For what it's worth, a big company in NYC that we work with definitely pays contractors with lots of experience (10+ years) $1000 a day. That's closing in on a quarter of a million dollars a year and you probably won't even have to invert a binary tree whilst juggling martinis in your interview.

Not quite though, as you get zero benefits or job security with that- in the UK you’d need to knock off 4 weeks of vacation, a couple of weeks for additional training, maybe a week or 2 for sick leave, and then budget a month or so between contracts. Plus buy your own laptop, fund your own retirement fund/pension etc. Plus it can be harder to get credit if your contract can be terminated at any notice.

And your next contract might go down, which is unlike a salary. and you’re exempt from climbing the ladder to a corporate position where the really big bucks are.

So all told it’s probably more like 150-180k/year

> And your next contract might go down, which is unlike a salary. and you’re exempt from climbing the ladder to a corporate position where the really big bucks are.

My impression is that the big bucks are actually in contracting, unless you're near the top of the corporate ladder.

Contracting scales only with the hours you work, so you can’t earn more than a day rate x number of days you work.

You have to leverage capital and/or people to go beyond that.

Yes there's a limit, but with contracting rates reaching 2500 GBP per day (a real life example) I'm fine with that limit.

Contracting in the UK seems to be a sweet gig. It has good tax advantages for the contractor right? And companies like it because it is easier to scale up or down based on need?

Yes and yes. However the government seems keen on making the tax situation worse, introducing new laws which tighten the noose every couple of years, so it's entirely possible that it will get bad in the next 5-10 years. Also, for non-British people, Brexit may make it make it hard/impossible to contract in the UK.

In London it’s good - outside of London not so great

That’s a very good contract- I’m curious as to what that’s for?

Dunno what it's for specifically, I just spoke with a guy who procured such contracts in a large bank.

Don't need vacations, I will need to buy a personal laptop anyway and pensions are Ponzi schemes.

Is he working for a company with comparable revenue and reliance on software as Facebook? If not then it's like comparing the salary of a newly minted cardologist with her pediatrician father.

FB pays new grads in NYC the same.