The caveat is that he was located in Nottingham for most of the history covered in the post, so this isn't necessarily comparable to SF -- more like, say, Colorado. That said, the most recent London (edit: sorry, Remote) salary is what I'd ballpark as average in London at the moment for that sort of position. There's been significant inflation in developer salary in London over the last few years, £100k is a reasonable total compensation for someone senior today. The salaries here are absolutely lower than in the US in raw numbers but in terms of overall position relative to other earners and quality of life, it's not much different.

The biggest gulf between the UK and US is at the top end, i.e: people earning TC of 500k+ is not uncommon in SF whereas that would be quite rare here outside of the upper echelons of the big tech companies. Part of this is because stock grants are much lower here in general, but salaries are lower too.

If you were an experienced software engineer in London today looking to maximise your salary, you'd have an easy time reaching £100k and you could probably touch £150k but it would take some effort.

Hmm, I don't think you know Colorado too well. Senior level dev makes about 2-3x of OP.

I think you've missed the point. He was comparing cost of living rather than salaries.

That would make the difference bigger, though.

Sounds like the company is paying HCOL salary in a LCOL state then.

Colorado isn’t even comparable to California in terms of cost, it’s also a state that most companies pay a national salary band for since it’s not considered a high cost state.

> LCOL state

Aspen is more comparable to SF costs than Sacramento is.

Those startup salaries largely apply to remote from LCOL too though.

I (occasionally) get ads up to £600k. YMMV

Depends where he is. £90K for a remote gig is a pretty damn good dev salary by national standards. If you live somewhere cheap (outside of London and the London commuter belt, the South East, and perhaps away from a few other major city centers), you can live well on that salary.

In London? You probably won't be buying a property anytime soon, unless you have a partner with a similar salary. Single and renting? You're leading a pretty comfy bachelor life

For perspective though, £90K is almost 3x the national median full-time wage . Total taxation at this level is 32%.

Double fucked then. Lower salaries and higher taxes.

But free healthcare and education. Plus retirement benefits included

In the us you put the money you save from lower taxes into a better healthcare plan, and get some nice quality care.

In the US, we pay more than any other developed nation for health care, and get worse results than most other developed nations in return. Individual healthcare plans are grossly inefficient.

Yeah, that doesn't really work out as well as you might think.

What's the % of total employee taxation at the 3x median salary level in say, SF or NYC?

not only that. you've a bunch of smart people here - who're blind. looking at absolute numbers as if they mean something.

I worked in a mid-tier us city i.e Austin, Nashville and my take home pay is comparable to what I earn in london for the same role level. and same level of company profile. never worked at a mega tech - but have worked for well known ones.

and better yet my standard of living is higher.

90% of devs who like to talk about their salary online are in SF, and they forget that they are outliers. Even though the salary was probably a big part of why they moved there.

Pretty normal yep. If you work in things fintech and / or are super senior then salary could be much higher. Overall this looks about right.

Remember that in the UK we have access to more public services and benefits etc. Americans pay more here for better or worse eg healthcare.

Overall, I guess American engineers do better. Hard to compare is all when you factor in things like cost of living. Net pay is only one metric.

Many Americans also seem to have to overwork from a European point of view, so you earn more but at a cost most of us wouldn't tolerate. Lack of holidays, long hours etc.

Not a judgement, just contextualising the differences.

I don’t think American engineers pay more for healthcare at all. It’s almost all covered.

We pay zero is the point.

Just to give you an example, I work for a tiny software firm of 40 people and my cost for the Cadillac of health insurance is 3$ a month. Each doctor's visit is 40$ but besides that everything is covered. I make 155k USD a year.

Damn, I want your health plan. Mine is more expensive, and it sounds like not as good.

Yeah, it was one of the main reasons I signed up with my company. They don't pay the most but they care for us more than any comapny I've worked for in my life.

The point is that the average American dev takes home a lot more cash than European devs.

Whether e.g. healthcare comes out of my paycheck separately or is paid via higher taxes is just accounting.

My original point was about avoiding the reductive view of comparing one country against another solely by how much cash one takes home for a given job.

Just on healthcare, did you know your per capita spending is 2 to 3 times higher?

https://data.oecd.org/healthres/health-spending.htm

I mean by that standard we pay basically zero—employer covers the premiums.

You could argue that's still paying for it and the premium will be high compared to equivalent national insurance payments here.

Once you add public services into the equation, you should also account for the lower taxes in the us.

Sure. Overall you probably end up with more money in your pocket. I don't think many would dispute that this is an upside to living in America for an engineer. My point is that money as the sole metric is a bit pointless and reductive.

Unfortunately no; it's on the high side for the sector. In my circle only I only see 6 figures for people working in the finance sector.

The deliveroo job is on the high side but £69k for a senior software engineer in London is definitely not! It's the government though so that's not exactly surprising. I wonder if he is not mentioning an amazing pension or something.

Salaries will be slightly higher in London. A mid-level engineer at a non-tech company will earn 50-55k.

Europe has atrocious pay in general.

I happy take a pay cut to live in Europe just for the extra time off.

I wonder how much of the lower pay is tax based. Like you make less, but the company pays more in taxes for the healthcare and such that the UK provides.

Not saying this is good or bad. Just curious about the reason for the pay discrepancy.

The reason for the pay discrepancy is less that the UK is an outlier, and more that the US is an outlier. Salaries in the US for software engineers are the highest anywhere in the world: salaries in the UK are very good nowadays relative to most countries, but the US is leagues ahead of everyone.

Could be, but I don't think it's health care. Check out the OECD stats:

https://data.oecd.org/healthres/health-spending.htm

The US in total pays $12318 dollars per capita in health care. In the UK, it's $5387 per per capita. The US's supposedly more efficient market-based system turns out to be wildly more expensive than any other country.

Yes this is normal for UK. It's high compared to other parts of EU where senior dev jobs earn like $50K EUR per year. I don't know why people even bother to become developers over there... And yes, there are really talented developers there; often more talented than in the US or other places based on my experience. You can probably earn more money and have better career prospects by being a janitor in the EU.

Surprise! There is no free market. We live in a global crony-communist system which decides how much money people get paid from the top down starting with US shareholders and executives at the top of the social pyramid. All based on military coercion, wars and foreign debt traps. You can thank your military-industrial complex.

Senior devs can do a lot better than 50k in Europe (I'm at 150k myself). But you have to push harder, and it helps if you're in Norway or Switzerland.

Ah yes Switzerland salaries are much higher... But costs of living are too. I remember everything in grocery stores cost almost twice as much as they did in Germany.

It's actually quite typical, when you move to places where costs of living are higher, salaries are higher too. You may still struggle to save anything. What you do manage to save can represent a lot of value, but only if you end up selling everything and relocating to a different, cheaper country/city later. I wish I had seen the global scheme sooner.

Same here. I would've stayed in northern California and emigrated _after_ saving a good chunk of change, especially since I grew up there. Oh well.

I live in Denmark, an entry level wage for a junior developer averages around 65K-75K EUR per year here depending on which part of the country you are in.

Cost of living is crazy high in Denmark though right? How does that €65-75k compare with the actual cost of living out of curiosity? ( Eg. rent, groceries, leisure activities etc..)

From my own experience being single with that wage range I would say it was enough that i didn't have to think about how much money I used on everyday activities while still having something left over to add to my savings. Not enough to like travel all the time or buying crazy luxury items, but enough that money wasn't something I had to think about.

It's obviously difficult to try to compare actual numbers, but I think I had 5-10K DKK (670-1340 EUR) in surplus at the end of every month at that time. Obviously things are different when you have a partner and/or kids - or you might just get less lucky with how cheap you can rent or buy an apartment.

That's only in elite circles for certain connected individuals. You can also make that or higher in London in finance sector but you need special credentials (IR35) to get that and it's very hard to get for certain people.

In the real market, in the local job boards, it's hard to find anything above $50K USD. There is a dual class system in EU. The upper class get certain salaries and everybody else (which includes immigrants and unconnected individuals) get totally different salaries for the exact same work.

What a load of BS. My numbers are from the wage statistics my union (IDA) publishes. This isn't some elite circle, these are real numbers collected from their 10's of thousands of members. For example (note numbers are monthly wage in DKK): https://imgur.com/a/7obnU8p

You realize not every one of the 2.5 million developers in the US work in SF don’t you? Most work at banks, insurance companies, government across the US.

Sure, but getting a SV job living in a LCOL is easier than ever with the prevalence of remote work. The numbers I have seen are for series B startups, not FAANG companies.

Also, I've worked at a bank before as a software developer and made basically the same range.

At a FAANG you can get ~£200k per year in London at a Senior level. Deliveroo doesn't pay particularly well (even though it's meant to be a competitor to Doordash which afaik does pay well). The Cabinet Office is a governmental agency and I would say it pays pretty poorly for London, but you'd probably find the same in the US.

You can get a better sense of the salaries in the UK via https://www.levels.fyi/t/software-engineer/locations/london-...

Salaries in London != Salaries in the UK.

Deliveroo doesn't pay well in London either.

Keep in mind the exchange rate fluctuation makes the comparison between US and UK salaries harder to reason about. The british pound recently dropped as low as $1.07, but was $1.40 less than 2 years ago, was $1.70 in 2014 and was above $2.00 in 2007.

Thank you for outlining the dumpster fire that is the British Pound.

Bay area engineers tend to make much more money than in most places. The cost of living is also much higher, so it all kinda evens out. You can't really judge the value of a salary based on just the number.