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> which I'd categorise as being generally apathetical, if not hostile, to the engineering profession Any chance you could elaborate on this? Arm exists and is

> which I'd categorise as being generally apathetical, if not hostile, to the engineering profession Any chance you could elaborate on this? Arm exists and is British, after all.

gswdh 3y ago
I'm not sure what that poster was referring to, however in my experience (as a brit), is that the UK is replacing any kind of industry into a service economy aka. people buying shit they don't need. You see this in a number of ways like the physical replacement of industrial areas into shopping centres or the fact the UK can't manufacture rail locomotives - the place where they were invented... Having said this, there is still a reasonable amount of industry in the UK, the UK is by far the best country in the EU to buy engineering supplies but I think this is a remnant of the past. Most of the major engineering companies in industrial estates are Asian or American owned, now.
- Matl 3y ago
  > the UK is by far the best country in the EU to buy engineering supplies Germany has a far stronger industrial base still, I'd imagine if you want access to the EU you'd base yourself there.
- klelatti 3y ago
  > the UK is by far the best country in the EU The UK is no longer in the EU. Quite a significant point!
dazc 3y ago
I think a simpler answer is that for directors looking for a cash windfall the US markets are currently a more favourable choice.
scrlk 3y ago
UK engineering jobs typically have uncompetitive compensation.
- DaiPlusPlus 3y ago
  That's just the result, not the cause.
- sofixa 3y ago
  Uncompetitive compared to?
  - tchaffee 3y ago
    Compared to the US. Dan Abramov who works for Facebook and is one of the primary engineers of the hugely popular React framework makes less than one of my junior engineers.
    - progbits 3y ago
      And when he gets sick gets free healthcare while your junior will go bankrupt. Compensation isn't comparable without comparing external costs and benefits.
      - dom96 3y ago
        And as a FB employee gets private healthcare as a perk and would also get it in the US. The US comp is much higher than the UK's even taking into account healthcare.
        Tijdreiziger 3y ago
        And what about long-term illness? If he fell ill for 1+ year, would his salary and healthcare be guaranteed or would he go bankrupt?
        tchaffee 3y ago
        That's is indeed where the US system fails. Overall though I think the risk reward ratio favors the US for young healthy engineers. Save up enough to retire at 45 and then get yourself to a country with good nationalized healthcare.
msy 3y ago
The UK has a long intellectual tradition which creates a steady stream of creative and capable engineers. Capital however is predominately held via inherited wealth and its controllers want rentier incomes with low risk. As a consequence there is low appetite for risky new ventures and those that want to undertake them mostly migrate elsewhere. What's left is a stock market dominated by octogenarian+ dianosaurs, a decaying rump of manufacturing, a finance sector that mostly makes its bread laundering the capital of the world's corrupt and corruptors and a tiny creative industry that clings on despite suffering through waves of either government neglect, or worse yet, government interest.
- pipo234 3y ago
  > a stock market dominated by octogenarian+ dinosaurs, a decaying rump of manufacturing, a finance sector that mostly makes its bread laundering the capital of the world's corrupt and corruptors Ah! Now I get it. That rhymes with companies like Shell and Unilever leaving the EU in favour of UK after brexit. (Not that Frankfurt, Milan, Amsterdam or Paris are known to be heavy investors in tech innovation, btw.)
  - Lio 3y ago
    Well Shell (and BP) are really likely to get sweetheart deals on North Sea oil from Rishi Sunak which might have swayed them. Now, I know what you're thinking, that that's just because both firms coincidentally signed multi-billion dollar deals coincidentally with Sunak's family business, Infosys, to coincidentally outsource all their IT jobs but I assure you that's a mere coincidence.... probably. :P
- deskamess 3y ago
  Canada has many similarities. The inherited wealth is essentially banks and oligarchs. You pretty much have to be risk free to get any funding. Lots of window dressing and marketing to make Canada look good. If it were not for US companies (Cisco, Google, etc) the Canadian tech salary would be closer to Europe. Once you start living here you realize the truth about how much they value tech, protectionism, the incompetence of the telecom sector, stodgy banking and finance, poor education, unaffordable housing, and declining access to health (Ontario and stories from the Maritimes since health is provincial - cannot speak of Alberta/BC/etc). All subpar but the marketing and virtue signaling is great. A lot of 'make Canada look good' comes at the expense of Canadians.
pjc50 3y ago
Goes all the way back to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Two_Cultures https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Two_Cultures and beyond. The UK has a great engineering tradition, especially from the Victorian and Empire eras, all the way up to WW2, but it seems that after that there was a dramatic and incredibly short sighted turn to economisation and avoiding investment. The absolute poster child for this was the UK space programme, which was cancelled just before the launch of its first rocket. The director of the programme decided to defy orders and launch anyway, on the grounds that everything was ready and he was in Australia. But this pervades everything. The TBMs for Euston HS2 have been bought, but are going to spend the next year buried doing nothing, because there's a persistent desire to cancel HS2 after most of the work has been done but before any of the benefits are gained. Concorde somehow escaped cancellation multiple times. The UK developed its own nuclear reactor technology (Magnox) then gave up and let Electricite de France run everything. I've heard this complaint from several people in Cambridge's "startup" industry too. There are hardly any angel investors. The amounts of money available are tiny. Got an idea? Tough, you'll have to develop it in your own literal garden shed at your own expense. The local capital owners are far more interested in property, which doesn't require any thinking.
- paganel 3y ago
  I'm not British, but it is my understanding that after WW1 and WW2 the money had just dried up when it came to capital-intensive projects. I've just finished reading a book [1] that explicitly mentions the lack of available money as a reason for the Brits having to give up their Sea Power status just after WW2. [1] https://www.amazon.com/Seapower-States-Maritime-Continental-Conflict/dp/0300230044 https://www.amazon.com/Seapower-States-Maritime-Continental-...
  - pjc50 3y ago
    This was certainly a real problem, as was the whole IMF rescue business in the 70s, but not across the whole postwar period. More could have been done with the oil wealth than turn it into a real estate boom, for example. Realistically the UK gave up sea power status sometime during WW2 when we were massively outbuilt by the US, and the collapse of imperialism as a ""business model"" took care of the rest by making us fall back on our own resources rather than simply taking them.
DaiPlusPlus 3y ago
As it's 2am here, I'll rattle off assorted bullet-points in no particular order: * The UK's sudden deindustrialisation (1970s-1990s) was inevitable but foreseeable and yet still poorly managed by both political parties, IMHO: my perception is Labour was more interested in propping up whatever heavy-industry remained rather than ease the UK into the future - and as for the Tories... probably best I say nothing there. * Even before deindustrialisation the overarching business-culture in medium to large businesses in the UK was, and still is, tied to the entrenched class system, insofar as the board-level positions, upper management, sometimes even middle-management, and many specialties like legal, are held by a kind of unofficial aristocacy that looks-out for each-other rather than what's best for the business that they run (let alone the country): some combination of Eton, Harrow, having read Classics at Oxbridge, you can see what I'm getting at. This alone explains how Boris Johnson won his party's leadership and remained in-office despite clear evidence of misconduct in office, and so on and so on. Nepotism is rife here: the middling, uninterested, types get to work at daddy's friends's firm if they can't get recruited by the banks when they do their milk-runs. * For reasons I haven't fully explored yet, despite the UK being the birthplace of the industrial revolution, and of so many inventions we still rely on today, and of great engineers like Isambard Kingdom Brunel - the engineering profession was never elevated to something Etonians would be interested in - it became a very middle-class occupation. That itself isn't a real problem as far as I'm concerned - the problem comes back to how the layers of management would be literally a class apart from engineering, and that class-divide results in engineering being excluded from management and leadership decisions, no-matter how central or critical engineering is to the company's identity or very purpose - for this reason you won't find many former-engineers being promoted to leadership or management or their experiences and inputs being valued: after all, the board read Classics so of course they know far better about how to run a successful business than a silly engineer from Lancs who plays with his funny slide-rule all day long. * Even in more progressive companies without the problem of aristocratic management it's difficult to get access to capital, especially for anything remotely risky. * A small, but still contributing point, that I feel matters slightly, is that different social groups in the UK tend to have differing mental pictures of what "engineering" even is: for many people (possibly even most people? maybe at least oop north...) they'll tell you an engineer is someone who stokes the fire on a stream-train, or fixes their telly when it breaks - MAYBE a civil-engineer - while our preferred answer: "someone who solves problems" would probably be 3rd or 4th down on the Family Fueds survey screen. This is my perception and I hope I'm wrong. As an anecdote, I was in secondary-school and 6th Form during the last of the Labour years when the careers advice service ("Connexxions"[1]) was pushing a very egalitarian view of how careers, further-ed and higher-ed, and professional development should operate - I support their goals, but I feel they got the messaging wrong and misrepresented how many careers operated - for a solid example, I still have my A2-sized full-colour print careers guidebook (with lots of flashy photos to boot) we all got when we were 14 (15? 16?) which certainly contributed towards the perception that (excepting civil engineering) that "engineer" is just another word for "technician": while the book did do justice to civil and chemical engineering, it made no mention of software engineering or electronics engineering, while mechnical engineering was really under-sold to its readers, and electrical engineering was down-right misrepresented. Experiences like these are only going to put-off kids from considering engineering precisely at that age when they're thinking about what they want to do with their life. * More broadly, I don't think the UK really has many (any?) public-figures who are celebrated as engineering figures - in fact all, of the celebrities I know who have engineering backgrounds got famous for deciding to stop being an engineer: Rowan Atkinson (Mr. Bean) is an elctrical engineer who went to Queen's College, Carol Voderman did engineering at Cambridge, and so on - while the people I suppose we could be celebrating, like James Dyson, clearly act against the interests of the UK's engineering sector (he moved huge chunks of the company to Singapore). Yes, we have Rolls-Royce jet-engines, BAE Systems, and an assortment of luxury carmakers - but I'm convinced they're only still around because they are strategic national interests, and the UK government has had to bail them out of bankruptcy more times than we'd like, so excepting the defence sector, the UK has no real equivalent of NASA with which to inspire its young children, pre-uni students, and mid-career-shifters. * Another aspect that I think matters, even if only somewhat slightly, the attitudes of those-in-charge (regardless of their class background: Tory or Labour) towards people-on-the-spectrum and those adjacent to it (i.e. us) - it's a nebulous thing I can't pin-down easily - but until 6th Form I was under constant pressure to conform (because if you don't support any footy team at all then you must be a right spesh) - it starts right from Reception year in Primary. Of course this is not unique to the UK, I've heard the exact same stories told from people I know who grew up in Iowa or Idaho - but those states aren't exactly known for their engineering sectors either. This extends to an undercurrent of scepticism of things like ADHD; while paternalism and gatekeeping remain in the medical profession, especially in mental health (though things are definitely better than they were 20-30 years ago) - right down to the anti-trans crap Rishi Sunak is still pushing to deflect criticsm of 13 years of Tory rule, never mind it led to the murder of a teenage girl. At least David Cameron wasn't that bad. * One of the things that Boris Johnson's government did while in power was to up-end the 6th Form examinations system - I'll admit I don't know all the details, but I understand his changed the system to be much closer to the (almost social-Darwinian) way things were when Boris himself was doing his A-Levels: where your final subject grade depends far more on how you do in your finals exams instead of continuous assessment/coursework, with no or very limited opportunities for resits, and removing choices like a-la-carte module selection - but it is exactly and only because of the flexibility afforded to me when I was at that age that my comorbid ASD+ADHD-addled brain was able to get into university (and a very good one at that), whereas I'm certain that I would not be able to manage today with that level of intense exam-prep in only a 2-month window - and without my degree I would not be able to qualify for the H-1B (where a BSc is an absolute requirement) and eventually get my US Green Card. * It is true that the UK does, actually, succeed in software in one crucial area: video games: Rockstar, DMA, Rare, Codemasters, Hello Games (No Man's Sky), just to name a few - but as others in this thread have remarked: successive UK governments, again, regardless of party, fail to give the sector the credit and support it needs and the UK's success here is in-spite of everything, not because of it. Crucially, the UK's games sector was built on the home-computer revolution of the 1980s - successive governments have had plenty of opportunities to repeat that success, but so far all I've seen is the 2016 BBC micro:bit project - which honestly felt like a gimmick than something to inspire kids with. * Things aren't all bad though: I'm happy to see things like Scratch being taught in primary-schools and A-Level Computer Science now being closer to undergraduate level than glorified-ICT than it was in my day - but these things won't address the larger social, cultural, and attitudinal issues at play here. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Connexions_(agency) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Connexions_(agency)
bemusedthrow75 3y ago
> Arm exists and is British, after all. Our current government is indifferent to this.
- DaiPlusPlus 3y ago
  Not entirely indifferent - they did intervene on national-security grounds in 2021: https://news.sky.com/story/government-intervenes-in-sale-of-uk-chip-designer-arm-over-national-security-implications-12280485 https://news.sky.com/story/government-intervenes-in-sale-of-...
  - bemusedthrow75 3y ago
    I had forgotten about this, to be honest, but national security grounds is either what it says on its face or "what is the smallest amount of intervention we can do here to satisfy all those critics talking about something we don't understand". Our Prime Minister thought getting the Royal Mint to produce NFTs was a good idea. In 2022.
- DrBazza 3y ago
  All modern UK governments have been largely indifferent on protecting British industry, and when they do it normally blows up in their faces. It's now a case of 'fool me once, shame on you; fool me twice, shame on me'.

> which I'd categorise as being generally apathetical, if not hostile, to the engineering profession Any chance you could elaborate on this? Arm exists and is British, after all.

gswdh 3y ago

I'm not sure what that poster was referring to, however in my experience (as a brit), is that the UK is replacing any kind of industry into a service economy aka. people buying shit they don't need. You see this in a number of ways like the physical replacement of industrial areas into shopping centres or the fact the UK can't manufacture rail locomotives - the place where they were invented... Having said this, there is still a reasonable amount of industry in the UK, the UK is by far the best country in the EU to buy engineering supplies but I think this is a remnant of the past. Most of the major engineering companies in industrial estates are Asian or American owned, now.

Matl 3y ago
> the UK is by far the best country in the EU to buy engineering supplies Germany has a far stronger industrial base still, I'd imagine if you want access to the EU you'd base yourself there.
klelatti 3y ago
> the UK is by far the best country in the EU The UK is no longer in the EU. Quite a significant point!

dazc 3y ago

I think a simpler answer is that for directors looking for a cash windfall the US markets are currently a more favourable choice.

scrlk 3y ago

UK engineering jobs typically have uncompetitive compensation.

DaiPlusPlus 3y ago
That's just the result, not the cause.
sofixa 3y ago
Uncompetitive compared to?
- tchaffee 3y ago
  Compared to the US. Dan Abramov who works for Facebook and is one of the primary engineers of the hugely popular React framework makes less than one of my junior engineers.
  - progbits 3y ago
    And when he gets sick gets free healthcare while your junior will go bankrupt. Compensation isn't comparable without comparing external costs and benefits.
    - dom96 3y ago
      And as a FB employee gets private healthcare as a perk and would also get it in the US. The US comp is much higher than the UK's even taking into account healthcare.
      - Tijdreiziger 3y ago
        And what about long-term illness? If he fell ill for 1+ year, would his salary and healthcare be guaranteed or would he go bankrupt?
        tchaffee 3y ago
        That's is indeed where the US system fails. Overall though I think the risk reward ratio favors the US for young healthy engineers. Save up enough to retire at 45 and then get yourself to a country with good nationalized healthcare.

msy 3y ago

The UK has a long intellectual tradition which creates a steady stream of creative and capable engineers. Capital however is predominately held via inherited wealth and its controllers want rentier incomes with low risk. As a consequence there is low appetite for risky new ventures and those that want to undertake them mostly migrate elsewhere. What's left is a stock market dominated by octogenarian+ dianosaurs, a decaying rump of manufacturing, a finance sector that mostly makes its bread laundering the capital of the world's corrupt and corruptors and a tiny creative industry that clings on despite suffering through waves of either government neglect, or worse yet, government interest.

pipo234 3y ago
> a stock market dominated by octogenarian+ dinosaurs, a decaying rump of manufacturing, a finance sector that mostly makes its bread laundering the capital of the world's corrupt and corruptors Ah! Now I get it. That rhymes with companies like Shell and Unilever leaving the EU in favour of UK after brexit. (Not that Frankfurt, Milan, Amsterdam or Paris are known to be heavy investors in tech innovation, btw.)
- Lio 3y ago
  Well Shell (and BP) are really likely to get sweetheart deals on North Sea oil from Rishi Sunak which might have swayed them. Now, I know what you're thinking, that that's just because both firms coincidentally signed multi-billion dollar deals coincidentally with Sunak's family business, Infosys, to coincidentally outsource all their IT jobs but I assure you that's a mere coincidence.... probably. :P
deskamess 3y ago
Canada has many similarities. The inherited wealth is essentially banks and oligarchs. You pretty much have to be risk free to get any funding. Lots of window dressing and marketing to make Canada look good. If it were not for US companies (Cisco, Google, etc) the Canadian tech salary would be closer to Europe. Once you start living here you realize the truth about how much they value tech, protectionism, the incompetence of the telecom sector, stodgy banking and finance, poor education, unaffordable housing, and declining access to health (Ontario and stories from the Maritimes since health is provincial - cannot speak of Alberta/BC/etc). All subpar but the marketing and virtue signaling is great. A lot of 'make Canada look good' comes at the expense of Canadians.

pjc50 3y ago

Goes all the way back to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Two_Cultures https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Two_Cultures and beyond. The UK has a great engineering tradition, especially from the Victorian and Empire eras, all the way up to WW2, but it seems that after that there was a dramatic and incredibly short sighted turn to economisation and avoiding investment. The absolute poster child for this was the UK space programme, which was cancelled just before the launch of its first rocket. The director of the programme decided to defy orders and launch anyway, on the grounds that everything was ready and he was in Australia. But this pervades everything. The TBMs for Euston HS2 have been bought, but are going to spend the next year buried doing nothing, because there's a persistent desire to cancel HS2 after most of the work has been done but before any of the benefits are gained. Concorde somehow escaped cancellation multiple times. The UK developed its own nuclear reactor technology (Magnox) then gave up and let Electricite de France run everything. I've heard this complaint from several people in Cambridge's "startup" industry too. There are hardly any angel investors. The amounts of money available are tiny. Got an idea? Tough, you'll have to develop it in your own literal garden shed at your own expense. The local capital owners are far more interested in property, which doesn't require any thinking.

paganel 3y ago
I'm not British, but it is my understanding that after WW1 and WW2 the money had just dried up when it came to capital-intensive projects. I've just finished reading a book [1] that explicitly mentions the lack of available money as a reason for the Brits having to give up their Sea Power status just after WW2. [1] https://www.amazon.com/Seapower-States-Maritime-Continental-Conflict/dp/0300230044 https://www.amazon.com/Seapower-States-Maritime-Continental-...
- pjc50 3y ago
  This was certainly a real problem, as was the whole IMF rescue business in the 70s, but not across the whole postwar period. More could have been done with the oil wealth than turn it into a real estate boom, for example. Realistically the UK gave up sea power status sometime during WW2 when we were massively outbuilt by the US, and the collapse of imperialism as a ""business model"" took care of the rest by making us fall back on our own resources rather than simply taking them.

DaiPlusPlus 3y ago

As it's 2am here, I'll rattle off assorted bullet-points in no particular order: * The UK's sudden deindustrialisation (1970s-1990s) was inevitable but foreseeable and yet still poorly managed by both political parties, IMHO: my perception is Labour was more interested in propping up whatever heavy-industry remained rather than ease the UK into the future - and as for the Tories... probably best I say nothing there. * Even before deindustrialisation the overarching business-culture in medium to large businesses in the UK was, and still is, tied to the entrenched class system, insofar as the board-level positions, upper management, sometimes even middle-management, and many specialties like legal, are held by a kind of unofficial aristocacy that looks-out for each-other rather than what's best for the business that they run (let alone the country): some combination of Eton, Harrow, having read Classics at Oxbridge, you can see what I'm getting at. This alone explains how Boris Johnson won his party's leadership and remained in-office despite clear evidence of misconduct in office, and so on and so on. Nepotism is rife here: the middling, uninterested, types get to work at daddy's friends's firm if they can't get recruited by the banks when they do their milk-runs. * For reasons I haven't fully explored yet, despite the UK being the birthplace of the industrial revolution, and of so many inventions we still rely on today, and of great engineers like Isambard Kingdom Brunel - the engineering profession was never elevated to something Etonians would be interested in - it became a very middle-class occupation. That itself isn't a real problem as far as I'm concerned - the problem comes back to how the layers of management would be literally a class apart from engineering, and that class-divide results in engineering being excluded from management and leadership decisions, no-matter how central or critical engineering is to the company's identity or very purpose - for this reason you won't find many former-engineers being promoted to leadership or management or their experiences and inputs being valued: after all, the board read Classics so of course they know far better about how to run a successful business than a silly engineer from Lancs who plays with his funny slide-rule all day long. * Even in more progressive companies without the problem of aristocratic management it's difficult to get access to capital, especially for anything remotely risky. * A small, but still contributing point, that I feel matters slightly, is that different social groups in the UK tend to have differing mental pictures of what "engineering" even is: for many people (possibly even most people? maybe at least oop north...) they'll tell you an engineer is someone who stokes the fire on a stream-train, or fixes their telly when it breaks - MAYBE a civil-engineer - while our preferred answer: "someone who solves problems" would probably be 3rd or 4th down on the Family Fueds survey screen. This is my perception and I hope I'm wrong. As an anecdote, I was in secondary-school and 6th Form during the last of the Labour years when the careers advice service ("Connexxions"[1]) was pushing a very egalitarian view of how careers, further-ed and higher-ed, and professional development should operate - I support their goals, but I feel they got the messaging wrong and misrepresented how many careers operated - for a solid example, I still have my A2-sized full-colour print careers guidebook (with lots of flashy photos to boot) we all got when we were 14 (15? 16?) which certainly contributed towards the perception that (excepting civil engineering) that "engineer" is just another word for "technician": while the book did do justice to civil and chemical engineering, it made no mention of software engineering or electronics engineering, while mechnical engineering was really under-sold to its readers, and electrical engineering was down-right misrepresented. Experiences like these are only going to put-off kids from considering engineering precisely at that age when they're thinking about what they want to do with their life. * More broadly, I don't think the UK really has many (any?) public-figures who are celebrated as engineering figures - in fact all, of the celebrities I know who have engineering backgrounds got famous for deciding to stop being an engineer: Rowan Atkinson (Mr. Bean) is an elctrical engineer who went to Queen's College, Carol Voderman did engineering at Cambridge, and so on - while the people I suppose we could be celebrating, like James Dyson, clearly act against the interests of the UK's engineering sector (he moved huge chunks of the company to Singapore). Yes, we have Rolls-Royce jet-engines, BAE Systems, and an assortment of luxury carmakers - but I'm convinced they're only still around because they are strategic national interests, and the UK government has had to bail them out of bankruptcy more times than we'd like, so excepting the defence sector, the UK has no real equivalent of NASA with which to inspire its young children, pre-uni students, and mid-career-shifters. * Another aspect that I think matters, even if only somewhat slightly, the attitudes of those-in-charge (regardless of their class background: Tory or Labour) towards people-on-the-spectrum and those adjacent to it (i.e. us) - it's a nebulous thing I can't pin-down easily - but until 6th Form I was under constant pressure to conform (because if you don't support any footy team at all then you must be a right spesh) - it starts right from Reception year in Primary. Of course this is not unique to the UK, I've heard the exact same stories told from people I know who grew up in Iowa or Idaho - but those states aren't exactly known for their engineering sectors either. This extends to an undercurrent of scepticism of things like ADHD; while paternalism and gatekeeping remain in the medical profession, especially in mental health (though things are definitely better than they were 20-30 years ago) - right down to the anti-trans crap Rishi Sunak is still pushing to deflect criticsm of 13 years of Tory rule, never mind it led to the murder of a teenage girl. At least David Cameron wasn't that bad. * One of the things that Boris Johnson's government did while in power was to up-end the 6th Form examinations system - I'll admit I don't know all the details, but I understand his changed the system to be much closer to the (almost social-Darwinian) way things were when Boris himself was doing his A-Levels: where your final subject grade depends far more on how you do in your finals exams instead of continuous assessment/coursework, with no or very limited opportunities for resits, and removing choices like a-la-carte module selection - but it is exactly and only because of the flexibility afforded to me when I was at that age that my comorbid ASD+ADHD-addled brain was able to get into university (and a very good one at that), whereas I'm certain that I would not be able to manage today with that level of intense exam-prep in only a 2-month window - and without my degree I would not be able to qualify for the H-1B (where a BSc is an absolute requirement) and eventually get my US Green Card. * It is true that the UK does, actually, succeed in software in one crucial area: video games: Rockstar, DMA, Rare, Codemasters, Hello Games (No Man's Sky), just to name a few - but as others in this thread have remarked: successive UK governments, again, regardless of party, fail to give the sector the credit and support it needs and the UK's success here is in-spite of everything, not because of it. Crucially, the UK's games sector was built on the home-computer revolution of the 1980s - successive governments have had plenty of opportunities to repeat that success, but so far all I've seen is the 2016 BBC micro:bit project - which honestly felt like a gimmick than something to inspire kids with. * Things aren't all bad though: I'm happy to see things like Scratch being taught in primary-schools and A-Level Computer Science now being closer to undergraduate level than glorified-ICT than it was in my day - but these things won't address the larger social, cultural, and attitudinal issues at play here. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Connexions_(agency) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Connexions_(agency)

bemusedthrow75 3y ago

> Arm exists and is British, after all. Our current government is indifferent to this.

DaiPlusPlus 3y ago
Not entirely indifferent - they did intervene on national-security grounds in 2021: https://news.sky.com/story/government-intervenes-in-sale-of-uk-chip-designer-arm-over-national-security-implications-12280485 https://news.sky.com/story/government-intervenes-in-sale-of-...
- bemusedthrow75 3y ago
  I had forgotten about this, to be honest, but national security grounds is either what it says on its face or "what is the smallest amount of intervention we can do here to satisfy all those critics talking about something we don't understand". Our Prime Minister thought getting the Royal Mint to produce NFTs was a good idea. In 2022.
DrBazza 3y ago
All modern UK governments have been largely indifferent on protecting British industry, and when they do it normally blows up in their faces. It's now a case of 'fool me once, shame on you; fool me twice, shame on me'.