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  1. Dave 15

    mmm, how about..

    It would be interesting to force advertisers to give their salary ranges. It would highlight the piss poor wages on offer in the UK for experienced engineers. I spoke to an agent this week who put my suggestion to the company who turned round and said it was way toohigh for them. Basically they want to pay sub what a Tesco check out operator earns. The wages in the UK today would not attract a street hawker in Bangalore never mind an engineer with experience and knowledge. Compared to many offers out there I would literally be better offf washing cars on the streets for a living. It is pathetic. I currently work mainly in Germany and Sweden, in both of those you can get per hour what the UK are prepared to pay per week. THEN the UK employers (who are all gufawing at the golf course over a few pints of champers) have the bare faced cheek to say people in the UK arent productive...of course they arent, they are stuck in substandard offices on sub standard kit worrying about the moonlighting they are needing to do in order to pay the electric bill, they dont give a monkeys about your stupid deadline because they cant afford their packed lunch!

    To prove a point I opened the first UK oine..

    £38,890 starting, in Kent, well known for beign the cheapest place to live (cough cough)

    The first USA one

    Salary Range: Competitive salary – Range $60k -$70k West Virginia...4 bed house available on the local 'realtor' site for 174,000.... and there are plenty of cheaper ones.

    The UK job is not even funny when you look is it? All that experience they want for peanuts in one of the most depressingly expensive places in the world.

    From a net search...

    The average salary of an experienced software engineer in Germany is 56,000 EUR per year or 27 EUR per hour. Beginners earn from 40,000 EUR per year while very experienced workers get paid up to 100,000 EUR per year

    There is always bleating about being competitive. Well they arent competitive except against outer mongoilian pug herders. The next complaint is that no one wants to study science and engineering - is it any bloody wonder??????? Or they cant get the staff.... hell when you are better off sitting at home on the dole than traipsing into an office you arent going to go for the job are you?

    Really it is time that UK employers woke up and smelt the coffee, you arent getting the people oyu need, you arent gettign the commitment oor interst because you are being too damned tight. Bet the CEO and the tea lady are makking more with a damned site less stress.

    1. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      Re: mmm, how about..

      And the US salary is already artificially lowered because Americans are competing with H1B visa employees who are very much willing to work for less than what a US candidate would tolerate.

      Even in bumf*ck West Virginia, somebody competent ought to be over $100k/year. In NYC or San Francisco it should be over $300k/year.

      Welcome to the 3rd world, I suppose. Britain is a pit of failure post-brexit, we all told you it was going to happen, the gov didn't listen, and here we are.

      See if you can get a H1B or head to Europe, maybe move to Scotland or Ireland before they ditch England for the EU.

      1. Dave 15

        Re: mmm, how about..

        Nothing to do with Brexit my friend, the wages for engineers have been total and utter crap and falling for the last 20 years. I left the UK about 15 years ago because the wages were pathetic then. I dont know why and I dont understand the mentality of the bosses in the UK that wont pay a decent wage. Lets face it the shit wages are not helping quality, motivate current staff, encourage new joiners, even kids cant be arased to study IT because there is fuck all future in the UK unless you have big tits or can kick a football!

        Worse is that we can see that places like Sweden, Germany, SA are all competing globally with decent wages.

        The fact you state that the wage offered in the advert is shit and locals wouldnt take it but I was showing it as more than twice a UK qwage really does show the level of UK wages. The respect (or should I say compete disdain) with which engineers are treated, the disgusting abuse of theirr employees that marks UK companies.

        When will UK bosses wake up to the fact that if we are ever to do anything beyond import Chinese crap we have to employ engineers and that means paying them what they deserve. Every single time I hear some bum headed CEO whine they cant get the staff unless they get them from abroad I always retort you would get them if you paid them. The only reason getting them from abroad 'works' is the same as the advert from Virginia - those from Romainia or Bangalore think the wage looks ok, then arrive and find it wont buy them a cup of tea and leave shortly after.

        All the time the CEOs are still taking an extrra 50% to their already inflated wages every damned year.

        The companies arent just bloody rude to their employees and treating them like shit, you find they are also treating their customers in the same way - palming them off with over expensive Chinese imports with zero quality, making sure you cant contact them once you are a customer and in the case of Virgin Mobile at least not putting existing customers on the lower tariffs offered to new customers.

      2. Dave 15

        Re: mmm, how about..

        I have worked in Seattle for th elord of blue screens in the past (sad to say - though I now write on linux because it falls over a hell of a lot less often and is orders of magnitude faster) and am currently in europe. But as I said the decision for europe was taken many years ahead of any glimmer of hope that Bbrexit might occur, this is not a brexit problem it is a problem of lack of respect for the skills, years of studty it takes and the value of the output of engineers. Once upon a time people like Brunel, the engineers behind our aerospace industries and so on were revered individuals, publicised, paid and looked up to. Now the press doesnt value anything other than the size of an actresses boobs or the latest amazing footballers wage. This disdain is repeated by the bosses - oh you qwant to be an engineer, then you are scum, you deserve a lower hourly rate than my cleaner. Hell given the hours most engineers are forced to work by the deadliine set by the sales arsehole or the boss who agreed to a customer demand without even talking to the scum engineers who will have to do it they are paid a lower hourly rate than a till operator at tesco and dont even get the bonus of cheap groceries.

        1. Anonymous Coward
          Anonymous Coward

          Re: mmm, how about..

          Once upon a time people like Brunel, the engineers behind our aerospace industries and so on were revered individuals, publicised, paid and looked up to.

          Bollocks.

          Brunel's father was if anything more innovative than his son. He was the engineer who built the blockmaking machinery for the Royal Navy in Portsmouth dockyard in ~1800 which produced blocks (as in block and pulley for a ships rigging) on an industrial scale for the first time. He literally invented mass production as a concept, as well as the machinery to make the concept work which was built to such a high quality that bits of it were still in production use when they closed that department in Portsmouth Dockyard in something like 1970. Production inhouse saved the country an incalculable sum, easily into the tens of millions just in the georgian era at a time when the average wage was about £10 a year. Because you know, while in actual production use this gear survived four King Georges, one King William, Two King Edwards, A Queen Victoria and were decommissioned and sent to the science museum well into the reign of Queen Elizabeth II.

          Naturally an esteemed figure producing equipment of this importance ended up broke, and in a debtors prison.

          He only managed to get out because he let it be known that he was accepting job offers and the Emperor of Russia was interested in offering him a job and paying to get him out of prison, at which point the British government of the day bailed him out on express condition that he not leave the country.

          His son did marginally better, but he wasn't exactly living in a comfortable mansion as you appear to believe.

          Now the press doesnt value anything other than the size of an actresses boobs or the latest amazing footballers wage.

          The engineers who laid the telegraph 150 years ago had this complaint:-

          “We are in great haste to construct a magnetic telegraph from Maine to Texas; but Maine and Texas, it may be, have nothing important to communicate... We are eager to tunnel under the Atlantic and bring the old world some weeks nearer to the new; but perchance the first news that will leak through into the broad flapping American ear will be that Princess Adelaide has the whooping cough.”

          Your other complaints would have been perfectly familiar to a Medieval monk, Roman Scribe or so on back through history to go by complaints in the margins of parchment scrolls, or inscribed on clay tablets.

          Ever were it so, and if it ain't changed in the last few thousand years then i'd suggest that it ain't likely to change in the next ten.

          You are worth what somebody else is willing to pay, which is always simultaneously more than they want to pay and less than you want to earn.

      3. Alan Brown Silver badge

        Re: mmm, how about..

        This has been a problem in the making for over 100 years

        I strongly recommend reading Neville Shute's "Slide Rule" - the final straw that led to him emigrating to Australia and writing "No Highway" was being sacked and gagged by de Havilland for predicting the inflght breakups long before they actually happened - because DH management decided that as a dope-and frame aircraft maker they knew better than people who'd actually studied pressurised airliners built to date and incorporated protections against the very events that occured mid-flight - which DH management REMOVED "to save money" - the windows were a convenient fiction to avoid manslaughter charges against company bigwigs

        1. Dave 15

          Re: mmm, how about..

          Will search for those books right now, sounds about right for the behaviour of UK management, dont listen to the people you employ for their knowledge especially if it disagrees with your own desires

    2. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      Re: mmm, how about..

      People in the UK are typically only able to work in the UK now. Visas for the US are much harder to get than they used to be and the EU will be preferring EU citizens now.

      If these things aren't a problem for you then consider yourself fortunate.

      1. Dave 15

        Re: mmm, how about..

        It is now much the same as before - if you are good enough for them to want you and unaware that you are being offered what in the UK seems a lot but is less than normal for locals then you will get the job and the work visa. The US became harder than before but large companies like Microsoft still manage to get people in (as they did me many decades back)

    3. sad_loser
      Meh

      Re: mmm, how about..

      the first one is for the NHS which has always put computer operatives on the clerical rather than the managerial scale.

      This is why the NHS wastes such a lot of money on computers - the people at ground level are often people who could not get good jobs elsewhere.

      If we paid a bit more we wouldn't have the train wrecks that are common now.

    4. This post has been deleted by its author

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