The living costs in London are enormous. A fellow student has a highly payed analyst job at Goldman Sachs in London, but still does room sharing in a flat somewhere in London.
I know living costs are "enormous". But if you make 3 times more money as you'd do in Berlin, it's still a much better deal.
The point I was making even in top cities in Germany (Munich for example) where living costs are also enormous, salaries are not very competitive compared to SF/NY or London (this only applies to contracting, permanent salaries are low in London).
So be fair and compare to the contractor salary in Tokyo as well. I can assure you that, despite being lower, salaries are quite close to London ones. A 3 time difference is a myth. Unless you are going to compare London engineers to Tokyo combini part time worker.
Yes I meant contractor salary is 3x more than permanent salary for a very senior software engineer in Germany for example. The idea behind this comparison is that you don't really have contractor market in Germany being so active as in London.
In London contractor market is very active and large so you can go from contract to contract basically without gaps and function basically as if you had a perm job but with much higher salary.
In Germany contracts are more sparse and I don't think it's easy to pull off a full time contracting there. The rates are also quite a bit lower (at least from emails I get from time to time about contracts in Netherlands & Germany) so there's that as well.
And of course, Tokyo is much much worse in this respect. I know some people who live in Tokyo so I know that being a programmer there is pretty bad.
> In Germany contracts are more sparse and I don't think it's easy to pull off a full time contracting there. The rates are also quite a bit lower (at least from emails I get from time to time about contracts in Netherlands & Germany) so there's that as well.
A rule of thumb in Germany: If you earn double the amount as a contractor as you would as an employee this is about the same standard of living. In other words: If you don't really earn a lot more as a contractor than as an employee, it is not worth the hazzle.
Another problem for contracting are the laws concerning Scheinselbständigkeit (fictitious self-employment) - cf. https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scheinselbst%C3%A4ndigkeit - which make it really difficult for companies to contract someone for a longer time.
Yes there have been changes like that in UK as well (IR35) aimed at making it difficult for companies to keep hiring contractors for a longer time.
First problem with that was that public sector IT in the UK depends on contractors so they have shot themselves in the foot (already many public agencies started relaxing the rules and working around IR35 to be able to hire anybody).
Also most contractors usually change contract every 6-12 months so it's not a problem. You don't work at a single company for longer than that (1 year 11 months is maximum, after that you get in trouble because of IR35).
> A rule of thumb in Germany: If you earn double the amount as a contractor as you would as an employee this is about the same standard of living
Well what if it is 3 or 4 or even 5 times more. With top market contracts the rates can be really good. If a company urgently needs to hire somebody skilled to come in and do some firefighting you can negotiate a very high daily rate for 6 months contract.
Also keep in mind you pay lower taxes as contractor as most of your income is via dividends. And you can also expense a lot of things you buy if it can be justified as cost of running business.
The living costs in London are enormous. A fellow student has a highly payed analyst job at Goldman Sachs in London, but still does room sharing in a flat somewhere in London.