The safety net argument has no legs. Australia and Canada both have social benefits that far exceed the majority of EU nations, yet pre-pandemic there was no shortage of $150k+ dev roles.
Zurich is.
> And I have colleagues who make £450k+
Just as there are American devs pocketing 7 figures annually. Again, the number of European devs making >$100k is a fraction of a percent. You can be making $100k in the US after a 6 month bootcamp or in AU/CA with a couple of years experience.
I doubt that $100k is the 99th percentile for London developers, maybe it is for European in general.
I promise you, the market for developers does not top out at anywhere near $100k.
That's closer to a starting salary (assuming a university degree).
London finance attracts a crowd that I had very little in common with. To be honest I only interviewed to see what it was like. It wasn't for me.
Mainly worked with high traffic Ruby apps but also done production C and Rust. Side interests in VMs and compilers.
These positions exist if you're good, experienced and most of all, not a complete asshole.
The baseline is decently middle class with a solid safety net but there's a lot more room at the top than you're making out IMHO.
As always, to make cash as a "working" dev you have to get as close as you can to a gigantic money funnel of some sort. The main difference from the U.S. is that there are fewer and different money fountains, especially missing unicorn and VC money. Finance, FAANG outposts and doing specialised things for huge real-economy companies still pay well.