Plan a career in IT: goal - £100k PA.

Diddums

Diddums

Diddums

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Been toying with this idea for a few years now, on and off. I'm not afraid of a challenge and love coding, but never really pursued it.

Let's say the goal is £100k PA, a few questions:

  • How quickly can this realistically be achieved (I'm not a dreamer who expects a massive salary from the get go)?
  • What sort of starting salary would I be looking at?
  • What would be the best / most specialized field to look in to?
  • What would be the best steps to take?

For clarity, I'm on a decent salary already and have worked my way up from £50 a day moving furniture, to living very comfortably and I suspect I'll be on £100k in my current line of work in a few years anyway, so this would be more of a quality of life move than a financial one.

Any ideas?
 
£100k in IT isn't easy, most senior roles sit around 80K for techies who are **** hot. I work in a niche area of IT where salaries are highly competitive due to not enough talent in the market. I've got 13 years experience doing this and to get £100K I'd need to move into a lead architect role. I'm on £68k now by choice but maybe moving and jumping up to a package over £80k.
 
LiE said:
£100k in IT isn't easy, most senior roles sit around 80K for techies who are **** hot. I work in a niche area of IT where salaries are highly competitive due to not enough talent in the market. I've got 13 years experience doing this and to get £100K I'd need to move into a lead architect role. I'm on £68k now by choice but maybe moving and jumping up to a package over £80k.
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Excellent, thanks. So the stories of IT gonks driving around in wrapped Lambos isn't as prevalent as some would have me believe then.

You're on slightly more than me so using you as an example I'd need to have a ton of experience before I can earn what I do now, in my next promotion I'll be on 70ish so this has certainly brought my head back to earth.

Maybe I should just bite the bullet and start my business, I know that people like @dLockers will always need decent tradesmen :p
 
Given I reached that milestone myself in September I guess my experience is pretty relevant to your question. Short answer is that there isn't really one clearly defined path, a lot of it comes down to what you want to do in the field and how much effort you put in (and some manufactured luck). And the usual salary affectors like location and the company you work for.

You're unlikely to hit that sort of salary if you only ever want to just be a "normal" developer who writes code 35 hours a week. I know and work with plenty of people like that, they still enjoy their jobs and are still compensated well for their time (inline with their experience), but if you want the bigger money you need to bring more to the table.

More to the table really means one of two paths, in my experience. Either you focus soley on code, work your way up the seniority tree and eventually transition into a architecture role. Here you'll be working on projects from a high level, will decide how many different systems work together and drive the solution. But you won't actually be involved in implementing that solution, save for some early skeleton work.

The other path would be management. Some people try code for a few years and don't like it, so they aim more towards a "development manager" role, whereby you'd be the person that forecasts what work is done when, work out what resource is required and when, and have general line management responsibilites.

Although I've just said that there are two main paths... I took a third :p My role is currently somewhere inbetween all of that. I'm employed as a Technical Lead and am responsible for a team of 10 and a team of 5. My job is basically acting as the glue betweem the developers and the rest of the business. I work with product to find out what they really want and distill that into technical requirements. I then take those requirements to my teams and turn them into useable products. Sometimes I'm just there in a mentorship capacity and can just let my team get on with it, sometimes I'm half-baking a solution and letting the team finish it off and sometimes I'm on the front lines churning through bug tickets like any other developer. I also have some line management responsiblity and work with other technical leads in my organisation to shape the near and long term futures of the business and our engineering teams.

For a bit of useful context...

- Graudated university in 2014 and got a BEng in Computer Science from a good uni,
- Started "real" work at an ecommerce company as a developer (building on what I learned there in my uni placement year), [£36k]
- Promoted to senior developer at the same company, took on team lead responsibilities, [£48k]
- Left after 5 years and moved to a consultancy in 2019, [£58k]
- Learned devops, got stuck in with AWS and honed my skills, got promoted to senior consultant and took on commercial and team lead responsibilities, [£75k]
- Left after 3 a half years and moved out of consultancy and into education as a tech lead, responsiblities as mentioned above, [£100k]

I'm 30, all I've ever known is computers and I thoroughly enjoy my job. I live in the north and work for a company that has offices all over the country, but I'm employed as a remote worker.

My degree is useless for my professional life and always has been but without it I'd have struggled to get my foot in the door. I am "lucky" in that I was given decent opportunities and a good foundation by my parents but I've also worked my behind off to get here.

Diddums said:
  • How quickly can this realistically be achieved (I'm not a dreamer who expects a massive salary from the get go)?
  • What sort of starting salary would I be looking at?
  • What would be the best / most specialized field to look in to?
  • What would be the best steps to take?
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- Depends how much effort you want to put in and what your current background is from a software point of view,
- As above, salaries range wildly depending on your experience even for junior roles, but I'd not expect less than mid-30s in the current climate,
- DevOps is a big thing, and rightly so, so I'd spend time and effort getting involved in that,
- First step would be deciding how badly you want the change and whether your life can accept the pay cut that the change would bring.

Post turned into a bit of a waffle, sorry. Will happily answer more specific questions if you have any.
 
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IT is full of mediocrity in the UK. And most make there way to 50-60k, maybe more. It's a real shame as it make recruitment a chore.

If you are smart and a good problem solver, and gain the language skills and knowledge of tools and processes, moving into a lead engineer role or architect role in the 70-80k space is possible.

How quickly is a different matter. Working in one company and getting there might take 5+ years if you excel.

Moving around won't really accelerate that once you get over the 40-50k mark.

If you live in London you might be able to get there quicker, but there are less and less IT jobs down south as prices increase. We don't hire down there anymore.

I think if you go on a coding bootcamp for a few months to aid getting a job, you could start on £30k and expect to be at 50k if you're impressing people in maybe 3 years?

Within 5 years I think you'd get to 70+

To get to 90-100k+ it's all about opportunities opening up for you.

The challenge will be getting that with little experience.

I would say I work in IT, and smart people come across my desk all the time, not many years experience (say 5) claiming they can do the role and want the 70k+ base. But as soon as I ask a question that someone with no battle scars, they fail.

Experience counts when you need creativity and experience to move forward on a problem..

The other option is contracting. I did that for a few years in my late 30s and pulled in 120k pa with less tax. But I didn't like the lifestyle tbh. You could contract perhaps after a few years experience. And ir35 reversals will make that a good option.

I went perm (with a 40k paycut) and progressed the corporate ladder and am now on more than I ever earned on a decent day rate, but I do code less and draw more box diagrams.
 
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About 15 years, but you need to be very good AND have luck on your side. Being in London helps for salary, but of course the living costs eat it up.

What stands out for me is you said you'd do it for quality of life. My opinion after 15+ years programming is that it's very stressful, and sitting at a desk all day is not healthy, if I could go back I'd do something else.
 
You'd need a decent number of years experience as a developer to be on that, but London would be easier just as the numbers are automagically higher. The developer high salary hype is largely people talking about the US where the numbers are a lot higher. My Urus order is still in the "todo" pile :)

What would be the quality of life as a developer earning 100K over what you currently do and reaching 100K in a few years any way ? I'm not sure I get that part - why move to development if your current path will get you there in less time any way.

There's definitely development jobs out there still. I've had something like 20 different recruiters hitting me up on linkedin since the start of the year.
 
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For most management software roles as a perm you’re probably only getting to 100k+ in head of/director/C level.

Contracting is faster, but it’s cut throat as you’re not headcount but simply a £ on a spreadsheet. First out the door if budgets change.

I won’t say directly how much i’m on but it’s not £800/day inside IR35. The role is described in one opening line in the interview “do you realise this is a chief <role>?” Clearly to see if I flinched. It’s a technical role but I spend the majority of my time managing stakeholders and sorting out their budget problems..

In my past I’ve seen all the salaries - people that have worked their butts off but unvalued by the company. I’ve seen people that do sweet fa given excellence awards before cut+run when their mess came back..

I’m going back to perm with a new job lined up.. less than 1/2 the current money but it’s interesting plus I’m not spent in the front line defending a consultancy and a engineering department (I don’t have control over) bickering whilst the playing diplomat to the business stakeholders. The consultancy is already getting nervous my contract renewal is in march..
 
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In your case @Diddums I'd be looking at your transferable skills. Coding is something you can build more experience with on the side whilst gaining some industry experience at the same time. Therefore, two roles spring to mind:

Business Analyst (essentially being the interface between users and projects, gathering and documenting requirements - needs nous and good people skills)
Project Manager (managing projects ;) including managing the Business Analysts but much more - core skills: people skills, management, spotting stuff ahead of time, getting buy-in etc, look up the rest) - Scrum master is a specific role you may want to look into, concerned with Agile projects.

I'd say go for the PM role, you already manage people right? High pressure work? You manage projects? All transferable skills. PM more likely to earn £100k but BA could be a good stepping stone to PM -BAs always seem to be in demand and still pay reasonable. PM roles lead to Programme Management roles, so you can earn £1000s a day claiming all the wins as your efforts but the losses as the PM's fault :)

Regarding £100k, it'd be interesting to hear about people's experiences, especially:

@Django x2 who once said he couldn't afford to live on £100k so is presumably well north

@kindai earns more than £100 an hour

@ChrisD. suggests contracting (highly paid) isn't as lucrative so is presumably on good £££

@Screeeech I seem to recall is a pretty senior dev/architect?

Edit, anyone work in IT sales? @Housey?
 
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throwaway4372 said:
About 15 years, but you need to be very good AND have luck on your side. Being in London helps for salary, but of course the living costs eat it up.

What stands out for me is you said you'd do it for quality of life. My opinion after 15+ years programming is that it's very stressful, and sitting at a desk all day is not healthy, if I could go back I'd do something else.
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I'd have rather done mechanical engineering and got into automotive industry. I hate sitting at my desk now.
 
Pre-Sales, 80k base with OTE of 100+

Gift of the gab and most companies will train you on the platforms you're selling if you impress them.
 
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ChrisD. said:
Get some AWS certs, grow a pair of ****, get good at blagging, and you'll be on over £100k in no time doing pre-sales.
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This is true. Getting some certs in AWS is a good thing.

I've got the associate solution architect. Not particularly bothered about professional, but want to do a security one.
 
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Moved to USA. Working as experienced software developer for legal services company. Lots of opportunities here. Took me a long time to realize getting decent raises etc was to be your own advocate and network with others.

Coming close now to earning double the amount I was on 10 years ago here, and far far better than the 30k on was on as a developer in Plymouth. (Location matters). Location also impacts your expenses, so make sure you are smart about where you live.

I'm still broke, but have nice cars, a house etc.
 
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