Whether you consider inequality a problem is down to your politics, but in general the UK is a more equal society (slightly less social mobility but less inequality) than the US and hence salaries are lower.
You're comparing full-time software development income versus the literal median income (which also includes people working few hours). That's your first mistake in the comparison. The median full-time individual income in the US is close to $50,000 now.
Junior developers in SV are getting $110k? The BLS numbers are such that the US median for all 1.4 million software developers is going to be close to that figure for 2020.
> You cannot have these high salaries without someone else getting shafted.
Yes you can. Wealth, incomes, productivity are not static/fixed, you can expand them rather than merely redistribute a fixed pot. As a recent example, if that wasn't true, modern China (specifically its incredible gains over the last 20-30 years) would have been impossible. Their $50-$60 trillion in new household wealth would have had to come entirely from the rest of the world's pockets (which didn't actually occur). Instead, it mostly derived from epic productivity gains.
Productivity is why US software developers can earn so much. Not because they're so much more productive in lines of code versus the rest of the world. Rather, because software developers at US tech companies produce very large economic outcomes on average. That is due to the way you can scale into the huge US economy ($22 trillion), and then push out globally; it adds up to extraordinary productivity of economic output per developer (Netflix is a good example of that in action: relatively tiny workforce, massive platform and sales, global projection; and that's why they can pay their engineers so much).
Further, the US has a very progressive income taxation system. People earning ~$110,000+ per year are carrying the tax load for the majority of the population. The US middle class has an extremely low tax burden compared to most other developed nations. High income persons paying higher taxes are what make that possible, and it produces one of the highest median after-tax income figures of any nation. That tax base pays for free healthcare for the bottom quarter of the population, among many other expensive social safety net systems.
So do software developers in many other parts of the world. The difference is more that employment is a competitive market and the market rate for a decent software developer in the US tech hubs is recognised as being much higher than most other places so people moving jobs expect higher rates. Sadly, those rates do not necessarily need to be tied to productivity in any meaningful way, and so in much of the world software developers continue to be paid far less than the value they can generate because they don't negotiate well or bargain collectively to push salaries up.
However, it's not really a fair comparison. For example, in the UK, a lot of us solve that problem by going independent at some stage. At that point, you are dealing with clients on a business-to-business basis where fees charged can be related to value generated, and if you know what you're doing and get results, you can far exceed the income that almost any salaried software development position will offer.
Similarly, there are a lot of small tech firms here that are not SV-style startups with big funding and aiming to be the next unicorn or to fail within a relatively short period. They're just a few people who've got together to take on bigger projects or invest in more infrastructure or otherwise scale up, and they're happy to be doing that indefinitely and again making better money and enjoying better conditions working for their own business than they would likely get working for someone else's.
Please substantiate your claim to this being zero sum. It does not seem self-evident.
If I have a data set from which I pick a value higher than the median there must be a value lower than the median ... otherwise the median would be higher. It's not a statement about economics but about math.
I'm not saying there cannot be economic growth (though, generally, wage inequality is rising so most people aren't seeing the benefits of this).
That's incoherent. Salaries are a flow, not a stock, and M2 is wildly variable anyway. Or do you just mean that if lower-earning people earned more, the median would be higher?
I'd argue that software developers are underpaid, considering large tech companies had been illegally colluding for years to restrict competition and keep wages low.
Here's 100 apartments for under $2000/mo
It's also worth noting that the U.S' "not free" healthcare costs the taxpayer more than (for example) the U.K.'s "free" system (https://www.ons.gov.uk/peoplepopulationandcommunity/healthan...). It's almost as if the word 'free' is not a useful term to use when describing government-subsidised services.
And that is because the vast majority of the price of petrol here in the UK is tax (in fact, multiple taxes). Successive UK governments have long used tax policy, on fuel and otherwise, to deter the use of wasteful, highly polluting vehicles. This has arguably been somewhat successful, though it will be a moot point within a generation in any case because eliminating petrol and diesel vehicles entirely is clearly the goal for several good reasons.
Plenty other forms of produce are dirt cheap. You can eat fruits and salad every day and do it cheaper than any other country I've been to, as long as you don't insist on outliers like multi-colored bell peppers in your food.
As for restaurants, technically fast food counts as restaurants. So I'd be surprised if the US wasn't one of the cheapest in the developed world there too. Hard to compare if you want to factor in quality though.
I'm still contacted by recruiters for salaries around that so the jobs exists.
All anecdotal but it does mean it's possible.
If you look at the official data[0] 2016-2018 you get this:
Item 2016 2017 2018
--------------------------------------------------------------
Average income before taxes $74,664 $73,573 $78,635
Average annual expenditures 57,311 60,060 61,224
The average London household spend is around £650 per week[1] or £33.800 per year
The average London salary[2] is around £736.5 per year or £38.298 per year which gives a net gain of over ~13%, but with medical bills included.
But you can easily make 70k-100k in London working in finance or SWE.
All in all is not that different (it actually is, UK is better on average, we are not even accounting for things like job seekers allowance - the dole in UK - or the benefits for having kids etc. etc.).
[0] https://www.bls.gov/news.release/cesan.nr0.htm
[1] https://www.ons.gov.uk/peoplepopulationandcommunity/personal...
[2] https://www.ons.gov.uk/employmentandlabourmarket/peopleinwor...
Compared to the rest of the UK, London salaries are significantly higher in general.
I cry when I see juniors in the US posting earnings 2-3x that of a senior developer in the UK. If I could work in the US I’d be there tomorrow just for the work.