A techie who moved from Bengaluru to London around 6 months back has shared his experience. The techie, identified as Arnav Gupta, also detailed the differences between working in the Indian tech space versus working in the UK.Â
Gupta said in a long post on X (formerly Twitter) that he came to the UK on the Global Talent Visa due to which he could explore joining some startups which might have not even started sponsoring visas.Â
He said that in the most of the last few months of 2024, he met a bunch of tech/product startups in the UK, figuring out the ecosystem.
“While I ended up doing something super cliched (go to a bigtech job), I learnt a lot about the tech culture here in that time,” he wrote in his post.
He said that the “biggest vibe shift” for him was to see the average level of passion for the work itself was way higher compared to India. As per his LinkedIn profile, he is currently working as an Engineering Manager at Meta.Â
In his long post, Gupta revealed that unlike India, tech salaries are at par with other jobs in the UK. “The more people I have gotten acquainted in the tech circles here, the more I have noticed – in general mostly people do this from a ‘love of the game’ perspective. Also unlike India, tech here doesn’t pay 10-20x of literally every other job.”
He mentioned that people who want high salaries in the UK generally seek finance roles. He also stated that while tech pays well in the UK, people don’t do it just for the money without actually liking their job.
Gupta highlighted that in India, there is a difference between the salaries offered at the top and bottom within the same industry.Â
“There is credible, good quality, cutting edge, demanding work in software engineering, that is done from 8LPA to 150LPA range. This is just in product engineering space, just for IC comps. In the 20-35 age group itself. This variance has its toxicity cost.”
Moreoever, he mentioned that working in tech in India definitely has its own set of benefits such as the sheer number of jobs available here. Gupta stated that numerous offices of most Big Tech companies such as Google, Microsoft, and Amazon have way more headcount in India compared to other geographies.Â
“Sheer volume of opportunities far outstrips any place, except I guess USA.”