Dev salary being double the average national salary is very good by western EU salaries. In Austria for example as a dev you earn just slightly above the national average income.

I think only in the US and cheap countries like Poland, Romania, SE-Asia, etc it's normal for devs to earn several times the average national income because they're hot markets for tech outsourcing and average national wages are on the low side for those not working in tech making the gap really big, but in western Europe dev wages tend to be around national wages out side of big-tech.

The other I think is how hungry and agresive the UK is for service sector opportunities, having always positioned it's economy as a middle-man. They have that US inspired go-getter mentality, that's lacking on the mainland.

During the mid phase of corona, let’s call it the Work from Home aka ZOOM phase, big tech hired massive amounts of developers all over the world and English was and is the lingua franca in everything Computer Science related.

I guess that the internationalization and corona together with English being the common denominator played a huge part here as well as cultural considerations. People from UK are tight to the main markets like USA, Canada, EU and India.

Just my 5 cents.

UK estate agents are also expanding abroad at an increasing pace.

Still all useless AF though.

The main driver is talent base, ease of operations, and time zone overlaps.

The true value of offshoring comes from being able to essentially run 24/7 operations across a couple countries that have a strong talent base and relatively easy operations for us as a company (easy to fire, easy to hire, tax holidays, etc).

This is why Israel, India, Ireland, and parts of Eastern Europe like Romania, Poland, Belarus, and Ukraine became popular for software outsourcing.

I think the accent has as much to do with it as anything. Americans are culturally wired to overestimate someone with even a mildly posh British accent.

Not sure where you got this from but the UK is far away from a low-wage economy. I once met a British engineer in a bar here in Austria and he was handing over industrial automation activates for relocation of a auto assembly from the UK to Austria, citing the much lower wages in Austria compared to UK.

In 2008 was chatting to a lady in LA who couldn't believe (at that exchange rate) that we paid $7 for a Starbucks - she assumed we were all loaded, and for that trip it certainly felt that way.

But now when I go to the EU or US I feel broke - my money barely goes as far as it used to. I know that my salary has barely kept pace with inflation the last few years, but life in Britain (even with a good job) feels hobbled.

Especially the deteriorating economic situation for the entirety of the UK outside of London?

*I say document, it's written like it's by 6th formers who have just discovered Ayn Rand, but it is pretty short.

https://finance.yahoo.com/chart/GBPUSD%3DX?showOptin=1#eyJpb...

The big shock was 2008. Then things were stable for a few years but starting in 2014 the value of the currency went into a long period of decline. Brexit in 2016 spooked a bunch of traders who were terrified of the readily apparent insanity visible in the (Remainer) government - talks of massive emergency tax rises and so on clearly had an impact - but then once Cameron/Osborne were booted out and the massive recession the "experts" had promised failed to materialize, the currency regained its value vs the USD until by 2018 it was back at the same level it had been at the start of 2016. Then the currency got weaker with time until a recovery around COVID, then the decline set in again.

So as you can see Brexit had a temporary effect due to the, uh, "broken promises" about the costs of leaving made by the Remain campaign. But within 18 months that had been unwound.

The real story here is a macroeconomic one: the UK economy was permanently damaged by the (American triggered!) financial crisis and never really recovered in the same way the USA itself did. Growth stopped around that time, and it was then dragged down even further by Eurozone weakness starting around 2012-2014 era.

The 2010s were a lost decade for the UK economically. The 2020s will be no better given the way things are going politically. Brexit has little to do with it though, except in the sense that it would enable a hypothetical capitalist/libertarian party that doesn't currently exist to liberalize the economy to US standards and restart growth. There's no appetite to do that in the UK political mainstream at the moment.

The UK actually seems to be stuck in more or less the same malaise that’s hit Italy and France, which is failure to recover from the 2008 crash. If you look at a graph of GDP per capita, all three countries have been totally stagnant on that measure since 2008. It’s similar to the stagnation Japan has experienced since its crash in the mid 1990s.

The US has in theory continued to grow GDP per capita wise, but the growth seems fake. If you take out a handful of global knowledge worker hubs like the Bay Area and NYC, people probably aren’t any better off since then.