I've just moved to the UK (London) for about a year (or 2 at the max) as part of a international transfer from work. Compare this to the USA: Average salaries are $75k, but 25% of engineers earn over $94k. 727. Getting Silicon Valley pay while living at Dallas/Ft. How much does a Engineering Manager make in London, UK? Its all a matter of supply and demand. Currently, the most lucrative engineering jobs are in the oil and gas industry, and the energy sector. It's more like CA/NY vs rest of world in terms of salaries. UK is so behind in IT advancements. The way to make out in the US is to work for a company that is based in the Silicon Valley and has nationwide operations with a single payscale. If your goal is to slum it and accumulate money, London does not come close. 70,900 ... work on machinery and site improvement workEnsure Engineering time is managed effectively and that that there is low Engineering down-time You: Hands on ability. The Western birth rate is falling due to poor decisions by government to encourage family values. Also there is very little understanding or appreciation for engineeing even within the business so failure is built in. People earn more as they get older - who'd have thunk it. 0 Low. Ditto for Oracle, Office 365, the Google Suite and even consumer stuff like Craigslist, Reddit or Apple's services (that the UK never home produced something like Reddit continues to boggle my mind). And Amazon has spent years being break even or making losses (albeit for good reasons). I am a Professional Engineer working in London zone 1 and my salary is £57000/year. Range £17 - £30,567. It’s the one I come to as well viewing things from the outside. The average UK salary was £25k, the average graduate starting salary is more like £19k. Low £41,085. I am a radio engineer and i have about three years of experience，but i just got your half income,less benefits... this is fact you have to face it . There is in many places (especially older companies with non-tech middle managers), also a management problem. Thanks for the input! That's £55k - £70k in British money - neglecting the fact that US dollars buy more anyway and that the cost of living in (most areas) of the USA … are all huge in the UK, yet most of the work on them is taking place in the US. Why are UK tech salaries so low compared to the US? Tell me it can't be done and I'll do it. Other reasons are that the UK has a better social safety net. Why are engineering salaries so poor in the UK? – xLeitix Jul 25 '16 at 19:04 2 Who do you expect to pay for their work, and why do you expect that those people would pay more than they have to in order to receive the same services? I've been in several interviews for jobs in London, and the salaries are terrible. High £81,209. Salary estimates are based on 554 salaries submitted anonymously to Glassdoor by Engineering Manager employees. Move to Switzerland to rake in more pay! As a contractor, it's also easier to get exposure to different tech, rather than be stuck doing the same thing day in and out. - More regulation around employee protection, - Excellent talent drawn from less wealthy EU states who may be willing to accept a slightly lower wage than locals, - Lots of STEM graduates from UK universities, - Tech skills are not seen as valuable as law/banking/medicine, - A more profit-first rather than growth-first startup mindset. In the US if you are broke then you are fucked. ... and dramatically lower engineer salaries than the US (with a GDP per capita roughly the same as the UK). The national average salary for a Engineer is £33,000 in United Kingdom. Why pay for the best people in the industry to work in the UK when we can just stand on the shoulders of work being done in the US? The translates to around $50k a year. You could increase postdoc salaries by 10% right now across the board, which would be a giant raise, and a first year postdoc would still make ~$10,000 less a year than a mail carrier. 23 ... not only because of their professional ability, but also their behaviour and attitude (which is so important to us!) Additional Cash Compensation. The other equivalents are cheaper in the US. UK companies do not produce as much value, hence they are not able to pay as much as FANG. Engineering is 80% foreign workers. Currently, the most lucrative engineering jobs are in the oil and gas industry, and the energy sector. According to data, the average salary is about £42k. When I looked into it a couple of months ago, I found zone 1 London rents are a fair bit higher than equivalent apartments in SF if you compare by square-footage and quality. Talking to people from around the US, it's just generally cheaper in other places in the US. 0 High. The Average Engineering salary in the UK is £33,589. In addition to higher income taxes Europe has a VAT (value added tax rather than sales tax and it's like 20%). Isn't N in FANG Netflix? And all the engineers do is what management tells them to, so they're replaceable. That to many people in many places in the uk there is no such thing as an engineer, if you work with computers you work in IT (and can you fix my laptop please?). Worth cost of living works really well. For this money, I work normally 11 hours a day under extremely stressful conditions with a lot of responsibility and the only thing I can do when I get back home is to go sleeping. Or give it a damned good try. Anecdotally, and when compared to America, it could be due to a combination of many factors including: It's not STEM supply pushing down the salaries. I can remember when 'back east' companies came out to Silicon Valley. UK salaries still thousands of pounds lower than across most of our European rivals. More seriously in Australia the average seems to be 70 to 80k staring and upwards for graduate with 2 to 5 years experience. As far as space is concerned, in my experience one of the Bay Area's biggest problems was inefficient use of space in every which way possible. Well it's needless to speculate, the variation is because London has the public transportation infrastructure to keep demand in prime areas under control. Salaries in the US also vary quite widely between regions and between specific disciplines. Finance in London pays typically £500-600 per day for average level frontend and backend work. Engineers are just paid more in the US than Europe. And they'll say this, with a straight face, with absolutely no mention of the pay, as if supply exists completely independently of demand. ARM is in Cambridge, Rockstar is in Newcastle, Dyson near Bristol. If you look at industries where the UK does take an innovative role like finance or bioinformatics, the salaries seem a lot more competitive, though are still not at US levels due to the UK's lower cost of living I guess. Which understandably sucks and pushes masses to not enter any engineering fields. Salary estimates are based on 285 salaries submitted anonymously to Glassdoor by IT Engineer employees. The only exception is in Banking where the salaries are much higher than the UK average (but still lower, as tech is views as second to other roles, not as the primary focus). The UK has a higher cost of living, with London pretty much equal to NY or SF and other high cost cities. Those numbers look quite wrong, I don't think they're comparing like-for-like. I am an Engineer in the TV and occasionally Radio Broadcast industry, but I have been pretty lucky to own my own TV Outside Broadcast business for most of my life, so I have never really worked for another company on a permanent basis so I cant really say what the wages are like, other than I do a lot of contract work these days.........I have worked for a UK owned company operating here from time to time, and they pay really well....better than the US, so maybe it more of a "we pay what we have to" thing in the UK.......32k pounds sounds like pretty ordinary pay to me.....maybe the job requires less there than here or in the US ? That’s not really surprising. Salary estimates are based on 2,381 salaries submitted anonymously to Glassdoor by Engineer employees. I've lived in both SF (and Berkeley) and London. Staying in North America for a similar job would pay $70-75k. Why are salaries so low? Yes I know the pound is not as strong now, but even with a stronger pound, around $1.6, I would be earning roughly the same as a graduate in the US still. You can't pay an engineer more than a (non-technical) middle manager, because the manager is (obviously) more important, as they can tell then engineers what to do. Why are UK tech salaries so low compared to the US? In the US you also need to put aside much more every month. I was curious about this since it seems unlikely SF can be so much more expensive than London. I do wonder if it’s too simplistic and appealing because it is so neat though. Which UK company makes the same profit per employee as FANG? I'm sure all the investors up to their eyeballs in the loss-making, ever hyped unicorns would beg to differ. Yep, that's right: It won't matter if you have snatched an offer from Imperial/Oxford/Cambridge or, for example, from a much lesser ranked institutions such as the London Metropolitan University, you will roughly earn between 38k-45k GBP a year as a starting Lecturer. UK electronics salaries were never great, but when there was demand for engineers salaries were better than they are today. The problem is that someone always needs the money so they accept the position which causes the company to think this new low salary is the norm. As a graduate my starting salary was $79,000 (£62,000), more than what I would be expecting to earn with 6 years of experience in the UK. would be interesting to know, people talk about SF only, but how salaries look in places like Phoenix or in states like Wyoming, Montana and Vermont ? Because when tech companies come to places in the us they become gentrified and everything becomes expensive. Times are changing, though, more and more engineers start their own company. I speculate that the idea SF is much pricier than London is caused by significantly lower standards/expectations for London. Pay tends to be quite a bit higher for contractors but without all the perks like pension contributions and leave that a permanent position has. How can it be that interested students pay so much, but many academic salaries are so low (excluding the obvious full professor in a field where the industry pays for Stack Exchange Network Stack Exchange network consists of 176 Q&A communities including Stack Overflow , the largest, most trusted online community for developers to learn, share their knowledge, and build their careers. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ That's not my experience of both places, and I've not found any data that supports London being as expensive as SF including. The average salary for all engineers working in the UK is close to £40,000 per annum. Why hire a 54 year old currently on £24k and winding down for retirement when you can get a graduate who will work hard so they can be on £80k+ by 54. Or, why does the US pay so well? This is obviously not a good environment for productive engineering, but explains why some companies see engineers as a cost centre rather than a revenue generating centre. Average £8,261. The national average salary for a Engineer is £36,265 in United Kingdom. – corsiKa Jul 25 '16 at 19:41 Which one of your so-called value-adding unicorns are actually making a profit? This makes me think the question is better phrased the other way around. What’s special about Silicon Valley is that nowhere else comes close, that the minimum efficient scale for a great many software ideas is small, that it’s new, the addressable market is close to the entire global economy, and most importantly, they’re talent constrained, not capital constrained. Or you can go the dark side and go team leader/management. Have you been to SV ? Low £21,520. I am an electronic engineer and I get paid £32k per year in Leeds. The salary in engineering is not low but the effort for reward is highly unbalanced. I understand that even for comparable jobs, salary bands are quite different for each country, but I just don't see why UK salaries (London in particular) are so low compared to the rest of EU and USA?, especially for mid-tier jobs.. It's actually possible for me, a not-especially-good junior/mid developer to consider living alone with a <40 minute commute in London; that seemed to be a no go for guys making far more than me in SF. My guess is that the electronics industry in the UK is gradually shrinking so the pay is poor because of market forces. Specifically im talking EE. This could also be a recipe for low earnings. Gas is cheaper, insurance, (non-SF)rent etc. If everyone refused the low salaries they would be requited to increase or not have anyone working. To fund my startup and live myself, it would cost me 3x to 4x less to do it here in Montreal instead of Silicon Valley. Filter by location to see Engineering Manager salaries in your area. Or, why does the US pay so well? Is that because of labor regulations there? It had to be somewhere. The Average Software Engineer salary in the UK is £49,181. LOL. New jobs added in the last day. The UK doesn’t need more engineers it needs more dog’s bodies to do the menial tasks whilst the … High £63,718. Low £41,085. UK entry-level professionals get £27k - … In most places where PhD salaries are low (say, Italy), regular salaries are also bad. Re: Why are engineering salaries so poor in the UK? Because outside of financial services, there aren't that many highly profitable companies, Google or Facebook profitability levels are not common in Europe. Accommodation further out is (overall) significantly cheaper than the BART accessible parts of Oakland and Berkeley with a drastically better public transportation setup. That certainly holds up for some I've worked with! Silicon Valley is the place where agglomeration economics kicked in for information technology. Averages are also dragged up quite a bit by places that pay absurd salaries, particularly in the software market--but many of those salaries lose a bit of their luster when you look at the cost of living you have to deal with to get them. Engineering salaries are poor in the UK, and I wouldn’t recommend to anyone going into engineering unless they were really self motivated and driven to. Thanks to govt and so called IT managers and architects there who didnt enforce change in UK and still working with IBM and Sap as being high end vendors Nov 28, 2019 8 6 39 Engineering Salaries provided anonymously by News UK employees. Salaries have been rising though, and London salaries are twice or more than much of Europe. SF is a place to go and pile up money with a get out plan in mind. Huge tech industry profits, high demand for skilled programmers, limits on foreign workers who tend to drive wages down. The average salary for a Engineering Manager is £75,694 in London, UK. (From personal experience food was noticeably costlier in the UK (gas too).) I would like to think the extra taxes we pay and companies pay in the UK goes towards this net. I think there are lots of reasons, both sociological and economical, but my hunch is that demand for the most productive tech employees is lower since it's so easy to lean on American-produced innovations and services rather than build our own in the UK. What are you bitching about? On my teams I've had people north of that figure as RF experts, people with DV clearances, analogue experts and a few others I've forgotten. There's the potential to earn much higher if you're good at what you do. I'd have happily traded half of it for a few hundred off my rent. I think they are equivalent (or even favorable to UK) after you discount the cost of health care, education, paid vacation days, etc. None. They had a hard time recruiting and retaining in the Valley because their 'back east' pay scales didn't cut it. I thought Netflix was loss making. However, as a contractor, you have more control over your life. Reason why salaries are low is because people are willing to accept roles at lower pay. are there any sw jobs there ? From my teams, trick is to have a specialisation which is in demand without going too narrow and niche. In the UK the vast majority of engineers will work 37-45hrs a week and get 25+ paid days off a year. Low £21,520. I'd take an absolute slum of a single room over sharing in prime apartment). High £63,718. > London's tech market is hugely contractor oriented. I haven't lived in London for long, but I found I had much more disposable income in SF, even compared to living in a non-London uk city. What's so interesting is that the same companies that do this will tell you that there is a very serious shortage of software developers. Pretty cool and inexpensive but (by London standards) not that accessible areas like Peckham are about as long of a commute into zone 1 as my Civic Center to Berkeley BART commute, and probably much shorter once you factor in the time spent waiting on platforms at before getting on and/or a connection at 19th Street/MacArthur. After tax, that's ~£24k. I checked out rental prices in SF on a recent visit and found SF pretty good value compared to London. Accommodation in London zone 1 is a good bit lower than SF without the same level of competition. Balero on July 5, 2018. Filter by location to see IT Engineer salaries in your area. All that being said, I saved a stupid amount of money in SF working on intern level wages. I'd need to know what metrics are being used for quality (e.g. There is no funding and there are no jobs. It's the high salaries that cause gentrification, not gentrification that causes high salaries. This makes me think the question is better phrased the other way around. A Free & Open Forum For Electronics Enthusiasts & Professionals, Login with username, password and session length. The national average salary for a IT Engineer is £29,099 in United Kingdom. Five years after graduation its alumni make a median of £24,000 rising to £27,900 10 years after, according to Department for Education data. Thanks, to me that is definitely the simple and obvious answer. Filter by location to see Engineer salaries in your area. They had a corporate wide pay structure that didn't account for differences in cost of living. Slightly less general points, but speaking as an engineer in the UK, the salaries can be better than what you're citing in the first post. Cost of living (at least from my perspective) is low. The national average salary for a Engineering Manager is £65,239 in United Kingdom. What salary does a Engineering earn in your area? In my opinion, the main reason for the low UK salaries is the "salary scale" system, which is the same for all public universities. The average starting salary in my highly-educated industry is 30-35k. This is typical european business culture. Filter by location to see Engineer salaries in your area. As others have said, if you want more apply for jobs over £25k, if you're any good its quite doable to get around £30k. High £81,209. https://sf.curbed.com/2018/3/2/17073100/silicon-valley-house-home-sunnyvale-record-price-crisis, Quote from: rstofer on May 21, 2018, 07:57:01 pm, Quote from: coppice on May 21, 2018, 09:07:09 pm, Quote from: rstofer on May 21, 2018, 09:55:33 pm, Quote from: ajb on May 21, 2018, 06:48:38 pm, Quote from: Harb on May 23, 2018, 02:44:02 pm, Quote from: lee_chen on May 25, 2018, 01:40:56 am, Quote from: David Chamberlain on May 24, 2018, 11:09:34 am, Quote from: DaveW on May 23, 2018, 10:55:13 pm, Quote from: BNElecEng on May 26, 2018, 09:48:20 am, Electron Fiddler, FPGA Hacker, Embedded Systems EE, I am a Systems Analyst who plays with Electronics. Same is true in the pharmaceutical industry. I have never received an offer in my region above £35k, and even in the South of England (London, etc), the best salaries I see are £55k. With the savings, I would just have to fly first class, plus 2 partners, and pay for hotels in Silicon Valley around 3 times a year and I would still save big$$$. Salary estimates are based on 2,084 salaries submitted anonymously to Glassdoor by Engineer employees. Japan has fewer per capita stem graduates than the US, with a highly developed technical economy, and dramatically lower engineer salaries than the US (with a GDP per capita roughly the same as the UK). Salaries estimates are based on 140 salaries submitted anonymously to Glassdoor by Engineering Manager employees in London, UK. According to data, the average salary is about £42k. When high paying companies come to London/Oxford/Cambridge/Bristol the effect is just the same, it's not a US only phenomenon. I think what most people are missing in these comparisons is that London's tech market is hugely contractor oriented, and so it makes more sense to compare day rates. Engineers need higher salaries to stop them leaving the profession early Poor pay is the reason why young engineers are finding different careers 04 December 2012 • 07:00 am In most cases tech companies coming to an area has a devastating effect as people who had lived in an area forever are forced out due to the insane spike in cost of living. Academia cannot be fixed. Even beyond the lack of usage of vertical space, every room I had was pretty huge, double bed, desk, room to do just about any kind of yoga I could think of and still a ton of extra on top of that. For consumer goods it seems they're comparing a cheap UK supermarket to Whole Foods in SF, and for rents they must be ignoring square footage and/or using different definitions of city center to get those comparisons. That Azure, AWS, Google Cloud Platform, etc done and i 'll do.... Out rental prices in SF working on intern level wages are no jobs unicorns would beg to.... 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