It's fairly easy to be on £60k outside of London with a few years of experience. Moving up north towards the Midlands or even further like Manchester or Leeds and you're going to live a very comfortable life on a Software Developer salary.
Yeah, it's not the US where people are on £200k at 25. But earning £60k in your 20s puts you so far ahead of almost everyone else in their 20s in the UK.
Yeah, but that is the point isn't it - in the US and some other countries you have the potential to earn a few hundred K per annum. That sort of money just isn't available to software people here. In fact you're more likely to be offered around £50k for a 'senior' role somewhere.
IMHO it's partly because here in the UK we don't really regard software engineers as skilled professionals, most management structures seem to treat us as generic office folks, and unruly, childlike ones at that.
Many US developers are overpaid. That's the reality. The pay floor has been shifted too high and so the ceiling is even higher. We mustn't kid ourselves, the skill floor in software development is relatively low. Why should a graduate front end developer get paid 6 figures? There's some good ones that deserve it, but there's also some really shit ones who will never learn and grow as a professional.
I've worked with good graduates and I've worked with shit graduates. The good ones get rewarded. The unskilled ones who don't learn, don't. I think that's fine. 6 figures for entry level grunt work is just an unreasonable amount of money and the only reason the US gets away with it is because of the pay floor.
Woo, £80K, for people in the top 2-5% of the game (going by salary distribution). Such rewards. Just don't look over the pond...
> If you want to be earning £200-300k then set up your own company. Almost no one is going to be employed by someone else on that money.
And that's part of the problem right there. In the US you can aspire to getting salaries in those sorts of ranges, one day, if you're good at what you do and make good choices.
> 6 figures for entry level grunt work is just an unreasonable amount of money
Sure it is! But unless you either strike out on your own as a contractor (which I have) or leave software behind and go into management/consulting/whatever, six figures is effectively unattainable at all.
I'm not disputing there are a lot of really not-that-great software people around, or claiming we should just hand a bag of gold to every new grad. But there is vanishingly little in the high end for the better people to aspire to. Which is why people either transition to management, go independent or just plain leave.
I'm not sure of your point. Become one of the top 5% of skilled workers and earn in the 95+ percentile. If you want money that's comparable to over the pond then go over the pond.
>And that's part of the problem right there. In the US you can aspire to getting salaries in those sorts of ranges, one day, if you're good at what you do and make good choices.
I don't think you realise how much money the average person in the UK earns, or even what the average american earns. Become an average developer making 50k and you're in the top 15% of earners in the country. That's a lot of money!
Just because the US has higher tech salaries doesn't mean you can't aspire to be a higher earner in the UK. Anyone who sees a £60-80k salary here and scoffs at it has unrealistic expectations.
Yeah, if you want to stay as a developer and not transition into a hands off management role then your earning potential will flatline pretty quickly. But I think that's just the nature of tech jobs in the UK, we don't have the high tech start ups that the US has. It's not like you can become an expert in creating distributed storage engines and have 10 companies knocking at your door here like you can in the US. There's not many companies outside of FAANG where expert software development knowledge is actually applicable and so the job market is less competitive.
I'm well aware thanks, I've looked up the numbers.
> Become an average developer making 50k and you're in the top 15% of earners in the country. That's a lot of money!
Not really, and certainly not in the context of this conversation, if you head back up to the very top of the thread - "The massive gap between UK and US gamedev salaries seems to keep getting larger"
(FYI average dev compensation is under £40k)
> Anyone who sees a £60-80k salary here and scoffs at it has unrealistic expectations
> if you want to stay as a developer and not transition into a hands off management role then your earning potential will flatline pretty quickly
> I think that's just the nature of tech jobs in the UK
All of this is precisely the problem I'm describing, that realistic expectations in the UK are pretty poor in comparison to what you can make elsewhere, in other English-speaking nations. The nature of salaried tech jobs in the UK makes them relatively unappealing. So the most motivated people either go contracting, where they can make 3 times that if they do it well but companies don't really get to build sustainable teams, or they just plain leave the country in droves. Meanwhile British industry complains it can't find skilled people to work for it. There is a systemic problem with poor rewards and poor results in the UK in this area.
So to come back to this -
> I'm not sure of your point.
The point is that your earning potential as an employed software developer in the UK is severely curtailed compared to the US and some other markets, to the extent that it causes industry problems.
/cries in Cambridge, Oxford, Bristol...
UK perm roles looking for the sort of experience I have tend to pay somewhere in the region of 33%-50% of what I can make as a contractor. Even in London perm, roles almost never break six figures AFAICT.
And in a post-Covid world, 'being in/near London' may not be able to increase your earning potential in the way it usually has done.
I've basically never seen a perm software role come up that pays six figures.