27 ms·

UK's hardware talent is being wasted

• honeybadger1 2y ago
  Gotta love how the folks spinning slick pitches make bank, while the engineers actually building our world are left pinching pennies. But hey, that’s capitalism for you.
• pinoy420 2y ago
  [flagged]
  • alephnerd 2y ago
    No. UK's pay is extremely low. And you know that it is VERY difficult to earn beyond £80k/yr as a SWE outside of top foreign employers in the UK like Google or Citadel. More likely, you'll stagnate at £50-60k. And when factoring the UK's CoL being comparable to some of the more expensive American cities (SF, NYC, Boston) yet salaries being a fraction of those available there, it makes sense why engineering isn't well regarded, and plenty of people either switch to finance or immigrates to the States, Australia, or Canada.
    • gjsman-1000 2y ago
      Calling it right now: give it five years, and even Raspberry Pi will be relocating. ARM is already somewhat relocating - some of their newest cores, like Cortex A78, were designed in Austin.
      • alephnerd 2y ago
        I don't think they'd relocate, but that doesn't matter. They most likely will pull an ARM and hire almost entirely in the US and India instead of in the UK, because competitive British engineers would immigrate to the States, and you can get top tier Indian chip design talent across the spectrum for $30-60k.
        • matt-p 2y ago
          >British engineers would immigrate to the States. I just don't think this is very true, some perhaps but not many. Secondly, if "the salleries are too low in the UK" is the argument then why would companies be interested in shifting hiring to the states?
          • gjsman-1000 2y ago
            The answer is right in your own question. They are shifting hiring to the US because the top talent is leaving the UK, or leaving the field.
        • cfd456 2y ago
          It is impossible to immigrate to the US unless your employer is willing to go through the time-consuming and expensive process of sponsoring a visa + green card, which they have little reason to do since they can pay you less over here. I've been designing chips for years in the UK at ARM and elsewhere, haven't encountered anyone moving to the States
          • alephnerd 2y ago
            Oof. That is rough. I assumed Arm would give the L1/2 option to high caliber employees - it's the norm in India.
    • cherryteastain 2y ago
      Low relative to the US Tier 1 cities only. Just based on a cursory look at levels.fyi London median comp is £96k [1] while e.g. Houston is £103k [2] Toronto is £80k [3]. In fact, the only location I could find outside the US that was higher was Zurich at £126k [4] [1] https://www.levels.fyi/t/software-engineer/locations/london-metro-area https://www.levels.fyi/t/software-engineer/locations/london-... [2] https://www.levels.fyi/t/software-engineer/locations/greater-houston-area https://www.levels.fyi/t/software-engineer/locations/greater... [3] https://www.levels.fyi/t/software-engineer/locations/greater-toronto-area https://www.levels.fyi/t/software-engineer/locations/greater... [4] https://www.levels.fyi/t/software-engineer/locations/greater-zurich-area https://www.levels.fyi/t/software-engineer/locations/greater...
      • alephnerd 2y ago
        First, CoL is miles lower in Houston and other tier 2 cities in America - you can buy a detached house for around $500k/£400k in a posh neighborhood. Not happpening in inner ring London. Secondly, I've noticed issues with Levels.fyi ranges outside US/Canada and top tech hubs like Tel Aviv and Bangalore. Most markets don't have the same awareness of the tool, so salaries tend to be overestimated.
    • corimaith 2y ago
      New Grad SWE London salary is more realistically 35k to 60k, Small Companies and Consultants are around 35k, Big Banks do 50k, and the bigger startups do like 55 to 60k. The 100k is pretty much the elite prop trading, that's the whole LC hard grilling that 99.9% of candidates aren't going past.
    • orf 2y ago
      > And you know that it is VERY difficult to earn beyond £80k/yr as a SWE outside of top foreign employers in the UK like Google or Citadel. That’s not correct at all. There’s a ~130k job going for lead engineer of a data team at a home improvement store. It’s not “VERY difficult” - it’s not easy but it’s definitely achievable.
  • Sevii 2y ago
    SWE comp will remain elevated as long as there are marginal returns to software development. The capital structure of turing machine programming allows most of revenue to be spent on salaries. The pay is higher because the marginal cost of a new software customer is essentially zero. It's not because programming is way higher skilled than hardware engineering. You deserve the wages you can command in the market. If the labor pool is limited companies will have to pay more. Maybe AI will change the dynamics. But otherwise hardware will always struggle to compete on pay.
  • wanderlust123 2y ago
    This is such a poor take. What is your justification that SWE is not a skilled job? The majority of the gains in the S&P 500 come from tech companies, with a large part of their value being embedded in their software assets.
    • HPsquared 2y ago
      UK companies don't make those kinds of gains, though. The market conditions don't allow it.
  • wyager 2y ago
    Insane Stockholm syndrome on display here. "My unnecessarily degraded conditions are actually a good thing"
  • backwardsmoo 2y ago
    Outside of finance, I generally find UK software and hardware comp to be abysmal. Especially when contrasted to the US, and even Germany. For reference, I hold a doctorate in Engineering and a Class 1 MEng both at Oxford. I was offered £40k to work as an engineer in my niche (photonics). My lab partner who went to Germany sits on a ~€90k salary doing similar to what I would have done. Due to the limitations of hardware career options in London, I opted for software engineering post-DPhil, but I ended up earning £42k. After two years of work, I am sitting on £52k. I don't regard myself as an "under achiever", I own a significant proportion of the product I work on and am a top contributor. I don't think that level of comp is appropriate given the amount of work I put myself through / how much I contribute, and I think it's reflective of the UK as a whole.
    • GamerAlias 2y ago
      If you are looking to move, reach out
      • backwardsmoo 2y ago
        How can I reach you?
  • michaelt 2y ago
    Maybe, but this post is about hardware engineers. I graduated ~15 years ago with a degree from a decent UK university, and the job situation for an electronics engineer who could program and was willing to move anywhere in the country was essentially: * Electronics graduate job, salary £25,000 * Programming graduate job, salary £40,000 Programming jobs think their competition is London fintech companies and Google with its free food. Jobs designing switch mode power supplies think their competition is Chinese OEMs who pay experienced engineers £15k So a lot of the electronic engineering graduates get diverted into software. They'd like to be able to own a house some day, after all.
  • 4gateftw 2y ago
    The SWE that you do may indeed be unskilled, but that says more about you than about the field as a whole.
  • DoingIsLearning 2y ago
    > on an unjustified 125k. Irrespective of your self perception of value, I am not sure you are fully grasping the disconnect between the growth in cost of living and the (lack of) growth in wages of the past 50 years for the average human in western economies. By many standards we actually need that 125k just to live what we would consider a middle class life in the 1980's.
    • pinoy420 2y ago
      [dead]
  • HPsquared 2y ago
    It's skilled, but skilled wages are low in the UK.
• gjsman-1000 2y ago
  Too little, too late. The list of reasons to stay in the UK are slim; and there’s very little the UK can do about it (other than begging people to stay out of national pride). Even the strong arguments a decade ago, like the NHS, are cracking.
• mapt 2y ago
  A lot of these complaints are not about an industry, but about late stage capitalism. About a failing society that privileges profits over social progress and material productivity because oligarchs and aristocracy own the institutions and are running this thing into the ground on base class instinct. All these cool "save the world" school projects exist because the current people running the world are deciding what is and isn't a priority and haven't fixed the problem in question; When these students grow up and go on to work for those same people, we are shocked, shocked that it isn't to do more unprofitable school engineering projects. Instead: Finance industry stuff. What we really need, and by we I mean the people in charge who are obsessively keeping score of imaginary numbers in an account.
  • gjsman-1000 2y ago
    Yeah, yeah, the meme copy-paste problem diagnosis, but what’s the solution? Rebuild into socialism? Rebuild into communism? Reset into early stage capitalism (lack of regulation and all)? How do you know that those systems won’t also have their own late stage failure? Case in point, the NHS right now. (Edit, posting too fast: To the person below who suggested 90% tax rates; the US never had those rates. On paper they did, but they had more and larger exceptions than now, to the point the effective rate never exceeded 45% anyway. This is also why the massive cut was politically palatable - it was cutting the rates to closer reflect the reality. At no point did the US ever have anything close, or even half close, to 90% effective rates.)
    • rwmj 2y ago
      Cracking down on monopolies and rentierism would be a good start. Followed by tying pension rises to worker's salaries. None of that is actually going to happen because of who votes combined with a government that's scared of its own shadow.
      • gjsman-1000 2y ago
        Combined with the fact that those solutions just listed are short term and a surefire way to ensure nobody gets a pension. You also can’t act against monopolies when China happily won’t act against their own state owned monopolies, which are in an arm’s race trying to surpass us. Falling behind to China is a great way to cause a tech investment collapse.
• brcmthrowaway 2y ago
  What ever happened to GraphCore?
  • ajb 2y ago
    They made a bad bet on the structure of their designs. They were bought by SoftBank last year; they have a new design in the works, but might have trouble delivering it as apparently there's been a bit of a talent exodus. There are several newer companies trying their luck in the area.
    • brcmthrowaway 2y ago
      I think d-matrix might succeed.
  • zipy124 2y ago
    they didn't transition to transformers and I focussed mainly on CNN's, which whilst still popular don't have the same financial draw, and weren't easily re-purposable for transformers. See techtechpotatos (Dr ian cutress, currently imho one of the best hardware analysts) videos on it for example: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OZmakgRZYxU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OZmakgRZYxU
  • JonChesterfield 2y ago
    Volta. The hardware is good. It's fairly horrendous to program but comparable to other specialised chips and the lowering from XLA / onnx etc worked well enough. The 20x performance lead over Nvidia's Pascal looked great. Volta beating Pascal by 10x did unrecoverable damage to Graphcore's marketing slides. I think they got the later generations running a bit faster but it was never the order of magnitude over nvidia they started from. I'm not sure what they're doing these days. The exit to softbank valued the employee shares at $0 so the engineers that had already left got burned. Most of the engineers I knew there have left but there still seems to be a large headcount.
• atbpaca 2y ago
  Similar in France / Paris where some American players can easily pay 100K+ euros for SWE. Rest of France salaries are half or even less.
  • leoedin 2y ago
    Contracting rates in Paris seem to be much higher - €700-€1000 a day seems common from what I’ve seen. I suspect a big part of it is labour laws. The UK is similar. Companies don’t want to take on the legal commitment of a high salary person, so they take on contractors instead.
    • Beretta_Vexee 2y ago
      This will depend enormously on the company: a consulting and IT services company like Capgemini will employ Moroccan university graduates at 32K€/year. Apple will recruit the best engineers from telecoms companies, arms manufacturers, research institutes and intelligence services for 120K€/year and the same in share, equity. France knows how to train excellent engineers and give them responsibilities in major government bodies, but doesn't know how to keep them in France. A glass ceiling is rapidly forming for engineers. French companies only value management. There's also this constant desire on the part of French companies to go low-cost. The speed run of the French engineer is to be admitted to a good engineering school, to be recruited on diploma in a large state body, to spend 3-5 years there with a low salary but great responsibility, to be recruited by a Swiss or American company, profit.
      • smartties 2y ago
        > The speed run of the French engineer is to be admitted to a good engineering school, to be recruited on diploma in a large state body, to spend 3-5 years there with a low salary but great responsibility, to be recruited by a Swiss or American company, profit. Your comment is on point, though I’d slightly adjust the part about French engineers career goal. From my experience, many French engineering peers were not even aware that companies in France (Big Tech or Fortune 500) could offer six-figure salaries. They also often have never heard of leetcode/system design/behavioral interviews. They assume their career trajectory depends almost entirely on the ranking/prestige of their engineering school (which is true for french companies), but in practice, most U.S. recruiters/companies don’t even know what a French engineering school is. A bachelor/master degree and a good grind on leetcode is enough for them. For most students I studied with, the dream is to secure a 45K~50k salary right after graduation, and target 80k as an end-of-career goal, by following this path: -Attend a top engineering school. -Join a CAC40 company as a software engineer. -Transition into management after 10–15 years.
• alephnerd 2y ago
  I agree with this call to action. Sadly, I think there are more fundamental issues in the UK economy. For all intents and purposes, Venture Capital is dead in the UK. While companies do get funded in the UK and are technically "UK domiciled" - in action most of their Engineering and Product teams are located in Eastern Europe or India, or are startups from those markets (and China) who domiciled in the UK to raise from foreign investors. There just isn't enough liquid capital to invest in the UK compared to other investment classes available.
  • HPsquared 2y ago
    I don't understand why it's so bad in a country that's supposedly amazing at financial services.
    • alephnerd 2y ago
      It's because the UK is so good at financial services. It's fairly easy to deploy capital in the UK in mainland Europe, the US, India, China, ASEAN, and Middle East, which means there isn't much of an incentive to deploy it within the UK in industries that the UK cannot compete directly in. For example, Dyson has almost entirely shifted operations to ASEAN (Phillipines and Malaysia primarily). And AugustaWestland/Leonardo, Rolls Royce, AstraZeneca, GSK, BT Group, JLR, and BAE have largely shifted operations to the US and India. The UK could make it harder to offshore, but then that also destroys the UK's entire financial and services industry, because most of the capital in the UK exists because it's a connector for global markets and would leave if that is ended. They're damned if they do, damned if they don't.
      • HPsquared 2y ago
        On the other hand, the UK has all these cheap engineers. Is it just that they're not actually cheap, on the international market?
        • cjbgkagh 2y ago
          Rent, taxes and industrial regulation plays a big part. As does power costs. Then there is political costs, it’s hard to rely on UK politicians not doing foolish things and tanking your company on a whim.
• refrigerator 2y ago
  This is spot on. All the smart and ambitious people I know who studied (non-software) Engineering at university in the UK have ended up going into software engineering via self-teaching or finance/consulting because the only hardware engineering career paths seem to be working for Rolls Royce in the middle of nowhere with terrible pay, or alternatively working at Jaguar Land Rover in the middle of nowhere with terrible pay
  • GamerAlias 2y ago
    Preach. My friend is a gifted passionate Aerospace engineer (top in his specific stream at Cambridge) and basically is withering away working for the above 2 firms. The location is grim being far from others and generally far from other young exciting people. Additionally in his org, there just isn't a sense of excitement/ urgency which leaves him with little to do. Prioritising career for a career that's not there Whilst others working in software (myself included) can have a far greater quality of life and salary working in London.
    • dzhiurgis 2y ago
      Wait what. Quality of life in rural UK is worse than rat race of London?
      • wbl 2y ago
        When a man is tired of London he is tired of life.
        • rgmerk 2y ago
          Or maybe he’s just tired of a specific kind of life which might be fun in your early twenties but is less appealing when you’ve got kids and can’t enjoy the nightlife and culture anyway.
          • sebmellen 2y ago
            How do you get kids if you can’t meet someone your age to partner up with?
• rwmj 2y ago
  Fully agree on all except this point: > "UK's small market limits growth." (followed by a list of companies founded before we put up trade barriers with our largest and closest single market)
  • Discordian93 2y ago
    Not that I disagree that Brexit was an awful idea, but this was a problem even before Brexit. The reach of European companies just isn't what it used to be in the face of American and Chinese giants, and the EU is failing to be a truly single market where companies can grow to that scale.
• marbro 2y ago
  Why don't all British hardware engineers move to the United States? What keeps them in Britain?
  • david-gpu 2y ago
    Family and friends.
  • LAC-Tech 2y ago
    Visas are not a pleasant thing to deal with.
  • rwmj 2y ago
    It's practically very difficult to move to the US. Getting a visa is hard even in the best case (with a helpful sponsor). And if you're in any way settled in the UK (partner, house, possessions, etc) then you've got multiple other problems to solve.
    • jebarker 2y ago
      > partner, house, possessions, etc) - then you’ve got multiple other problems to solve I get the intent, but this made me laugh
  • corimaith 2y ago
    Immigrating to USA is hard, probably one of the hardest because competition is so high. Tbh I'd recommend going someplace like Hong Kong whose government is starved for talent and pays similar when balancing for tax but similar social services.
  • nicoburns 2y ago
    Aside from non-economic reasons why one may wish to remain in one's home country, it is not easy to get a work visa for the US.
  • Discordian93 2y ago
    It's not that easy to get a work permit in the US unless you're truly exceptional or marry an American.
• blibble 2y ago
  you can do worse than creating credit reports they could be figuring out how to get people to click on ads
  • robertlagrant 2y ago
    Ads only work because there are useful products to buy. They're a sadly necessary indicator of a productive economy.
    • idhegeu 2y ago
      The fact that ads work doesn't mean that they're beneficial to the economy. I disagree with the premise that non-human entities are entitled to my attention.
      • robertlagrant 2y ago
        > I disagree with the premise that non-human entities are entitled to my attention. I tried that but the cop said it was still speeding even if I refused to acknowledge the speed limit sign.
        • idhegeu 2y ago
          Fair enough, I'll add some nuance. The government that I am a citizen of is a special case of a non-human entity, they do have entitlement to my property (which includes my attention). Traffic signs put up by my government are different than billboards put up by a company. The former is to protect me, the latter is to exploit me.
          • robertlagrant 2y ago
            > they do have entitlement to my property (which includes my attention) Er, I hope not. > The government that I am a citizen of is a special case of a non-human entity What about a private company that puts up a parking charge sign?
• poisonwomb 2y ago
  The UK as a society doesn’t care about anything related to industrial production because it is ideologically opposed to anything resembling an industrial working class. Skilled jobs are anathema to the ethos of the people in charge of the UK’s industrial policy - who have never held a skilled job in their life - as they would prefer everyone to be a backbiting, striving social climber like them, either moving money around of gumming up the system with endless bureaucracy. This trend is exhibited in many of the ‘developed’ economies but it is particularly strong in the UK, a country fooling itself with delusions of grandeur while, like Wilde’s picture, its foundations gnarl and ossify and crumble, like dust into the dustpan of history. Next…
  • LarsDu88 2y ago
    I don't think the UK is allergic to industry, it just got worse and worse at manufacturing relative to other countries after WW2. Just look at the UK's automobile industry... terrible quality.. terrible reliability, particularly in electrical components until the whole thing collapsed.
    • hyperold 2y ago
      The general attitude that manufacturing is only for people who suck at school is the driving force behind this decline. You are indeed left with mostly not-that-bright guys who don't even consider themselves skilled workers, and definitely don't go the extra mile to produce quality stuff. A guy half-assing his work earns just as much as the guy who puts his heart to it, that's the harsh reality of modern industrial work. If anything the guy who cares too much is ridiculed and considered weird. The exceptional craftsmen still exist but they mostly work for themselves, for obvious reasons. They really don't want to be "managed" and bossed around like cattle.
  • jacknews 2y ago
    I'm not sure I agree with the tone of this, but imho it's definitely true that British culture views STEM people as just a bunch of nerds ('boffins') to be told what to do, and not really trusted, wheras the 'important' serious people are all 'media' types; politics, sales and marketing, people-people. Probably true to some extent the world over, but especially malignant in UK, as you say. It wouldn't be so bad if the UK's executives had a track record of excellence, but they are generally abysmal.
• justin66 2y ago
  Aren't hardware salaries outside California basically shit even in the US?
  • trollbridge 2y ago
    Not that bad. Engineers in "flyover country" where I am seem to easily exceed six figures. My town has, ironically, a formerly British-owned firm (since bought out Berkshire Hathaway) that not only has six-figure engineering jobs, but shop floor jobs that are union and starting pay is $25/hr for unskilled - electrician and so on start higher, $30/hr, and only go up from there. The UK operations are still going, but engineering has largely moved to the U.S. (which is a bit of a puzzle, since apparently engineers in the UK can be had much more cheaply).
    • xxpor 2y ago
      >Engineers in "flyover country" where I am seem to easily exceed six figures. So do brand new software grads
      • justin66 2y ago
        New "software" grads? Easily? Today? In flyover country? I'm not seeing it. Salaries got a nice bump over the last few years, but hiring has slowed down and new grads are the first to suffer. (and some of what you see when people on forums like this one talk about what they're paid is bullshit, for some reason)
        • rcbdev 2y ago
          You seem to overestimate the engineering supply in Des Moines.
          • justin66 2y ago
            Maybe? If you're in the area - would it be fair to characterize entry level software development jobs in Des Moines as "easily exceeding six figures?" I took a quick and lazy peek at a job site and I didn't feel like there were enough jobs to even make a judgment. (my filter brought up some Epic Systems jobs with no salary listings and some other stuff that is well below six figures)
• r_thambapillai 2y ago
  As a Brit, when I was raising the seed round for my startup, UK and European VCs would consistently try to haggle you down on price while the American VC's were exclusively focussed on trying to figure out whether this could be a billion dollar business or not (in the end we raised a $5m seed led by Spark, and have done extremely well and raised more since). The UK lost Deep Mind - which could have been OpenAI!! -- to Google. I think part of the issue is cultural - the level of ambition in the UK is just small compared to the US. Individual founders like Demis or Tom Blomfield may have it but recruiting enough talent with the ambition levels of early Palantir or OpenAI employees is so hard because there are so few. Instead, a lot of extremely smart people in the UK would rather get the 'safe' job at Google, or McKinsey than the 'this will never work but can you imagine how cool it would be if it did' job at a startup. There are probably political reasons as well. Unfortunately the UK has not been well governed for 20 years or so, and hence economic outcomes as a whole have been abysmal.
  • bell-cot 2y ago
    > Unfortunately the UK has not been... 20 years, or 112 years? Consider just how far the UK's place in the world fell between 1911 (George V ascended to the throne of the global superpower; his Royal Navy was launching 2 to 4 new capital ships per year) and 1948 (3 years after "winning" WWII - and basics such as food, clothing, and gasoline were still strictly rationed).
    • r_thambapillai 2y ago
      Very true, although I suppose a significant fraction of the decline at that time might be a result of the end of the Empire, which given that there are simply no such successful Empires anywhere in the world anymore was almost certainly inevitable. By comparison, the performance of the UK in the last 20 years vs the US or the Nordics is a singular tragedy.
      • roenxi 2y ago
        > there are simply no such successful Empires anywhere in the world anymore There is the US not-an-Empire [0] though, that'll probably count when the history books reflect on the present era. WWI/II can very easily be interpreted as a transition of power away from incompetent British leadership (indeed, European monarchies - the change pre- post- WWI is striking) towards more capable US-based leadership. It isn't clear UK public ever really grappled how insufficient their leadership theory is. Their acceptance of poor performers over the last 20+ years has been striking although it is mirrored by low standards in the US. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_American_military_installations https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_American_military_inst...
• LarsDu88 2y ago
  Ad services, once it was monopolized by Google and Facebook really warped the value of the software engineering profession over other areas. Software is incredibly valuable, but there are other technology areas that are much harder and equally as valuable (if not more so when augmented with good software). A lot of software engineers who only know the last 20 years have inflated egos as results. How many technology experts suddenly became public health experts overnight when COVID-19 hit? And how many of these same people continue to parrot the same bullshit after over 1 million American deaths?
  • yearolinuxdsktp 2y ago
    [flagged]
    • LarsDu88 2y ago
      To be fair, a lot of European countries and localities do not treat their water with fluoride at all. Some have better dental health purely due to better healthcare/dental coverage. The onset of anti-vaccine sentiment will do far more damage and shouldn't be bracketed in that same category.
      • seabass-labrax 2y ago
        As a British person, I only discovered that water fluoridation was a thing a few months ago. We usually have chlorine in our water, but almost no fluoride - we get that in our toothpaste. PS. I've never needed a filling so far :)
• deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
• James_K 2y ago
  God, this place is such a sh*thole (literally if you count the sewage in the water). It's depressing. Every week, X is going downhill, Y is failing, we're out of money. I am so hopeless about my country's future. I feel that this is our century of humiliation.
  • blast 2y ago
    Hopefully we'll at least get something new out of it, like punk rock the last time.
  • smartties 2y ago
    This seems to be the case for most European countries, particularly here in France. We’re experiencing stagnation, or perhaps even a decline. Launching a product in Europe is significantly more challenging due to the market’s high fragmentation. I don’t have much hope for the future of tech companies in Europe.
    • tokioyoyo 2y ago
      If it makes you feel better, I'm having a hard time to think of a single country with more than 10M people that doesn't have the same problem.
      • alecco 2y ago
        The problem is policy is oriented to growing GDP and not GDP per capita. Large corporations benefit from GDP growth and lower wages, so they incentivize the political class to grow the population artificially (wink-wink).
        • nobodywillobsrv 2y ago
          The other problem is the welfare state or just the state. So much graft and just living off printed money. It pushes out success. What percent of the UK is effectively civil servants or people receiving benefits? What percent are net takers? A lot
• wakawaka28 2y ago
  Keep importing skilled workers. I'm sure it will work out for you eventually. /s Seriously, I feel bad for our British bretheren. The UK government is seemingly out of control and actively working against the people. There are also long-running geopolitical trends like outsourcing to contend with. Talk too much about these things and you're probably getting sent to prison. It's time for the US to bring some democracy to the UK lol.
  • bdangubic 2y ago
    you switch UK and USA in your post and you are right
    • wakawaka28 2y ago
      Lol the US is not without its problems but the UK is worse, hands down.
      • Xiol32 2y ago
        Try unfollowing Musk for a bit. It'll do you good.
        • wakawaka28 2y ago
          Try unfollowing CNN, MSNBC, and BBC for a bit. It'll do you good.
          • bdangubic 2y ago
            that’s like a US election, eh? you drunk at 2:00am and there’s two of the ugliest people on Earth at the bar but you know you taking one of the home :) I’d still pick MSM over fucking Elon :)
            • wakawaka28 2y ago
              [flagged]
• tidenly 2y ago
  I left the UK after graduating at 21, fully intending to come back within a couple of years. Its weird watching it from the outside for 10 years waiting for a "good time" to move back and realizing that time isn't coming more and more each year. The salaries in Japan arent great honestly, but mine, the quality of life and how far my money goes is so much better than if I lived back at the UK. Every time I go back it seems more and more people are struggling to pay for basic expenses - and even if I moved back it seems get a great salary I'd have to live in London, which I dislike. I imagine lots of people far more talented than me must also be feeling the pull to not stay in the country too. Its festering politically and economically. Besides family there really is no benefit to remaining.
  • tjpnz 2y ago
    >The salaries in Japan arent great honestly, but mine, the quality of life and how far my money goes is so much better than if I lived back at the UK. In a similar situation to you apparently. Every couple of years I'll take a look at UK as well as NZ and Aus (all places I can legally work) and Japan is still the better option. Even with the yen situation and despite all the doom and gloom others write online, life is still pretty nice here.
    • robocat 2y ago
      As an NZer, jobs in Australia pay wayyyy better and everyone here seems to agree that the lifestyle is better there. Lots of NZers move to Oz to improve their life and opportunities. The NZ economy isn't doing great. I'm personally worried that demographics and an incoming Labour government will mean that if you have saved for your retirement our next government will simply tax your savings until you have nothing (they keep talking of a 2% wealth tax: if we go back to a 4% annual return environment that's 50% tax of your savings over time). Plus they are slowly introducing means testing or equivalents.
      • sgt 2y ago
        In the meantime, it seems your parliament is quabbling over (the limitation of) Maori rights and so on. I guess the end goal is to improve the economy but is the chaos worth it?
• klelatti 2y ago
  And the author's most recent tweet [1] (apart from one referring to this HN post): > Is it just me or is UK’s hardware scene really kicking off again? > Founder friends have just raised millions, moved into massive warehouses, imported CNC machines and some started metal casting. > Even SaaS VC friends are talking about hardware now [1] https://x.com/joseflchen/status/1881058447946391848 https://x.com/joseflchen/status/1881058447946391848
• devnullbrain 2y ago
  The article mentions Arm, but even they describe themselves as a software company[1] [1] because the implied higher margins mean this attracts more investment
• jamesy0ung 2y ago
  I'm not from the UK, but I get the same vibe here in Sydney. There doesn't seem to be much technical work here, all of it is in Silicon Valley.
  • RachelF 2y ago
    Very true, the Australian scene is so dismal, it makes the UK look great.
• Onavo 2y ago
  OP's views on British companies are questionable. > Consider: Dyson: From a Wiltshire barn to a global technology powerhouse, now innovating in Singapore and Malaysia. The founder of Dyson is a Brexit proponent who enjoys outsourcing and playing games with tax havens. I doubt he's doing any "innovating" in those places. Does OP think CS prodigies are building world changing stuff? 90% of the top 1% are building SaaS. Perhaps the 0.01% get to work on actual foundation model ML research or cutting edge theoretical CS. Everybody else will optimize buttons in CSS to pay their bills. Software just pays more, it isn't an exception to economic forces.
  • jbc1 2y ago
    Implementation is what takes that raw R&D and uses it to solve problems real problems, which is where it derives it value. Armies of people slightly modifying slightly different saas is how those foundational ML models end up in the everymans workflow.
• pfdietz 2y ago
  Reading all this negativity about the UK made me wonder: is it possible that the UK throwing in the towel and asking to become part of the US could actually become reality? It's an admittedly outlandish idea, but suddenly it didn't seem entirely preposterous.
  • lotsofpulp 2y ago
    Why would the US want the UK? The UK does not seem to have natural resources that the US would want. The main resource is intellectual talent, which is already free for the US to obtain via immigration and a common language.
    • quacksilver 2y ago
      Possibly the UK's worldwide military bases / islands to build bases on or mine the oil and some restricted technology. Maybe a 'Hong Kong' style outpost in Europe. May be a bit of a stretch though.
      • zipy124 2y ago
        We already offer those, just look at diego garcia currently, or RAF Menwith Hill in yorkshire which is an NSA base.
      • mixmastamyk 2y ago
        Airstrip One is born.
  • Peanuts99 2y ago
    Probably because 85%+ of the population would reject it.
  • t43562 2y ago
    No way. There would be a much bigger loss of "sovrinty" than people were prepared to put up with in the EU and that's in the miraculous case that the US wanted it.
  • 2y ago
• ggm 2y ago
  You'd need to change the basis of JV and IPO in the UK, the nature of chartered engineering, and probably the laws on being declared bankrupt. America has a financial regulatory environment which is somewhat unique, and encourages this kind of innovation. The UK has a different view both of the financial risk management, and of the consequences of engineering. The history of canals, bridges, roads, railroads and lighthouses in the UK is littered with people blowing wads of money up. Speculation was rife. I think it led to caution which has stayed with us across the victorian era into the modern day. If you want an object lesson in "god, could we do this better" -I was told Australia had world-class optics industry, at the end of WWII due to the need to diversify the supply chain and get away from European sources now in the Axis. Russia and Japan seized the day, while Australia basically _shut itself down_ and gave away any market lead. People laugh at russian cameras but the glass was excellent, they got half of German tech at wars end.
• bsnnkv 2y ago
  I left the UK for the USA in 2020. It was only last week that another HN commenter finally opened my eyes to the fact that since I have left the UK, I have become someone with the ability to take things from 0 to 1.[1] I do not believe I could have achieved what I have in the last half-decade if I had stayed in the UK. There is something deeply rooted in the UK's contemporary culture (which I cannot yet fully explain in words) that serves to crush the individual ambitions of the working and middle classes. [1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42705792 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42705792
  • kjellsbells 2y ago
    So good to read this and feel...validated, somehow. The UK is culturally a very difficult place to start and run a business. There's a crabs in the bucket mentality that I didnt have words for before I'd left the UK for a few years, but now when I visit or do business there is absolutely everywhere. One business thing that really strikes me is that people in the UK treat bankruptcy as a moral failing, as if you cheated your investors, and not a strictly financial one, as in, you ran out of cash before achieving product market fit. It seems rooted in an unusually Victorian ethis, which is ironic, because in that era, businesses started and folded all the time.
    • BuyMyBitcoins 2y ago
      I wonder how much of this has to do with a more rigid class system compared to the US.
    • Earw0rm 2y ago
      Depends on the bankruptcy. Nobody is going to shed tears over investors losing out. Speculate to accumulate, risk and reward. But IDK how it works in other countries, UK bankruptcies also means customers, unsecured creditors (often other small businesses), and the State (payroll taxes) also lose out. And it leaves a bad taste when a company run at high risk of bankruptcy ("oh but we're a Start Up") screws over their suppliers which are often more traditional businesses (whether that's print designers, lawyers or tradespeople) by carrying on trading far into insolvency. That implies a kind of arrogance ("You just have a business which pays it's bills, I have a vision) which UK culture is allergic to.
• black_13 2y ago
  [dead]
• Animats 2y ago
  If engineering isn't near the factory, it's not as effective. Here's one of the most generic electronic components - a 1K resistor.[1] These sell for about US$0.0015 each. DigiKey has a list of many suppliers. There are a few old-line US resistor makers in there, including Bourns and Ohmite. They're price competitive with Chinese companies. But when you look up their engineering job locations, none are in the US or UK.[2] Plants are in Mexico, Malaysia, Taiwan, and Hungary. To get prices down, engineers have to be very familiar with what goes on in manufacturing. If you separate engineering from manufacturing, you get overpriced designs. Not that many people who went to a good engineering school in a first-world country today want to spend their lives inside a big factory in a low-wage country. But that's what it takes to make stuff. [1] https://www.digikey.com/en/products/filter/chip-resistor-surface-mount/52?s=N4IgjCBcoExaBjKAzAhgGwM4FMA0IB7KAbRAHYBWGAFhHwA4AGeiu8l2hgZnvrbGqMAbLQC6%2BAA4AXKCADKUgE4BLAHYBzEAF98YAJz098EEkhoseQiRCMQonSBjNW0ENNkBVVcqkB5ZACy2KiYAK6K2GyhsgDWvgAWALaYbIlqshD4iagAHhna%2BAC0Rq6mSqGWRJCkEPZFLogoGDj4VTV2Wg5w1SARmMqYUgSKdvhCxsoAJrKFYIyZbjKQIGwAjlIAnhmMO7b4mxKRyyFInUA https://www.digikey.com/en/products/filter/chip-resistor-sur... [2] https://jobs.bourns.com/go/Engineering/9254400/ https://jobs.bourns.com/go/Engineering/9254400/
  • nine_k 2y ago
    > spend their lives inside a big factory in a low-wage country Some gladly would if paid handsomely by the local standards, that is, adequately by the US standards. The bigger problem is raising children away from your native culture.
    • MichaelZuo 2y ago
      You should probably recommend them to Apple recruiters, since they regularly have shortages of bilingual top tier talent willing to work full time at major factories. Even with extremely generous FAANG salaries in areas with cost of living less than a quarter of Cupertino.
    • freddie_mercury 2y ago
      I spent a decade in a low-wage country and the number of people who were "glad" to spend even half that much time there -- paid handsomely! -- could probably be counted on one hand. Virtually the only people who stay longer than 3-5 years are ones who end up founding their own businesses there. Raising children away from your native culture isn't the deal breaker you imply. There are international schools (though, with eye-watering fees) and expat enclaves in most places I've been. But very few (effectively zero, though I did come across a handful of exceptions) companies treat these employees the same way as the ones back in the home country. If you don't rotate back to HQ in ~3 years then you're in a career dead-end. So you've got this situation where you need people who are ultra-ambitious -- willing to throw away all their existing social networks to go work in a foreign country for years on end! -- but that means those same people aren't going to want to stay past their expiration date. And companies know that, too. A lot of them make it an explicit part of the deal. I met one high-level guy (regional CTO I think?) at Coca-Cola who was Indian and the deal with corporate was he'd do 3-years in a low-income country (not India) but then he'd get transferred to the US. Met some people in the oil industry who had similar deals. Do 2 years in Vietnam then you get to go to Malaysia or whatever.
• jasonjl 2y ago
  Software is eating the world
• JohnMakin 2y ago
  I see this in the USA too - electrical engineers fiddling with css to make buttons dance, published computer scientists working on trivial systems for massive data centers billing systems - the tech market does always seem inefficient, and yet, at some point the market is going to have more knowledge and expertise than it needs, especially if AI predictions play out. What happens then?
  • happymellon 2y ago
    > especially if AI predictions play out Thats a big if. Big tech has enshittified everything its touched for a long time now.
    • JohnMakin 2y ago
      sure - I don’t personally believe AI will, but, if hardware becomes a commodity, rather than how software has traditionally been, this is an inevitable outcome anyway. It isn’t a dramatic statement, we’ve already been seeing the effects.
• incog_nit0 2y ago
  It's not just in the hardware sector, it's across the board. My (American) wife moved to London years ago and was a manager in a prestigious London museum overseeing 60 people. She has over 20 years experience in some of our top museums and her salary in 2023 was a paltry £30k. We just moved to the US and within a couple of months she has a job in museums here but now paying 2.3x the salary (converted back to £) and only managing a team of 20 people. Less stress, more resources for uniforms and initiatives and annual salary increases here way above inflation. As a Londoner I feel quite aggrieved by the situation. It's one thing to increase your salary 50% as a lot of engineers do moving to the US. But to 230% increase your salary is just nuts. Only London's financial sector pay was globally competitive - but now with Brexit's rules fully locked in even that sector is slowly losing its talent and customers to Europe and beyond.
  • Nursie 2y ago
    The UK pays terribly in a lot of areas when compared to the US, Canada and Australia. In software, the only way to keep up is contracting, preferably in London, preferably in finance. But my partner also pretty much doubled her pay in retail management when we moved to Australia. The London financial sector may be losing talent to Europe, but from what I can tell European pay in fintech is not comparable.
    • rpep 2y ago
      Australia’s economy is propped up by the export driven mining industry. It’s not really a fair comparison.
  • titanomachy 2y ago
    I'm pretty sure engineers are also 230% increase or more.
    • marcinzm 2y ago
      If you take advantage of the larger number of tech company jobs in the US and were in a non-tech company in the UK then you can make 500% more.
• remus 2y ago
  Not to disagree with the thrust of the article, but I think they're wrong on > Hardware is riskier than software: No longer true If you're building hardware you need to source materials for the thing, manufacture the thing somewhere, store the thing somewhere and distribute the thing. All steps that either don't exist with software or are orders of magnitude easier. All this stuff costs money and adds risk, making hardware inherently harder and riskier than software. Obviously building stuff is still possible, but if you're going in with a VC "how do we scale this to 100 million users in 2 years" mindset then there's a lot of logistics in there for hardware.
• pjmlp 2y ago
  This is an issue in most countries, not only UK. The job market is not prepared to fulfill the promises the talent expects, and in places like SV, what you get is the STEAM version of Hollywood, where every waiter dreams of being the next movie star, and there can only be so much.
  • constantcrying 2y ago
    Except that not so long ago the dream mostly came true. For many decades an engineering degree was a golden ticket to middle class financial stability and job security. Both in Europe and the US. Nowadays that is no longer the case. Mostly because of international competition. People are still completely in denial, that there are people in China who do just as good of a job as they do, but for half the wage. Even more striking in software, where outsourcing to India is very common.
• deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
• nobodywillobsrv 2y ago
  Taxes and a hatred of success by over half the population
• varispeed 2y ago
  Author missed that due to low wages in engineering in particular, people will stop study that, because it requires more effort and is more expensive to learn than stacking shelves - that pays very much the same. It's a problem of class warfare - government hates working class, including the current Labour government - that despises the working class in particular. They don't want ordinary people to develop skills, start businesses. They want them to slave away in foreign big corporations. You don't have to look hard for evidence - PM jets around the world asking foreign big corporations to hire British slave workers, instead of spending time home and creating environment for local business to thrive.
• tikkabhuna 2y ago
  The problem I see in the UK is a lack of hubs. I wrote to the Department for Levelling Up when it was a thing. Finance has done well in the UK due to London and having a significant number of firms in a single place. I can get a new job for a different company, doing a similar thing, in the same building. How does that work for any other industry in the UK? Its no wonder that wages haven't risen when moving job also requires you to move house/schools/away from friends and family. We need the government to get involved and create regional hubs for different industries and really facilitate giving them everything they need. Address transport, power concerns, housing, labour and education requirements. The government is in a far better place to be able to influence across all these requirements.
  • IshKebab 2y ago
    > How does that work for any other industry in the UK? I don't know about other industries but in silicon there are a few hubs - especially Cambridge, Bristol and London. When I lived in London there was a big start-up scene around Hoxton. It's not going to happen for consumer product type things (think Dyson) though because none of the manufacturing is in the UK. Who gets injection moulding done in the UK? Nobody. Dyson is a rare exception and even then it's only R&D that happens in the UK - manufacturing is all in Malaysia.
• saos 2y ago
  The U.K is not doing anything innovative that creates jobs and wealth. Instead the U.K. focuses mostly on housing wealth and building a property empire. This is evident with a govt that’s hell bent on stoking demand…after so many years they’ve only just stopped “right to buy”!! If we want higher salaries then the uk needs to start creating meaningful and impactful products that other countries want…
  • pjbster 2y ago
    Back when he was still considered quotable, Dominic Cummings often mused about the UK's future post-Brexit. I seem to remember his blog mentioning data science and drug research as possible areas where UK could build a global advantage. I can't be bothered to wade through it all but if you're interested his (old) stuff is here: https://dominiccummings.com https://dominiccummings.com
  • constantcrying 2y ago
    And these products need to be globally unique. You can not compete with a product that China can make far cheaper. The US has achieved this numerous times through start-ups.
• jna_sh 2y ago
  I’ve seen this exact trajectory play out with several friends. Get a good degree in robotics engineering or the like, options are working for civil servant pay at a defense subcontractor, or Ocado. Pretty much it.
• kleiba 2y ago
  If my salary had been my only or even my main objective, I would have taken a very different route in my career. Sure, for some people it is, but there are other factors as well. But if you're from the UK, young and independent, and money is your main drive, what's keeping you from moving to the US, at least for a couple of years?
  • eptcyka 2y ago
    The green card lottery?
  • zipy124 2y ago
    Getting a visa is incredibly difficult, with the easiest route being working for a US firm in the UK and transfering to their US offices, but at which point you're already one of the lucky few to score a US job in the UK and are probably paid well enought that uprooting your life doesn't seem worth it.
  • dukeyukey 2y ago
    > what's keeping you from moving to the US, at least for a couple of years? Visas. US has a very very weird visa system that really hates skilled workers.
• mschuster91 2y ago
  > Founders: Stop fleeing to the US. London can be the hardware capital of the world. We have the talent. We have the creativity. What we need is your audacity. Easier said than done, Europe doesn't have the money for that (partially because all the exit money circulates in American VCs).
• thom 2y ago
  Things are tough all over. I’m based in Sheffield, and we have an Advanced Manufacturing Research Centre and obviously a rich history of manufacturing and engineering across the city that pioneered chrome steel. But the process for new enterprises always seems the same, you get some small, timid spinout from one of the universities, that spends years iterating through various crumbs of grant money, and maybe finds a corporate partner to commercialise some tech. Everyone’s excited about Northern Gritstone, the new regional VC which has raised £300m and deployed about £40m so far, but even that is itself basically a university spinout. I was at an event recently where everyone was excited about a programme to create thousands of new apprenticeships in the steel industry in the region, and sat at the one table of tech people I couldn’t help feel they’d probably do better if you just taught them to code, even in this job market. Or alternatively if we actually want a steel industry to challenge China let’s do that. But no half measures. The UK has vanishingly little risk capital compared to the US. It has very few exits and almost no secondary, so what angel money exists is often tied up long term. The British Business Bank are trying to convince more pension funds to expose their assets to the risk/return of VC funds but that’s a long and controversial battle. Startup investing is largely driven by income tax breaks rather than dreams of outsized returns. And of course property is such a reliable investment in the UK that it sucks up most of the free money anyway. A lot of this is (the lack of) network effects and we get grumpy if you say it’s a cultural thing. But just once I’d love to hear someone saying they’re investing in their local ecosystem, or creating an accelerator, or whatever, because they want to make loads of money. That isn’t something you can comfortably say out loud at most startup events in the UK. Lots of talk of Impact Investing, an endless merry-go-round of gobshites wanting to give advice and mentoring, or “do you have any “SEIS left?” Lots of tech agencies working on making other people’s ideas go big, selling reliable hours instead of unreliable equity. And a good enough quality of life that all this is fine! But it can be really hard to find somewhere to plug into and get the energy from. Kudos to those that are making/have made the slog here.
  • constantcrying 2y ago
    >a programme to create thousands of new apprenticeships in the steel industry in the region It seems very cruel to put people into a job market where the entire industry is undercut by China and has very little reason to exist, besides a nominal interest by the government in security. If you want to challenge China, you have to embrace Chinese poverty, how else are you going to make profitable steel? You have higher energy prices, higher labor cost, higher construction cost and more bureaucracy and you want to compete? >I couldn’t help feel they’d probably do better if you just taught them to code, even in this job market Seems very cruel to put people into a job market where the entire industry is undercut by India.
• lordnacho 2y ago
  Here's a story I tell from time to time. When I was at uni, we had an internship as part of the course. The course was a joint course between Engineering and Econ/Management, so you could choose from a very wide variety of industries to satisfy the thesis requirement. The business school would coordinate the internships. So I went interviewing in the engineering firms to the west of the country. Aerospace, materials, that kind of thing. Someone offered me £12K/year. Even for a student, that seems kind of low as I'd be looking for a short term accommodation somewhere. I kept it secret from the business school because I knew they'd pressure me to take it. A couple of weeks later, I got an offer from Intel. Not in engineering, but in marketing. £15k, just about enough to pay rent and eat. But a lot more than engineering. I took the job and has a great time, and I still know people there. Turned down the return offer, due to the firm itself seeming a bit complacent, but also... During the internship I went to see my friend in central London. He had landed the coveted Goldman's internship. Fully paid apartment for the period, with a view of the river, plus money. £37k/year if you include the free rent. So when I went back to university for the final part of the degree, it was clear where I was going to look for work. I got a job at a prop trading shop, and in the first week a guy told me about his story. He had originally taken one of the jobs in the west country, some sort of aerospace engineering. He had accidentally seen his boss's paycheck, and that made him start looking for work in finance. These days, what are your options realistically in this country? Particularly if you want to hang around your family in the south? Finance, big law, consultancy, certain US tech businesses. I don't even understand how doctors live here.
  • gadders 2y ago
    Fundholding GPs don't do badly. A lot get 6 figures if they are partners in a surgery. I think most Doctors etc need to wait until they're consultants until they make decent money. But I'm like you - fell into banking due to being a Lotus Notes developer when it was flavour of the month and have never left. I reckon I'm on over double what I would be if I'd ended up working for IBM or Cap Gemini or similar. [And I should say I ended up in project/programme/change management. I'm not still a Notes Developer]
    • sgt101 2y ago
• awanderingmind 2y ago
  This is interesting, but as other commenters have noted, the general point applies more broadly than hardware versus software, or UK versus the US - if you're only trying to optimise for income, 'go work in the US and/or the financial industry' is solid advice for many people, and the macroeconomic incentives driving this are not easy to shift. I also make much less than my counterparts in the US - but here in South Africa moving to the UK to work in the finance industry is considered a major win for many people, because the salaries are better and is considered higher 'prestige' for some reason. Eleven years ago during my MSc. in theoretical physics I was writing Fortran code to solve scattering equations to serve as input into quantum field theory calculations. Since then I've worked for a bunch of startups, alternating between writing boring backend services and doing 'data science' that is often no more complicated than linear regression or writing SQL queries. The continual hype, toxic positivity, and unhinged growth expectations has made me essentially tap out mentally. I also consider this a 'waste of my talent' (not that I was ever really a great physicist!), but as I get older I am no longer sure what would have satisfied me in that regard (is this bad or good? - I honestly don't know). More money would be nice I guess. I typically get bored/frustrated and change companies every few years - I'm currently 3 years in at a fintech (elixir backend).
  • physicsguy 2y ago
    Similar background here although I stayed on in academia a bit longer. I find the same, I'm working on not very challenging problems a lot of the time. I found a decent compromise in working on engineering software with some physics and maths involved, but it's not world beating in terms of salaries.
    • awanderingmind 2y ago
      What types of engineering software do you work on?
      • physicsguy 2y ago
        Currently predictive maintenance but previously have worked on simulation software development.
• gadders 2y ago
  >>"Engineers: Your brain's worth billions. Build empires, not apps." Pay engineers billions, then, not CEOs, VCs and shareholders.
• benrutter 2y ago
  I think a lot of this is exactly right - but one tiny caveat I'd add is that comparing the UK to the USA is sometimes a misnomer. On a size basic, the UK is much more comparible to a US state that the USA as a whole, and a lot of the observations made here are probably equally true of some US states like Colorado where talent is moved out to California.
  • piker 2y ago
    The UK is almost twice the size of the largest US state--California. And that comparison doesn't fare well for the UK. The UK is below the US' poorest state in terms of GDP per capita.
    • benrutter 2y ago
      I'd still argue that it's a more realistic comparison (even if 2x off) than comparing to the whole of the USA (significantly more off)
    • AdamN 2y ago
      > UK is almost twice the size of the largest US state--California You mean by landmass? Looks like the UK is quite a bit smaller than California and I presume is a middle-sized state in size terms: https://www.mylifeelsewhere.com/country-size-comparison/united-kingdom/california-usa https://www.mylifeelsewhere.com/country-size-comparison/unit...
      • IshKebab 2y ago
        He meant population.
• t43562 2y ago
  Just a note - 100k jobs aren't that common in software in the UK. Perhaps they're there in finance but there are a lot of people looking for software jobs now who accept much less. I've managed to avoid the finance sector my whole career in the UK by working for telcos, since I felt that, for me personally, finance was intensely boring and motivated by all the worst and most short term values. IMO the whole attitude to finance here is difficult because not enough people have become rich through software/electronics to be angel investors. It's still a place where the big old money comes from people in banking. The arts are respected, being rich is respected, but the rest of us are still "techies" and that's an attitude prevalent throughout the population. The person who fixes your washing machine gets called an "engineer." It's a matter of who has the power. Success breeds success and we have had some great ones - it's just that the whole economy is still skewed towards finance. People want the pound to have a high value. Investment comes here to seek "safety". Costs are high. Everything is short term. We have "spaffed billions" on leaving our local trading bloc but moan a lot about investing in HS2. In other words we're not really united and trying to build a future. The population is aging and some of it thinks "only a few more years for me" and "I'm alright jack". Do I really know? This is all just the bullshit whirling around in my head. There's a chance with net-zero. It will require huge investments. If you want to do hardware then I suggest you think about that. Octopus Energy's Kraken system, heat pumps that work together to spread out demand over the day, home energy controllers, battery chargers ...who knows. One word of warning though: I'm actually from Africa and any idea that ends with "....for disaster relief in Africa" is a mistake. If your idea only works in poor countries then I think you'll never make any money. Nobody really cares significantly about disaster relief, especially the potentates of those countries who have allowed the disastrous situations to occur through their own mismanagement.
  • ldite 2y ago
    > 100k jobs aren't that common in software in the UK They really are, if you're prepared to work for $BIGCO
    • zipy124 2y ago
      Exactly what he means by not common, meta employs only around 1000 software devs in london, same for goldman. If you only have 1000 devs you can bet they aren't hiring that many per year. There aren't that many $BIGCO jobs in London, but yes they do pay very very well.
• joeofbook 2y ago
  [dead]
• coolThingsFirst 2y ago
  The common European tragedy, if I could go back in time I would've never majored in CS. The salaries are just not worth the effort and struggle required to get there. Much better to have partied and taken a lightweight major. Those extra 400-500 euros simply don't make up for the wasted youth reading Tannenbaum.
• alexisread 2y ago
  Sadly the UK has a long history of underinvesting in cutting edge tech, from aerospace (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BAC_TSR-2 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BAC_TSR-2 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/British_Aerospace_HOTOL https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/British_Aerospace_HOTOL further development of Concorde) to transport (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Advanced_Passenger_Train https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Advanced_Passenger_Train https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tracked_Hovercraft https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tracked_Hovercraft https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hovertravel https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hovertravel https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sinclair_C5 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sinclair_C5 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maglev#Birmingham,_United_Kingdom,_1984%E2%80%931995 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maglev#Birmingham,_United_King...) to chip design (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inmos https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inmos transputer, static RAM, VGA standard). Interestingly, the 3 British designers who made up Flare Technology, had a big influence on console and computer designs in the 80s/90s: They were responsible for the ZX Spectrum (partly), Konix Multisystem, Atari Falcon, ATW (and Blossom graphics card), Atari Jaguar, Super FX chip, Nuon
• wazoox 2y ago
  This problem isn't limited to hardware engineers, nor to UK. All across Europe, a massive brain drain is occurring, and the way it's going we'll become developing countries in a couple of decades at most.
• mgaunard 2y ago
  The comparison of salaries doesn't necessarily make sense there. Cost of life in the UK is only high in London, and remains lower than California. I remember working as a software engineer on £32k, and I could still afford a 3-bedroom house with a garden, garage and a car.
  • IshKebab 2y ago
    That must have been a very long time ago!
    • mgaunard 2y ago
      10 years ago.
• turbojerry 2y ago
  Firstly I would not go back to London unless I had the protection level of a government Minister. My life is not worth any amount of money and violence is out of control. Secondly the government acts as an economic terrorist by stopping innovation. Search engines and social media are a classic example by treating them as publishers so the owners are liable for any copyright infraction. No one is going to build a company with the threat of being prosecuted over the actions of one of their users. This goes for hardware as well, e.g. the government brought in the EU regulations on drones, which bans the flight of autonomous drones and thus stops innovation. This means people like myself who were working on autonomous drones had to stop, causing me to lose out on millions in revenue and the government missed out on the taxes I would have paid. Short of a revolution or an economic collapse nothing will change. The latter is baked in at this point, when and how bad it will be I do not know, I'm hoping for the best and planning for the worst.
  • 0x70run 2y ago
    > Firstly I would not go back to London unless I had the protection level of a government Minister. My life is not worth any amount of money and violence is out of control. I feel like there's heavy observation bias here. Maybe you had a bad experience or two, but I've been living in London for the past 4 years and haven't had any such encounter(s) so far. You make it sound like London's some third world warzone; I personally felt that New York, SF, and LA were far more unsafe when I was living there with the amount of homeless people and fentanyl addicts walking around.
• tomhoward 2y ago
  I don’t think it’s just a UK thing, or that it’s much easier to start a hardware startup in the USA. I think it’s more that the bar for getting a hardware startup off the ground is much higher than a software startup - everywhere in the world. Personally I’ve been trying to self-fund and bootstrap a hardware startup (based in Australia but I’m reasonably well connected in Silicon Valley as I’m a YC alum). I’ve had plenty of early success and validation of all my market theses, but it’s super hard to get any investors interested. Plenty say “exciting” and want to chat. All lose interest when you start talking funding needs and path to market. In a world in which investors and other startup industry contacts are accustomed to seeing a bootstrapped SaaS app showing signs of growth and revenue just a few months in, with a hardware startup it’s just impossible to avoid looking like a failure by comparison - due to all the costs, delays and complications involved with getting an MVP to market. And because successful hardware startups are so scarce relative to software ones, it’s hard even to get any good advice; there’s just barely anyone around with good, relevant experience to share (and I already know many of the people who have built companies in this vertical in past decades, none of whom are in SV). I’ve come to the conclusion that the only way to make it work is to start by achieving success as a software startup, then transition into hardware to later - but even then you’d have to convince investors that it’s worth the risk. In short, the whole tech industry has been spoiled by easy SaaS wins over the past decade, and that’s all that most investors are willing to even consider. The exceptions are “start-big and-get-huge-fast” plays like Groq - but the founders of that company were already highly credentialed and connected when they started, and even then vanishingly few investors are willing/able to fund new companies like that. That’s not the kind of thing young, unproven founders can pull off, anywhere.
  • sylware 2y ago
    Yep, look at RISC-V, the most promising hardware is from the USA. It is not yet on the latest silicon process, but with the latest GPU, I guess we could run the latest games, until the game devs recompile and QA a bit their games (obviously on elf/linux)
    • jononor 2y ago
      Most promising by what definition? And what subset of applications/markets are you considering? In the microcontroller space, China is leading on RISC-V. EspressIf, WCH, et.c are already shipping units at scale. Of course these are low value chips, but the volumes are large. The combined shipments for microcontrollers are in tens of billions of units annually. The technology choices in the space changes slowly (32 bit over 8/16bit is quite recent...), but over the next 10 years RISC-V looks poised to take a decent chunk.
• constantcrying 2y ago
  Completely wrong on the root causes. Britain used to have a large hardware industry, where these people would actually get to do proper engineering. The difference between Germany and Britain is that Germany still has large, successful and innovative hardware companies and it still has decent engineering jobs. Britain has lost them, together with the companies which once offered them. But these jobs didn't vanish into thin air, they vanished to India and China, which now control the companies making "British" cars (MG, Lotus, Jaguar, Landrover, etc.). There is the delusion in many Western people that e.g. China just can not do proper engineering and that outsourcing jobs there will not work. This is false. Most engineering jobs people do can be done just as well by people on the other side of the world for half the pay. The only reason you get paid twice the money for the same thing is institutional inertia, a company can not move it's development all at once to there other side of the world, so there need to be people locally to do engineering, even if it is more expensive. This is not something which will remain true forever. These Hardware jobs are paid terribly because they well paid for the global market rate. It is not geography, or lack of innovation or VCs. It is outsourcing.
  • nsteel 2y ago
    I don't disagree with anything in particular here but I'm not sure your latter paragraphs do anything to explain why Germany is different. Or are you saying it's also institutional inertia and it's just a matter of time for them to end up the same?
    • constantcrying 2y ago
      >Or are you saying it's also institutional inertia and it's just a matter of time for them to end up the same? Exactly. Britain has lost its industry long ago, while Germany did not. The situation right now is different, but I do not believe the trajectory is. Especially when it comes to software, even the largest corporations in Germany just outsource to India. And justifying hiring people for 2x/3x//4x the cost at "home" becomes increasingly hard.
• dmwilcox 2y ago
  I moved from Silicon Valley to London -- a funny thing I haven't seen mentioned is that the tax rates on RSUs are absolutely awful (extra NI can push rates to nearly 60%). That is a large disincentive for working in a tech company versus finance. Tech companies especially start-ups largely pay in stock which could be mispriced and you make more (or less) money than could be predicted. But versus finance paying pure cash, less (equity) risk, and a lower tax rate the incentives are clear. HMRC I don't think should be underrated in their effects on answering the question -- "should I start my start-up in the US or the UK?"
• bArray 2y ago
  I'm somewhat bucking this trend as a hardware engineer in London, a few comments: > Geographical Constraints: Unlike lucrative software jobs, hardware engineering demands physical presence. Not completely true. Our engineers take hardware home, and I have a mini-lab at home for developing hardware. If COVID2.0 kicked off tomorrow, we would be robust against this. > Venture Capital: European VCs, mostly bullish on fintech and SaaS, remain wary of hardware. Result? A feedback loop of underinvestment and missed opportunities. Extremely true. I cannot overstate how wary of hardware investors are. As with software, you have two types of hardware: research-based and engineering-based. Engineering-based hardware is actually quite low risk if the risks are well understood. > Innovation Stagnation: We're not just losing salary differences; we're missing out on the next ARM or Tesla. 100%. Even when the UK accidentally creates the likes of ARM, it always fails to stop it being purchased by other Countries. > False. London is around the same as NYC and more expensive than most parts of California and definitely Texas. This also ignores: I'll put some numbers to it. If you want a house share (one bedroom, shared common rooms and utilities), at a £1600 budget you will struggle to find somewhere. On a £25k salary, losing £5k to pension, etc, your ENTIRE salary goes on accommodation. If you are one of those pesky eating humans who sometimes requires clothes, travels to work, etc, it's literally impossible. > "UK's small market limits growth." In any situation you have to realise the opportunity. As the article points out, the hardware engineers are 25%-50% of their US counterparts at the same quality. > Your next unicorn isn't code. It's cobalt and circuits. Back the tangible. It's actually a mixture of the two. Software and hardware working in tangent. The barrier to entry with software is very low, it's difficult to compete there. The barrier to entry to hardware is higher due to time and costs, you can work there and have less concern about competitors. The profit margins are also far higher, as there is a tangible thing, there is a greater perception of value. You buy <Software> and it takes a year to develop. You spend another year writing <Update>, people expect to get it for free, despite the same resources being applied. When you buy <Hardware>, the next iteration which is a year of <Update> can be sold at full price, and people will pay it.
  • agwp 2y ago
    Aside from computer hardware, another industry that the UK is nowhere near ambitious on (despite its fortunate geography) is offshore wind power. This is an area with ridiculous potential in the UK if the will and the financing was there to build it. [Conservative analysis shows](https://www.sustainabilitybynumbers.com/p/can-solar-and-wind-power-britain https://www.sustainabilitybynumbers.com/p/can-solar-and-wind...) that if only 10% of the UK's EEZ was used for offshore wind, it would produce >2000 TWh annually (over 2 trillion kWh). That is equivalent to half of [all the electricity consumed by the United States](https://www.eia.gov/energyexplained/electricity/use-of-electricity.php#:~:text=Total%20U.S.%20electricity%20consumption%20in,year%20decreases%20occurred%20after%202007 https://www.eia.gov/energyexplained/electricity/use-of-elect....) - from a country with five times fewer people, a GDP one-eighth the size and a total land area 39 times smaller. Not only would developing this sector be an industrial driver in itself, but the sheer excess of carbon-free power could be used to power the growth of other sectors - from energy-intensive data centers to heavy industry. Needless to say it would also act as some protection given geopolitical risks with fossil fuel supplies. And also the [development of novel energy storage solutions](https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2024/apr/01/thermal-energy-storage-industry https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2024/apr/01/thermal-...) means concerns about periods of low wind will likely become less of an issue over time.
• cue_the_strings 2y ago
  This is really not a UK-only thing, it's a thing everywhere. The US has some defense jobs that pay well (but are immoral IMO), and there are some gambling-machine related jobs that pay well, but otherwise engineering pays really poorly. I used to work as an embedded engineer in Slovenia, in the automotive industry, and wanted to potentially move to Germany or Austria or Switzerland to do something similar. After interviewing with some really prominent companies, household names if you will, and seeing their offers - I bushed up on my CS and switched to finance.
• aiisahik 2y ago
  The answer here can be found if you just "follow the money" and realize that while some investments follow international boundaries, other types of investments are highly mobile. The lack of UK hardware startups is due to the lack of local VC appetite and the unwillingness of US VCs to fund a non-Delaware incorporated company. Therefore the investment from a VC to a startup is generally "bounded" by geography. The lack of UK VC appetite is due to the fact that there are just not that many LPs that want to give their money to a UK VC given their choice internationally. The LP investment to VC is "unbounded" - meaning it just follows exactly where the returns are highest. What we really need is for UK startups to break the international border between silicon valley and the UK (or anywhere else for that matter). This means setting up a Delaware C corp, selling to the US, but keeping most of the talent in the UK.
• Simon_O_Rourke 2y ago
  > I think it’s more that the bar for getting a hardware startup off the ground is much higher than a software startup - everywhere in the world. I hear ya on this, and it's not just the setup costs, or the testing or the certification... It's a non trivial task to run a hardware company. Even the stuff you don't expect. For instance, a good friend of mine founded a health startup that makes wearables, and they were almost torpedoed in the first year of operation by some mouthy influencer who went about publicly calling their beta release product a fraud. This is despite the fact it worked and did what it should.
• throwaway83726 2y ago
  A lot of these comments tell me that most commenters haven't actually worked in the EU or attempted to build wealth here. I come from an unprivileged background, my father joked that he might leave me an empty bottle of whisky when he died. I went from making 20k USD at my first job to over 800k per year. Taxation never particularly blunted my avarice or desire to advance further, and I never minded paying my taxes either. Frankly, only two things ever really slowed me down: the good old boys clubs in Europe, where if you haven't gone to the right schools, they treat you like you're supposed to be a slave rather than expect a slice of the pie... and the good old boys clubs in the US, where unless you're in CA/NY, well, again, how dare you expect a slice of the pie. If I could, I'd gladly try to get richer than Musk, and honestly, fuck the taxes. Having miserable poor people around me sucks more than paying taxes. I'd rather they enjoy some of my success too. That way I can hire fewer bodyguards.
  • constantcrying 2y ago
    >the good old boys clubs in Europe What are you talking about? This certainly is not a "European" phenomenon. >I went from making 20k USD at my first job to over 800k per year. Then you are extremely lucky, as those just are extremely rare.
• yapyap 2y ago
  > Meanwhile computer science graduates land lucrative jobs in big tech or quant trading, often starting at £100,000+ I mean, not really
• hbrav 2y ago
  I'm a Brit who has worked in finance and AI. I honestly want to move into building hardware. My background is physics, I want to build things that make the world better. But the businesses just seem absent. One of the UK's most exciting hardware projects was Reaction Engines, and they went bankrupt recently. I really want to know what we can do to fix this. As a country, we aren't building things that people want. Which means we are less powerful.
  • heeton 2y ago
    Same. I'm in the UK, I've been a software dev for a long time (with forays into physical consumer products, not electronics/hardware). I tinker with robotics, rpis, embedded tools, and the potential _power_ there is huge. But I never hear or see of jobs or opportunities (in the ballpark compensation of software).
  • pjc50 2y ago
    > As a country, we aren't building things that people want. The key distinction is between "what people want", "what people are prepared to pay for", and "what the people with all the money really want to buy". The huge success of gatcha games which understand the economic inequality among their audience is important. Most of the free users are effectively there as an audience for the few whales who pay for the whole thing. Similarly, startups are not so much about serving unmet needs as about fishing for whale VCs, of which there are very few and all searching in the same pond of Silicon Valley. They in turn want whale companies: a mere profitable business isn't enough, it has to be world-dominating. The financial sector makes a lot of money because it serves the customers who have the money.
• rfool 2y ago
  Oh no! What you describe is generally known as a 100% german trait. You cannot steal it from us and relabel as british! No, Sir! BTW: your examples stink. From first to last one: > Sarah: Built a fusion reactor at 16. Now? Debugging fintech payment systems. Nice, but that fusion reactor? Where is it? Did she really accomplish something?
  • rfool 2y ago
    Btw: remaining examples are just as stupid as the first one. Ideas are worth nothing. Even if they shine
  • constantcrying 2y ago
    Germany has multiple successful and innovative engineering companies, where engineers work for good wages. >Where is it? Did she really accomplish something? Building a fusion reactor is not that hard, although that example is probably hyperbole. Note that a fusion reactor is something totally different than a fusion reactor which outputs net energy.
• ETH_start 2y ago
  All economic development initiatives face an uphill challenge if the underlying macro conditions aren't right. The solution for the UK, the EU and Canada is simple but politically anathema: cut taxes A 2018 study shows tax increases significantly reduce innovation. A 1% increase in the top marginal income tax rate leads to a 2% reduction in patents and inventors, while a similar increase in corporate taxes causes even larger declines. The study is quite rigorous too: https://www.maximum-progress.com/p/tax-cuts-and-innovation?r=2xrvu https://www.maximum-progress.com/p/tax-cuts-and-innovation?r...
• nedt 2y ago
  The cost of living thing is debunked very quickly, but I think it's missing some aspects. I'm not in UK, but just on Europe main land, but I can easily pay for my flat, don't need a car for anything, while still living pretty much in the city center, should I lose my job I still get payed while looking for another job, should I get sick I can also just go to a doctor or the hospital and pay up to nothing, my kids just go to kindergarten and school also with paying up to nothing. At the very least most of that is not true for the US. So earning less is okish. Of course I'd also love to get more. But it's not as much needed as it might be in the US.
• ashergill 2y ago
  > The reality for most graduates is even grimmer: > • £25,000 starting salaries at traditional engineering firms > • Exodus to consulting or finance just because it's compensated better This is _exactly_ my career so far. The key thing about the British economy is that while most things operate in a free market, construction is centrally planned by councillors who are incentivised to block most development. So the whole economy is struggling, but industries that need physical space are especially hard hit. Your local council can't block you from writing more code, but can stop you from building lab space near where people want to live and work. My first job out of uni was in a wonderful small engineering firm in Cambridge. Lab space there is eye-wateringly expensive because it's illegal to build enough, so we were based in a makeshift lab in an attic next to the sewage works. I loved working there, but it shows that we're restricting our small businesses unnecessarily through our planning system. The solution is frustratingly simple, but politically suicidal for any government that tried to implement it: just legalise development subject to basic design codes. I hope we see some planning reform before it's too late for our struggling innovation industries.
  • pjc50 2y ago
    I used to live and work in Cambridge. In many ways it's a victim of its own success; people will, not unreasonably, argue that it's a beautiful little town of historic buildings, embedded in a primarily agricultural county of either prime agricultural land or protected wetland. They're not going to let you build Shenzen in Shelford no matter what the economic benefit might be. Meanwhile it's close enough to London that the property prices tick upwards to London commuter weighting. (This is also why we have expensive electricity, because people oppose building any infrastructure. I'm coming round to the idea that there should just be county-by-county referendums where people have to pick either blanket allowing energy development or having a bill surcharge.)
    • glompers 2y ago
      The wiki editor(s) who wrote the boosterish Economy subsection of the wiki page on Peterborough [1] (thirty miles away, same county) make it sound as though it is a growing area that does want to grow more. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peterborough https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peterborough
• constantcrying 2y ago
  >Unlike lucrative software jobs, hardware engineering demands physical presence. Genuinely baffling. What is talking about? Most hardware jobs involve sitting in front of Design and simulation software.
  • pjc50 2y ago
    Eventually the hardware comes back from the factory and somebody has to do bringup. It doesn't need constant in office presence, but it does need to happen some days. Sometimes you even need to go to the factory itself.
    • constantcrying 2y ago
      If you are doing CAE why would you ever need to look at the physical object?
• necovek 2y ago
  As brought up through the thread, it sounds more plausible that the hardware talent is most useful near the factories, and due to globalisation and pay discrepancy, fewer factories are being built in UK. With compensation catching up in developing economies, it will make less and less sense to move production outside a "wealthy" country, and you'll see resurrection of domestic hardware companies. Right? How far away are we from the tipping point is beyond me, though (and there are always "cheaper" countries still, even if it's mostly due to lacking legislation and environment protection rules).
• iancmceachern 2y ago
  I couldn't agree more: "Your brain's worth billions. Build empires, not apps."
• mertnesvat 2y ago
  > Sarah: Built a fusion reactor at 16. Now? Debugging fintech payment systems. It's striking to imagine a fully functional fusion reactor that could benefit humanity, yet its creator now focuses on fintech payment systems. This highlights the importance of a strong middle class, which seems to be declining globally. A thriving middle class, with disposable income and free time, creates the conditions for innovation. Without it, even brilliant minds like Einstein might spend their entire careers working on immediate economic needs rather than pursuing breakthrough discoveries.
  • ImHereToVote 2y ago
    What you are saying is essentially true. I just don't want people to come away with the notion that building a fusion reactor and yielding net energy from said reactor is equivalent. They are very very very far away from each other in terms of complexity.
  • maginx 2y ago
    Probably what was built was a Fusor. There's tons of instructions how to build one (https://fusor.net/board/ https://fusor.net/board/) and seemingly there's a lot of focus on how "young" the builders of such are. Just google: fusion reactor teenager. In some of the stories it become apparent the fusor was never actually even finished but just along the way. https://newsforkids.net/articles/2024/09/04/16-year-old-student-builds-nuclear-fusion-reactor/ https://newsforkids.net/articles/2024/09/04/16-year-old-stud... https://online.kidsdiscover.com/quickread/arkansas-teen-builds-nuclear-reactor-in-garage https://online.kidsdiscover.com/quickread/arkansas-teen-buil... https://interestingengineering.com/energy/nuclear-fusion-reactor-by-teenager-achieved-plasma https://interestingengineering.com/energy/nuclear-fusion-rea... ...
  • Chris2048 2y ago
    Are these real examples? I was curious, and all I could find it: https://newsforkids.net/articles/2024/09/04/16-year-old-student-builds-nuclear-fusion-reactor/ https://newsforkids.net/articles/2024/09/04/16-year-old-stud... They are not working in Fintech AFAIK.
    • 2y ago
• rbanffy 2y ago
  While it's a shame so few hardware engineers have the opportunity to build hardware, I wouldn't say they are being wasted. I am a hardware engineer. I invented a couple hardware devices, but I transitioned to software very early in my career and I don't regret that. I don't feel my talents or education has been wasted - my understanding of how a computer works down to the transistors (planar CMOS, I'm from the 80's) is handy when I have to predict how software will behave (and how it'll ultimately break). Engineers are, ultimately, problem solvers. Some problems are hardware - electronics, mechanical, electrical, production, and so on, but the space of problems we've been trained to solve is a lot bigger than that - If you can see feedback loops, you have a future in commodities, banking and finance. And, as we recently learned the hard way, in politics as well. We are all trained to identify sub-optimal solutions and to have an almost irresistible itch to solve them. One quote I love is that "scientists see the world as it is, while engineers see the world as it could be".
• wkat4242 2y ago
  > Venture Capital: European VCs, mostly bullish on fintech and SaaS, remain wary of hardware. Result? A feedback loop of underinvestment and missed opportunities. Um? We're pretty crap at SaaS too here in Europe. The problem is just that venture capital is simply not really around in Europe. Part of that is better labour protections, you can't just start a firm and dump all your staff if it doesn't work out. I think that's a good thing too. And really hardware is a China thing these days. The "designed in" is just a small part. But Britain also has the Brexit problem. I'm glad I'm not British.
• pyb 2y ago
  On the other hand, HW engineers are very cheap to hire in the UK. So, as a founder, you could look at this problem as an opportunity. I'm more concerned with the impact of Brexit, in terms of attracting people, and also the issue of quickly shipping goods to and from the EU.
• pclmulqdq 2y ago
  As a former hardware engineer and a lover of all things hardware, the only country that isn't currently wasting its hardware talent is China. The rest of the world has been spoiled by the easy money in software. Only China has produced a stable flow of hardware startups, and they have generally been very impressive.
  • fragmede 2y ago
    BBC reports they're being wasted in China as well. https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/ce8nlpy2n1lo https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/ce8nlpy2n1lo
  • fragmede 2y ago
    BBC reports they're being wasted in China as well, with many stem graduates failing to find jobs and working as drivers instead. https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/ce8nlpy2n1lo https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/ce8nlpy2n1lo
• mike1505 2y ago
  YASA, Oxford: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31701133 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31701133
• Sparkyte 2y ago
  The same can be said almost anywhere. The big issue is that businesses often offshore work to save on labor costs rather than to improve the quality of their products. This problem is significant, and here’s why: consider yourself of average intelligence. Now think about how many people are below that level. Then consider those above your level of intelligence and start dividing them further by demographics, age, profession, interests, and so on. What you’re left with is an alarming realization—only about 0.1–0.2% of the global population may truly excel in your skilled profession. Education helps, but it doesn’t define one’s ability. Unfortunately, this also means that many people end up in professions they are not suited for, including CEOs who shouldn’t be in those roles. It’s a sobering thought, and when you really consider it, it’s a bit crazy to think about. Sometimes that talent pools in different part of the world too.
• ibloomt 2y ago
  That's a really good article! Do you want to know a bit more? Ukraine hardware best talents -> 18k/year. Belarus best hardware talents -> 6k/year Some part of Russia best hardware talents -> 14k/year Eastern Europe -> hardware talent is basically free
  • constantcrying 2y ago
    You can decent even further, look at what labor in India costs. Companies are already taking advantage of that and are outsourcing there.
• epicureanideal 2y ago
  Talent everywhere is being wasted because we’re all trapped working for oligopolistic companies or the mediocre-talented leadership of the rich and connected.
• aussiegreenie 2y ago
  A better headline is the UK is being wasted. It ignores its strengths and uses its weaknesses.
• jackoregankenny 2y ago
  Finding it tough in Ireland too. Though salaries are higher, access to machines, tools, etc. is significantly harder. We have the talent, but capex is just too tough for startups. I tried to help solve this with saltharbour.org but it flopped during fundraising (who knew making no money isn't appealing, still going for sponsorship though). That said, setting up a new thing in Cambridge, offering £40k starting salary (with intention for it to go much higher) has shown: 1) exceptional talent on my doorstep, 2) plenty of people to choose from, 3) immediate impact. The downsides are real though - industrial space, while cheaper, is hard to find and significantly out of the way. There's also a lower ambition level and a lot of red tape. I really think compared to other places in Europe the UK is in a far better place to start to excel. Things like aria, works in progress, renphil and more have such a presecence and it feels like people are excited about reasearch, progress and hardware.
  • hbrav 2y ago
    I'd be interested in what you set up in Cambridge, if you're happy to share?
    • jackoregankenny 2y ago
      Sure! Ping me an email jackoregankenny@gmail.com it's somewhat hush atm
• iNic 2y ago
  This is a direct consequence of the housing theory of everything [1]. When land is scarce landlords can eat up any surplus produced by both labor and capital! [1]: https://worksinprogress.co/issue/the-housing-theory-of-everything/ https://worksinprogress.co/issue/the-housing-theory-of-every...