anything with the headline of 'shortage' can be distilled into this translation:
employers want people with high tech 'digital skills' for less pay.
The UK is infamously known for not appreciating programming skills.
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> The UK is infamously known for not appreciating programming skills.
Not sure what the basis is for this. I'm a SWE with 10 years experience and I've been shopping around for countries to escape to for more than a year, I didn't really want to consider the US but currently my options based on salary expectations are only the major US cities.
Nowhere in the world that I've seen offers comparable rates to London/NYC/Bay area. You could include the rest of the UK in the statement I quoted, but then you'd have to also include the rest of every other country. I doubt you'll find a competitive tech salary for a non-remote job in Arkansas or Düsseldorf.
edit: Someone else mentioned finance salaries in this thread, I haven't worked for a company anyone here would likely know and this was all true before I moved to a finance-adjacent business
If you account for the cost of living, it suddenly doesn't look that great. Then in the UK chances are that you'll work for an agency - they'll charge the client £1500 per day for your service and you'll get fraction of that and there is a system around that there is always some intermediary that pockets money for nothing.
Start freelancing right now and increase your pay by one third.
But this quote from the article
> "We need digital literacy and common sense, not someone who can program a Raspberry Pi to control a robot," Mr Howell told the BBC.
I'm getting the impression that this is not about programming or SEs being paid SV salarys - I think it's the age old 'how do computers think? - how can I leverage them in my job?' kind of skills.
It's actually both someone who can program AND has digital literacy, but for less pay.
I thought that quote was silly. If there's a useful point in there I'm missing it. Someone who can program a raspberry pi to control a robot may not be able to instantly debug your legacy spaghetti code with zero supervision on day one of the job. But I think robot programmers meet a pretty solid standard already if we only had enough such graduates.
I dunno - I read it as more of:
"The History of Art Grad from Prestigious University who is on Grad Scheme at $BIG_BANK fails to grasp that instead of emailing 100 people individually and copy pasting responses into a spread sheet, he/she could just use Google Forms or something", so, more fundamental skills.
Our hypothetical humanities graduate here didn't explicitly study this as a degree, and shouldn't have to, any more than they didn't need a degree in maths to count.
Yes I think that's right. But I think that quote misses the point that there's a connection - if someone has been taught roughly how to program a Raspberry Pi to control a robot (even if they did it at school 10+ years ago), that might give them enough confidence to go and work out how to script whatever monotonous Excel task they do in VBA etc with a little help from Google.
The UK is infamously known for not appreciating programming skills.
Any technical skills at all really. In Italy or Germany an engineer is a respected and protected profession. In the UK an "engineer" is the person who swaps a toner cartridge or replaces a washer in a tap, the word gets used for anyone regardless of their qualifications or role, devaluing it in the public consciousness.
> In Italy or Germany an engineer is a respected and protected profession.
So much so, that in fact a software developer is definitely not seen as an engineer in Germany, which is a protected word you can only call yourself, when you actually have an engineering degree (similar to lawyer or doctor).
It also does not mean, that you can earn more over here. I am hoping that this will change due to the car manufacturers investing massively in vehicle software.
It's exactly the same in Italy. I self-describe as a "software engineer" in English-speaking contexts because the word "engineer" in English doesn't have the same connotation, but I'm very careful never to use the Italian or German equivalents. It's considered a very serious lie that could (unlikely, but potentially) even get you in legal trouble.
Yes. In Italy you can actually get an Engineering degree in CS, but you still need to take an habilitation exam to call yourself an Engineer (and in fact even pure CS graduates can take the exam). Most don't bother though as it is not really needing for anything other than calling yourself an actual Ingegnere.
This rather begs the question - can we ever migrate coding to be come a profession like 'real' engineering? I think its the strongest argument for 'software literacy' I can come up with - no we cannot.
It kind of depends on what you mean. Leaving aside regulatory frameworks and restrictions on "engineering proper", I believe the underlying question is "can we expect the average 100 IQ person to be able to write code?". I believe the answer could hypothetically be yes, but you have to attach a lot of strings to that. I don't think it's reasonable to expect anybody to come out of high school with a firm understanding of, say, memory management or OOP principles or computational complexity, but I do believe a bit of "algorithmic thinking", for lack of a better word, could be something valuable to integrate in the average curriculum. It's not less esoteric than Latin or Greek.
can we ever migrate coding to be come a profession like 'real' engineering?
Of course we can, but noone is willing to pay for it. Then they pay for it on other ways, and act like they're surprised when once again hackers waltz in, or there's an outage that costs the business a fortune, or yet another project fails to deliver because of corners cut early on.
~This annoys me as well~. I find this degrading to my profession as well. Engineer is at minimum BSc, and no, a plumber is not an engineer.
The parent post was downvoted by the HN hivemind who loves opining about things it knows nothing about.
I live in the UK and while parent is obviously hyperbolic, it has some truth in it. Where I work, people with engineer in their job title are _literally_ the ones that come around when your computer breaks and they turn it off and on again.
Come to think about it, parent isn't even that hyperbolic...
Is it? They still have best earnings (post-tax) in Europe... You have to count in contractors though. Where are better offers than in the UK? I didn't find any better even in Switzerland.
Unsure where you get your quotes but Switzerland beats UK in post tax earnings by quite a margin according to data I found. Note that Switzerland has only a 20-25% effective tax.
If you want decent money (not even NYC or Silicon Valley money which is not possible) you need to move to London at which point even 80-100k pounds (usually terminal salary for software engineers) does not give you the same savings rate or quality of life you'd get elsewhere.
The same problem can be highlighted for many expensive places in europe which is why there is such a brain drain for top talent.
You can get significantly more than 100k in London. And even at that price, life would be quite comfortable (but of course COL is still significantly higher than many other places).
Life can be comfortable but it’s not sustainable. You can indeed be comfortable if you spend all that money on rent + lifestyle, but it’s just not enough to actually buy a property in a reasonable amount of time.
A handful of 10x devs earning 100k doesn't address the general skills shortage. In fact I'd say the overemphasis on top-tier talent in the tech sector exacerbates the problem.
It's very heavily dependent on where you are in the UK though (as with most countries) the delta between best/worse places is quite large.
My thoughts exactly. No other european country pays as much as the uk for experienced tech workers. Although ir35 is taking a bite, from what i hear daily rates are going up to counterbalance the issue. However, the risk of outsourcing is real thanks to some silly measures.
> You have to count in contractors though.
Who the UK government made a very deliberate effort to squeeze with the IR35 changes. Now they're shocked-pikachu-face-ing that those contractors are leaving.
> Where are better offers than in the UK? I didn't find any better even in Switzerland.
India. Uber's doing very well there, lay the best engineers off and go there instead.
No offense, but you have to be quite adventurous for living in India.
Is it? They still have best earnings (post-tax) in Europe.
This is skewed by the financial sector which out of necessity pays comparable wages to New York. The average programmer in the UK is just another office worker in terms of pay and status.
What is the necessity? In most of finance tech jobs you don't need domain knowledge. The UK financial companies are competing for devs with non-finance UK companies, not with Wall Street. I'm under the impression that they pay more than the rest of the UK because they can easily afford it and also to make sure the other silly industries don't get in their way of hiring the best people.
This.
If you're not FAANG, FTSE 100 or an engineer in the finance sector, your pay is similar to an entry level office IT worker.
There are plenty of permanent individual contributor jobs in the £70-120k range in London. Not just FAANG/FTSE/finance either, plenty of funded start-ups and non-finance tech companies if you can't stomach finance.
Outside of London, your statement is much closer to the truth. Lots of employers in Manchester for example are there principally to avoid paying London salaries.
Honestly though, the day to day reality of programming in fintech is about the same as working in any other industry.
The cost of living differential is much lower than the salary differential when you move out of London so no real incentive for employees to move.
120k permanent salary is meaningless because you’d fall into the higher tax brackets. Permanent employment tax is insane here.
Pretty much this. Id say half the time in the FTSE100 its the same also
"less pay" isn't something you get to define all on your own, it is a 2-way street.
Programmers are already among the highest paid professions anywhere, so it's laughable that they complain about "less pay". Who's next? hedge fund managers and investment bankers complaining about low bonuses?
This is not entirely true in the UK. The relative pay ratio for skill difficulty to pay is very low. Programmers get paid like plumbers.
https://uk.jobted.com/salary
According to here, software engineers are paid roughly the same as other types of engineer, and a lot more than plumbers.
There are some very low paid development related job titles. For example, "Web Developer" salaries are always awfully low - but that's a job title you only ever really see at tech-phobic companies or design agencies.
Speaking as someone who does a fair amount of hiring in London, a decent software engineer commands a high salary - around the six figure mark. I don't mean FAANG "can invert a binary tree on a whiteboard" level, just "knows what a mutex is". There really aren't many other careers in this country that you can be paid six figures in a non-management job without a degree.
For those of us who don't live or work in London, the salary situation is very different. I've been a developer for 30+ years and I have never met anyone who earns that kind of money for developing software.
You can get £60-90k in places like Manchester and Edinburgh, which does afford a pretty nice lifestyle given that the average salary in those places is less than half that.
The best way to get a high salary in the UK seems to be to either work in London, work remotely for a London based office, or work in London then transfer to another part of the UK.
I'm not a London native, but there's a phrase people in my home town use, "doing your London time" - meaning working in London for a few years then moving back home. Reason being that once you've worked in London, your salary is permanently much higher once you move back than it would otherwise have been.
Very low six figures I assume? Which is even less of an impact when you account for the higher tax rate bands.
Six figure in the UK is very different from six figures in other countries.
I plugged £120k ($166,400) into a UK and California tax calculator.
UK after tax came to £74,244 ($102,885), California came to $108,070.
I don't know how accurate those numbers are, but they don't seem all that different to me. And compared to the rest of Europe, UK tax is on the low side.
Of course I don't particularly _enjoy _paying high taxes, but I feel like living in London, earning within the ballpark of that amount, my life is pretty good.
The thing with California (and US in general) is that 120k is the lower end of tech salaries, where as in the UK it's the top-end. So while tax rates might be similar, US salaries significantly offset it.
Glassdoor says that the average in USA is $77k and high is $107k. For California, the numbers are $92k and $134k respectively. Indeed says $136k is average for California. £120k/$166k is clearly on the upper end by their measures.
FAANGs, start-ups, unicorns, fintech etc. are much higher, but the same is true in the UK. I know mid tier software engineers working in FB/Google in London clearing over £300k in total comp. I work in a fintech start-up and my TC is close to £200k.
But sure. London pure tech salaries are not the quite as high as the global tech hub. Fintech salaries are competitive with NYC though (but slightly worse after tax).
> hiring in London
Outside of London companies are still looking for experienced software people under the £40k mark, and then wondering why they have staff retention issues, or can't attract top talent.
This is showing signs of slow change - Starling bank have a plan to open offices in other cities, starting with Southampton, and pay close-to-London money. JPMC have had that strategy in Dorset for quite a while too.
Exactly, and outside London PHP is still rampant where rates are around 30k.
The PHP community is partly responsible for this where rates are consistently 20% below the going rate.
I am in the US and we hear such statements even from SV engineers who make wow salaries. So "enough" is in the eyes of the beholder.