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A comment on Agony of an African programmer. Parent comment

Re:Agony of an African programmer by mattmanser on Sunday April 06, 2014 @05:52PM (#7543206)
UK, outside of London the average salary is roughly £40k for an experienced programmer ($66k). It does seem to be climbing rapidly though, 3 years ago £35k was more the avg, now I'm getting recruiter emails claiming up to £45k.

So unsurprisingly it's just a sliding scale depending on your local GDP, there's not some universal pay grade.

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Re:Agony of an African programmer by lgleason on Monday April 07, 2014 @01:55AM (#7544854)
Which languages? From what I understand you could earn that in South Africa and have a much better standard of living. Given the cost of things in the UK that is crazy....
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Re:Agony of an African programmer by mattmanser on Monday April 07, 2014 @05:48AM (#7545533)
All of them.

I think part of the problem is class, there's a psychological barrier in the UK that employees shouldn't earn more than managers.

The other part of the lower pay is that we had a lot more people dabble with development in our school system in the 80s/90s because of the BBC programs and the Micro/Archimedes in schools which means we started running short of developers a lot later than other countries.

Both of those are speculation, but that's my belief.

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Re:Agony of an African programmer by thisone on Monday April 07, 2014 @06:57AM (#7545735)
I've seen c#, Ruby, and the odd PhP with a decent salary up North.

C and C++ also has a calling up here, but more specialized to the particular company (think Ubisoft).

Recently saw a posting for a Linux kernel dev.

I haven't really seen calling for more niche languages, but I'm also only looking at the postings that come into my email.

Re the comment about management salary, I have been given that as a reason during salary negotiation as to why they can't pay what I'm asking.

The salaries I've been seeing have risen quite a bit in the past 2 years (after dropping suddenly, recession and all).

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