It does look pretty low if you assume that you only need 1.25x the salary in SF vs London to maintain the same standard of living [1],[2].

I worked in EU (Belgium) for 7 years before moving to the Bay Area. In my personal experience (so it cannot be generalized!), I definitely felt that CS folks are highly undervalued in EU. The starting salary for a CS grad (or equivalent by experience) was no more than 1.5x that of say a bartender who never went for higher education. Over time the more "competitive" people did complain about being paid way too less. And companies offered no significant distinction / appreciation for being a great engineer vs an average. On the whole though, most people seemed pretty content. I guess coz you are getting a pretty good deal unless you are a good software engineer :)

[1] http://www.numbeo.com/cost-of-living/compare_cities.jsp?coun... [2] https://angel.co/salaries

I've lived in the UK for about 10 years now and though I'm not sure I read or picked up this idea, it has felt "true" in a truthy sort of way - the UK, culturally, regards software engineers or those similar to be little more than educated manual labor. You're not in management, so you're labor. It's a result of the significance of "class" here in the UK and the different ways to define that. And "middle class" here is roughly the equivalent of "upper middle class" in America and IT folks don't make enough to be in the "middle class".

"Lions ruled by donkeys" - this saying about British society is still true today and has its roots in the class divisions and structure. I have heard it said many times by now that Britain is still fundamentally a feudal society, certainly on the psychological level. (And I can see it) So that is going to certainly influence what management pays labor...

It has made me very appreciative of the strengths of American culture/society, though there are lots of things to complain about America as well.

I think you're right, and it's something I've only started to realise very recently having lived in the UK my whole life (a culture is hard to understand when you've only ever experienced the world from inside it).

I suspect that HN'ers are a skewed sample set because I think there are fewer of what Hanselman calls "dark matter programmers" on HN than in the wild.

Good point, but it seems low in absolute terms as well. £37k really isn't a lot of money to live on in one of the most expensive cities in the world

Answering my own question, but this Quora thread contains some good answers:

https://www.quora.com/Why-is-the-salary-of-software-engineer...