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The UK may have wanted to be a world leader in software and may have heavily invested in education, but then they failed to keep their programmers by creating j

The UK may have wanted to be a world leader in software and may have heavily invested in education, but then they failed to keep their programmers by creating jobs that paid those developers a competitive enough salary to stay in the UK. A huge portion of us left the country to take our software skills to countries we would be paid competitive salaries and have a high quality of life. Those countries are exploiting the UK's investment by offering a high quality of life and a streamlined path through their immigration policies, pillaging UK developers and negating the billions of dollars the UK spent to get ahead. Having kept a close eye on the development market in the UK for the past 20 years, it's becoming apparent that there will never be an opportunity to bring our skills back home. It's no good investing in education if you don't provide the opportunity for that education to bring long term benefit to the UK. You need to keep the people once you've trained them and they're just not going to stick around while other countries salaries and immigration policies make it easy to take those skills where they're going to be guaranteed easy access to a high quality of life. Those developers are never going to come back if they face the prospect of losing 80% of their salary and their partner not being able to work for for a period during the immigration process. This is a huge gap that the UK seriously needs to look at. There's no point in having an industrial policy that trains people if you're just going to lose a huge portion of them at the end of that training, never to see them again.

jdietrich 8y ago
We failed to capitalise on the advantages we had created. It has to be remembered that the Computer Literacy Project ended in 1989. The following decade was not kind to the British computer industry, in large part due to a lack of investment and leadership. Thatcher (for all her faults) was seriously committed to computing, but Major just didn't get it.
DaiPlusPlus 8y ago
Can confirm - though I’m younger than the BBC Micro generation. After I got my BSc in CS I got a job offer from a west-coast FAANG company. My friends I went to uni with who are still in the UK doing jobs that require their degree make about 1/4 to 1/2 what I do, and I don’t even think I’m particularly good at what I do either. I note that at the pay-scales we’re talking about the “hidden” differences in CoL (like healthcare costs, etc) don’t really matter anymore.
bennybob 8y ago
Uk programmer here, late 30s, in the last year or so I've woken up to the fact that we re getting terribly salaries in the uk. Reddit is full of naive europeans who seem to be brainwashed into thinking the USA is some racist hell hole and that "cost of living is cheaper in Europe" (as far as I can tell this is complete nonsense). Or that paying high taxes will give them a good pension (not in the UK). As I live in Scotland I pay 40 percent tax on everything I earn over 41 thousand pounds. I take it you went to the States ? Is it even possible for someone my age to get there to work?
- balabaster 8y ago
  I went to Canada. I won't lie, the immigration path is a pain in the ass, but it's doable, even as a late 30 year old. Toronto is one of the top places in the world for income vs. cost of living for a career in the development industry. Coming from the UK to the U.S. is troublesome, their H1B Visa Lottery for skilled workers from anywhere but India seem to be futile. I've attempted twice now and I've written it off as a waste of time. Perhaps there's another path I'm unaware of. The U.S. may be considered a racist hell hole, but just like everywhere else, it's really the few loudest ones that make a bad name for everyone else. On the whole, Americans are wonderful people living in a system that offers them a reasonably high standard of living for a reasonable work/life balance. They've got some issues, just like any country. They've got a shit political system that just occasionally manages to be a beacon of light and hope to the rest of the world; a shit debacle of a medical industry that somehow has a couple of shining examples that manage to stand shoulder to shoulder with the best hospitals in the world; and an education system that fails about as many as it helps, yet still somehow manages to pull out a few of the best schools in the world. Quite how this is, I'm not sure. Don't let stereotypes and bad press colour your perspective of a culture you don't know anything about. Visit, go attend some interviews, spend time to find places there you love. Spend time with people. Form your own opinions. You may be surprised.

jdietrich 8y ago

We failed to capitalise on the advantages we had created. It has to be remembered that the Computer Literacy Project ended in 1989. The following decade was not kind to the British computer industry, in large part due to a lack of investment and leadership. Thatcher (for all her faults) was seriously committed to computing, but Major just didn't get it.

DaiPlusPlus 8y ago

Can confirm - though I’m younger than the BBC Micro generation. After I got my BSc in CS I got a job offer from a west-coast FAANG company. My friends I went to uni with who are still in the UK doing jobs that require their degree make about 1/4 to 1/2 what I do, and I don’t even think I’m particularly good at what I do either. I note that at the pay-scales we’re talking about the “hidden” differences in CoL (like healthcare costs, etc) don’t really matter anymore.

bennybob 8y ago

Uk programmer here, late 30s, in the last year or so I've woken up to the fact that we re getting terribly salaries in the uk. Reddit is full of naive europeans who seem to be brainwashed into thinking the USA is some racist hell hole and that "cost of living is cheaper in Europe" (as far as I can tell this is complete nonsense). Or that paying high taxes will give them a good pension (not in the UK). As I live in Scotland I pay 40 percent tax on everything I earn over 41 thousand pounds. I take it you went to the States ? Is it even possible for someone my age to get there to work?

balabaster 8y ago
I went to Canada. I won't lie, the immigration path is a pain in the ass, but it's doable, even as a late 30 year old. Toronto is one of the top places in the world for income vs. cost of living for a career in the development industry. Coming from the UK to the U.S. is troublesome, their H1B Visa Lottery for skilled workers from anywhere but India seem to be futile. I've attempted twice now and I've written it off as a waste of time. Perhaps there's another path I'm unaware of. The U.S. may be considered a racist hell hole, but just like everywhere else, it's really the few loudest ones that make a bad name for everyone else. On the whole, Americans are wonderful people living in a system that offers them a reasonably high standard of living for a reasonable work/life balance. They've got some issues, just like any country. They've got a shit political system that just occasionally manages to be a beacon of light and hope to the rest of the world; a shit debacle of a medical industry that somehow has a couple of shining examples that manage to stand shoulder to shoulder with the best hospitals in the world; and an education system that fails about as many as it helps, yet still somehow manages to pull out a few of the best schools in the world. Quite how this is, I'm not sure. Don't let stereotypes and bad press colour your perspective of a culture you don't know anything about. Visit, go attend some interviews, spend time to find places there you love. Spend time with people. Form your own opinions. You may be surprised.