I graduated ~15 years ago with a degree from a decent UK university, and the job situation for an electronics engineer who could program and was willing to move anywhere in the country was essentially:
* Electronics graduate job, salary £25,000
* Programming graduate job, salary £40,000
Programming jobs think their competition is London fintech companies and Google with its free food.
Jobs designing switch mode power supplies think their competition is Chinese OEMs who pay experienced engineers £15k
So a lot of the electronic engineering graduates get diverted into software. They'd like to be able to own a house some day, after all.
SWE comp will remain elevated as long as there are marginal returns to software development. The capital structure of turing machine programming allows most of revenue to be spent on salaries. The pay is higher because the marginal cost of a new software customer is essentially zero. It's not because programming is way higher skilled than hardware engineering.
You deserve the wages you can command in the market. If the labor pool is limited companies will have to pay more. Maybe AI will change the dynamics. But otherwise hardware will always struggle to compete on pay.
Outside of finance, I generally find UK software and hardware comp to be abysmal. Especially when contrasted to the US, and even Germany.
For reference, I hold a doctorate in Engineering and a Class 1 MEng both at Oxford. I was offered £40k to work as an engineer in my niche (photonics).
My lab partner who went to Germany sits on a ~€90k salary doing similar to what I would have done.
Due to the limitations of hardware career options in London, I opted for software engineering post-DPhil, but I ended up earning £42k. After two years of work, I am sitting on £52k. I don't regard myself as an "under achiever", I own a significant proportion of the product I work on and am a top contributor.
I don't think that level of comp is appropriate given the amount of work I put myself through / how much I contribute, and I think it's reflective of the UK as a whole.
Irrespective of your self perception of value, I am not sure you are fully grasping the disconnect between the growth in cost of living and the (lack of) growth in wages of the past 50 years for the average human in western economies.
By many standards we actually need that 125k just to live what we would consider a middle class life in the 1980's.
UK's pay is extremely low. And you know that it is VERY difficult to earn beyond £80k/yr as a SWE outside of top foreign employers in the UK like Google or Citadel. More likely, you'll stagnate at £50-60k.
And when factoring the UK's CoL being comparable to some of the more expensive American cities (SF, NYC, Boston) yet salaries being a fraction of those available there, it makes sense why engineering isn't well regarded, and plenty of people either switch to finance or immigrates to the States, Australia, or Canada.
New Grad SWE London salary is more realistically 35k to 60k, Small Companies and Consultants are around 35k, Big Banks do 50k, and the bigger startups do like 55 to 60k.
The 100k is pretty much the elite prop trading, that's the whole LC hard grilling that 99.9% of candidates aren't going past.
Low relative to the US Tier 1 cities only. Just based on a cursory look at levels.fyi London median comp is £96k [1] while e.g. Houston is £103k [2] Toronto is £80k [3]. In fact, the only ___location I could find outside the US that was higher was Zurich at £126k [4]
First, CoL is miles lower in Houston and other tier 2 cities in America - you can buy a detached house for around $500k/£400k in a posh neighborhood. Not happpening in inner ring London.
Secondly, I've noticed issues with Levels.fyi ranges outside US/Canada and top tech hubs like Tel Aviv and Bangalore. Most markets don't have the same awareness of the tool, so salaries tend to be overestimated.
I don't think they'd relocate, but that doesn't matter.
They most likely will pull an ARM and hire almost entirely in the US and India instead of in the UK, because competitive British engineers would immigrate to the States, and you can get top tier Indian chip design talent across the spectrum for $30-60k.
It is impossible to immigrate to the US unless your employer is willing to go through the time-consuming and expensive process of sponsoring a visa + green card, which they have little reason to do since they can pay you less over here. I've been designing chips for years in the UK at ARM and elsewhere, haven't encountered anyone moving to the States
