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Comment by cosmodisk | Hacker News Reader

I'm not saying that all the development jobs should be $250K no matter the location, but some leveling is long overdue. I live in London and while the tech salaries aren't very high here, it's even worse in the rest of the country. Maybe it's just the usual suspects trying to find some naive developers, but when you see job ads for 5+ experience offering just a little bit more than a national average, it makes you wonder what's going on.

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I think the problem with the UK is on the whole we never really got past seeing software as an administrative / back-office concern, which leads to naturally wanting to place developers etc into "low-paid, low-leverage" positions (think mindlessly running a few SQL queries or adding a few fields to an internal tool) vs having them radically improve the business proposition.

This really presages trouble with industries being upended on the basis of technological innovations. The light at the end of the tunnel is that long-term, companies that value and can utilise technical talent to innovate rather than sustain will win out and heat up the talent market.

I think you've got a point here. Not sure why, but many businesses I've seen here don't seem to be bothered at all about pushing themselves onto the next level. The competition doesn't seem to be too intense either,as I can't see how companies could stay alive with what often looks like they've been stuck in early 90s. There are literally sector after sector, where a decent injection of capital could wipe out any competition.

software jobs in the UK are insane. They are illogical. I work in finance in London, which is about the only place (in Europe, perhaps) that's even comparable to US/California rates. I make a six figure base (GBP) and a hefty bonus on top.

But my real passion is audio and signal processing. I look at job postings around the country for embedded developers and DSP specialists; fields that require much more specialist skills than the CRUD web apps and PDF reports I generally produce for my employers, but those jobs are offering a fifth of my current income! I've seen jobs saying "master's degree in computer science and 5 years of experience required" offering 30k.

We pay our grad students more than that.

Edit: obviously, it's not really a mystery as to why; you get paid money when you work in an industry that has lots of it. But the discrepancy is still shocking.

I have a friend who bootcamped for 6 months and landed a $130k/yr job at a buzzword start-up doing app development. No previous coding knowledge or really even tech interest. He did accounting previously.

He makes 3/4 of what the president of my small defense contractor company makes, a guy who has been an RF engineer for 35 years prior to taking on the leadership role.

The two fresh grad EE's we have are both spinning software in their free time to nab software dev jobs over EE jobs, because the pay is often double.

Why are tech salaries so low in London? The CoL is as high as any city in the world really

Only when compared to the US, they're not low compared to anywhere in Europe.

I don't think they are very high, considering how much everything costs here. Making £70K in London is like getting €20-25K in Poland,or Hungary.

Prices in London are probably similar to those in NY or even Bay Area.

This is exactly my point, regional wages, global top city cost of living

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