And most who stayed at one job haven't gotten any significant salary increases unless they job hopped often which brings it's own problems later in ones career.
Edit: Had a quick look at jobs in Munich and curious where those high salaries are as 80k for senior positions on 40+h/week seem like a joke to me considering how expensive it is to live there and how high taxes are.
80K€ in Munich is a good salary, considering that you don’t have to pay for private healthcare (in the UK you have to), education is free (in the UK it costs a fortune, either in private school fees or in housing premia) and rents are much much lower than in London (for equivalent properties).
Taxes are higher in Germany, but not extremely so if you account for child deductions and family support. A family of 2 in London making 80K per annum, will spend ~20K to send a child to a random nursery, 5-6K£ in healthcare and 2K£ in public transport (just to name the first 3 thing that come to mind), and will be much poorer than a German family making 50K€ per annum.
A lot of employers in the UK offer additional health insurance as a benefit, but that’s on top of - not instead of - what the NHS offers you.
Just to give a practical example, you can go through an entire pregnancy without ever seeing an NHS gynaecologist (I know because it’s my experience), and if you go to private doctors, which you should, 3 visits plus some ultrasound scans and tests may cost in excess of 3000£. Also GPs have a tendency to prescribe (random) medicines without referring patients to specialists, which is simply not civilised, and so you end up going to a private doctor and paying 2-300£ per visit.
A family of 3 can easily spend 5-6K£ per annum in healthcare, especially during the first years of the child.
It's definitely not the same as the German system for example where every minor issue gets a million tests and multiple specialists, but usually that isn't needed. If you feel you need that and want to spend thousands on private appointments with specialists it is not going to be a good system for you. FWIW I've never ever heard of anyone that hasn't had loads of ultrascans in pregnancy. That is not normal at all.
Which means that the quality of service is worse than other countries, where you don't have to "play" the system or become friend with a GP to get referrals. Again, not my problem, I can use private healthcare, but this is not civilized.
> It's definitely not the same as the German system for example where every minor issue gets a million tests and multiple specialists, but usually that isn't needed. If you feel you need that and want to spend thousands on private appointments with specialists it is not going to be a good system for you.
As I said, it's not the same as the German or the Italian system, it is evidently inferior. I don't feel I need to spend thousands of pounds in appointments (I don't, my insurance pays), I feel I need to get a western European healthcare service (which, again, I get through my insurance), and I'm forced to go private because the NHS is not good enough. The point is that a German (or a French or an Italian) gets that for free and a Briton has to pay thousands of pounds for the same level of service.
> FWIW I've never ever heard of anyone that hasn't had loads of ultrascans in pregnancy. That is not normal at all.
I wrote "you can go through an entire pregnancy without ever seeing an NHS gynaecologist", not that you don't get scans. By the way, you do get 2 scans from the NHS, not loads. You get to see lots of midwives, which are not doctors, and lot of doulas, whatever they are, but unless somebody who is not a doctor thinks you need to see a gynaecologist, you don't get to see one, which is not civilized.
This is just not true. Senior dev at non FAANG could well add 50% to those numbers.
While everybody I know who rented in London had to deal with mice or bed-bugs (and I don’t fully understand what these are, because before coming to London I never heard of them), at least those on low income, I don’t know of any other place where this is even remotely true.
To get what in the continent would be a normal flat, you need to aim at what the locals may call “luxury apartments”. And still, if it wasn’t built after 2010, you’d still have to deal with rotten sash windows, no escalator and other crazy stuff I’ve never seen before.
If you make less than 40K£ in London, you are likely to experience a form of poverty that is unseen in the continent (pests in your flat, revenge evictions, very very bad healthcare, etc…). Outside of London, salaries are ridiculously low.