greenie

For the past year I've been a frontend software engineer at an up-an-coming UK startup. In the interest of furthering myself as an engineer (with the intention to mould myself into a full-stack web application developer) I've been asking for more challenging work from the company for the past six months.

Unfortunately, the company can no longer support my role and we've come to a mutual agreed whereby I'd leave the company and receive severance pay.

Getting involved with the US startup scene is something that's been a dream of mine for a while now and I'm finally in the perfect situation to do something about it.

The only problem is that I have no idea where to begin!

I'd love to come over to the US and meet people who work for startups, hack something together and just get a general feel for how the US differs from the UK.

If anybody could give me some advice on how they'd proceed if they were in my position, possibly create some introductions for me or even allow me to work along side you for a week or so then I would be very grateful indeed.

A little more about me...

Things I'm awesome at: HTML, CSS, JavaScript, interface design and usability, client interaction.

Things I'm good at: PHP, MySQL, Amazon AWS server admin.

Things I'm learning: Python, Objective-C, Sphinx, MongoDB.

Things I do to kick back: Gym, run, read, consume specialty beers, play unhealthy amounts of video games.

tl;dr I had to leave my job and now I'd love to experience US startup culture. Please help!

I'm a software engineer building web apps for a UK based startup, with offices in the South West of England, London and San Fransisco. The opportunity to move to London has recently been presented to myself and the other engineers, with the overall objective to have all UK engineers in London before we start a large new project.

I understand that salaries in London are on average higher than the rest of the UK to make up for the cost of living. However, I'm not exactly sure how the salaries of London engineers in a similar job with similar experience stack up against my own.

If you're an engineer in London, I'd love to know what area you work in, your salary (if you're happy to say) and any other thoughts you have about startup salaries in London.

Myself, I have one and a half years experience and I'm currently on £20k.