On moving to London

“It has been more than 6 months I moved my primary residence from Bangalore to London,” Gupta wrote on X. “Most of the last few months of last year, I was talking to a bunch of tech/product startups here, figuring out the ecosystem.”

He said that he arrived in the UK on a Global Talent Visa, through which he could explore joining some up-and-coming startups that have not even started sponsoring visas yet.

“In many of these places I was discussing about senior/leadership roles, so I got to interact with a lot of prospective team members during those talks,” he said.

Despite his many interactions with UK startups, Gupta said he ended up doing something “cliched” and joined a big tech company. According to his LinkedIn profile, he is currently Engineering Manager at Meta.

On tech salaries

In India, tech jobs typically pay more than other professions. According to Gupta, that is not the case in the UK. He revealed that in the UK, tech salaries are at par with other professions.

In fact, people who want high salaries in the UK generally go for finance roles.

“Unlike India, tech here doesn’t pay 10-20x of literally every other job,” Gupta wrote on X. “In fact, here, finance is more that place where people go to if they want to purely optimise for earnings, regardless of loving their work,” he added.

The Meta techie explained that tech jobs still pay well in the UK, but employees there don’t go for tech roles simply because it pays well. “Tech pays well here, but it isn’t like 95% people just do it for the money, without actually liking it. It makes a lot of difference,” he revealed.

Tech jobs in India

Gupta, a graduate of the Delhi College of Engineering, said that the upside of working in tech in the UK is that because people there are not simply doing it for the salary, they tend to like the work and are more invested.

In India, there is a huge difference between the top and bottom salaries even within the same industry. “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 own toxicity cost,” he opined.

However, according to him, there are definitely some upsides to working in tech in India. The first one is the sheer number of jobs available here.

“The number of tech jobs purely in volume is much larger. There are also numerous offices of global tech giants like Google, Microsoft, Amazon with way more headcount in India. Sheer volume of opportunities far outstrips any place, except I guess USA,” he said.

Secondly, for business owners, the cost of getting software built in India is low as employee compensation is also low. “The top end is comparable (and fairly more in terms of purchasing power), but median is very low globally,” said Gupta.