I'm a PHP Developer with above average ( I think ? ) experience ( 3 years commercial experience in Manchester )<p>I've quite comfortable with OOP, Design Patterns, Symfony, Laravel , Custom build solutions etc ...<p>In the past few months i was busy building search solutions using Elastic Search, Caching solutions using Redis and Geo coding.<p>Also i manage bunch of ec2 instances , a few google cloud servers and quite confident in managing and maintaining our production servers.<p>Git / Average javascript knowledge / Ansible / HTML & CSS as usual.<p>I have 40k job offer in Manchester but i want to relocate to London, Now i see the average salary in London is about 45k ? is that right ? Please could you give me an idea how much should i be looking for in London ?
The UK is all about the contracting market. PHP isn't the best paid gig in the world but you'll do £350 to £450 a day if you're resonably good and if you can do a bit of AWS you're a lot more hireable. So that's about £88k a year.<p>Word of warning though, the contracting market doesn't suffer fools gladly, and at 3 years commerical experience you're a baby. Thus, unless you're actually really quite good, you're doing well at £40k.<p>Edit: I can recommend you a company in a town 40 minutes outside London. PM me if you're interested.
PHP Dev here with similar experience as yours. I used to work/live in London and stayed there for a bit less than ~2yrs. My salary was 50k in a well respected big US-based corp. Mine was the highest salary in the team, other members were between 35 and 45k.<p>Honestly, be well-aware that the value of your salary is going to remarkably decrease if you relocate to London. Mainly because of rent. I used to pay 1.5k to live in Bethnal green (which is ~20/25 min by feet from the silicon roundabout - very likely where you'll end up working). You can save some money commuting but you'll end up paying for transports, so, expect end of the month to spend about the same. If you are alone and will be happy with a single room, it will be 600-800 in a decent shared flat.<p>I'm 100% confident saying that those 5/10k of salary increase are not enough to justify you to move. 40k in manchester are a lot more than 50k in London.<p>In terms of salary increase, as a lead PHP dev you can expect to go around 65-70k but that will require time.<p>Completely different story if you decide to start contracting as in London you can easily ask for 400/500GBP a day.<p>I hope it helps :)
Angellist has an awesome tool for this sort of research[0]. You can set geographic filters and skill filters, etc. It's usually got tiny sample size when you have multiple specified filters, but might give you a good idea.<p>[0]<a href="https://angel.co/salaries" rel="nofollow">https://angel.co/salaries</a>
I hired many developers including PHP developers in London.<p>I would call 3 years commercial experience below average to average. Depending on ability it would be high-level junior developer to low-level mid developer. £40-45k would definitely be the high end of what you could expect, and it would rely on you interviewing very well to get it.<p>PHP is not a technology stack that's hard to find people in, and therefore salaries tend to be lower. Other tech stacks that are more specialised tend to attract higher salaries, but there are less positions available.
Can't speak to London particularly but my experience has been that the secret to better salaries is to be a dev that knows <Language/Tool> not a <Language/Tool> dev. It helps alot to have solid fundamentals that you can work with in several different languages/platforms and be able to demonstrate that you understand "systems" more than isolated applications. (i.e. the world of enterprise development ;)
These salaries are terrible, how is it possible to get away paying such low salaries in London? In the US (not even San Francisco) I'd expect nothing less than 125k USD (105GDP)
I'm doing Python but PHP friends I have in London at a senior level hit around £50-60k+. To be honest with the commute times, train prices, rent (£1400 a month for a 2bed in zone 3) - I am increasingly looking to get out of here and head towards Manchester and would take a £25k cut for it and probably be better off overall!<p>Hope it works out, I'd bump your 45k target up to around 50 as a baseline - you might get a few k more or few k less but £50k seems average enough to me (outside of contracting - contract rates are a lot higher, friends regularly getting £400/pd contracts for "just" front end).
If you're getting offered 40k in Manchester the same price range in London is 50-55k. 40k is the high end for Manchester so you should be looking at the high end for London. Unless you're doing Magento.
London is a really expensive place to live. I bet your rent would be double compared to Manchester, so even though your salary is less you will have probably have more money in the long run.
Even as a European this sounds strangely low to me. I make 60k EUR (~48k gpb) in Berlin, which is MUCH cheaper than London in every way. I do mostly PHP, have more experience but still know a lot of people that earn around the same mark with 5-10 years experience.
That sounds about right - I used to (don't hate me) work in recruitment and £40-50k was about the top end of the range for PHP devs in London before people started moving into contracting. YMMV and I'm sure there's exceptions but it doesn't sound like you're too far off the mark
40k in Manchester is good, people are moving from London to Manchester as the rents is so high.<p>BUT<p>I love London, I am so glad to live here, it's so much fun, Manchester got boring quite quickly for me and the dev community is great.<p>I'd say 55k for London is average amongst my dev friends.
I can't believe how low these salaries are. Its not like it is a cheap place to live either.<p>I guess if you want to live in Europe, just telecommute to the US :)