So what salary does a mid-level developer earn at a London startup at the moment? I know a bunch of people at more traditional software places (i.e. not startups) in the £40-60k range. I know a some people who've gone through accelerator programmes as founders and are barely drawing enough salary to eat.
I'd be interested to hear about this as well. The £40k - £60k range is indeed what you can expect to get as an intermediate to senior software developer in London (add maybe another £10k to £20k in the financial industry at a push). Which I find ridiculously low given the cost of living in London. And you haven't got a hope of being able to buy any decent family home in London on this salary.
Contracting rates, at £400 - £600 / day are more in line with the living costs.
But it's quite sad to see that living and property costs in London have become so insane that even senior software developers either have to contract or end up earning just about enough to pay the rent but not much more.
On the other side, a good seed round for an early stage startup in London is £200k. Maybe £300k if you're the hottest startup in town and work incredibly hard on your round. You're not going to be able to pay your employees very much at all with so little funding.
To me, the numbers just don't add up. I don't see how London can build a sustainable startup community. Or even tech community to be honest.
> And you haven't got a hope of being able to buy any decent family home in London on this salary.
You haven't got a hope of being able to buy a decent family home in central London on that kind of salary.
If people can be bothered to commute just a little bit further out, you can in fact get a decent family home in Croydon for example, for 200k-300k. My 3 bedroom house with a garden cost use 208k when I bought it in 2004. The market has gone up, but it's still "only" valued at around 270k.
When we did buy, I was paid only a little bit out of that range, and it was only my income, and we lived very comfortably on my salary despite that mortgage. For years before that, I rented properties that cost me more per month even on salaries closer to the bottom of the 40k-60k range.
The issue, in my experience, is that younger people tends to want to live in areas that are more hip and closer to the centre, despite not having built up any equity, and if they can't, they often prefer to rent. And then years down the line they're still complaining that they can't afford to buy, when competing with people who spent the last decade living somewhere cheaper and building up equity that lets them put up higher total amounts and gives them access to cheaper mortgages.
> you can in fact get a decent family home in Croydon for example, for 200k-300k
Right, so for a single person earning £35k going to a bank and getting 3.5 times earnings they'll have £105k to spend. How is a 200-300k property in a frankly awful outskirt of London (sorry) considered an acceptable situation?
The quicker the correction comes the better for everyone, this ongoing speculation/bubble of London property is disgusting.
Wow, at first I thought "Croydon? That's not even in London!", but as it turns out, apparently it's possible to go from Croydon Rail station to London Bridge in 14 minutes! From London Bridge, it's less 15 mins to Mayfair, City and Shoredich, so it's really quite close in terms of commute!
Most recent data is £315,000 for the whole of London. Outer London is £276,000. In Croydon, for instance, it's £230,000. Still pretty rubbish, but probably ok if you're earning £40k and above, especially in combination with a partner's salary.
The Outer London figures haven't changed much with the extra year of data: 2012 Q3 £275,000, Q4 £270,000, 2013 Q1 £266,500, Q2 £276,000, the Croydon figure went down by £8,000 over that period, so it's unlikely to be two years of 17% growth.
Agreed unlikely, but the point remains there have been considerable increases since £315,000, hence all the talk of bubble danger by BOE, politicians and investors, especially if you don't single out suburbs, and consider the data is incomplete, and old in a heated market.
Croydon is not a nice place to live in AFAIK. Also when you say "family home in Croydon" do you mean there are any good schools with catchment areas in Croydon?
The average full-time salary in London is 34k right and that 60k would put you in the top decile in the country.
Property prices are indeed high in London, but as a software developer you're earning significantly more than the average Londoner which is worth keeping in mind.
I would be _very_ surprised if it is any more than 60k for a senior developer. This isn't Silicon Valley, unfortunately (well, at least property prices are on par!).
I suggest looking at post-series B venture funded startups they're the ones who have enough money and the need for senior engineers.
That's around the level I'd expect a VP eng with domain experience (i.e scaling a high-growth consumer product, deep ecommerce experiences, etc.) to be able to make.
I'd recommend approaching startups who just raised a significant round (>$10m) as that's the point when many companies make key senior dev hires.
At this level of compensation they would be competing with financial sector. I have not seen any evidence of this so far in London. I have not seen start-ups openly offer that kind of money so far. I think this is just a speculation from your side. Shame we don't have an AngelList.
I work at a venture capital fund so I've seen internal salary data from a number of tech startups as well as from recruiters in the space. I also used to run a developer recruitment startup which gave me access to a lot of internal data from hiring companies.
While it closes the gap with fintech, top devs at hedge funds can make £200-£300k (I have friends who are in this range) which it's hard for any tech startup to compete with.
FYI. AngelList are now operating in the UK and are ramping up. @andychung is their guy on the ground here.
I think a lot of these job ads would be much more attractive if they actually listed the average/expected salary or at least the range. I kind-of understand why they don't, but it still frustrates me.
I think there's something fundamentally strange about the UK and the startup scene in particular where it's considered poor form to discuss salaries. Startups are unwilling to be up front about it and engineers are reluctant to discuss it with each other. I think each of those things feeds the other and we end up with a lack of transparency that is as much cultural as anything else.
Agree, I personally immediately ignore all the offers that at least don't show the salary range.
I had enough of places when the interview ends like "Well, you are our perfect candidate! But we cannot pay you atm. So if you want to work for us for free just for the next few months we'll surely give you all the salary arrears when we start to be on the wave"
I get the intention of all these these scrapers-type comparison/search sites, and all the best with the venture - having had a quick look things are very tidy and well organised, but I always feel they miss the root cause of their existence; wouldn't it be much better to develop a central site with a client API so that all these diverse organisations can submit their job apps straight into the mix?
Establishing harmony among competitive organisations can be difficult - but these are all tech/design companies so they should 'get it' to some degree, and it's not as if they are giving away secrets - a centralised, standardised portal would just make life much easier to engage with talent - especially if there's a standardised application form instead of a mess of different online/word versions all wanting the same information but in different order or structure - that drove me mad when I was job hunting a few months back; I suppose it indicates commitment making someone slog through 'yet another' document format, but spending 4+ hours on 4 different applications, with multiple cuts and pastes AND dealing with fill-in lines created using rows of underscores (aargh!) is soul destroying. There's also the implication that one should print, fill-in, scan to PDF and email back but..seriously!?
If anything needs 'disrupting' its online job applications - I know there are a few sites that handle such things, but most of the ones I have seen belong to specific sectors (public health, military etc.) or just one large company.
Wired Sussex is an example of progress in this respect:
Perhaps phase #2 could be to get all the target companies to agree you can host a standard application form that users could pre-populate and save to use as a template for specific job applications, tweaking things here and there as needed to highlight specific skills (or let users build a custom submission from pre-saved building blocks). It would really save a lot of time.
What we set out to try and do was to build something that didn't rely on companies posting their jobs. Free tech job boards are a dime a dozen. We wanted this to be an up to date account of the jobs that are available as a useful tool to job seekers. That said, you make a really good point about building a client API and I think that's the route we should go: Seed the site with scraped stuff but enable companies to upload their jobs, too.
I totally agree about applications being a nightmare. Some systems are starting to simplify this but it would be great if there was some standard for it. That's something we've talked about, too and we think would be useful. But this actually requires getting startups on board which will take time - but hopefully a few mavericks will want to join in!
Good spot. We've ended up playing a little fast and loose with the definition. Dennis made the cut because we've seen them at silicon milkroundabout (https://www.siliconmilkroundabout.com/) but by that definition we'd let the BBC in, too. Should probably tighten it up - not sure the likes of Ocado really qualify, either.
Very hard to define what a startup is these days and it would be great if you were able to define criteria and post them on your website.
Too many "Startups" have been going for years and don't offer equity to new employees. So what's the point? Might as well have an SME tech companies site...
I think you're exactly right about SMR. Haven't tried mining the HN lists yet, but that kind of seemed like cheating! All of these jobs come straight from the startups' own sites.
London based companies who are hiring in other countries are a real ballache. You think New York is tricky - Ustwo are hiring in Malmö, too (http://zonino.co.uk/job/1132). And I can't even point at Malmö on a map.
All joking aside we decided not to try to filter out jobs in other countries because knowing where a startup is hiring might actually be interesting or useful. We're hoping to improve how the site handles different locations soon.
Unless Ocado have moved their development operations since last time I checked, I believe the job is actually located in Hatfield which is not even in the M25
Whilst this might be a generalisation, most workers in London don't own a car, so public transportation is obviously a key deciding factor when taking into consideration the commute.
I'd hardly call some of those companies start-ups. Take Blinkbox for example, that's backed by a FTSE 100.
On a more serious note, what do other devs feel about working at startups themselves (freelance + perm)? The only I nearly got involved in was folded within 6 months. I'd have potentially been in a very bad situation as a result had I gone through with it.
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I'd do piece meal work. Throw in hours along side my regular job but going full time without a decent golden parachute would worry me.
I've had a really positive experience working for a startup. I was the first engineer hired and it's been amazing to see a company grow from 4 founders to over 100 people. Naturally I'm biased because it all worked out splendidly but I'm really really glad I did it. Sure, it's a risk but I think it all boils down to weighing up the risk with how much you think the founders and the business can succeed.
I think engineers are in a better position now that the London startup scene has matured as there is no stigma attached to being a part of a startup that didn't work out. I think a lot of employers value those experiences and the lessons learned!
Yeah, the search can be a little bit precious sometimes if you don't pick one of the pre-defined skills. Need to work on that. For now this should do the trick: http://zonino.co.uk/search?q%5B%5D=Node.js
