Market Research: Senior Engineer in London
I wanted to get a sense of the market out there so I changed my LinkedIn status to “Open to work”. Initially I had the intention to chat to a few recruiters but it became quickly evident that I had invited a deluge of messages that overwhelmed me. To regain some control and oversight, I’ve tried to categorise the data that came in. In this post I’ll provide a brief overview of these results to share the knowledge. I will note that this is intentionally a low-fidelity approach at evaluating the market so you should expect variation. It might, however, be a reasonable indicator of where the talent market is at this time.
For context, my own background can be found here. No big name companies, working in London with 5 years experience of which 2 years as senior engineer. Stack ranges from back-end C# services to React Native front-ends.
I evaluated this under the following constraints:
- Messages were received between May 20 and June 4, a period of 15 days.
- 74 messages were considered in this analysis
- The data is gathered from the initial message, I did not respond to ask for more info
- I only looked at messages that were about a specific position, general introductions were not counted
- Everything is evaluated pessimistically: if no remote work is mentioned, it’s a NO. If it says “salary £80k” then that’s considered the maximum
- Remote work is considered a “YES” if it would allow you to live anywhere in the UK. “2days/month” in London is considered “YES”. “2 days/week in the office” is considered “PART”.
- Only full-time positions, no contract or part-time work
Due to the big difference in messages that mention both min & max salary, I’ll provide their data separately.
Minimum Salary
| N | 13 |
| Average | £71,923.08 |
| Median | £75,000.00 |
| 75th pct | £80,000.00 |
Maximum Salary
| N | 32 |
| Average | £80,625.00 |
| Median | £85,000.00 |
| 75th pct | £86,250.00 |
Remote work
It’s worth re-iterating that for many of these “NO” responses it was first and foremost a case of not knowing the answer at all.
| Total | 74 |
| Yes | 27 |
| No | 36 |
| Partly | 10 |
| Temporarily | 1 |
