I feel like that range is a on the high side, at least for jobs outside the Bay Area. Unless aerospace pays a lot better than software jobs at government contractors. When I was laid off less than 2 years ago and applying to a wide variety of places, the gov contractors were only offering in the $120-$140 ballpark for senior sw engineering positions. They tended to play up gold plated benefits, high 401k match, etc as well but there’s no way that would get it up to $263k.
That is outrageous that two seemingly developed countries could have such a huge compensation gap. A senior aerospace engineer in the UK can make as little as 45k GBP, or 56k USD? One fifth as much as the lowest-paid American??
The take-home on that is £35k. The median rent in London is £26k. I suppose the person making £45k doesn't likely live in London, but still pretty grim.
Americans are often blown away and kind of ignorant of how, relative to the rest of the world, they are really wealthy and well paid. Like, people have way less disposable incomes in other parts of the world, even developed countries. The purchase power of the USD and the power of the US economy is absolutely insane.
Yes, Aerospace Engineers don't live in London because there are very little (if any) aerospace jobs in London. Biggest aerospace employers in the UK are BAE Systems and Airbus, and both have factories in much cheaper locations (Wales, Northwest of England).
You're basically comparing "super specialised job in the middle of nowhere with very low cost of living" vs a "super specialised but much more needed job in multiple high cost of living locations" (Seattle metro area, LA metro area to name a few).
The UK is poor because they decided to financialize the economy in the 90s and stop making things. It's like canada where the GDP per capita goes down every year. I'm amazed there hasn't been a revolution.
Sure, but expanding the definition of “Canadian” to include people who were already poor is a bit different from people who were already Canadian becoming poorer.
I don't think the average migrant salary is much different from the average UK citizen salary. Then again, I also don't find the "financialisation" argument very compelling. Plus, the GDP per capita visibly does not go down every year.
According to Stats Canada, “Real GDP per capita has now declined in five of the past six quarters”, so fair to say it’s currently declining. This was news to me.
"another respected data journalist, John Burn-Murdoch, calculated that without London, the UK would be poorer, in terms of GDP per capita, than even the poorest US state, Mississippi."
Yes, it's true that the UK economy is very London-centric, but the original poster was talking about the UK as a whole vs the US as a whole. (The flip side of this is that the figures would look better if you compared London to a major US city.)
None of this changes the fact that US software engineering salaries are a poor comparison to use to illustrate wealth disparities between the US and other countries, as they are an outlier.
Regardless, Americans are not five times richer than Brits by any reasonable measure. The salaries in the comparison upthread are outliers. The exact figure obviously depends on which stat you look at, but Americans are around 50% richer by most measures.
The U.S. engineer can be fired on a whim immediately and lose their health care (COBRA) and the company that fires them can even contest their unemployment benefits (that the employee paid into) if they feel motivated enough. That's one of the reasons they get paid much more.
I’ve been fired before by a major American tech company. I was underperforming, unmotivated, and depressed about it. They gave me a substantial severance payment in exchange for quitting voluntarily, and for signing an agreement that basically said I wouldn’t sue them. They let me pick my last date, they paid my health insurance through the next three months, and my manager told me I could use my last month of employment to find a new job. I was quickly hired into a better-paid position at another company, with a better manager, and I did well there.
I realize this story sounds absurd to anyone who hasn’t experienced it, but my understanding is that this form of firing (“managing out”) is basically the norm for low performers at top-tier tech companies.
To get actually fired, you usually have to fuck up big time, like sexually harassing a coworker, stealing trade secrets, or trying to start a union. (That last one is a joke, sort of)
Quite! A top 10% earner in Finland, a supposedly very developed country, by saving all of their net-income spending zero on food and letting their SO pay the bills, could in 2-3 years afford a new Skoda.
I don’t know if you’re making a joke or not, but getting NHS isn’t worth $200,000 USD per year.
Most Americans get employer-provided health insurance, which costs money (the amount specified in the DD section of the W2), and its often in the $1500/month range. That DD amount isn’t part of your income or the salary Glassdoor mentions. It’s an added benefit of top of that.
In the UK and elsewhere, around $500/month/person in taxes pays for your healthcare. That’s essentially subtracted from your income. So the uk income is even lower when you subtract the taxes the NHS costs.
> I don’t know if you’re making a joke or not, but getting NHS isn’t worth $200,000 USD per year.
Nope, but NHS + no/less student loans + no car dependency + cheaper childcare + time off + a ton of other things shave quite a bit off that $200k. Not equal, and not in every personal case, but a lot.
Isn’t housing extremely unaffordable in the UK though? That erases a lot of these benefits, doesn’t it? (I’m aware this is true of a lot of HCOL areas in the U.S. as well.)
Canadian and not UKian, but our public healthcare is definitely not worth 50% of my take home cash, I get much better access to care in the US right now. it still says Canada on my passport so I can get healthcare if I get fired or chronically ill
You say this ironically, but someone who’s been working hard 15 hours 7 days a week in a niche, 50 weeks a year, from age 15 to age 29 has clearly a much higher potential than a 45 year old following the normal path in life.
And almost certainly a higher employable value too unless they have catastrophically bad social skills…
Someone who works for 15 out of 18 of their waking hours, leaving 3 hours to eat, exercise, and have any semblance of social interactions or secondary interests, for FOURTEEN YEARS is not a genius. They are actually an idiot, wasting their life.
The implication was that someone who dedicated all of their time as physically possible to working and studying, would not have had time to develop social skills
>… been working hard 15 hours 7 days a week in a niche, 50 weeks a year, from age 15 to age 29…
Developed the same level of social skills as the average individual who lived a more normal schedule?
I have to ask before you even answer that. Do you believe that social skills are something to be practiced and built upon, are they some waste of time they only hormones bother with, or some other option I haven’t considered?
I think you might be delusional if you think that the people who can do all of this at the same time and don’t come out maladjusted to society is anything beyond a fraction of a fraction of a percent of outliers
This is just magical thinking on your end. I’ve met some of these “literal geniuses” making 500k at faangs and most of them are completely socially maladapted once you’ve taken them out of the pipeline they’ve lived in since high school to getting their first job mid or late 20s after their masters or PhD.
Secondly you started off this chain with talking about how someone working hard for 15 hours a day for decades is going to be more valuable and they’ll just be able to pick up every skill a human could have or need because they’re “geniuses”.
If they’re really geniuses why do they need to grind?
If you’re implying that they are only part of the set of geniuses that grind that long and there is another set of geniuses that didn’t, then how does that track with geniuses being a very small fraction of society?
> But the majority of them do exceed that very low bar, so it’s simply not that critical of a hinderance most of the time.
Describing not having catastrophically bad social skills as a “very low” bar is not a valid take when it comes to the world of computer science. I remember when visiting Carnegie Mellon as a senior in high school and evaluating their comp sci program, how the guides suddenly got very serious when they informed our parents(not the prospective students) that a course on hygiene was required freshman year and could not be waived. I’ve also worked with near limitless number of engineers who think they have the social skills down and then don’t understand why no one wants to work with them when they will do shit like call someone else’s project they’ve worked on for months pointless or useless in a group setting without even trying to approach said coworker with even a modicum of social awareness.
Those kinds of behaviors don’t show up in a population where having non catastrophically bad social skills is a “very low bar”
> You appear to be reading absolute implications into my comments, and/or inserting your own conjectures which aren’t there on a plain reading.
I think we’re coming at this with different axioms. You seem to believe that social skills are trivial and don’t matter next to the hard sciences that people grind away on. I am coming from one where I have to constantly make excuses or apologies for various people in software engineering or comp sci because they appear to be literally incapable of empathy or understanding that other people might have a different viewpoint than theirs.
Given my axiom I think your are handwaving away a lot, and that’s where you see my statements as inserted conjectures.
Realistically, there are plenty of competent people they could hire for any low six figures amount (unless they are directly in the DC area, in which case add 20-30k for cost of living). 500-600k or half of that is a unicorn salary that doesn't apply to those industries or areas and is irrelevant to the discussion. Even if they offered you that salary you wouldn't take it because the work environment would be radically different from working at a bloated web tech firm, or working at a silicon valley startup.
Totally different markets. You wouldn't be interested in that job, and they wouldn't want to hire you even if you were interested. Even the tone of your post makes that obvious.
We should be discussing early to mid career folks from somewhere other than silicon valley startup or big web tech land. Aka "meat and potatoes" tech jobs. That is what's being discussed.
I don't know what their problem is with hiring either and I agree with you that it could be partially compensation related. But not being able to compete with Silicon Valley on compensation is not where I would be going with that argument....I think it's more likely to be related to environment and interview style and notions of what "experience" means. In other words...bad hiring practices...not necessarily raw compensation issues. The compensation for non "big tech" firms can sometimes be quite good in comparison to other career paths especially when located outside of the valley, so being unable to hire talent makes me suspicious of hiring practices more than compensation (assuming they are reasonably large and hit market rate for the area and are in a reasonably large metro).
How well do you pay? If I were at Meta, my total comp would be 500-600k. I make half that at a small startup. Can you afford me?