Good software engineering job availability in a cheapish area to live (compared to Reading)

BlackDragon · 19 Mar 2011 at 14:14

Hi all,

I currently live in Reading and I'm looking to live by myself soon rather than sharing. My salary is at the lower end of the £30K range, and I can only really afford about £500 in rent a month which will be the most I've ever paid in rent.

I was browsing properties in the Reading area and I was amazed by how little I would actually get for that amount. Anything that was affordable (and decent) was in a dodgy part of Reading. Many of the properties I have seen simply are not worth their cost. I compare this to my old uni town of Leeds and the equivalent amount to get me a palace! Of course this is based on the assumption that my salary would not also be lower in the North.

To the point of my post, what areas in England are there a good availability of software engineering jobs, whilst still having a good choice of properties to rent that are actually worth their value? I can't drive yet, so living in the middle of nowhere isn't convenient. I can commute by bike, which is what I do at the moment.

Appreciate it if people can provide some advice

Thanks

Rroff · 19 Mar 2011 at 14:56

Depending on the price of commuting (which is quite likely to be high but with monthly or similiar tickets might be relatively reasonable) Reading is on several major rail routes so you may find somewhere a couple of stations down the line i.e. towards the west country where rent is cheaper... tho I have the feeling cost of commute is probably gonna offset that.

RomanNose · 19 Mar 2011 at 15:00

Swindon?

SuperBOB · 19 Mar 2011 at 15:04

hm

not England, Scotland Sir! Edinburgh & Glasgow have lots of dev jobs at the moment.

Kemik · 19 Mar 2011 at 15:09

Does your £500 figure include bills? If you rent with someone else it will be cheaper. Even in Liverpool I knew of people paying £500 a month on rent for their own place!

Chris1712 · 19 Mar 2011 at 15:35

How can you only manage £500 rent on 30k+!? I've paid £300 a month at LEAST during uni and £320 a month during my placement went I was on a lowly 16k.

Dave M · 19 Mar 2011 at 15:40

Anywhere to be honest, some big companies have their development in the oddest of places.

For choice though you aren't going to do better than london, although I'd hazard a guess Manchester and Birmingham had plenty of options.

SKILL · 19 Mar 2011 at 16:03

Chris1712 said:
How can you only manage £500 rent on 30k+!?

This interests me as well, I pay £300 a month for rent in a house share, and I run a car (plus motorbike and van), spending £200 ish a month in fuel, plus all other bills including some debt that I ran up a bit ago and I comfortably have £5-700 disposable each month, earning just under 30k...

dowie · 19 Mar 2011 at 19:30

What you're essentially trying to do is cut down on the % of income you spend on rent/living costs. You've assumed that the best way to do this is to find a location where the cost of living is low. This might be a correct assumption however I'd also encourage you to look for something that simply pays more - in some instances living in London is only a small rise in living costs in comparison to the pay increase you might receive. Especially if you're moving from say dev job at vendor/corporate to dev job at big bank in city.... If your base+bonus jumped XXk then would you really care about a cost of living rise of XK

Taking the move to the lowest living cost thing to the extreme you should logically move to India - however unless you're on ex-pat wages you'll likely find that just paying for a flight home would be a struggle.

BlackDragon · 19 Mar 2011 at 19:31

Kemik said:
Does your £500 figure include bills? If you rent with someone else it will be cheaper. Even in Liverpool I knew of people paying £500 a month on rent for their own place!

I'm happy to pay £500 if the property is worth £500. Where I am it feels like £500 gets you very little, whereas £500 up north gets you a lot more. An example is a £500PCM in Reading and Leeds. Quite a difference! My £500 does not include rent.

I won't go into the details of my finances but basically there isn't much left after my planned outgoings. I don't mind spending the amount of money that I currently am, but the idea of spending £500 for an overpriced under maintained box which tends to be in some scummy area in Reading is really off-putting. The magic number to get a decent property here seems to be £700+ which I'm not willing to pay for as it seems like a big waste of my money.

I know the area I am in has a huge number of tech companies, which makes me a bit reluctant to move elsewhere. I am not too sure what the job availability is like and the average salary is for software engineering up North.

Amleto · 19 Mar 2011 at 19:48

If it makes any difference, when I was looking at jobs all over in ~2008, I got offered one from bham and one from cambridge - bham was £5k lower form a reasonably big company - GoodRich. I would have thought a salary 'drop'* is inevitable.

*compared to what you could get if you looked in oxford/reading area