HN Explorer

Ask HN: How much do you make in London?

126 points by ldneng ↗ HN
There's recently been a lot of discussion about how much people are making in different areas of the US, but the threads about London are either outdated or not too comprehensive.

Please include your company (be it BigCo, startup, finance) / contractor status, level / years of experience and compensation breakdown in GBP.

I'll start: Investment bank front-office, 3 years experience: £59k, ~10% annual bonus, no stock.

Links to previous somehow related discussions on HN:

- https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7672167

- https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11317897

- https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5804134

179 comments

[ 5.0 ms ] story [ 233 ms ] thread
TamDenholm
Contractor, PHP/Full stack, 11 years exp, £350 - £400 a day in London. Not risen much in 5-6 years which is why i started doing other things like business consultancy.
1_player
How's business consultancy doing for you? Seems it's better paid, but I prefer the technical side personally.

You surely have more experience than me, but what I personally do is increase my rate by X% every 6 months or so, non-negotiable for new clients, with fair warning for existing ones. I often start a contract on tech X, and after some time I'm touching other parts of the business, so the rate increase makes sense.

TamDenholm
I actually prefer the business consultancy now. I got bored of writing code all the time, i still do it for fun, but only about 1/3rd of my time for my business is coding now.
dan_b
May I suggest something more anonymous like a google spreadsheet? Or a HN poll?
ldneng
I think keeping it in comments here is better since spreadsheets tend to to have a lot of messed up data (looking at previous surveys). What people share is definitely free-form, so I'd prefer to leave the data rather unstructured. Creating a throwaway is also really easy and bogus comments are easier to deal with than someone messing with the spreadsheet.

However, I've created a spreadsheet (https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1MAIX9UEnpq0pAsMWr1NW...) if anyone prefers that.

jbms
I recommend making a web form using Google spreadsheets - which takes 3 minutes, and making the spreadsheet read-only.

When I last posted an open spreadsheet to hacker news it grew, then got defaced with all the data deleted. Someone restored it but it was work to ensure no data was lost.

acta_non_verba
Startup, full time employee, called Senior but I only have one year of commercial experience, £47,500. ~10% annual bonus & Stock Options.
1_player
Contractor 100% remote, full stack, 10y experience, currently £40/h, will increase to £50 before the end of the year.
mbrain
May I ask whats your stack?
1_player
Current contracts are on PHP, Vue.js and Go. Experienced on backend systems, C, Python, Linux sysadmin, MySQL DBA, and a security enthusiast.

I'm specialised in being a jack of all trades.

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ThrowAwayLondon
(throwaway account for obvious reasons)

Web Developer in London for a dating company - £75000 pa (with bonuses it's around £110000 pa)

throawaylondon3
Are you a team lead or architect or similar? This seems high for just a web developer
dan_b
More importantly, are they hiring?
ThrowAwayLondon
Actually no :( we just finished hiring some new candidates to fill our team. Like I mentioned in the earlier comment I am an outlier because I do end up working a lot with architectural tasks so maybe my job title doesn't justify my work.
ThrowAwayLondon
Nope, but I am one of the seniors in the team and been here for a while. To be honest my title doesn't really reflect my work because I do end up dabbling a lot with other infrastructural work so could say it's an architect position.
Graham24
excellent income; you can almost afford to buy a flat in London for that.
thecupisblue
75k, bonuses, dating - I smell badoo. Am I right and if I am, how is it working there? Glassdoor is conflicted.
wastedhours
Are we only talking programmer side?

Digital marketing, education sector, 4 years experience: £39k + healthcare

ldneng
Although I initially thought it out for tech, I think any area is relevant. Thanks for sharing.
[dead] throwawaygrover
In that case: Digital Marketing Manager. Property/3rd sector. 9 years experience. £50,000.
wastedhours
Am also looking if you're after a digital marketer who can also hack about in Rails to build dashboards, tools and insight analysis pieces.
ThroAwayLondon2
Established privately held (profitable) company, full-time tech-lead, Telecoms + Web + Backend, 10 years experience - £50k.
strongai
Senior technical author. I freelanced from 2004-2013. My very first London contract in 2004 was at £350 a day. Nowadays, it's crazy bad - anything from £200 to £400, maybe £450 if your domain knowledge is spot on. And Google - I'm looking at you - contract rates of £20-£25 an hour have been bandied around in conversations with recruiters. So, no real market uplift in more than 10 years, which is why I'm now a permie (not in London) on £55K basic plus 20% bonus, no stock.
ijuhoor33
Senior iOS, contract, last year: £575 per day in a medium sized company Switched to a smaller company as Team Lead for £500 per day
ShinyCyril
While we're on the subject of tech jobs in London... does anyone work with FPGAs?
gadders
Some investment banks do.
Throwaway33333
£650 / day, almost all remote doing Hadoop and Redshift Consulting and POVs. Coding for 15 years, in Big Data for the past 5.
ionwake
How is the contracting market health these days?

Are you finding it easier or harder to find contracts? What is your average downtime between contracts?

Throwaway33333
I had 15 unpaid weeks this year wrapped around the referendum. Last year I had 7 unpaid weeks.
ionwake
Do you rely on random calls from agents throughout the day to setup your next role or do you have a couple you rely on? How many calls / emails do you get a day?
Throwaway33333
Half my contracts are through agents, I spend a lot longer than I'd like to admit on my LinkedIn profile. One agent has admitted they have a 30% margin which explains the ~1,000 phone calls and emails I got last year.

I run a blog, I'm active on Twitter and I've worked with a lot of different businesses and coworkers since I started my career so this is where the other half of my contracts come from.

I've heard from someone at (Big Hadoop Consultancy) that they send consultants out to train and do POVs paying the consulant £1,200 / day so there should be some growth in my day rate to come.

It's probably worth mentioning I only sell my time in one week blocks. I had two contracts this year where a client was having some troubles with Kafka on AWS. The first problem was taken care of in an hour in a half but they were still billed for a week. Same thing a few weeks later when Zookeeper was feeling upset.

ionwake
Thank you for your replies, they were most informative. I'd love to read your blog if you want add me on twitter and DM me, thanks!
jalev
45k pa working as a DevOps for one of the console companies for 2 years.
throwawaythrowa
Senior developer in the Civil Service, 8 years experience, £60k/year
mrsomeone7
Developer contractor, nearly 20 yr exp., now mainly .NET, works out at just over £1 a minute :-)
jakub_g
Semi-related question: How do you calculate taxes in UK? Is the base of the tax the salary offered by companies in job offers? I mean, with say £60k job offer, do I pay tax from £60k? (with the last £17k being taxed at 40%)?
pmuk
Yes salaries are advertised gross, and you deduct tax from the gross figure. Try this site: https://listentotaxman.com/
jakub_g
I mean, for example in France, the salaries might be advertised as "€35k", but from this you deduct social charges etc., and you pay tax from the "taxable income" which would be for example "€27k". Does this work the same in UK, or do I pay tax exactly from what the job offer says?
andyjohnson0
In the UK you pay National Insurance (NI) on your gross earnings. NI pays for things like the National Health Service. The amount you pay depends on your employment status and how much you earn [2]. I assume this is similar to "social charges" in France.

After deducting NI and the tax-free allowance [3], you pay income tax on whats left. And whats left after that is yours to keep.

Most regular employees have tax and NI automatically deducted from their monthly/weekly pay by their empoyer. This is called Pay as You Earn (PAYE) and keeps things simple. Company owners, contractors, etc. often pay tax yearly or half-yearly and often employ an accountant to arrange this.

[1] This is the amount that the job pays, before all taxes and deductions.

[2] https://www.gov.uk/national-insurance/how-much-you-pay

[3] https://www.gov.uk/income-tax-rates/current-rates-and-allowa...

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matthewmacleod
Nope, you pay tax on the full amount. Each taxpayer has a personal allowance (currently £11,000 generally, but this varies) on which no tax is paid; a rate of 20% applies to income between £11,000 and £42,000, a rate of 40% on income between £42,000 and £161,000, and a rate of 45% above that.
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youngtaff
Don't forget you start to lose the personal allowance at 100k, so someone earning earn between 100k and ~122k has a top rate of 60%
asldfkweiorz
Throwaway. Data Scientist, Insurance, FT, 39k a year, approx 3 years experience.
asldfkweiorz
Oh, yeah, also got a PhD in Maths. And am looking for a new position.
strongai
Shoot me an email (see profile). Medium sized company - analytics, financial services, other interesting data science stuff. Offices in London and elsewhere :-) I'll help steer you to our HR people and if you're successful, will receive a modest introduction bonus. We pay well, but not investment bank salaries. We have lots of PhDs - they're coming out of our ears, so you'll feel quite at home. It also seems that the planets are in alignment for our tech and its place in the market, so things are very upbeat right now.
eecks
Slightly unrelated to your offer but I am curious that you have lots of PhDs. Is this a requirement for the position or is it just by chance?
throawaylondon3
Senior front end developer. 4 years experience. Now a contractor on my first project at £350/day in a big company. Expecting this to rise to 400/450 for the next gig. A few months ago I was full time at a startup on £52K.
wannabecontract
48k, London startup, frontend, 2.5 yrs exp. Took a paycut from 52.5k (@ 1.5 yrs exp) for this role.

Off topic - As someone in your exact previous position and looking to make the same move to contracting do you have any advice, did you find it easy to land that first contract?

throawaylondon3
I did find it quite easy. I just followed up with a recruiter, went to interview and got the job. You usually have to start fairly quickly so have some holiday banked up so you can leave permanent work sooner.

The work, culture, etc is similar to any other permanent job I've had. As long as you keep up to date and are good you'll be fine. Other companies may differ wildly I'm sure

le_ticket
working for an engineering consultancy at a very senior technical level, overseeing big data projects, and doing some business development. £80k p/a plus benefits
middleman90
6 years experience. software developer 450£ per day
jakub_g
what is your stack? frontend, java, c++ (and, do you work in finance?)
middleman90
nodejs right now, but I'm full stack

I don't work in finance

throwawayPayLdn
Just switched roles so can give two:

Small Investment Bank - 61k + ~30% Bonus (3-5years experience) Java / Angular - Back Office Developer - Permanent

Small Hedge Fund - 65k + 50%+ Bonus (expected/promised) - .Net / WPF (5years experience although not in .Net) - Permanent

throwaway64928
What are the hours?
throwawayPayLdn
Not bad to be honest, 8-7 but I do get out for an hour or so at lunch.
jbms
Those look pretty bad to someone outside London.

How much travel on top of that?

m_t
Working 10hr per day looks bad even inside London!
throwawayPayLdn
I'm young, so if I'm not coding at work, I would be doing it at home most of the week.

Travel is < 30 minutes each way.

bbcbasic
But the coding at home would be your IP and you'd have no boss to tell you what tech to use.
nicolasMLV
In 2013 I declined an offer (first job, graduate): software dev in bigco (IT Provider travel industry), £38K
throw9383
For comparison, in Devon. Full stack senior developer, 20 years experience, full time - £42K.
rojabuck
(kind of off topic) considering a move? considered riverford.co.uk? if so fire me your CV...
m_t
Riverford is hiring? Oh that's funny. Could be fun to work where I buy my veggies.
londondev998
Senior developer with a front-end focus at a startup with some corporate backing, 7 years of experience, ~80k plus benefits.
wissam124
Quant risk analyst for a commodities trading house

Base £67k Bonus anywhere between 15 to 50%