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Poll: Full-time software engineers in London, what's your annual salary?

481 points| basicallydan | 12 years ago

Inpsired by the poll of SF & the Bay Area, this poll is targeting current full-time software engineers and software developers in London, UK.

Base salary only, pre-tax. No options, shares, bonuses, adjustments for inflation, or benefits.

(Don't forget to up-vote the poll to get more data.)

402 comments

order
[+] shadchnev|12 years ago|reply
Having read all comments, I'm somewhat lost. I was hired in London in 2008 on £37K, it was my first programming job after uni, I had clean resume. Today a competent beginner with a few web projects under his belt easily gets around £45K.

I'm hiring developers for my startup – http://www.makersacademy.com – and I wish I had more applicants. I'm happy to pay £350-450/day for a decent Ruby dev and or around £60K permanent for the same position and I don't get nearly as many candidates as I'd like to. I was hiring devs at Forward Labs (http://www.forwardlabs.co.uk), arguably one of the coolest places in London, and I had the same problems: small number of applicants, qualified candidates asking for £400-£450 or equivalent.

At SiliconmilkRoundabout, the biggest startup job fair in London, dozens of startups are fighting to find a developer, many of them happy to pay more than £40K or £50K. From what I can tell based on my experience and what other entrepreneurs/recruiters are telling me, hiring devs is incredibly hard not because the companies are unwilling to pay but simply because there are not enough devs looking for work.

Occasionally I interview candidates that don't know the basics of software development, e.g. what mocking is or how to use TDD but they are asking for £400+/day because someone is going to pay that.

The data by Adzuna (http://blog.makersacademy.com/what-is-the-demand-for-ruby-de...) shows that the average Ruby salary is over £50K, and top 30% make over £60K. How is that compatible with the results of this poll?

How is it possible that there are so many complaints about low salaries in the comments, while at the same time my experience hiring Ruby devs suggests the low salary isn't a problem at all?

If you're one of those devs who voted £30-39K or £40-49K above and know how to use Ruby/JS at a decent level, drop me a line, I'll have a much better offer for you: [email protected].

[+] adrianhoward|12 years ago|reply
I agree. My experience of folk I know in London is that even vague competence is going to get you £35-40k - and being actually good is going to get you a fair bit more than that.

Hell - I live in bloody Dorset and I'd be expecting to pay at least £35k for a decent dev.

I'm confused about what kind of work the 0-30k folk are doing and for whom. If I were in that group I'd be seriously thinking about:

* Switching jobs - I'd be job hunting right now

* I'd be looking at freelancing rates and experimenting with that

* I'd be taking a serious look at my skill set, and the skill set of the job adverts and doing a compare and contrast

* Thinking about whether I'm selling and marketing myself appropriately

Seriously - it's a sellers market in London for dev skills right now. I regularly get folk chasing me for £50-60k jobs - and I'm explicitly not looking, don't live in (or want to live in) London, and have very un-hip skills in the old CVs they have of mine (perl anybody ;-)

[+] rmc|12 years ago|reply
So at 60k you can't find devs maybe that's not high enough. Try offering 100k, see how many applicants you get. If you can get lots of CV then you've found the market price.

Remember, to attract people you'll also need to attract people who are in jobs already. For that you'll have to offer something better than what they have.

[+] mpeg|12 years ago|reply
As it's been mentioned elsewhere in the thread, asking for base salary only is a bad idea.

I'd be happy to consider moving jobs for £80k~+, but £60k would be a huge step down, and yet I voted £40-49k because that's my base salary.

My company knows they can get away with paying me less because I have enough stock+bonus to make it worth it anyway (which I don't agree with, but it's still better than not being paid that at all)

[+] eyko|12 years ago|reply
In the end it's not so much about the money, but I'd be surprised if you didn't get top candidates for 100K (obviously). I don't think, however, that money plays a big part. In my case, I'm earning in the 30-39K range as a full-stack web dev (ruby and javascript), but I wouldn't change for 40, 45... and might start to think about it if I am offered 50, 60, or something high enough that it'd be difficult not to accept, but the bottom line is that a lot of us are not looking, or willing to change, because we're happy with our jobs. But of course, every now and then we think about moving on, and then even just a small rise in salary would interest us, as long as we get a change it atmosphere, meet new developers with some passion for what they do, etc.

If you have a nice team (which you do, and forward labs is also an awesome place by the way) and offer an average to high salary, then I think your problem won't be so much in attracting good devs, but more in filtering out bad ones. Another thing might be that the developers you want might not come across your offers, since they're not out there looking.

[+] jamedjo|12 years ago|reply
Is it the number of applicants or the quality which is the issue?

Would it help if you targeted CS students by running web dev workshops? That way you could attract developers who haven't considered applying to a startup and might not otherwise teach themselves web development. Student salaries are also lower.

Maybe you could look further geographically too. We had an ItMegaMeet in Bristol yesterday which sponsor companies used for recruiting.

I too would be surprised at how little some CS students know about web development and testing-- if I hadn't sat through a web tech unit so outdated that those of us with some experience could easily have done a better job. I helped the lecturer improve the course for the next year, but think these kinds of things need a different and more collaborative teaching model.

Thing is though- some things are easier to train on the job than others. So while I would hire my peers, I'd personally see it as a bonus if they used TDD not a prerequisite.

[+] dmmalam|12 years ago|reply
Just from what you said, the solution 'seems' very simple: Compensate more. This may mean pay, equity, or being able to work on interesting problems. From my experience there are many extremely talented programmers in London, and these guys can work anywhere they want, including starting their own company or moving to the US.

Also 'coolness' is hard to define, I see many startups think cool is having some beanbags and a pingpong table, whilst working on a standard CRUD RoR app. To most talented engineers, they would much rather be working on interesting technical challenges. This is how hedge funds get them: squeezing a few millis out of an already optimal trading engine by whatever means possible is extremely fun. Same reason game companies, F1 and GCHQ can pay peanuts.

[+] mordae|12 years ago|reply
I live and work in Prague and recently our team have finally found a sponsor for our software project. I am very happy that in a month or two, together with full-time system administrator pay with maximum bonus from state research/education institution we work for I will finally be able to pay my rent and food at the same time.

We are looking at ~£13K each.

I am very competent in C, Python and do Racket for fun. Both other guys are competent in Python, one of them have some Android experience, both are competent in modern web stuff. One of the guys just learned PgPL/SQL in a week, on flu, because it was needed.

Do we even live on the same planet?

[+] _progger_|12 years ago|reply
Ruby is not mainstream at all. Also my guess is that most decent experienced Ruby devs are already on at least 50-60k - why switch? Another thing I noticed is that London start-ups are a bit shy when it comes to offering stock options. So the recipe is something like 70k + 1-2% stock options and ideally a bonus (doesn't have to be a huge one 5-10%). It's a market - if you can't get something at given price it doesn't mean it is not present/not for sale.
[+] lucaspiller|12 years ago|reply
I think one of the big issues is visibility. When I was in London getting £35k I thought that was good. I had no idea I could get more moving around. I got a lot of emails from recruiters, and pretty much the only ones that had salaries were for contracts not permanent. If I knew I could have got more elsewhere I bloody well would have taken it :)
[+] mseebach|12 years ago|reply
Sample size=1, I've found that the "idols" of the developer community in London work for gov.uk or the BBC. I respect both very much, but you can't optimize for "soft" values and cash at the same time. It's a bit tautological, but if you want to make a lot of money, you have to go do that. You can't optimize for a fun, "meaningful" (hugely subjective, obviously) job with short hours and expect the money to just come rolling in.

Note on finance: It's not as bad as some people like to make it sound, and if you're ruling it out wholesale, either for ideology or prejudice, you're doing yourself no favours salary-wise. Banks (by which I mean investment banking, retail is not even on the radar) are by no means a singular working environment, it matters a lot which team you join. Banks works on absolutely massive problems, and have plenty of new work going on. There are tons of opportunities that don't involve sitting in a basement, fiddling with a 20 year old Java 1.1 codebase under a psychopathic boss. The reason banks can pay well is that it's generally pretty easy to follow the money, and if you get yourself in a position where you pretty clearly create value, you can (almost) write your own paycheck.

Alternatively, if you're still not going for the banks, there is a huge cottage industry of companies catering to the banks: financial services. They will be a lot more "normal" than the banks, but they still pay decent money.

EDIT to add: Finally, obviously, contracting. If you have a couple of years of solid experience, you can make £500+/day. Add a good blog, a few conference talks, maybe a book and you can easily 50-100% to that. That's £110-220k/year, with 8 weeks off.

[+] pointyhats|12 years ago|reply
Financial services? A typical financial services company in London this fine day (no names mentioned):

Still has classic ASP deployed, VB6 COM is the backend, "extreme waterfall" is the process and integration via CSV files (using ' as a quote char of course!) over FTP is the mutt's nuts. Add to that a security policy which involves a large brush, a fucking huge rug and a copy of the production SQL Server 2000 database on every laptop.

The system build is the "secure windows XP build" which is XP SP1 with no patches other than to put the company logo on the background, some bastardised IEAK'd up IE7 build, content filters which understand HTTP like Manwell from Fawlty Towers understands English.

The price of muttering Linux, Python or even Windows greater than XP in the office is to be whipped by lengths of state of the art 10base2 with BNC plugs on the end until you submit that there is only Windows.

Management is entirely powered by crack dust and "champers". And the architect to monkey ratio is at least 10:1. The architects don't even know what the hell an HRESULT is.

A good day is when SourceSafe doesn't try and fuck you.

Fortunately we only have to integrate with them...

Stay away. You have been warned.

[+] SandB0x|12 years ago|reply
The software industry here in London is really badly paid, for salaried jobs outside finance at least. I know plenty of developers who started at £20-25k as graduates from decent universities and whose salary has slowly risen to 40k over quite a few years. PhD graduates making £35-45k too.
[+] Alan01252|12 years ago|reply
No longer full time, but I thought I'd share my salary journey.

Graduated ( computer network management and design ) working in Portsmouth started on £16k (software developer).

Three years with the same company progressed to £25k.

Moved to London salary £33k

Two years with the same company salary rose to £40k

Went travelling, came back, started freelancing/consulting earned ~£50k last year.

[+] sbanach|12 years ago|reply
80k base, 130k last bonus. I'm 2 years into doing mostly Java, Python and C++ in a hedge fund. I left a small non-finance software firm where after a few years I was on 25k.
[+] kenshiro_o|12 years ago|reply
That's quite impressive! I work in an investment bank (my team is the only one that sits on the trading floor) developing low latency systems in Java. I get around 65K pre-tax in salary and bonus is not even 10K (I have about 4.5 years of Java experience and started working on this job about 2 years ago).

I have been interested in moving to a hedge fund for a while and even had a telephone interview with one of them. I thought I did really well and it did seem like they agreed with me in their feedback to my recruiter but they also declared that "while I was an outstanding candidate, I was not what they are looking for and will come back to me once they have a more suitable role". I just don't understand what that means. From chatter with recruiters and friends, your best change of getting into a hedge fund is through personal contacts. Can you confirm this theory?

[+] thinkersilver|12 years ago|reply
I'm thinking of moving across from a financial IT consultancy to a hedge fund. What are the hours like? I'm not that interested in working in a large IB (e.g RBS,CS pr ,MS) I've done that before and the work in that space is a lot less interesting now and has stagnated somewhat. I know this is a bit long winded but your skill-set matches exactly what I have but I don't have much opportunity to use it on a daily basis. Any comments or pointers will be really helpful.
[+] _progger_|12 years ago|reply
Is that 130 on top of 80? Are you doing trading systems / algo trading?
[+] mpeg|12 years ago|reply
Nice. Are your people hiring? :)
[+] sopooneo|12 years ago|reply
Why are the salaries so much lower than in the States? I know part of it is that demand outstrips supply here, so perhaps my question resolves to why there is less demand. I assume that the point of software is that it can be an efficiency multiplier, so if you hire someone to automate a process, that is either reducing costs or increasing revenue, which should be fundamentally valuable.

I am deeply ignorant here and will gladly learn from relevant links or responses.

[+] OrsenPike|12 years ago|reply
Salary: £85k + bupa + pension and a 25% of gross salary (£~21k) a year paid each quarter if objective are met (70% or above).

Tech: Primarily Java with some C, C++ and more recently Go (although Go is only in our code playground, nothing even close to production yet)

Location: West London

Company: Small but well established (since 1996). There are 4 developers including myself. One software is one part of what we offer.

Edit: I know you said without benefits, etc. but I included it for others as well. Just look at the £85k figure if you want a hard number.

[+] FrankenPC|12 years ago|reply
You are making decent money compared to SF. According to the poll, not many are though. Does the UK not value intellectual workers?
[+] cpdean|12 years ago|reply
Is this poll in pounds or USD?
[+] xSwag|12 years ago|reply
As someone debating whether to do a Mathematics vs Computer Science vs Joint Honours, I'd really like to hear from graduates what worked out for them.

    - As a developer, how often are skills from CompSci degree applied on the job? 
    - What do you wish you knew about the job market as an undergrad?
    - How much part did the prestige of your university play in your current salary?
[+] beaumartinez|12 years ago|reply
I did two years of computer science, then quit. I use very little of what I learnt, and the personal development (no pun intended) outside of what I was taught at university has been far more important to my career.

If money is your goal, knowing how to sell yourself (in job applications and interviews) is very important. For job security and progression in general, people skills are essential.

My advice? Don't bother with university, start work ASAP, and keep learning in your spare time.

[+] mebassett|12 years ago|reply
I find that skills from more traditional, hard degrees (maths, physics, chem, history, philosophy) translate into high-level employable skills more than raw computer science. raw comp sci (and basic programming jobs) is a useless skill without advance business domain knowledge (and the traditional hard subjects provide the scaffolding, if you will, to pick that up more quickly.)

One think I wish I knew about the job market before I started: you'll be more successful using programming as your "secret weapon" in some other domain than as line-engineer elsewhere. of course, "success" here is defined in terms of what I like, and may not match you.

I found my personal development and existing work mattered a lot more than my university.

[+] OrsenPike|12 years ago|reply
To answer you questions...

1. Hardly ever. Then again I am not doing anything amazingly special or complicated. Just standard business apps.

2. That experience is worth double what theoretical education is. So make sure you DO STUFF and stick it up on github. Write a blog about what interests though. Writing a blog is great at improving your language skills. Also take some presentation skills courses while you can as it is all about selling yourself and your MSc won't sell you sorry to say.

3. Zero. Nobody cares what uni you went to unless you are going into fields like medicine. Your experience and previous work (again stick stuff on github!!) will help more than saying you got a first from Cambridge. The exception might be places like Google but I don't know anything about working for Google :)

[+] shubb|12 years ago|reply
1. My job requires software engineering skills more than compsci skills, i.e. designing a program in UML, or writing elegant code is important, but most actual algorithms are pre-implimented, e.g. container classes implement sorting.

2. Big companies pay more, and give you access to an internal job market. Getting work is easier than you'd think, so don't worry all that much. Your first pay settlement plays a big part in your subsequent pay deals.

3. In the UK, elite graduates (oxford etc) that I work with tend to get about 1/3rd more to do the same job. They find it much easier to get onto elite graduate programmes, e.g. in finance, so I guess the employer must compete with that. STEM graduates with a 2.1 or better from a top 50 university do not have a problem finding 'graduate' work. Anything less than that, and you may as well not have a degree (i.e. you can get good jobs, but have to work your way in as you would without a degree).

[+] thinkersilver|12 years ago|reply
I won't talk about grades. Getting a 2:1 or better is a given when applying in the UK. My experience is mainly London, Finance/Tech. The hardest class was my algorithms class in my second year and it turned out to be the most useful. The rest of the degree was too unfocused. The school you go to does matter. It counts a lot. People tend to hire from Universities that they are familiar with. Not out of any elitism but it often boils down to being familiar with that university's curriculum. The biggest piece of advice is that you shouldn't expect your Computer Science degree to teach you how to develop software. You should be advancing this skill alongside your course in popular languages, by yourself in your own time. This will ensure that you can talk intelligently about technical topics. Finally, your extra-curricular activities count for a lot more than you realise.
[+] thruflo|12 years ago|reply
Choosing a university degree to maximise your salary is a counter productive waste of opportunity. Become a generalist where command line foo is your super power, not your day job.

People hire to get stuff done. They have zero interest in your qualifications. They have every interest in your github repos. One cool project trumps your degree.

Employment offers plenty of scope to increase your salary. What it doesn't offer is much space (unless you work for decades to earn it) to study anything for the sake of it. That's your current opportunity: you can choose to study something for the sake of it, like Mathematics & Philosophy, History of Computing or Smart Geometry.

Don't put yourself in a box. Plenty of other people will be trying to do that for you.

[+] ronaldx|12 years ago|reply
Freelancer here: the prestige of university is certainly very useful for getting more work and commanding higher pay - some people use it as a simple marker for quality.
[+] dxm|12 years ago|reply
Started on £17.5k in Wales and was moved to the London office for £25k, after a year I got a new job for £35k, and a year later took a new job for the same money but for a much better company. At the same company, I've reduced my salary to £32k since the pension law came in, but I take home the same amount as I did at £35k (some loophole).

I hate London, and the company I work for is now allowing me to work remotely so I'm keeping my salary and moving back to Wales, where it is much cheaper to live and I will not have to share a house with people.

I really don't care about money (really) and it's much more about being happy, which I will be once I move out of this city.

[+] lucaspiller|12 years ago|reply
I have a friend who decided to stay in the area he grew up in for a better quality of life (North Devon). He is 25, now earning £35k and looking to buy a second house. No way you would be able to do that in London :) Kudos and good luck!
[+] api|12 years ago|reply
This surprises me given how god-awful expensive London is. I remember it being one of those cities I've visited where I was like "how do people live here? what do all these people do?"

Or maybe, like New York, you actually can live there fairly reasonably if you really know the place and know how to do it. As a visitor maybe I was paying tourist prices.

[+] benjaminwootton|12 years ago|reply
London cost of living isn't so bad.

Public transport is cheap and abundant, competition keeps prices down for restaurants and shops, and there are a lot of free events to keep you busy.

The main expense is in the accomodation, which most people in their 20s combat by sharing houses in undesirable areas. (This is a problem UK wide though as they have managed to keep our housing bubble inflated unlike in the US.)

London is expensive for tourists though. A ride on the Heathrow Express, a few nights in a 3* hotel, and a spin on the London Eye would be enough to make Zuckerberg wince.

[+] jmaskell|12 years ago|reply
I've been living here for a few years, and the main killer has always been rent. I've been able to get this down by sharing with others, learning about nice but cheaper neighbourhoods (I live in Putney now), and being prepared to commute 30-45 minutes in to central London.

Aside from travel (~£120/month), other costs are similar to elsewhere in the UK. There are decent, well priced (<£10-15 per head) places to eat, drink etc.

A salary in the £20-30k range would require careful money management, but you can live comfortably on £30k+.

[+] wavefunction|12 years ago|reply
I have to agree. I've seen positions advertised via LinkedIn for 20k (GBP, but still!) and I'm not sure how you'd make that work in any big city, let alone London...
[+] yeureka|12 years ago|reply
2007-2008: 28k in games industry.

2008-2011: 60k ( including bonus ) in finance.

2011-2012: <20k freelancing as a creative coder for museums and advertising, lost half my savings doing this...

2013: 68k in educational software used by millions of kids.

As a lot of people mention here, only finance pays well in the UK. If you don't mind working in that you can earn quite a lot. The other route is contracting, but that works if you have a skill that is in demand.

I am very happy with my current job though I make roughly half what I could potentially get if I went back to finance.

[+] crntaylor|12 years ago|reply
I made a quick and filthy script[0] to pull out job listings from indeed.co.uk - it's pretty scrappy but maybe someone wants to try and improve it (or generalize it to other countries)

    In [348]: %run salary.py "London" "graduate developer"
    
    Job Title: Graduate Developer
     Location: London
    
     Salaries:
       20000 - 794
       40000 - 288
       60000 - 85
       80000 - 25
      100000 - 19
    
    Number of jobs: 1,211
    Average salary: £30,057
    
    

    In [349]: %run salary.py "London" "software developer"
    
    Job Title: Software Developer
     Location: London
    
     Salaries:
       30000 - 5762
       50000 - 3303
       70000 - 1298
       90000 - 590
      110000 - 345
    
    Number of jobs: 11,298
    Average salary: £46,018
    
    

    In [350]: %run salary.py "London" "cobol developer"
    
    Job Title: Cobol Developer
     Location: London
    
     Salaries:
       50000 - 7
       80000 - 4
      260000 - 3
    
    Number of jobs: 14
    Average salary: £103,571
[0] https://gist.github.com/chris-taylor/5694151
[+] beaumartinez|12 years ago|reply
"At least 200k" full-time, wow. For anyone who's on that type of salary, what role and industry is it? CTO-level?
[+] upthedale|12 years ago|reply
Given the way the City works, do you really want us to not include bonus?
[+] Yhippa|12 years ago|reply
Wow, I am shocked at the low salaries. There go my fantasies of doing software development in London. From what I've read about there's no way I could afford rents there on that salary.
[+] _progger_|12 years ago|reply
Started on 30k progressed to 60k in London. People who stay in one place for more than 1-2 years without decent raises do a bad favour to everyone except for employers. Do move around and get what you deserve along with varied experience! Companies do shell out on contractors when there is a need and can keep them for years. I think it is some sort of misrepresentation that leads people to think that it is OK to pay less then 50k to a decent dev in London.
[+] nawitus|12 years ago|reply
Is there a point when moving around too much is starting to look bad on your resume?
[+] EnderMB|12 years ago|reply
It's surprising how poorly paid developers are in this country, even in London. In Bristol I was able to earn £25k after graduating, but from what I've heard a lot of companies are now offering lower, around £17.5k to £20k if lucky. A lot of programmers with five years experience are still on around £25k, whereas a post-doc in Cardiff will be on around £32-35k fresh out of their PhD. Hell, friends of mine that went into sales instead of uni are on £40k, a salary I'd probably struggle to get in the next five years, even as a senior dev.

What I also don't understand is that salaries are getting lower, and hiring is getting harder. Anyone that has hired will appreciate how difficult it can be to get good developers. Given the long hours and need for learning in development it's shocking how low the salaries are, and how it's not talked about more often by UK developers.

The last time I was solely responsible for hiring was at a start-up that had just been acquired. I said that £25k was the bare minimum we should be offering for a junior to mid-level developer. We hired a really good developer, who now leads that team and landed another couple of pay rises (probably now earning a fair bit more than me). The start-up was acquired based on a product largely created by the developers, so we needed a strong developer to take over and I guarantee that if we offered the same low salary that others were offering the product would have been run into the ground.

It's really bad. In my mind, developers across the board should be on £5-10k more than they are, across the country. Hopefully within the next few years the tech industry will push towards better compensation, instead of thinking a drinks fridge and a ping pong table will win other twenty-somethings with no other commitment in life than to they hand their rent to.