i'm not sure about plumbers, but i think CS graduates do much worse in the UK, even adjusting for cost of living and currency and so on.
of course it's hard to compare statistics, but 40k pounds a year would be somewhere around normal for a dev with a couple years' experience?
whereas $70-80k would be low for a similar developer in the US, and you're making $100k+ if you go to work for a big tech company straight out of college.
i've heard people speculate, without much justification, that this is a CP Snow "two cultures" thing, where a sort of British aristocratic spirit means that engineering and other fields requiring applied scientific knowledge are lower status than other professional fields like law or finance. (if this applies to medicine as well, it would explain the lower status of doctors in the UK.)
Salaries for programmers in the UK are definitely lower than Silicon Valley, but it was still well paid. The career structure was different with far fewer big tech company jobs. Experienced developers who weren't looking to become managers would move into independent consulting / contracting.
10 years ago £500-600/day was fairly standard for consulting gigs (>£100K/year vs £60K/year as a senior engineer employee.) In London there was plenty of contracting work and could easily count on working full time on six month contracts. Outside of London the pay was a little less and the opportunities further between but with the lower cost of living it ended up about a wash.
Working in Silicon Vally now, the big advantage is the availability of super-senior engineering roles that only really exist in organizations with 1000s of software engineers.
By my estimation, software engineers in the UK are on about the same social rung as solicitors or accountants. I think doctors still enjoy a high social status in the UK, just without the high salaries (or huge student loans!) of the US.
of course it's hard to compare statistics, but 40k pounds a year would be somewhere around normal for a dev with a couple years' experience?
whereas $70-80k would be low for a similar developer in the US, and you're making $100k+ if you go to work for a big tech company straight out of college.
i've heard people speculate, without much justification, that this is a CP Snow "two cultures" thing, where a sort of British aristocratic spirit means that engineering and other fields requiring applied scientific knowledge are lower status than other professional fields like law or finance. (if this applies to medicine as well, it would explain the lower status of doctors in the UK.)