IT salaries in South Africa compared to the UK

[Ipwn 4]

Never mind...

Figures are too low

 

[Ancalagon]

???

Just noticed this. Wow! Ha ha!

What would have been better is if they had offered a comparison of take home pay and effective tax rate for the different jobs in different countries.

You would easily see that you pay less tax in the UK.

 

[cguy]

I think you'll find that the only people that fill out info on glassdoor, payscale etc are those people that are unhappy (read underpaid) and want that to reflect on the company badly on the internet. People then take this info as the holy grail of salary comparison. So all those saffer numbers will probably be on the lower distribution for the jobs quoted.

I think the numbers for both the UK and SA are too low, by about half.

It looks like those are supposed to be averages, but they look more like junior numbers to me. They also don't tend to reflect where the majority of these jobs are. I mean, for a London salary, £37k for a developer is very low. I mean, I know for a fact that if Bloomberg hires you straight out of university as a software engineer, you get £65k. No experience.

Myself, I got a 60% raise when I emigrated. Even with London being more expensive, financially I'm more comfortable here. My money goes further.

Software Engineer

R367,988

£37,041 (R793,209)

Agreed.

Glassdoor, Payscale, Indeed, etc. are probably the worst places to get this information. Firstly, as noted above, it's generally not filled in by people who are doing well, so the salaries are biased downwards. Secondly, it is organized by title, not profession - and there's a big difference out of SA for this. A Principal Software Engineer in the UK has a £78k salary for example (according to Glassdoor at least - this is just to highlight the difference, the reality is that most Principal Engineers make a hell of a lot more than that). Hell, I've seen ads offering up to £600k for software engineers! Thirdly, additional compensation structure like bonus and shares are not included, which can be significant, and is pretty common outside of SA too.

 

[cguy]

Just noticed this. Wow! Ha ha!

What would have been better is if they had offered a comparison of take home pay and effective tax rate for the different jobs in different countries.

You would easily see that you pay less tax in the UK.

That would be much more useful - of course, you would also have to have the Total Compensation right though, which is apparently problematic enough.

 

[cda]

That would be much more useful - of course, you would also have to have the Total Compensation right though, which is apparently problematic enough.

Leaving out of course that perhaps the SA salaries should have a column for each race, but in the UK your career is not limited based on your race and gender.

 

[Mijiz]

This seems way to low, maybe they brain washing us in to thinking it's ok to earn this low for our roles.

 

[The Voice]

I dont see the point, most of the private schemes will just send you to the NHS anyway for most stuff. Like its the only way to get prescriptions

They'll also pay YOU a daily rate if you're admitted to an NHS hospital.

 

[Ancalagon]

Here is an example of how high the ceiling is in the UK.

Typically at hedge funds, your bonus can be 100% of your salary. So, add another £200k to your yearly compensation.

And that is not even as high as it goes. A recruiter sent me a job email with salaries up to £400k plus bonus on top.

Not even the best South African tech or finance company will pay a software engineer R2 million, let alone R4 million. Yes, I know that these are outliers, and very few people ever get to work at hedge funds. But I just thought I'd share how much you CAN earn if you are good.

 

[prod]

Here is an example of how high the ceiling is in the UK.

Typically at hedge funds, your bonus can be 100% of your salary. So, add another £200k to your yearly compensation.

And that is not even as high as it goes. A recruiter sent me a job email with salaries up to £400k plus bonus on top.

Not even the best South African tech or finance company will pay a software engineer R2 million, let alone R4 million. Yes, I know that these are outliers, and very few people ever get to work at hedge funds. But I just thought I'd share how much you CAN earn if you are good.

Who would've thought that a bunch of first world countries would pay more than a struggling developing country

 

[Ancalagon]

Who would've thought that a bunch of first world countries would pay more than a struggling developing country

Yeah, fair enough, but I guess it is the multiple that is surprising.

I mean, it isn't 20% better, or 50% better. It is more like 150% better. It is crazy how much you can make when you get to that level.

 

[cda]

Here is an example of how high the ceiling is in the UK.

Typically at hedge funds, your bonus can be 100% of your salary. So, add another £200k to your yearly compensation.

And that is not even as high as it goes. A recruiter sent me a job email with salaries up to £400k plus bonus on top.

Yup! I work for a fund manager and its a lot of responsibility but the pay and benefits are enormous. On top of that twice as much vacation days as I had in SA, office hours are 10 to 4, work from home policy standard everywhere (long before COVID), overtime pays tripple on a weekend (something SA companies are constantly screwing IT people on), and I always seem to have at least 30% of my gross for savings and investments every month without even trying - because trust me Amazon addiction and a functional postal service is one hell of a thing.

These pay scales are way off, especially for London where any mid level dev will be on £65K+ excluding benefits and 5% pension matching.

 

[randomcat]

What would be a better source for this information instead of Indeed, PayScale, and Glassdoor?

 

[cguy]

What would be a better source for this information instead of Indeed, PayScale, and Glassdoor?

Levels.fyi and blind.com are definitely better, but aren’t that representative of smaller companies.

I personally, have a lot of insight (in some areas at least) because I’ve been involved in hiring and compensation decisions for over 20 years, so my information comes from seeing offers from competitors, prior salaries, our own pay distributions, offers, etc. Without this, you either need to know someone in the company well or go somewhere well represented on blinde/levels.

 

[randomcat]

Levels.fyi and blind.com are definitely better, but aren’t that representative of smaller companies.

I personally, have a lot of insight (in some areas at least) because I’ve been involved in hiring and compensation decisions for over 20 years, so my information comes from seeing offers from competitors, prior salaries, our own pay distributions, offers, etc. Without this, you either need to know someone in the company well or go somewhere well represented on blinde/levels.

If you include these site's data with Indeed, PayScale, and Glassdoor, would you get more realistic figures?

 

[Ancalagon]

Levels.fyi and blind.com are definitely better, but aren’t that representative of smaller companies.

I personally, have a lot of insight (in some areas at least) because I’ve been involved in hiring and compensation decisions for over 20 years, so my information comes from seeing offers from competitors, prior salaries, our own pay distributions, offers, etc. Without this, you either need to know someone in the company well or go somewhere well represented on blinde/levels.

Levels.fyi doesn't include UK figures though right? I've never seen any UK figures there.

 

[cguy]

Levels.fyi doesn't include UK figures though right? I've never seen any UK figures there.

There’s a “by location” option.

 

[VooDooC]

Good lord, I'm not even near management level and I earn more than that. They looking at outsourced companies that shaft their employees perhaps?

 

[cguy]

If you include these site's data with Indeed, PayScale, and Glassdoor, would you get more realistic figures?

The problem with those 3 sites is that they want people to do things like to fill in their salary to get unfettered access and such. Most people probably just enter crap, so there is so much noise in the data, I doubt it would be reliable.

It’s almost like offering free t-shirts to fill in a salary survey - you’re immediately biasing the results by selecting people who are more likely to be enamored at the prospect of a free t-shirt.

Because of this lack of reliability, it’s just not something that’s used by the more senior professionals at all (who are actually pretty unlikely to fill in any kind of salary survey at the best of times) so the values are just way lower, and it’s hard to put a number on it.

What I can say is that I worked at a large Silicon Valley company, and the Glassdoor results at the time were just complete garbage despite many hundreds of samples.

 

[Rocket-Boy]

That salary equates to R80k pm which is in the senior developer range. A senior solutions architect (like a real one) will be far North of that.

Yup, the term "solution architect" gets used incorrectly pretty often. I have worked with many that have absolutely no clue.

 

[randomcat]

The problem with those 3 sites is that they want people to do things like to fill in their salary to get unfettered access and such. Most people probably just enter crap, so there is so much noise in the data, I doubt it would be reliable.

It’s almost like offering free t-shirts to fill in a salary survey - you’re immediately biasing the results by selecting people who are more likely to be enamored at the prospect of a free t-shirt.

Because of this lack of reliability, it’s just not something that’s used by the more senior professionals at all (who are actually pretty unlikely to fill in any kind of salary survey at the best of times) so the values are just way lower, and it’s hard to put a number on it.

What I can say is that I worked at a large Silicon Valley company, and the Glassdoor results at the time were just complete garbage despite many hundreds of samples.

Everybody likes getting offer(zen)ed free merch.

On a serious note, is there anyway of getting an average with the least amount of noise from crap sources?