Yeah, the serious money's in contracting in London. You can make anywhere from 400-600 per day.

Get yourself a solid year long stint somewhere & the pay will be £100k - £150k

If you contract in an Investment Bank in London, those day rates would be on the low side.

True. Got a friend who basically works as a contractor CTO. His day rate is around 2k. Which is insane.

Yeah. Programme managers can get around £1k+/day.

A good dev would be £700/day and up, depending on experience, business line, hotness of their tech skills etc.

Just curious: That seems disproportionately low compared to US salaries. Is cost of living proportionately lower in Scotland?

The cost of living where I live in Scotland is pretty small (IMO).

I make around £40k as a developer with 11 years experience, which seems about average for my city.

My total cost of living each month is around £930. That includes my mortgage.

The company where I was working before I made ~£29k as developer, some people in that company were on as low as £21k. The average was probably around £25k.

Contracting rates can be good, I regularly get calls about contracting jobs from recruiters with rates around £400-£450 a day for a 6 month contract. But then you have the hassle of looking for a new contract every 6 months or so. That hassle is just not worth it for me.

I get emails each day from a job place with jobs. Today the jobs are

C# .net developer - £30k - £45k

C# software developer - £28k - £35k

Senior python developer - £65k

PHP Developer - £35k - £42k

.NET Developer -£38,000 DOE

.NET full stack developer - £35 - £50k

Java Developer - Upto £65k

Javascript Developer - £30-£40k

These are all for positions with many years experience. I don't know where people are seeing £100k a year salaries?

Salaries that have been <£40k for the past few are starting to look really abysmal. UK inflation is currently 3.1%. In England we have above-inflation rail fare increases, inflated rents that keep going up, potentially 5.99%/year council tax rises and not to mention utility bills and food.

The effect of price rises (council tax, travel, utilities, rent etc) combined with your salary remaining stagnant is nothing short of devastating over a period of 10-20 years.

Companies pretending that inflation doesn't exists probably contributes quite a bit to job hopping

lower, but not proportionately lower

Edinburgh vs. SF (~1.8x) :

https://www.numbeo.com/cost-of-living/compare_cities.jsp?cou...

Edinburgh vs. Seattle (~1.3x) :

https://www.numbeo.com/cost-of-living/compare_cities.jsp?cou...

Yes, yes it is. Unless it's Edinburgh in August due to the Fringe festival, where rents go past London levels.

Wow, that's shockingly low :(

European tech salaries are famously lower than US salaries.

Southern Europe is even worse. I was offered a role of Senior/Lead engineer (with over 10 years exp) for "maximum salary of 45k Euro". And was told by their recruiter that this is considered high for Spain.

I know, I live and work in UK and still the up to £50k in the company like Amazon sounds dirt low, I know devs working for DailyMail (!!) for ~£90k

£90k for a dev job isn't that low, even in London. Unless it's very senior, you'll be paid more than in most other sectors (probably same as in finance).

I'd need to be paid a lot more than that to work for them.

If you set aside the slow erosion of human decency that is the Daily Mail, their tech stack is very impressive.

From an engineering point of view they kill it, they're one of the most visited sites in the world.

https://www.alexa.com/siteinfo/dailymail.co.uk

Really depends on the location within Spain like other Euro countries like the UK. In Barcelona or Madrid a Lead engineer at the right firm will be hitting around 100-110k euros.