I managed to land a well paying job with good work life balance by changing my approach to job seeking. Here's what I did.
1. I tracked all incoming offers in a spreadsheet with a column for salary and equity
2. I responded to every incoming lead on LinkedIn with 'what is the salary band for this role?' and 'how did you find my profile? What did you like about it?'
This allowed me to build a distribution of jobs available to me, and then I only ever took calls with the top 1% of those offers.
I must've spoken to 150 recruiters on chat, but I only interviewed for 6 companies and secured 4 offers.
I kept iterating on my LinkedIn based on the feedback from the initial chat interaction and very quickly I was getting really good leads.
I put in about 100h work over a year to get to that point. I still, 3 years later, regularly get offers with >200k GBP base compensation now.
EDIT: I forgot to add a key factor. When the recruiter responds with a salary that is below the top 1% you reply: 'Thank you, but I am currently only able to consider salaries with a base comp of at least X, please get back in touch with me if you find something in that range." - X being your current estimate of the top 1-5% of the distribution.
The roles that I get approached for that pay 200k+ are mostly in Finance (quelle surprise) or DeFi.
I regularly see golang and c++ roles paying 175k+ outside of Finance too though.
Some tech roles typically fall between 120-150k with the odd outlier.
And yet other roles come in at 60-80k.
I'm pretty sure the distribution of salaries are multimodal, even when you discount finance.
Salary aside, IMO the higher paying jobs are also the more attractive ones when it comes to remote work, holiday allowance, and (I suspect) technical maturity.
When people tell me they think all they can in the UK is £28k or something, I point them at jobs boards like Oxford Knight https://oxfordknight.co.uk/jobs/. You'll easily find £200+ base on there.
Skilled senior engineers working for hedge funds or in low latency trading can get paid that much but I've never seen tech salaries that high in any other industry in the UK.
1. I tracked all incoming offers in a spreadsheet with a column for salary and equity 2. I responded to every incoming lead on LinkedIn with 'what is the salary band for this role?' and 'how did you find my profile? What did you like about it?'
This allowed me to build a distribution of jobs available to me, and then I only ever took calls with the top 1% of those offers.
I must've spoken to 150 recruiters on chat, but I only interviewed for 6 companies and secured 4 offers.
I kept iterating on my LinkedIn based on the feedback from the initial chat interaction and very quickly I was getting really good leads.
I put in about 100h work over a year to get to that point. I still, 3 years later, regularly get offers with >200k GBP base compensation now.
EDIT: I forgot to add a key factor. When the recruiter responds with a salary that is below the top 1% you reply: 'Thank you, but I am currently only able to consider salaries with a base comp of at least X, please get back in touch with me if you find something in that range." - X being your current estimate of the top 1-5% of the distribution.