> commodities are more expensive than in the US

Eating food that doesn't make you very sick in the US is very expensive. It is very much not as simple as you state here.

Staples in the US are very cheap and many older generations ate them into old age. The real risk is eating at restaurants and eating snacks that didn't exist 50 years ago.

Many older generations smoked into old age. This doesn't mean that smoking doesn't make you very sick.

Most food in the US doesn't make you very sick. And food that doesn't make you sick is not very expensive.

100k USD is “only” 76k GBP, which is high but not peak especially somewhere like London.

You’d take home ~70k$ of that 100k.

I was talking about Europe in general here.

And ... I would argue that living, working and thriving in London as software engineer with a salary north of 75k GBP is, in fact, a peak of one's career, hence my argument still stands..

London salaries are such a mystery. I still have no idea what the high range of salaries is, or how difficult it is to get there.

Haven't seen the "London salary" in real life. All I get is recruitment spam from co.uk addresses: "contract position 300 GBP per day, 3 months contract onsite, we don't care how you relocate". Daily commute and hotel alone are 150-200 GBP per day in Londongrad. Bugger off mate.

...and I've received another one just after this post. HN you evil feckers.

300k GBP/yr TC is pretty normal with some years of experience.

How to get there? As always it’s more about your networking ability than specific technical skills.

This what I mean by mystery... some people drop insane numbers like £300k which is way above stuff that you see on levels.fyi - https://www.levels.fyi/Salaries/Software-Engineer/London/ and those levels.fyi salaries are already skewed because they overrepresent the bigger tech companies. Then I go on the market and anything above £90k seems almost impossible.

Yeah well, if your job searching is limited to submitting online applications as opposed to going out and interacting with people it makes sense that your opportunities will be limited.

The best paid people I know have those jobs because they chatted up some random person outside a restaurant, at the airport, on the plane or at some event like Serpentine gallery’s “future contemporaries”.

London of all places is full of ludicrously good networking opportunities. Anyone with basic social skills who can create websites can hustle their way into an Annabel’s membership.

The people who actually put in some real effort will land those jobs, often regardless of their actual skills.

I’m an eastern European tech worker from a poor family that deliberately forced my way into situations where I’d be surrounded by the rich and powerful. After a few years most of my friends were such people, after a few more I found myself married to the daughter of a billionaire.

A lot of tech people just don’t understand is that this kind of bullshit is exactly how you win. People working in finance or law mostly seem to ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

One might as well waste their time, health, and money on 5 GBP per pint of ale and receive offers for free labor on someone's brilliant blockchain concept. In other words there are no billionaires on Tinder while many pose as such.

> I’m an eastern European tech worker

> I found myself married to the daughter of a billionaire.

dude, you don't exist

> In other words there are no billionaires on Tinder while many pose as such.

No, but there sure are a plenty having lunch at LPM, dinner at Coya or Zuma.

> dude, you don't exist

I think this is something you’ll only hear from people who have never put in the slightest effort to infiltrate such circles.

Turns out that being the guy that bullshitted your way in automatically makes you the most interesting person in the room.

Your story deserves a movie with Leonardo DiCaprio in it.

Those movies are only exciting because they tend to involve somewhat unusual criminals.

I’m just a regular gold digger, just like ~30% of the people in my post code.

They already made this movie, except it was about a Russian girl trying to pretend to be a (already rich) billionaire, not meet them

levels.fyi looks accurate to me - £300k is not completely unheard of but still far from normal.

That said theres a weird schism between finance and everything else in London. Whats normal for finance isnt normal elsewhere and finance is often a bit insular.