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Tech Nation shutting down as UK government pulls key funding
- bilekas 4y ago> DCMS) had decided to give £12m of grant funding, which Tech Nation had relied on, to Barclays Bank That is absolutely wild.. 12m to a bank surely is pocket change. What possible justification did they give for that? They gave the funds instead to Barclays incubator who is a for profit organization. Meaning they will simply push and invest in what is currently making money and not unproven technologies and sciences. This won't end well long term i feel.
- WaxProlix 4y agoI mean, this is contemporary UK politics in a nutshell. Decades of tory (and tory light) rule have gutted programs in search of short-term benefit for ages, we'll see how the country fares but it's not looking pretty.
- gumby 4y agoConsider Sunak’s background.
- toyg 4y agoConsider the background of 99% of his party, rather. These decisions are not taken one by one at the top. And this happened in September, under the previous cabbage. Tories be tories.
- gadders 4y agoThat sounds.. racist. What relevance is the fact that he's of Indian ancestory?
- triceratops 4y agoI think they meant his background as an investment banker.
- gadders 4y agoBarclays made £7b profit last year. Nobody would be stupid enough to claim that the prime minister personally stepped in to get them another £12m (which they will have to give away in grants).
- gumby 4y agoYes I am pretty sure he never thought "Aha, Barclay's needs £12MM", or even noticed. My point is that he is a perfect synecdoche for his party: reflexively help establishment business and the donor class; ignore the small stuff that could grow large. And cutting anything that encourages immigration is important to the BREXIT wing of his party (which may be all that is left of it).
- triceratops 4y agoIt's natural to feel fondness or bias towards one's "own" industry. They're "your" people, you know the field well and can evaluate who's genuine and who isn't. You might believe that it's a force for good in the world. You probably still have friends or professional contacts in the industry.
- _joel 4y agoHe worked in a parmacy and his father's a doctor... as he likes to parrot.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- stuaxo 4y agoCompletely and utterly on brand for the Tories.
- kurthr 4y agoSomebody's gotta hire them when they leave office... might as well be a bank!
- kmlx 4y ago> That is absolutely wild.. 12m to a bank surely is pocket change. What possible justification did they give for that? “Our decision to make the Digital Growth Grant competitive brings the funding into line with the majority of government grants. Barclays Eagle Labs was successful because their application represented the best value for taxpayers’ money, will benefit the most startups and scaleups over the next two years, and was scored highest by an independent panel.”
- logifail 4y ago> That is absolutely wild.. 12m to a bank surely is pocket change. What possible justification did they give for that? I'm no huge fan of Barclays bank (bad experience several decades ago, vowed to never touch them again), but they aren't "giving the money to the bank", it sounds like Barclays is taking over the contract to provide the service.
- madeofpalk 4y agoArticle says this is not the case > [Barclays] will not, however, take over Tech Nation’s role administering the UK’s global talent visa. Tech Nation has notified the UK’s Home Office that its visa scheme will stop — though it will continue until then. Kind of weird that Tech Nation is notifying the government that a visa program will stop. Does Home Office intend for another org to take over the role of administering tech applicants for the Extraordinary/Global Talent visa?
- logifail 4y ago> Article says this is not the case "the Department for Digital, Culture, Media & Sport (DCMS) put Tech Nation’s contract up for grabs after growing concerned about its reliance on state money"[0] "Barclays’ tech incubator Eagle Labs will use the government grant — which has been awarded for just two years — to launch new programmes to help tech companies"[1] Q: In what sense did Tech Nation "administer" the global talent visa? It seems to be at https://www.gov.uk/global-talent https://www.gov.uk/global-talent - what did Tech Nation have to do with this? [0] https://sifted.eu/articles/barclays-tech-nation-grant-fintech/ https://sifted.eu/articles/barclays-tech-nation-grant-fintec... [1] https://sifted.eu/articles/tech-nation-shutting-down/ https://sifted.eu/articles/tech-nation-shutting-down/
- madeofpalk 4y agoI have this visa, I've been through this process back when it was called Extraordinary Talent. To get the visa you must first get an endorsement from a nominated organisation who's fit to judge your field (academia or research, arts and culture, or digital technology). Tech Nation did the endorsements for digital technology. Once you have the endorsement from Tech Nation, the actual visa application done by Home Office is rather simple and is just 'rubber stamping' back in your home country.
- r00fus 4y agoIsn't this a clear-cut example of pure corruption? Who got that kickback to move moneys from a non-profit to a for-profit endeavor?
- unity1001 4y ago> Isn't this a clear-cut example of pure corruption? You mistyped 'Tories'. Not that the Tory-lites (the other party) is any better.
- Neil44 4y agoThere's more info in the FT article - https://www.ft.com/content/93abf2e2-d484-4edc-b5c9-30999a18b234 https://www.ft.com/content/93abf2e2-d484-4edc-b5c9-30999a18b... The short version is that Barclays Eagle Labs project represented better value for the taxpayer because Barclays absorb the operational costs leaving the taxpayer's 12M to go wholly towards it's intended target. Tech Nation used some of the 12M to run it's self.
- 908B64B197 4y agoWas anyone actually interested to go to the UK, especially post Brexit? Here in the Bay it seems there's a constant interest from British nationals to move to America (judging by the volume of applications we get). But I've never heard anyone interested to do the reverse. Top destination for UK nationals in Academia was... the US [0]. [0] http://spectrum.ieee.org/at-work/tech-careers/the-global-brain-trade http://spectrum.ieee.org/at-work/tech-careers/the-global-bra...
- gnad_sucks 4y agoSpeaking of which, what's the move like? Can a company sponsor a green card if they like the candidate enough? How does this work? Yes, I'm one of those people you're talking about.
- gumby 4y agoYes, if you work on an H-1 your company can sponsor you for a GC. Many do.
- troebr 4y agoAFAIK you need a visa first, most people I know that did this (myself included) first had a visa first: H1, L1, O1, etc. Then their employer sponsored a green card. H1-B is the most common for tech workers, unfortunately due to quotas it can be pretty hard to get. Even if you get the job, your petition could be denied randomly because there were too many applications for the year.
- gnad_sucks 4y agoI already have L1, but my employer won't sponsor green card. What are my options?
- digianarchist 4y agoNew employer using a different non-immigrant visa or EB-1.
- _joel 4y agoThe terrible thing is, I think most of us in the UK expect this from the current government and there feels like there's nothing we can do to change that until next year, whilst chaos and corruption run free.
- anigbrowl 4y agoYou could strike, or rather join the existing strikes. Generations of Thatcherite policies have wiped a lot of institutional memory and trained society to think of itself as being made up of investors, consumers, and drones.
- _joel 4y agoTrue and I fully support them, unfortunately there seems to be complicit inaction in the government and they want this to fester.
- anigbrowl 4y agoIt's rational for the government to just wait it out if they correctly estimate that people will just stand around passively. You have to disrupt their function; waiting for them to develop a sense of shame and see themselves out isn't going to work.
- dpflan 4y agoNews from the UK is troubling...and intriguing. What would be the best resource to understand how the UK seems to be being sucked into the event horizon of an socio-economic blackhole of institutional collapse?
- digianarchist 4y agoI liked the following article on the UK's terminal decline. > There exist what I call the ‘forever problems,’ policy challenges that Britain has faced for decades, known about for decades, debated and deliberated over for decades and yet the raging, fiery injustice that these challenges promote lingers and festers. [0] The future is bleak for Britain with it's zombie government and feckless opposition, both devoid of ideas. [0] - https://www.oxfordstudent.com/2022/07/11/the-fall-of-a-nation/ https://www.oxfordstudent.com/2022/07/11/the-fall-of-a-natio...
- dpflan 4y agoThanks for the resource.
- unity1001 4y agoUmair Haque writes a lot about the UK. In intricate detail. Pretty gruesome. https://medium.com/eudaimonia-co/welcome-to-dickensian-britain-97bf9e7fe93a https://medium.com/eudaimonia-co/welcome-to-dickensian-brita... https://eand.co/brexits-three-years-old-how-s-it-going-catastrophic-is-an-understatement-22736f3f1db7 https://eand.co/brexits-three-years-old-how-s-it-going-catas... https://eand.co/britain-has-officially-lost-its-mind-5c218510b11f https://eand.co/britain-has-officially-lost-its-mind-5c21851... There are many other articles regarding the UK and what went wrong in his publication. https://eand.co/ https://eand.co/
- dalyons 4y agoThank you! Hyperbolic writing style but well sourced and very interesting. Seems grim indeed.
- blibble 4y agothe title is not strictly true is it? a company the UK government has outsourced part of the "tech talent visa" check to has lost its government funding no reason it couldn't be done by someone else the article also states the grant was for £12 million and 3000 people went through it that's quite a lot of taxpayer money per visa to check someone's eligibility
- dang 4y agoYes, that seems to have been a wrongly rewritten title. We've reverted it now. (Submitted title was "UK Tech Talent Visa to shut down after government withdraws funding".) Submitters: "Please use the original title, unless it is misleading or linkbait; don't editorialize." - https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html (Sometimes it's the site itself that changed its title, in which case of course it isn't the submitter's fault.)
- VLM 4y agoIt took 70 employees 12 years to process those 3000 employees. That's one per work week, roughly.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- christophilleg 4y ago[dead]
- brm 4y agoNever seen anything like it really. Over a £12mm handout they chopped the head off one of the most important visa endorsing bodies with no real plan to replace it. I'm sure they'll scramble to find one but the absolute madness of it absolutely reflects the entirety of what's going on in UK government at the moment.