£60k is the lower end of senior outside of London. It's not surprising at all.

£60k in a company that's making more than £1m per employee though, that's definitely "Fuck this" territory.

The profitability of the company that you work for should have absolutely no impact on your salary if it's not making a profit. Do not accept less money for the value you generate just because the company can't sell it at a good price that makes a healthy profit. Your earning potential is not dictated by someone else's ability to sell.

To be honest, the wages are quite low compared to other tech centres. As someone in the UK I'd definitely like them to be higher.

I'd be surprised if even 1% of the devs in the UK are contractors in London.

I’m a manager at a consulting company in France. My total comp is a bit shy of €70k which looks ridiculous next to an American but you have to factor in that I have a full medical coverage, access to free education for my family, unemployment insurance and retirement benefits plus a wide array of perks on top of that.

From having experience with both, that’s simply untrue.

First, education here is free - technically university is a couple euros if you are rich enough but free-adjacent - at all level. Medical coverage is not tied to your job and covers everything properly including chronic disease, heavy procedure and potential long-term inability to work. Unemployment last two years and fully covers your salary for the first six months.

You will win a lot more in the US if you work in IT because the salaries are incredibly high in the US but for anything else I would stay in Europe. Well, I would even stay in Europe for IT personally because I hate the US culture but that’s another story.

In my understanding, when you consider total wages and benefits, it’s not only IT professionals that are better off than in Europe, it’s at least everyone above median income. The class of people who’d probably be better off in Europe are low skill, low wage working class people: US welfare system is much less generous towards them, especially compared to people who don’t actually work at all.

I'm not knowledgeable enough about the UK job market, but across the North Sea, in Denmark, you can still more or less pick and choose, there are tons of companies lacking developers and operations people. Not as many as last year, but still more than enough that you don't have to fear unemployment.