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.