You have to compare like with like: number of days holiday is different (we have different numbers of public holidays); you don't have to pay for health insurance; the numbers here are in sterling not USD; do we value experienced developers more than very new ones; how many have bonuses as a major part of their salary [which this doesn't show]?
Pretty much any full-time developer gig in the US will include employee-provided health insurance in addition to salary, so salaries are still pretty much directly comparable in that sense -- take-home pay shouldn't be that different. I could see that argument being used to justify higher salaries in the UK, since employers don't have that additional expense, but not lower ones.
Sure, a lot of things here are taken care of. But compared to other jobs for smart graduate in the uk, e.g. law (£35-40k as a graduate trainee), investment banking (£40+k as a graduate, rising very quickly and with significant bonus) it is poorly paid.
With law you have to do a two year training course (so effectively two years of training) where they're usually sponsored.
Investment banking is often long hours (9-midnight) plus weekends. Many leave after a year or two or don't make it past 2 years (don't get their contracts renewed after analyst). Also, I'd consider those individuals to be some of the very smart; does this survey really allow one to filter how good they are at their job? There are different levels of software engineer from someone tweaking a wordpress blog template to someone writing assembly code on chips.
Also, what about google and facebook? They pay pretty well, don't they? Also, there are other companies like linkedin and oracle here too. No idea if they pay well or not (no info to base it off)
Working for government contracts as non permanent employee ?
I've worked at investment banks. People are committed, but they're not there after 7 on the whole.
There are smart people, they're the seniors. The juniors are just like everywhere else. There are the actively clueless.
The only good thing about investment banks is that they're more agile than consumer banks. That's probably country dependent though.
Don't think it's like this special place or some crap. It's really not.
On the whole, if you have strong programming skills you're going to be better compensated in the financial sector than at google or facebook. You just have to work with a non software oriented business that doesn't give a shit, and put up with things.
All of that's true except possibly the bonuses. It's probably still worth noting that £50k is worth about $76k at the moment, so most of the London responses so far would be lumped together in the bottom category on the previous poll.
Direct comparisons are difficult though. Price of living differs dramatically. Taxes are different. The risks of switching jobs are different. (e.g. nobody in the UK has to worry about health insurance costs).
