Comment by petercooper
8 years ago
I think there are lots of reasons, both sociological and economical, but my hunch is that demand for the most productive tech employees is lower since it's so easy to lean on American-produced innovations and services rather than build our own in the UK.
Consider that Azure, AWS, Google Cloud Platform, etc. are all huge in the UK, yet most of the work on them is taking place in the US. Ditto for Oracle, Office 365, the Google Suite and even consumer stuff like Craigslist, Reddit or Apple's services (that the UK never home produced something like Reddit continues to boggle my mind). Why pay for the best people in the industry to work in the UK when we can just stand on the shoulders of work being done in the US?
If you look at industries where the UK does take an innovative role like finance or bioinformatics, the salaries seem a lot more competitive, though are still not at US levels due to the UK's lower cost of living I guess.
The UK has a higher cost of living, with London pretty much equal to NY or SF and other high cost cities. The other equivalents are cheaper in the US.
I've lived in both SF (and Berkeley) and London. Accommodation in London zone 1 is a good bit lower than SF without the same level of competition. Accommodation further out is (overall) significantly cheaper than the BART accessible parts of Oakland and Berkeley with a drastically better public transportation setup. Pretty cool and inexpensive but (by London standards) not that accessible areas like Peckham are about as long of a commute into zone 1 as my Civic Center to Berkeley BART commute, and probably much shorter once you factor in the time spent waiting on platforms at before getting on and/or a connection at 19th Street/MacArthur.
It's actually possible for me, a not-especially-good junior/mid developer to consider living alone with a <40 minute commute in London; that seemed to be a no go for guys making far more than me in SF.
All that being said, I saved a stupid amount of money in SF working on intern level wages. If your goal is to slum it and accumulate money, London does not come close. SF is a place to go and pile up money with a get out plan in mind.
I was curious about this since it seems unlikely SF can be so much more expensive than London. When I looked into it a couple of months ago, I found zone 1 London rents are a fair bit higher than equivalent apartments in SF if you compare by square-footage and quality. I speculate that the idea SF is much pricier than London is caused by significantly lower standards/expectations for London.
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Thanks for the input! I haven't lived in London for long, but I found I had much more disposable income in SF, even compared to living in a non-London uk city.
Talking to people from around the US, it's just generally cheaper in other places in the US. Gas is cheaper, insurance, (non-SF)rent etc.
¯\_(ツ)_/¯ That's not my experience of both places, and I've not found any data that supports London being as expensive as SF including https://www.numbeo.com/cost-of-living/compare_cities.jsp?cou... - I've found it much easier to live in London on a budget than SF where you'd throw your personal safety and comfort into jeopardy by cutting too many corners.
Those numbers look quite wrong, I don't think they're comparing like-for-like.
For consumer goods it seems they're comparing a cheap UK supermarket to Whole Foods in SF, and for rents they must be ignoring square footage and/or using different definitions of city center to get those comparisons. I checked out rental prices in SF on a recent visit and found SF pretty good value compared to London.
In the US you also need to put aside much more every month.