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Comment by Toenex | Hacker News Reader

For comparison, what do Google et. al. pay in the UK?

I work in a small medtech in Manchester UK (like a scaled down Boston!) and simply currency adjusting these numbers would make for attractive offers here. For example I've a PhD in computer vision, 20 years building and selling medical device approved imaging software in the EU & US and have yet to be offered anything close to $100K (yes dollars) and options that would impact on anything I do. I'm good at what I do too. I just think the UK investment attitude is totally different.

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If you have a PhD AND 20 years of job experience, I am sorry to say you are doing something really wrong if your base salary has not crossed the six figure mark. Maybe companies in the UK don't pay as much as those in the US; I wouldn't know. If that is the case though, I would suggest that you work in the US for a few years and maybe move back and try to negotiate a better offer. Having EU/UK citizenship makes it much easier for you to work in the US and I would implore you to make the most use of it.

The starting salary for a new graduate in the UK is probably in the range of £25-£33k, unless you're really lucky and do something like investment banking which is about half of what comparably qualified grads make in the US.

On the other hand, there are additional things that are paid for because of various legal differences between the the UK and the US (such as paid maternity leave, paid sick leave, and employers have to pay a tax for each employee called National Insurance which effectively funds the state pension system). The law also gives all employees 5.5 weeks of holiday (though there often some restrictions on when it can be taken).

We do have a paid maternity and sick leave in the US (well, at least in the tech companies. In my current company (IBM), we even have paid paternity leave). How expensive is the National Insurance tax? I can't imagine it being much more expensive than what my company pays for health insurance for its employees (although perhaps I'm wrong here).

> The starting salary for a new graduate in the UK is probably in the range of £25-£33k,

Are you talking about starting developer salary? That seems really really low! Why wouldn't UK devs simply relocate to the US where they could make a lot more right away?

Apologies, I don't mean to pontificate...it just befuddles me why a UK developer wouldn't want to move, if only for a little while.

Sure. How much are employer health plans in the US? Employer NI is 13% of the salary over £152 per week, so for an employee on £25000 per year, the employer has to fork out about another £2000 on top.

Almost all companies have a pension scheme too which are usually something like matched contributions - the employee contributes X% of their salary, and the employer contributes an additional X% of their salary up to some threshold (usually 5-10%).

Starting salary for any graduate job is about that in the UK, and most of Europe too. I suppose that the cost of upping and moving is significant enough to put people off. Plus, the difficulty in getting a visa is likely a major factor.

Not sure about Google but other large/well-known tech firms seem to pay their UK engineers on par with their US ones based on speaking to my UK friends who work for SF-based tech companies.

I hear contracting for day rates in London is the route to ££ in the tech field over there (or working for a US-based company), but the salaries/equity on offer in the US even for non-rockstar positions dwarf what UK employers are able or willing to provide.

The UK massively undervalues and under-compensates its technical talent, it's a big part of why I left the country.

On top of other things, it's worth noting that the exchange rate has shifted a lot over the last few years. $100k would have been about £58k in 2014, but now is about £83k.

Manchester here too, though I work remotely for a mainly London based company. I think salaries are climbing here, as more business comes but we don't have the same size talent pool as London so the demand is pushing things up.

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