Out of curiosity what career path did you choose? And where is here if I may ask?

Finance in the UK

How can it be that engineers are poorly paid in the UK? From some googling it seems like the average is £62,500. That tells me the upper tier is probably around £80-100k, which is not too bad. Lower than Silicon Valley salaries, but surely living costs in the UK are also significantly lower if you live a bit outside of London?

£62k is not very far from entry level in finance, and as you become more senior you would typically earn 2-3x that. Outside of software engineering, I don’t think things have changed that much.

Part of me thinks that if engineering was offering better careers, we would have flying cars now. But I also see it as a market and if engineers aren’t paid that much, it is probably because there isn’t a supply shortage. For software developers, there is a supply shortage (as every company is becoming a software company) and it translates into higher wages.

"Part of me thinks that if engineering was offering better careers, we would have flying cars now."

> I was thinking something along those lines, we've had an entire generation of smart people go into finance and create financial innovation that led to 2008 (amongst other, potentially positive, things).

Glassdoor gives the following salary numbers for Google: London: £65000 (=$83.7k) Mountain View (CA): $145000

Both seem a little low; I'd expect a mid-level in London to be >£75k (~$100k). Less sure on the US salary; maybe >$155k? Neither include equity, but I imagine they scale pretty similarly.

So a London dev at Google is looking at a loss of $70k per year compared to their SV colleague.

London isn't cheap. It may not be NYC or Bay Area levels, but you can't really escape it by commuting in. You're going to be competing with everybody else trying to do that and knocking £5-6k off your post-tax income, so I don't think it really comes out as "cheaper" to try that. I was estimating needing ~£1000 per month as basic living costs (rent + public transport, but not food) in shared accommodation when I was looking to move there (in the end I didn't, but not because of anything I've said here).

Edit: Fix bad maths in comparison

I think your looking at software engineering roles, not traditional engineering roles.

Traditional engineer roles pay far less, think £40k in London.

As an American that just immigrated and graduated Uni this is really disheartening. I was planning on going into SWE in London. Is finance the better option? The market seems to be hot for developers.

Long term career in mind, finance is not necessarily the better. In the UK it's the last post-colonial metropol advantage it has, but it also will gradually evaporate due to Brexit, anti-corruption legislation and eventual introduction of rule of law in the 3rd world.

The City has one of, if not the world's greatest concentration of finance brainpower and capital, and has survived through hundreds of years of global turmoil as one of the world's leading financial centres. Do you really think these vested interests will just give up that lead and move elsewhere?

It became global leading when it happened to be the navel of the nascent Empire. With reducing global relevance of the United Kingdom and improvements in conditions for finance elsewhere there are fewer reasons for capital flows to be managed there.

Still may take a while and one may well live a fulfilling career in meantime, just saying it's far from a sure bet. Capital is not terribly sentimental.

No skin off my nose either way - I'd be quite happy to see house prices fall, which is one of the likely consequences.

There was a great concentration of brainpower and capital from the industrial revolution, from the age of sail, and from the victorian era.

That hasn't lead to the UK being a leader in railway construction or shipbuilding - despite the vested interests.

The unions bear a large part of the blame for destroying British industry.

Relying on what happened in the past as a metric for the future might be the slippery slope fallacy..

Yes, and the death of the UK and London has been predicted over and over, and yet somehow they continue to flourish...

Finance in London does pay well, but there are plenty of engineering opportunities as well.

I would say that UK junior and mid engineer roles are in general worse-paid than in the USA, but senior roles are competitive. Getting a big salary straight out of uni is not something I've seen over here but you hear about it in California.

If you're in London you have the benefit of a pretty thriving tech scene. If you want to look further afield then Bristol, Manchester, and Edinburgh seem to have a lot going on as well, and lower living costs.

Top tier tech is competitive with finance in London (FB/goog/DM/palantir/apple) and probably less work than equivalent technical finance roles (Jane Street, 2sigma, GR etc). But things if you're in the top 20% of your cohort in finance the money gets sillier much faster as I understand it. Non-technical finance roles seem to pay barely minimum wage when you divide by the hours for the first few years.

Yeah that was a decision made 20 years ago. I think developers can make similar salaries as people in finance (outside of a few hedge funds), particularly if you do contracting. Plus after the financial crisis, finance is a smaller club. But for other areas of engineering, I don’t think I would take a different decision now.

You can go into software engineering within finance.