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.
