Just a comment on the expected salaries for developers in London:
- A junior developer at £20k is probably going to do you more harm than good
- £30 - £40k for a junior developer is more reasonable, where £30k would be fresh from red-brick uni (if lucky) or a couple years industry experience
- A senior developer asking less than £50k is probably not super confident (could be various reasons e.g. failing to get other jobs, not super experienced) or experienced with startups
- Good senior developers experienced with startups are more likely to be on a minimum of £60k and anywhere up to £80/90k
Also it's a little more nuanced than this. A first hire developer might (perhaps reasonably) expect to be a CTO or Tech Lead assuming further hires - this is one of the reasons some developers consider working in startups as it's a potential fast track to gain management-like experience. If you're hiring a junior developer, this probably isn't the best idea and it should be made clear to them this isn't the case. In hiring a senior developer it should at the very least be discussed - the outcome of this may potentially be an expectation of higher salary (either immediately or upon company growth). It's not unheard of for small startups (seed / series A) to pay £100k+ for CTOs.
Is this a guideline for startups only? I work as the only dev in a small design company but have no frame of reference for salary expectations as I've never worked with other developers and transitioned into it from a design role. I earn slightly more than the other employees (designers) but that's still under £30k. I would consider myself more experienced than a junior.
Can I send you my resume as well? I've worked for small companies or startups most of my life in a not so strong region for developers, so I really have no idea what I actually should be asking for my salary, and I know I'm probably underselling myself.
I was speaking mostly in the context of startups. For instance, more established companies have greater resources to hire more junior devs at a lower salary point and train them up. They also usually have a higher ceiling for top end salaries (team leads, various flavours of management, architects or niche skills depending on sector).
Hard to say what you should be expecting as i'm not sure how long you've been developing. If you can demonstrate your ability (i.e. pass technical interviews) and have about a years experience or more I would imagine you could get £30k or more fairly easily, startup or not.
Some of the highest salaries in London for software engineers are for senior developers at Ecommerce companies built on Magento or building Wordpress websites for agencies.
The idea that PHP developers don't get paid much is erroneous, on average they probably do, but the peaks are just the same. I currently earn £70k "hacking" php in Magento and I'm based in Manchester where the cost of living is far lower.
Currently my time is split between JS (node and vue, vuex, webpack for frontend work) and PHP (Laravel), occasionally some Python. Primarily work for clients building single page applications. And yes I use version control and keep up to date with modern specs. Haven't touched WordPress in about 5 years thankfully.
Having crunched the numbers in London a couple of times, I think these are pretty much spot on. One thing I will say is that there is a pretty large variance. It depends a lot in what sector you're working. Outside of London is quite a bit cheaper (surprisingly so) and I often wonder how people hire anyone.
I work a lot in the UK. And NL and DE as well. I do not like talking about salaries, how much someone makes. But fresh out of uni I was above your senior numbers and besides being overly confident I did not do much more. My senior friends in the UK and NL and DE also make far more than you suggest. I think you are right that you need to be confident; without that you get abused. And I guess that is when labels like introvert get tossed around; if you do not ask or if you think you are not worth it...
Edit; Forgot to add the context; gross salaries per yet. In EU talking about net salaries make no sense at all so I assumed that.
- A junior developer at £20k is probably going to do you more harm than good
- £30 - £40k for a junior developer is more reasonable, where £30k would be fresh from red-brick uni (if lucky) or a couple years industry experience
- A senior developer asking less than £50k is probably not super confident (could be various reasons e.g. failing to get other jobs, not super experienced) or experienced with startups
- Good senior developers experienced with startups are more likely to be on a minimum of £60k and anywhere up to £80/90k
Also it's a little more nuanced than this. A first hire developer might (perhaps reasonably) expect to be a CTO or Tech Lead assuming further hires - this is one of the reasons some developers consider working in startups as it's a potential fast track to gain management-like experience. If you're hiring a junior developer, this probably isn't the best idea and it should be made clear to them this isn't the case. In hiring a senior developer it should at the very least be discussed - the outcome of this may potentially be an expectation of higher salary (either immediately or upon company growth). It's not unheard of for small startups (seed / series A) to pay £100k+ for CTOs.