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UK workers are getting the biggest pay raises in the tech industry, research shows

The average salary of London-based software engineers increased by 13% in 2019, to £74,000 ($95,848), which was the biggest increase of any tech hub globally, according San Francisco-headquartered jobs marketplace Hired.

This equated to a pay increase of £8,000 ($10,362) from 2018 and was well above the overall average salary of £37,000 ($47,983) in Britain for full-time employees.

Hired attributed this wage growth to the continued influx of funding going into the U.K.’s tech sector. British tech firms received £10.1 billion in venture capital funding in 2019, up 44% on the previous year, according to U.K. network Tech Nation, which claimed this investment outstripped that of the U.S. and China.

The Canadian city of Toronto had the second biggest salary increase in its tech sector, with an average pay rise of 9%, or £4,000.

In the U.S., New York software engineers saw their pay bumped up by 7% on average, while San Franciscans got a salary boost of 6%.

The average global salary for a software engineer was £100,000, according to Hired’s annual report. Hired gathered outside data from job interview requests and offers as well as collecting its own survey responses from 1,600 software engineers using its platform.

Gaming engineers got the biggest pay rise of any type of software engineer in London and San Francisco, seeing their salaries increase by £19,800 and £13,600 on average, respectively.

Machine-learning engineers in New York pocketed an additional £13,800 on average and search engineers in Toronto earned an extra £19,800.

Jobs in augmented reality/virtual reality (AR/VR) saw the sharpest rise in demand by employers globally, with interview requests up 1,400% on Hired’s platform for this role. This overtook hiring demand for blockchain engineers, which rose 517% in 2018 but slowed to 9% last year.

Hired said the growth in demand for people with skills in AR/VR reflects how the use of this technology has expanded beyond the world of gaming. It pointed out that beauty company Sephora and furniture retailer Wayfair were among the companies now using this technology.

Mehul Patel, CEO of Hired, said managers should focus on assessing a candidate’s skills rather than basing the selection of new hires too much on education.

“While 50% of software engineers have a computer science degree, another 32% either taught themselves to code or learned through a coding bootcamp,” he said, suggesting that they may therefore “have the same set of programming skills.”

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