The founder may not want to pay their engineer more (the founder doesn't even recognise the engineer's tie, for a start) but there are only so many competent people so if you want one you just have to put your hand in your pocket even if you don't like it.

I absolutely cry when I see people looking at £28k starting salaries in the UK. People don't know how bad they have it compared to what they could be getting. They should take remote jobs with Canadian or American companies and forget about British companies, I'm afraid.

I suspect this is because they consider the work that an engineer does as auxiliary in nature and that Taylorist presumptions can be applied to them (modern day factory workers).

I have an anecdote that somewhat fits your point. An old colleague of mine told me he was alone in the office one night, working away at something when the director of the program walks in and sort of surveys the open plan office and empty desks. He walks around and starts talking – ostensibly to the colleague but possibly to himself – about Henry Ford and the assembly line. He made the point that he was some sort of modern day Ford and that these desks were his assembly line.

It really motivated my colleague to avoid working unpaid overtime, so something good came out of it at least.

I'll answer from the perspective of another European country(Germany):

Because all companies artificially cap salaries through a silent "gentlemen's agreement" where execs refuse to believe that a working class simpleton such a software engineer can be worth more than X amount of money no matter how badly they need to hire one.

There is not much in therms of competition when they all do this.

Sure, there's tons of opportunities if you're looking for a job, but when they all cap their salaries, the so called competition for talent means nothing in the end.

The EU market is super fragmented due to differences in language, culture, income and regulations so it would be nearly impossible to successfully scale a service made for Swedish consumers to the Italians for example. As another example, the Norwegians only pay with card while the Austrians only pay in cash.

That's why almost every EU country/region has it's own local website for jobs, classifieds, real estate, etc. All this fragmentation coupled with the lack of risk friendly VC funding means there's no chance for big players the size of FAANG to rise up from Europe.

When ambitions software companies from Europe have a good idea and want to grow fast, they just launch directly in the US market, ignoring the EU for the beginning. It's simply a much easier and profitable market.

Aral Balkan made a compelling argument at the EU parliament:

"You are acting as an unpaid Research and Development department for silicon valley. Because if a startup here succeeds, it gets bought by Google or Facebook. If it fails, we pick up the bill."

https://video.lqdn.fr/videos/watch/861c07f7-7e9b-4e64-9765-c...

Another variant I've observed is launching in the EU first, hiring locally at low cost but also having low profits. Then once the idea is validated, the move to US (sometimes literally moving the company headquarters) seems obvious.

Booking.com did it very well, but of course the audience for that is intrinsically mobile and cross-border.

It might sound crazy, but if a company is struggling to fill a position, offering a higher salary just never seems to enter the conversation. Instead you'll talk about working with a different recruitment firm, reformulating the job advert, trying to tap existing staff through a referral scheme, etc.

The only time I've seen salary seriously in the mix is when companies are going after a known individual who can make demands based on proven exceptional talent, or when looking for candidates with extremely niche skills.

Get in contact with your local friendly tech recruiter and he'll ask about your experience and salary expectations. And when a recruitment firm is engaged, salary bands are communicated, though they're not often advertised. The recruitment firm (who employs your recruiter) is the matchmaker.

And if you're in a position to hire, you'll get lots of spam from recruiters, directly advertising candidates & CVs along with their salary expectations - it's unusual not to get a salary expectation in a cold approach from a recruiter.

Ground worker is what would have been called navvies

These are typically US or NA only remote

And the ones that aren’t pay “local” salaries

In the end, it’s a country that still has an official aristocracy. There is a reason for that.

Errr, isn't all of the West structured like that?

You're either the wealthy upper class who own the capital, land and means of production, or the middle class, responsible for keeping the upper class wealthy and in power(finance/law/consulting/politics) or the lower class, performing the basic services for the other two classes(building, cleaning, security, etc.)

AFAIK, that's how it works in most places on the planet including Europe and the US and it has been like that since a long time just that now the upper class has better PR.

And the opportunity to bridge through that income inequality (social mobility) is pretty low. France and a lot of Continental/EU Europe is far more equalitarian, better social system.

That's not the count of rough sleepers, though, that's more like 5000 to 8000.

(Also, IMO, what London has even more than income inequality is wealth inequality. House price appreciation has really added to it; it's not unusual to have little old ladies who are property millionaires, but their houses are decrepit piles of junk and they have no money to do them up. The housing stock is generally in dreadful shape, nowhere commensurate with the value of the land it's sitting on. Large sections of the capital are like this; decrepit, but very expensive.)

No, at least not all of it, not all of the time, and not as markedly, as you see in the UK.

The fact that you can not conceive this is possible, is telling in itself.

But I grew up and lived in several other Northern European countries where there is mostly just a huge middle class. Sure, some differences between upper-middle and lower-middle. But not a lot, and they can live side by side, go to the same school etc.

There are the odd billionaires, big estate heirs and royals i.e. classic upper-class but very few and they don't own everything. And they might also live near you, their kids might go to your normal public school etc. And then there are some unfortunate that could be classed as in a lower class but that is very few, and not everywhere, mostly just in the big cities. Mostly recent immigrants that do the jobs no-one else wants to do. They quickly get swallowed up by the middle class once settled.

Unless I was very sheltered that seems to be the case for most countries in Northern Europe apart from the UK?

Malnutrition! And Tower Hamlets is of course a 5 min walk to the very core of the City of London.

* lawyers * consultants * ad execs * dentists

Huge contrast with SF, where I work now. Here in SF engineers are comfortably near the top of the professional class and have the social capital to move into careers in investing/management/exec in the right circumstances. This is also reflected in compensation.

There are lots of things broken about SF as well of course, but along this axis at least it's a much nicer place to be an engineer!

I could be surrounded by the wrong class of people, obviously.

(I do, however, have 9 good years in the industry at the age of 28; so usually act quite confidently)

In the UK it's the humanities students who run the show and get the real money.

As a concrete example - I think basic new grads at Linklaters, a pretty pedestrian, non-sexy law firm doing boring routine corporate stuff, not Google-style super-stars, get £83k https://www.legalcheek.com/2018/10/linklaters-bumps-junior-l.... That's an open application, not something targeted at particularly talented specific people.

I think that's more than even Google new-grad pay in London. Google! The highest of the high tier international tech companies. How does it compare to what you see engineer new-grads getting?

And it's very weird to call Linklaters "a pretty pedestrian, non-sexy law firm doing boring routine corporate stuff". They're in the Magic Circle, which is the British legal equivalent of FAANG. Their new grad roles will be just as competitive as Google's, if not more so. That the work their grads will do will be more boring seems like a reason for them to pay more, not less (not to mention the difference in number of hours).

Are you sure you're not just falling into tech chauvinism here? According to LinkedIn https://www.linkedin.com/company/linklaters/people/ people who work for that firm largely went to Oxford, Cambridge, and LSE. All you're pointing out is that white shoe law firms that hire from the top-tier universities in the country pay their associates extremely well, even as they do work you consider boring and unsexy.

It's the same thing as a FAANG job: any rando can apply but they're gonna get screened out before the first stage.

Outside magic circle et al, salaries are lower and hours are more normal.

Also, before they become a grad but after university they spend 2 years doing what’s known as a “training contract” while they do their professional quals. and the pay is much lower during this time. Graduate in law is after this period.

So what kind of professions, and how many years of experience, get £1m+ bonuses (if you happen to know)? AFAIK the only example that I'm aware is traders and/or high-level investment bankers (Director+ level)...

Conversely, when I’m in SF I do feel a bit anxious about saying what I do - when I’m talking to people who aren’t in tech - due to the inequality/negative image of techies.

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

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.

I'm not sure big tech and finance are representative of London.

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 :)

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.

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.

edit: ah, those stats are based on advertised salaries, not actual salaries after the bait and switch - so they're all inflated.

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.

Look at Canary Wharf at lunchtime and tell me with a straight face that those are developers.

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.

I’d suspect 20% of my engineering colleagues make in excess of £150k a year.

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.

I often see cash compensation >300k on there.

Here's one for precisely 150k right now https://oxfordknight.co.uk/jobs/big-data-engineer/.

These aren’t junior jobs, and they often require you to be in central London so your money won’t go as far, but these jobs do exist.

> 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.

Where might a developer find a better overall mix of compensation and quality of life, without this pronounced social divide, if the US is not an option?

You think it's that rather than, say, the continuous fall in per capita funding for police over the last decade?

You nailed this right on its head.