Hacker News Reader

Comment by heidar | Hacker News Reader

There are lots of contracts in London with 500-700 GBP per day rates...Java/Ruby/Node and more. Those are for dev roles, not consulting roles.

View on HN

No, there are not. There are a lot of ads with those rates, but most roles are ~ £450. Please note that a single contract goes out to many agencies that post the same contract, so you might think that there is a lot of £600+ roles. While in reality there is a lot of people posting the same role X^N times.

Some of those posts are not even real roles - new guys in agencies need to collect a lot of CVs, so they post bogus £600 contract and collect your CVs as "stuffing" for their "portfolio"

£700 are rates for an experienced core Java developer with investment banking or FX experience.

Rates in london for developers are usually under 500 day for non-finance, and anywhere between 500-700 for finance, and maybe 700-800 if you have some quant dev work in finance. You can get higher rates outside dev, for example Project Mgr is around 700 day, and Programme Mgr around 900 day.

Occasionally, there are much higher rates (1k-2k) for very short urgent roles, but not that common.

"I'm sure that's also true but plenty are real." Plenty are, but not as many. There are a few teams in London and they usually stick together and for long term. And a lot of them don't get filled fast, because they are looking for very strong specific experience.

My most well paid contract was awarded to me after the job was open for 3 months - Thales e-Security HSM API specialist.

I'm sure that's also true but plenty are real. I know devs in London who are on those rates. And yeah, the Java roles are usually banks.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com