure what you mean by subtract. If you mean save away to pay yourself because as a contractor you don’t get paid time off – sure, you have to plan and be fiscally responsible.
My personal experience being a contractor vs. employee though is that contracting is Significantly more lucrative. Not orders of magnitude more lucrative, but at least ~2x in gross terms. What really sets it apart for me though is the freedom to choose how to make the best use of that revenue. That freedom to me is priceless, and can absolutely increase that multiplier quite significantly by way of investments, expense allocation, pension schemes etc. It’s more responsibility and more admin than simply being an employee and collecting a salary and benefits, and it’s certainly not for everyone, and you will definitely need a good accountant, but in my experience being a contractor is worth every second of extra time and effort.
More often than not recruiters (external and in-house) make up large numbers to get you to reply. Here is a verbatim quote from a mail I got last year:
> For the right candidate year 1 comp will be up to £500k.
After going through a three hour coding test, phone screen + onsite it turned out to be 120k + smallish bonus. Maybe I'm not the right candidate but most likely 500k was never on the table.
It's not the first time this has happened to me or people I know
either. What I'm getting at is that I'd take the Oxford Knight compensation numbers with a pinch of salt. Those 300k jobs _do_ exist but nowhere near as many as in the US.
Additionally levels.fyi or glassdoor data doesn't support a large number of 300k jobs in London.
