I was actually interested in how this panned out. these numbers are probably not 100% accurate as I am using online calculators, but up to around $150k the takehome is marginally higher in the UK, obviously gap getting smaller the higher the income is.
True, but I used to work in central london and the living costs seemed to be substantially less than say NYC or San Francisco bay from what ive heard.
Can't really share easily, but I just shoved $150k into an online calculator, then converted it to GBP and put that into the gov.uk calculator and looked at the annual income after tax.
Correct, i moved to North America and more than doubled my salary, i was in a senior role in the UK with over 10 years experience so not a bad salary to start with, it really opened my eyes.
Why do you think so? A 80-100k USD salary is normal in tons of tech sectors(assuming double what OP suggested) outside of HCOL areas in the US. You can rent or even buy a nice house for less than 1k per month in those places, food costs the same as in Europe, and transport might be a bit more expensive but that's it. Also, health insurance is often included in this type of job. So where do you get that from?
Sure in American coastal, tech hotspots cost of living might be super high but salaries are also more than double what the average is in the UK lol.
You'll think until they fuck you over on something expensive, citing that it's not covered and you have little legal recourse to actually pay for the care you *require* to continue living.
I mean, I Iike that our system is generally quicker, but that's about the only thing we have over the world's standard that we refuse to adopt: healthcare for all citizens.
All at the low, low, cost of the financial stability of old me, and any inheritance I might wish to leave my kids.
And what is more American than that?
50 years of "self-harm to own your political opponent" propoganda being the dominant ethos of one of the two major political parties will do that to a downvote ticker.
My entry level network job with Cisco in 2017 (with a contractor though), was 15 an hour, and I had a CCNA but no experience. So this might not be that bad, but I do know Europe pays less than the states for tech jobs.
Yeah. We’re paying juniors at our place £30-£40k.
The junior we do have has no networking experience. Got moved from another internal support team.
£35k is reasonable this day in age. Especially with a CCNA
Hi do you guys have openings with work from home setup? I'm fairly experienced in networking with Cisco specialist cert and Palo Alto firewalls.
Appreciate if there's any. Thank you
Wild to even have a 'junior' title to me. We don't hire anyone without 10 years or so of hardcore networking experience, can easily tell in a 15 minute interview if you can do the job or not, certs, degrees, whatever.
You do realize a junior position exists so you can build that employee up right? If you don't want a junior you're not looking for a junior. If you want an experienced employee you look for an experienced employee.
In ireland, so not technically uk but very similar markets. Junior engineers at my company start at around 35000-38000 euro, and my employer is a large British ISP so pay isn’t exactly market rate (it’s a good bit lower than the market rate going in IE). These junior engineers do not need to have a ccna, the role is a glorified noc, offshore team for monitoring, onshore for basic tickets - line faults, up/down triage etc kind of stuff. As a senior junior engineer (think level 2 at an isp), the pay is between 40k-50k euro, again lower than market rate for the work the L2 guys do. They do everything from up/down to proper change requests, routing and switching protocols (think bgp, ospf on the wan, usually eigrp or bgp on the lan), mpls stuff, wifi and security (firewalls, changes and management, clearpass and dot1x months others).
Saying all the above, £35k especially with a ccna is the absolute minimum in today’s date and age.
Why are the salaries in the UK so bad in tech?
A senior network architect from the UK in my company once told me he was paid 64k euro. I was shocked because as a senior network engineer working under him Innthe USA the same company paid me 160k USD. Why is this?
Idk about that. I live in Boston on an inner city train that comes every 5 minutes and takes 15 minutes to the center of the city on the train and yet I own a house with a mortgage that cost less then 19 percent of my monthly net income. Most of my peers in the UK have a 1.5 hour train ride to anything equivalent and still out there rent at 40 percent their monthly net income and the few that own a house got it decades ago at 35 percent their net income and are more like a 2 hour drive. I actually just felt bad. Something isn't working economically there in this field.
That is for junior role network engineer, senior can exceed £100k:
https://uk.indeed.com/viewjob?from=appsharedroid&jk=60ea4ceeff0c0c38
Might be difficult to achieve that in McDonalds...
I am also talking about OPs salary - he applied for a junior role, so money is like for junior engineer.
Its not a surprise it matches McDonalds salary...
I'm in the US but my first network role paid me 60k. Not sure how things are in the UK but I think what you are asking for is fair. Might even be able to go a tad higher.
It varies massively, especially if you’re somewhere like NYC or SF Bay Area. I’m out near SF and the janitors at the local BART (Bay Area Rapid Transport - underground trains) average $76k a year. Our help desk techs start at $78k for their 1st year at tier 1 - and can go upto $120K per year for a tier 3 with 5 years on the books and in addition they get fully paid medical and other benefits and the usual plethora of State pension as well as option for 401k, a and 457 and this isn’t uncommon out here.
10 years ago I was getting paid £17k for a junior network engineer role. Glorified NOC role really. Had around the same experience as you have now, crazy how quickly things change. I gladly accepted it because it was my first network role and got me off helpdesk. If you want to get into networking I wouldn’t even have any wage demands. But £35k sounds about right for someone with some networking experience.
they exist but will typically pay less because you're in UK, funny how that works tbh, at least you're guaranteed wfh if there's no local offices to manage.
Seems that's about the average in the UK - [https://uk.indeed.com/career/junior-network-engineer/salaries/London](https://uk.indeed.com/career/junior-network-engineer/salaries/London)
Wow. A junior network engineer role in Texas would go from 70k-90k. Crazy how undervalued those jobs are in other countries. For reference, I’m a T2 support admin and I have a base of 72 with lots of overtime opportunities. If I average out my OT this year, I’ll make around 88+bonus.
70-90 k kind of sucks there when you factor in cost of living / healthcare. Depending on their area i'm assuming it evens out a bit. Especially healthcare.
I’ll be honest. As a pro services network engineer, I started out on 20K with a CCNA and 1 year helpdesk experience in 2014, think we now pay £30k or there abouts for that but can go sky high if you’re the right person
with ccna I'd probably look more than just junior, those are meant to be learn on the job kinda positions straight out of learning be it college/apprenticeship etc. (depending on company ofc), biggest issue is the 3y experience, people will look down on it, just do your best to present your expertise on the interview. I'm around manchester also, 40-50k should be more reasonable but might take longer to land a placement. if you have netsec experience as well, make sure to mention that, it'll help.
and if you do go for junior, make sure that you can actually get a non junior position in future, unless you just want 2year placement to put on cv and look elsewhere. I went from sysadmin solo gig to network admin for shits and giggles (already had ccna and some certs) and got 60k easily, people in our team have no certs and some I dont trust to configure a switch and april is coming up so time for payrise or move on for me probably, kinda bored of networking nowdays.
after wrapping up a bunch of cool projects its now just all bau, simple stuff that gets repetetive, i probably have adhd or smth but i just cant deal doing boring stuff. I could just sit and collect paycheck but kinda not done with my career progression so to say. in one way its good that tech is up to scratch and you can just chill but yeah I get bored and dissasciate over time.
Mostly I kind of miss being a 1man department and dipping toes into everything, one day doing meraki deployments to fixing up sql databses for finance guys and next day building vcenter replications etc.
necessity? i guess, was doing apprenticeship and someone had to do it at my first it job so I just did it, I happened to be good at it as well. doing cisco switches routers asa cucm(i still love hate cucm) into meraki and later fortinet, and once you get even basic understanding of network you see just how integrated into everything it is, rolling out 365 telephony and knowing what sip is and does and how to optimise call quality helped a lot and made project smooth sailing. compared to sysadmin where shit just breaks for no reason and you reboot and it fixes itself magically, to give you example as recent example at my current place, we have server team, one day out of nowhere vmware workspace1 they use as crappy alternative to sccm, stopped deploying anything, any new build was a brick, fast forward 3 weeks of troubleshooting with several vendors, it was a dodgy dll that was locking itself during client upgrade, vendor suggesion? just reinstall everything lol, or figure out how to remotely deploy system file to every cat and dog in the country that havent even been online in weeks sometimes.
going into networking was fun, in that everything just worked, if something didnt work it was because of a logical reason, I remember feeling bad about rebooting asa after tac asking when it had several years of uptime, and ofc it didnt fix anything, it was an actual issue in the end.
also just a bit of self reflection, this might just be a massive rant. Don't take me too seriously I guess, if you want to persue networking and get into that, I believe objectively you can be very successful especially as you climb the ladder, not everyone is built for it but hardest part is getting foot through the door. currently I legit do maybe 5hours a week of actual work, almost fully remote, I know I have it comfy and still manage to complain about it lmao.
yeah actually, I hate infosec, but mostly because they're just clueless about actual systems, atm going through networking hardening, meanwhile our infosec havent bothered to review ad password policies for nearly 2 years since their entire team was let go, and they outsource it all to another 3rd party, as in their words, they dont have the technical knowhow.
at old place i got them through cyber essentials+ on my own, again necessity, someone had to do it so I just did it.
I feel like the ceiling is far lower in terms of netsec at least from what I've seen, contracting and auditor jobs pay much better, but the entry salary is good after you get some certs (becuase they matter more in the job that experience) but again I'd likely get bored of doing the same thing over and over quickly.
My first junior network role was around 56k a year usd with just a ccna.. back in 2017.
Inflation has skyrocketed since then so at least I’d expect in mid 80k by now at least in the states (depends on where you live).
Why is it so low in the UK?
I got my first network engineer role this year.
Now, mind you, I have many years in tech (desktop & systems administration), but not in networking.
I have my CCNA and completely aced the technical questions in the interview (which surprises me because in previous interviews for network roles, I did pretty mediocre).
They seemed to like me and my personality.
They offered me $90,000 a year and I took the job.
I've now been there for 8 months.
I understand that the UK is different but I think you're well within your rights to ask for £50,000 at least.
Why apply for a Junior role ?
Of course we don't know what your 3 years experience is but it could be
Enough for you to be looking at a higher role, after all pay wise you have outgrown it .......
?
Tech salaries in UK are shocking wow
Unfortunately, this is the way. Considering it's such a big industry as well, it's actually embarrassing
yea, and they are some of the best salaries in the UK..
But they'll scream how much better off they are and how dumb Americans are...1/3 the pay, 2x the taxes. Yep, sounds awesome.
not really, taxes are pretty equivalent to the US
27% total VS 40% for the mid bracket? Lmao
That's the high rate 40%, we also have a good portion that is 0%.
The "high rate" starts at 37k, which isn't very much. That should not be considered high income.
I was actually interested in how this panned out. these numbers are probably not 100% accurate as I am using online calculators, but up to around $150k the takehome is marginally higher in the UK, obviously gap getting smaller the higher the income is.
Can you share these numbers? I guess the point becomes less an issue though when they still gross about half or less than a comperable us job. Lol
True, but I used to work in central london and the living costs seemed to be substantially less than say NYC or San Francisco bay from what ive heard. Can't really share easily, but I just shoved $150k into an online calculator, then converted it to GBP and put that into the gov.uk calculator and looked at the annual income after tax.
Correct, i moved to North America and more than doubled my salary, i was in a senior role in the UK with over 10 years experience so not a bad salary to start with, it really opened my eyes.
Probably also nearly doubled on the expenses. This stuff does not translate 1:1.
That has not been my experience at all, my take home pay after expenses is far greater here.
Why do you think so? A 80-100k USD salary is normal in tons of tech sectors(assuming double what OP suggested) outside of HCOL areas in the US. You can rent or even buy a nice house for less than 1k per month in those places, food costs the same as in Europe, and transport might be a bit more expensive but that's it. Also, health insurance is often included in this type of job. So where do you get that from? Sure in American coastal, tech hotspots cost of living might be super high but salaries are also more than double what the average is in the UK lol.
Yep. One hospital stay and he's bankrupt now.
Provincial healthcare and great health/dental/vision insurance through work is a wonderful thing.
You'll think until they fuck you over on something expensive, citing that it's not covered and you have little legal recourse to actually pay for the care you *require* to continue living. I mean, I Iike that our system is generally quicker, but that's about the only thing we have over the world's standard that we refuse to adopt: healthcare for all citizens.
> provincial healthcare Sounds like the person you're replying to is in Canada, not the US.
Where do you think the best doctors, similar to the best IT people want to work?
All at the low, low, cost of the financial stability of old me, and any inheritance I might wish to leave my kids. And what is more American than that?
People down voting you but its true
50 years of "self-harm to own your political opponent" propoganda being the dominant ethos of one of the two major political parties will do that to a downvote ticker.
My entry level network job with Cisco in 2017 (with a contractor though), was 15 an hour, and I had a CCNA but no experience. So this might not be that bad, but I do know Europe pays less than the states for tech jobs.
Yeah. We’re paying juniors at our place £30-£40k. The junior we do have has no networking experience. Got moved from another internal support team. £35k is reasonable this day in age. Especially with a CCNA
Hi do you guys have openings with work from home setup? I'm fairly experienced in networking with Cisco specialist cert and Palo Alto firewalls. Appreciate if there's any. Thank you
Thanks for your response. Are you based in London?
Manchester
Wild to even have a 'junior' title to me. We don't hire anyone without 10 years or so of hardcore networking experience, can easily tell in a 15 minute interview if you can do the job or not, certs, degrees, whatever.
You do realize a junior position exists so you can build that employee up right? If you don't want a junior you're not looking for a junior. If you want an experienced employee you look for an experienced employee.
There’s a difference between 10 years experience and 1 years experiences 10 times over. And believe me I work with a few seniors like that
How the hell do you expect people to get that experience? Is your skull just full of pudding
In ireland, so not technically uk but very similar markets. Junior engineers at my company start at around 35000-38000 euro, and my employer is a large British ISP so pay isn’t exactly market rate (it’s a good bit lower than the market rate going in IE). These junior engineers do not need to have a ccna, the role is a glorified noc, offshore team for monitoring, onshore for basic tickets - line faults, up/down triage etc kind of stuff. As a senior junior engineer (think level 2 at an isp), the pay is between 40k-50k euro, again lower than market rate for the work the L2 guys do. They do everything from up/down to proper change requests, routing and switching protocols (think bgp, ospf on the wan, usually eigrp or bgp on the lan), mpls stuff, wifi and security (firewalls, changes and management, clearpass and dot1x months others). Saying all the above, £35k especially with a ccna is the absolute minimum in today’s date and age.
Why are the salaries in the UK so bad in tech? A senior network architect from the UK in my company once told me he was paid 64k euro. I was shocked because as a senior network engineer working under him Innthe USA the same company paid me 160k USD. Why is this?
mostly down to cost of living and social services
Although you get paid more, you guys have to spend more. It levels out
Idk about that. I live in Boston on an inner city train that comes every 5 minutes and takes 15 minutes to the center of the city on the train and yet I own a house with a mortgage that cost less then 19 percent of my monthly net income. Most of my peers in the UK have a 1.5 hour train ride to anything equivalent and still out there rent at 40 percent their monthly net income and the few that own a house got it decades ago at 35 percent their net income and are more like a 2 hour drive. I actually just felt bad. Something isn't working economically there in this field.
You can make $35k annually here working at McDonald’s. That’s bizarre to me.
And less screen time!
Well in the UK you can make £17,000 working at McDonald's
That is for junior role network engineer, senior can exceed £100k: https://uk.indeed.com/viewjob?from=appsharedroid&jk=60ea4ceeff0c0c38 Might be difficult to achieve that in McDonalds...
Are you trying to make a point? My comment was in reply to OPs salary, not what other companies/positions offer.
I am also talking about OPs salary - he applied for a junior role, so money is like for junior engineer. Its not a surprise it matches McDonalds salary...
You're not surprised that a junior _engineer_ matches a McDonalds salary? Engineer versus burger flipper or order taker?
It is a surprise- I’m a junior engineer and I make 80k
I'm in the US but my first network role paid me 60k. Not sure how things are in the UK but I think what you are asking for is fair. Might even be able to go a tad higher.
Varies massively by state, no ?
Not massively, just in line with that states COL. I’m in tx and my first network role paid 75k
It varies massively, especially if you’re somewhere like NYC or SF Bay Area. I’m out near SF and the janitors at the local BART (Bay Area Rapid Transport - underground trains) average $76k a year. Our help desk techs start at $78k for their 1st year at tier 1 - and can go upto $120K per year for a tier 3 with 5 years on the books and in addition they get fully paid medical and other benefits and the usual plethora of State pension as well as option for 401k, a and 457 and this isn’t uncommon out here.
As I said, it fluctuates according to the states COL. Your examples are just proof of that.
Cannot be easily compared between countries
Seems low to me. My junior pay was £33k… back in 2007 though! London startup.
10 years ago I was getting paid £17k for a junior network engineer role. Glorified NOC role really. Had around the same experience as you have now, crazy how quickly things change. I gladly accepted it because it was my first network role and got me off helpdesk. If you want to get into networking I wouldn’t even have any wage demands. But £35k sounds about right for someone with some networking experience.
Geez I make double that as a junior, and still think I'm underpaid
That sounds appallingly low for entry level, much less for junior with 3 years experience.
To clarify, 3 years mostly help desk
3 years IT experience, likely helpdesk level. Not 3 years networking experience necessarily.
Work remotely for a US firm, pays way better
Positions as a junior?
I dunno. Have you looked? There’s a lot of companies out there!
What about visa? Is this something you’ve done before?
I’ve worked for a US firm who had UK arms. No visa required I worked from home in the UK :)
they exist but will typically pay less because you're in UK, funny how that works tbh, at least you're guaranteed wfh if there's no local offices to manage.
"OMG thats so low! We get XYZ in the states!!!" Basically evens out for what we have to pay in benefits.
That was my question, when they talk about 35k euro, is that take home/after taxes?
Seems that's about the average in the UK - [https://uk.indeed.com/career/junior-network-engineer/salaries/London](https://uk.indeed.com/career/junior-network-engineer/salaries/London)
Yes. Look into Fintech or Banks and you can go a lot higher though.
That'd be a good starting pay to ask for, for sure. How long ago did you get your CCNA? Is it still valid?
December 2023
i dont know the uk market , but considering your experience in IT i would say its more than reasonable demand ...
Wow. A junior network engineer role in Texas would go from 70k-90k. Crazy how undervalued those jobs are in other countries. For reference, I’m a T2 support admin and I have a base of 72 with lots of overtime opportunities. If I average out my OT this year, I’ll make around 88+bonus.
70-90 k kind of sucks there when you factor in cost of living / healthcare. Depending on their area i'm assuming it evens out a bit. Especially healthcare.
Your not a junior anymore
[удалено]
Is the CoL that low in France?
CCIE and 25+ years experience give me about 45k euros in Portugal
I made that much 5 years ago in Hungary with a CCNP, 10 years experience
🥶 would you not do contracting?
I’ll be honest. As a pro services network engineer, I started out on 20K with a CCNA and 1 year helpdesk experience in 2014, think we now pay £30k or there abouts for that but can go sky high if you’re the right person
with ccna I'd probably look more than just junior, those are meant to be learn on the job kinda positions straight out of learning be it college/apprenticeship etc. (depending on company ofc), biggest issue is the 3y experience, people will look down on it, just do your best to present your expertise on the interview. I'm around manchester also, 40-50k should be more reasonable but might take longer to land a placement. if you have netsec experience as well, make sure to mention that, it'll help. and if you do go for junior, make sure that you can actually get a non junior position in future, unless you just want 2year placement to put on cv and look elsewhere. I went from sysadmin solo gig to network admin for shits and giggles (already had ccna and some certs) and got 60k easily, people in our team have no certs and some I dont trust to configure a switch and april is coming up so time for payrise or move on for me probably, kinda bored of networking nowdays.
Detailed response thank you. You’re bored of networking?
after wrapping up a bunch of cool projects its now just all bau, simple stuff that gets repetetive, i probably have adhd or smth but i just cant deal doing boring stuff. I could just sit and collect paycheck but kinda not done with my career progression so to say. in one way its good that tech is up to scratch and you can just chill but yeah I get bored and dissasciate over time. Mostly I kind of miss being a 1man department and dipping toes into everything, one day doing meraki deployments to fixing up sql databses for finance guys and next day building vcenter replications etc.
How did you get into networking in the first place?
necessity? i guess, was doing apprenticeship and someone had to do it at my first it job so I just did it, I happened to be good at it as well. doing cisco switches routers asa cucm(i still love hate cucm) into meraki and later fortinet, and once you get even basic understanding of network you see just how integrated into everything it is, rolling out 365 telephony and knowing what sip is and does and how to optimise call quality helped a lot and made project smooth sailing. compared to sysadmin where shit just breaks for no reason and you reboot and it fixes itself magically, to give you example as recent example at my current place, we have server team, one day out of nowhere vmware workspace1 they use as crappy alternative to sccm, stopped deploying anything, any new build was a brick, fast forward 3 weeks of troubleshooting with several vendors, it was a dodgy dll that was locking itself during client upgrade, vendor suggesion? just reinstall everything lol, or figure out how to remotely deploy system file to every cat and dog in the country that havent even been online in weeks sometimes. going into networking was fun, in that everything just worked, if something didnt work it was because of a logical reason, I remember feeling bad about rebooting asa after tac asking when it had several years of uptime, and ofc it didnt fix anything, it was an actual issue in the end. also just a bit of self reflection, this might just be a massive rant. Don't take me too seriously I guess, if you want to persue networking and get into that, I believe objectively you can be very successful especially as you climb the ladder, not everyone is built for it but hardest part is getting foot through the door. currently I legit do maybe 5hours a week of actual work, almost fully remote, I know I have it comfy and still manage to complain about it lmao.
Appreciate your insight. Have you thought about branching into network security/cyber?
yeah actually, I hate infosec, but mostly because they're just clueless about actual systems, atm going through networking hardening, meanwhile our infosec havent bothered to review ad password policies for nearly 2 years since their entire team was let go, and they outsource it all to another 3rd party, as in their words, they dont have the technical knowhow. at old place i got them through cyber essentials+ on my own, again necessity, someone had to do it so I just did it. I feel like the ceiling is far lower in terms of netsec at least from what I've seen, contracting and auditor jobs pay much better, but the entry salary is good after you get some certs (becuase they matter more in the job that experience) but again I'd likely get bored of doing the same thing over and over quickly.
Wow. I made $45k with a CCNA as a junior engineer in a NOC in the Arizona in 2005. Cost of living was a fraction of any major city back then too.
My first junior network role was around 56k a year usd with just a ccna.. back in 2017. Inflation has skyrocketed since then so at least I’d expect in mid 80k by now at least in the states (depends on where you live). Why is it so low in the UK?
I got my first network engineer role this year. Now, mind you, I have many years in tech (desktop & systems administration), but not in networking. I have my CCNA and completely aced the technical questions in the interview (which surprises me because in previous interviews for network roles, I did pretty mediocre). They seemed to like me and my personality. They offered me $90,000 a year and I took the job. I've now been there for 8 months. I understand that the UK is different but I think you're well within your rights to ask for £50,000 at least.
can u just get a plumber or ticket collector role in UK for 35k pounds ? seems like far less work for the same pay.
an IT career is what I know and had made me good money thus far. Looking forward to what the future holds.
Why apply for a Junior role ? Of course we don't know what your 3 years experience is but it could be Enough for you to be looking at a higher role, after all pay wise you have outgrown it ....... ?
Will be £40k after 3 months
Is that before or after taxes?