Remember that for remote roles you are competing against the best talent in the world, and most of them can afford to work for a tiny fraction of what you are asking for.
There are still plenty of jobs at local software shops, banks, consulting firms, hospitals, government agencies and more, and you are at the front of the line for all of those. A lot of them enforce as little as 2-3 days in the office. Apply there instead.
For fully remote jobs - agreed. Some job sites have the ability to filter by Remote + Country - roles which are still WFH but require you to be a resident/citizen of a specific country. OP might look into those as well. It'll cut down on the competition.
> The last permanent role I negotiated had a TC of £160,000/year.
If you want that £160k+/year, you might as well either go to a quant firm like Citadel or Jane Street (But there is a 0% chance it will be remote) or build your own startup.
> I'm open to go down to £90,000/year or even less for the right opportunity
£90k is not bad, but not the best either, but anything higher than 120k in the UK means you lose 45% of that.
But the risk is that someone else will go even lower than your offer until the role can be done internally by another person using an AI agent.
The point is, most businesses that are non-quant and non-big tech, non-big AI do not want to pay the extortionate level of taxes in the UK and it makes SWEs in the UK look very expensive and the jobs + office move off-shore.
> But the risk is that someone else will go even lower than your offer until the role can be done internally by another person using an AI agent.
I have assessed various AI models & agents. I don't think I can be replaced by them, so I feel safe on that end.
That being said, I don't think my potential employers fully understand that.
> The point is, most businesses that are non-quant and non-big tech, non-big AI do not want to pay the extortionate level of taxes in the UK and it makes SWEs in the UK look very expensive and the jobs + office move off-shore.
Yes, this is where contract work came particularly handy. But the government made a big deal about taking them offshore due to IR35 pushing them out
There are still plenty of jobs at local software shops, banks, consulting firms, hospitals, government agencies and more, and you are at the front of the line for all of those. A lot of them enforce as little as 2-3 days in the office. Apply there instead.