You are probably better off making £80K in Manchester as a senior dev than £100-110K in London. Newcastle has also a decent tech ecosystem tho it is very much focused around Sage.
Whilst it’s true that I probably won’t find a pay like this outside of London it’s also quite hard to get it within London if I lose my job it’s more likely that I’ll have to take a pay cut than not.
In fact once you get to 6 figures in the UK outside of contracting it’s not uncommon to essentially bounce up and down by as much as 30% between jobs.
Looking at the more median salaries especially post COVID the pay gap has shrunk considerably.
Finance/Fintech is still very much London centric and those places pay the most in uk tech outside some senior FAANG roles but not everyone is lucky enough to land those.
It’s even not about being good or asking for more it’s really about just landing a job with an employer that is able and willing to pay that much and being able to justify that to them and it’s not as easy as it seems to be in SV.
In fact just before the pandemic I was looking to make a move and I went to a few recruiters and their honest advice was pretty much stay where I was (less than what I get now but 20% (5/15 split) pension and very very good benefits).
I did managed to move in early 2020 to my current role but that was through my network.
Overall considering it the loss of pension I probably came out even it was more of wanting to do something new in a different setting than the pay.
Do you mind me asking what industry you're in?
Also, my experience with London companies + recruiters in the last 3 months has been that permanant remote roles have been cropping up. I would say its about 50/50 of whether a job requires any on prem time, and about 90/10 that the job requires 1-2 days a week on prem.
The 2 bed flat I’m renting got recently evaluated at 1.7M it’s very nice and very large (for London)but the lease remaining on it is 68 years and the Victorian building it sits in would need a lot of work very very soon so the buyers are looking at 350-400K bill within a few years of buying the flat (leasehold renewal and building repairs) on top of that which also is why the current landlord is looking to sell.
As it stands now if you want to buy a property for £600K you are looking at £60K deposit, £20K stamp duty and probably another £20K for misc costs.
£600K is a below what an average new build in a Zone 3 would cost you these days outside of the few units they reserve for HTB. If you can save £3K a month you’re looking at 3 years of saving. Since most people / couples would struggle to save even £1K a month especially in their early careers they are probably looking at a decade of saving for a property or even more if the house prices keep on rising as fast as they are now.
Edit: Reader, he looked at the prices
Found almost identical flat at 499,999K, so coming in at less than Millbank flats were going for in 2016. Those flats are only £25K more now. This seems perfectly doable for software engineers who have a good permanent job or are contracting.
The only flats in my area around 600K all have a huge asterisk the leasehold on them is about to expire so you can only buy them in cash.
Five years later I think it's more feasible to stay in Zone 1 or 2 with kids as the air becomes cleaner and you should have saved up enough to find a bigger place. A friend travels from Zone 1 to 4 every on the train for the school run, so it's perfectly doable given flexible working.
The $$$ is the problem. 3 bedroom in Zone 1 is 1.5-2m
Not to mention the salary ceiling is so huge in London it's easy to be saving more than someone else is earning in another city.
(Not denying it, genuinely curious which sector/companies etc)