CoL adjusted UK salaries for anyone from junior to mid-level are terrible, and saving even 1/3 of your income on that kind of salary is hard. Not to mention, the lower CoL areas (and correspondingly low salaries) generally just aren't nice places to be. The idea that you can pay someone 24k/year to write C and Python filling a "junior" role that requires two years of expirence is crazy.

Even if you adjust for healthcare, even if you adjust for cost of living, UK tech salaries are simply bad. I don't know why, and my only hypothesis is that there just isn't much respect for tech workers in the UK in general, or companies don't make much money.

I'm not asking for a Bay Area 150k, I'm asking for 35k outside London for a junior role and 45k for a mid role. It's unlikely I'd get it. The number of people who brush this huge discrepancy off with "healthcare costs" (which, in the US, is a matter of company-paid insurance), or "safety" (as if that's something which should cost half my salary in the developed world) or "social safety net" (something I'm happy to pay for, but that comes out of tax which I already pay, not the take-home) is ridicuous.

There's no way around the fact that UK tech salaries are low, even accounting for the high tax in Western Europe, and I'm tired of being told that they are in any way equivalent to US (non-Bay) adjusted for CoL and healthcare. I'm paid poorly, and if I could access the US employment market, I'd be paid at least 1.5x before converted to USD no matter where I am.

The fact that things may be worse in France or Italy doesn't mean anything to me. In fact, it just makes me surprised that the UK has done well in comparison.

In the past few years IT salaries in continental Europe have increased significantly and, adjusted for the cost of life, German salaries are significantly higher. French and Spanish are almost on par.

If you make less than 40K£ in London, you are likely to experience a form of poverty that is unseen in the continent (pests in your flat, revenge evictions, very very bad healthcare, etc…). Outside of London, salaries are ridiculously low.

It's kind of an "be grateful for what you have because so many people have it worse" argument.

This isn't the case. People read about salaries in the UK, and they are usually referring to one of the big tech cities.

In reality, most tech jobs are the small web-shops or big-name consultancy sweatshops (one particular example is Edinburgh, huge market for tech jobs, there are quite a few startups now but the tech industry ten years ago, the period when the OP occurred, it was mostly sweatshops...and still is to a large extent, large companies who open up an office but labour is cheap, and will head off to Eastern Europe if wages rise). Starting salaries under £20k are not unusual in the UK, and startups are still definitely the exception outside London. In particular, the market for grads in the UK is very difficult...it is very, very hard to get your first job because there are lots of scammy companies offering slavery wages, lots of consultancies looking to churn staff, and a relatively small number of decent companies that often aren't particularly good at hiring (or willing to train, or willing to take risks...the UK job market is flexible relative to Europe but not flexible enough that employers don't view hiring someone as a big risk...because it is).

To say this another way, the UK does have some startups where you can make decent money...but the core of the industry that employs most people is just like Europe (because the UK still isn't very well-developed outside London).