5 ms·

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 Ec

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
  >I think most Doctors etc need to wait until they're consultants until they make decent money. A consultant gets £100k -> £140K ish from the NHS. However, many supplement that with private work and therefore make significantly more.
  - Marazan 2y ago
    Yeah, 100k is starting pay band for Consultants, 140k is after 14 years of service _as a consultant_. To get to the starting line of Consultant they have to go through the Residency gauntlet which start you off at 36k and hideous hours.
    - sgt101 2y ago
      Yup - I'm not saying it's good or fair, or bad and unfair. I'm just saying this is what it is.
  - gadders 2y ago
    To be fair though, they work for it. A consultant I saw recently did a full day with the NHS and they 3 - 4 hours of appointments in the evenings privately at a different hospital.
- lordnacho 2y ago
  I don't know, the doctor route seems like a lot of work for the money. My FIL told his kids not to do it, and he was a surgeon who ran a department. They messed around with the doctors' pensions, and it made a lot of them quit. Conditions are also awful, he started the department in a temporary building and retired with it still there. A doctor is also a kid who got full A grades as a high school graduate. They'd have the pick of what university course to do, and then they end up doing this thing that takes until you're 30, with insane nighttime hours. It just makes no sense to me that there are still kids who think this is worthwhile. It's not even as if you are guaranteed to be allowed to specialize in what you want either, that's a battle with all the other top students.
mattnewton 2y ago
I have noticed this anecdotally as well in costal areas of the United States. It’s like textbook Baumol’s cost disease[0], except housing is rising fastest while the cost of labor nearly not at all, because buyers (hiring firms) just don’t buy [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baumol_effect https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baumol_effect
- pydry 2y ago
  I always found it interesting that a lot of economists thought that a rising tide lifting all boats could be characterized as a "disease".
  - tome 2y ago
    Personally I'd prefer it if good quality healthcare were cheaply available to all without having to be bottleneck on expensive-and-time-consuming-to-train human labour, even if it did mean that the 0.5% of the population that are doctors might end up working differently (and not necessarily for less -- it's not as though the industrial revolution has impoverished society).
    - pydry 2y ago
      That's not the same issue at all though. A waiter from the early 19th century will have much the same productivity as now. Doctors (we would hope) could be more productive by, say, not using bloodletting and leeches to heal people.
      - tome 2y ago
        It is the same issue. The reason that medical care is so expensive is that it's bottlenecked on a small number of people who are qualified and licensed to provide it. If it weren't bottlenecked on them then it would be a massive boon to society overall, and it's not clear that it would be particularly detrimental to those people.
        2y ago
swarnie 2y ago
I wonder if we ever crossed over, i also worked for Intel in the west country (Swindon) and now whore myself out to aerospace/defence in the same area. I see what our engineers are paid and its genuinely concerning.
- ktallett 2y ago
  Is the UK more in line with the norm though and the US is the outlier? I would say the UK, Europe, and Japan all have similar wages (although Japan has worse benefits and on the whole a larger expectation of workers so it's not like for like.)
  - blitzar 2y ago
    > Is the UK more in line with the norm though and the US is the outlier Mostly the US is an outlier. Unfortunately, UK property prices, food prices, utilities etc make Silicon Valley look cheep.
    - gambiting 2y ago
      Not disagreeing with your general point, but UK food is very cheap, compared to almost anywhere in western europe and nowadays with the states too.
      - Xelbair 2y ago
        UK's food, not eating out mind you, is on par with even eastern europe in some cases.
        ablation 2y ago
        That's a boring, played-out stereotype that wasn't even true 30 years ago, let alone now. If you've never set foot in a UK supermarket I could see you perhaps still languishing under this delusion.
        2y ago
amelius 2y ago
At this point someone please explain to me how finance doesn't exist to extract wealth from the rest of us.
- fxtentacle 2y ago
  It's called capitalism because we use capital to allocate value creation. So obviously finance extracts wealth, that's their job in a capitalist system.
  - DrScientist 2y ago
    We only allocate to value creation if there is a functioning free market. The banks profit margins would suggest that they are not really facing the fierce winds of competition.
  - amelius 2y ago
    But in the case of OP the value creation does not happen because they are working in finance instead of in a job creating value. I want to see some decent analysis of the situation, not stories about how the system is supposed to work.
    - mewpmewp2 2y ago
      Decision of where to allocate money creates value. Imagine you have 500k to allocate. You can choose to invest in A or B, after analysis you realize A is a failing business, but B with 500k invested will create enormous value by producing product C. If you didn't allocate in B this company wouldn't have had enough money to produce C and succeed.
      - amelius 2y ago
        Yes, but this can still be true if the system works in a perverted way. In your example, you should include how many $ go to the entity doing the allocation. If this is an insane amount of money, then maybe we are better off without finance and just figure out the optimal allocation in some other way.
whywhywhywhy 2y ago
The UK is over educated so everyone who walks into an interview has a degree so it just isn’t worth anything and puts you at the starting line, internships are there to mold nothing into something and if that values too low for you there is a queue of people behind you also with degrees who would be happy for the opportunity. If your focus is money then higher education is the wrong path anyway, it’s oversubscribed.
petesergeant 2y ago
> These days, what are your options realistically in this country? Particularly if you want to hang around your family in the south? In 2013 I was working as a CTO in London, managing a team of 40, and I could just about afford a run-down 2-bedroom in a just-ok part of Zone 1, assuming I wanted to make some savings too. My salary wasn't bad for the role, outside of banking. Anyway, that was pretty much the end of living in the UK for me.
- ta1243 2y ago
  90% of the problems in the UK come down to the cost of housing in London (and maybe a couple of other key cities, but mainly London) This cost is driven by relatively high wages in London, so people on good salaries can afford more, so prices go up as supply is constrained and demand increases. The rest of the western world is starting to see this, and before London had the issue, city states in the far east like Hong Kong and Singapore had the same problem.
  - petesergeant 2y ago
    > This cost is driven by relatively high wages in London I disagree on this cause, FWIW, and would say the cost is driven entirely by the constrained supply you mention. It's a very, very politically difficult problem to fix, because if you increase the housing supply, people who already own houses see their net-worth decrease. I am sure there are some smart solutions, but most MPs and many voters already own homes and don't have much of an interest in fixing it yet.
mellosouls 2y ago
If you are only doing it for the money, your point is fair - but there are many of us for whom - beyond reasonable necessities - that is at best a secondary consideration. Anybody who moves from engineering to finance doesn't have their heart in engineering - which is fine, but its not like they had no choice. Agree though that London and parts of the South place extra pressures on people looking to build a life and home.
- officialchicken 2y ago
  > Anybody who moves from engineering to finance doesn't have their heart in engineering - which is fine, but its not like they had no choice. Ahhh, the classic no true engineer / scotsman argument ... I couldn't possible be an Engineer because I like hard software projects with smart people, good budgets, and tight deadlines.
- StefanBatory 2y ago
  Passion does not pay the bills; or later on, a comfy lifestyle.
rich_sasha 2y ago
Senior doctors are paid OK actually. Consultants are paid between 105-140k [1] with a big pension contribution too. That's not Goldman pay, but also quite secure and a big pension contribution from the employer which isn't included in the salaey. Also scope for very nice NHS/private combo. Also at this point, to have any medical care in the UK, you basically need to know a doctor... Now, sure, that salary might be too low, and working for the NHS seems like hell but it would seem the money isn't the main obstacle. Maybe not right now for 2 years ago that was a very good pay. There are other pay-related issues. Marginal tax between 100 and 150 or so is incredibly high, around 60-70%. This is because many nasty things kick in there. Tax free allowance shrinking for example. Doctors are double screwed in some cases, as by law they have to contribute a lot of their salary to pension, and in this threshold often exceed their allowance - which is a real kick in the nuts, seeing how they can't reduce it, and anyway, pension saving should always be seen favourably in a place like UK. These are by the way some of the reasons for doctor shortages in the UK, senior doctors have little incentive to work harder, many cut their hours with little difference to their net pay. But these aren't strictly linked to their headline salary. [1] https://www.healthcareers.nhs.uk/explore-roles/doctors/pay-doctors https://www.healthcareers.nhs.uk/explore-roles/doctors/pay-d...
Symbiote 2y ago
In ~2006 I had a similar experience arranging my work placement during university, although I was earning a bit more — £16k for software development in the South East, just outside London. The banks were certainly offering a lot more, £30-something-k. The university careers person said five banks would each take all fifty of us, just on the basis of us being Imperial College students, so we should apply them and forget anything else we were interested in as it wouldn't pay well. She couldn't understand the person who wanted to work at a computer game company. We complained to the head of department, who was furious. A short time later there was a new careers person.
SkiFire13 2y ago
I also had a similar experience in Northern Italy. I did an unpaid internship for 2 months during my bachelor (you don't really have a choice here) and then remained working part-time from time to time while getting my master. When I graduated they offered me €17k, meanwhile I got a €65k internship offer in Milan...

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
>I think most Doctors etc need to wait until they're consultants until they make decent money. A consultant gets £100k -> £140K ish from the NHS. However, many supplement that with private work and therefore make significantly more.
- Marazan 2y ago
  Yeah, 100k is starting pay band for Consultants, 140k is after 14 years of service _as a consultant_. To get to the starting line of Consultant they have to go through the Residency gauntlet which start you off at 36k and hideous hours.
  - sgt101 2y ago
    Yup - I'm not saying it's good or fair, or bad and unfair. I'm just saying this is what it is.
- gadders 2y ago
  To be fair though, they work for it. A consultant I saw recently did a full day with the NHS and they 3 - 4 hours of appointments in the evenings privately at a different hospital.
lordnacho 2y ago
I don't know, the doctor route seems like a lot of work for the money. My FIL told his kids not to do it, and he was a surgeon who ran a department. They messed around with the doctors' pensions, and it made a lot of them quit. Conditions are also awful, he started the department in a temporary building and retired with it still there. A doctor is also a kid who got full A grades as a high school graduate. They'd have the pick of what university course to do, and then they end up doing this thing that takes until you're 30, with insane nighttime hours. It just makes no sense to me that there are still kids who think this is worthwhile. It's not even as if you are guaranteed to be allowed to specialize in what you want either, that's a battle with all the other top students.

mattnewton 2y ago

I have noticed this anecdotally as well in costal areas of the United States. It’s like textbook Baumol’s cost disease[0], except housing is rising fastest while the cost of labor nearly not at all, because buyers (hiring firms) just don’t buy [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baumol_effect https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baumol_effect

pydry 2y ago
I always found it interesting that a lot of economists thought that a rising tide lifting all boats could be characterized as a "disease".
- tome 2y ago
  Personally I'd prefer it if good quality healthcare were cheaply available to all without having to be bottleneck on expensive-and-time-consuming-to-train human labour, even if it did mean that the 0.5% of the population that are doctors might end up working differently (and not necessarily for less -- it's not as though the industrial revolution has impoverished society).
  - pydry 2y ago
    That's not the same issue at all though. A waiter from the early 19th century will have much the same productivity as now. Doctors (we would hope) could be more productive by, say, not using bloodletting and leeches to heal people.
    - tome 2y ago
      It is the same issue. The reason that medical care is so expensive is that it's bottlenecked on a small number of people who are qualified and licensed to provide it. If it weren't bottlenecked on them then it would be a massive boon to society overall, and it's not clear that it would be particularly detrimental to those people.
      - 2y ago

swarnie 2y ago

I wonder if we ever crossed over, i also worked for Intel in the west country (Swindon) and now whore myself out to aerospace/defence in the same area. I see what our engineers are paid and its genuinely concerning.

ktallett 2y ago
Is the UK more in line with the norm though and the US is the outlier? I would say the UK, Europe, and Japan all have similar wages (although Japan has worse benefits and on the whole a larger expectation of workers so it's not like for like.)
- blitzar 2y ago
  > Is the UK more in line with the norm though and the US is the outlier Mostly the US is an outlier. Unfortunately, UK property prices, food prices, utilities etc make Silicon Valley look cheep.
  - gambiting 2y ago
    Not disagreeing with your general point, but UK food is very cheap, compared to almost anywhere in western europe and nowadays with the states too.
    - Xelbair 2y ago
      UK's food, not eating out mind you, is on par with even eastern europe in some cases.
      - ablation 2y ago
        That's a boring, played-out stereotype that wasn't even true 30 years ago, let alone now. If you've never set foot in a UK supermarket I could see you perhaps still languishing under this delusion.
        2y ago

amelius 2y ago

At this point someone please explain to me how finance doesn't exist to extract wealth from the rest of us.

fxtentacle 2y ago
It's called capitalism because we use capital to allocate value creation. So obviously finance extracts wealth, that's their job in a capitalist system.
- DrScientist 2y ago
  We only allocate to value creation if there is a functioning free market. The banks profit margins would suggest that they are not really facing the fierce winds of competition.
- amelius 2y ago
  But in the case of OP the value creation does not happen because they are working in finance instead of in a job creating value. I want to see some decent analysis of the situation, not stories about how the system is supposed to work.
  - mewpmewp2 2y ago
    Decision of where to allocate money creates value. Imagine you have 500k to allocate. You can choose to invest in A or B, after analysis you realize A is a failing business, but B with 500k invested will create enormous value by producing product C. If you didn't allocate in B this company wouldn't have had enough money to produce C and succeed.
    - amelius 2y ago
      Yes, but this can still be true if the system works in a perverted way. In your example, you should include how many $ go to the entity doing the allocation. If this is an insane amount of money, then maybe we are better off without finance and just figure out the optimal allocation in some other way.

whywhywhywhy 2y ago

The UK is over educated so everyone who walks into an interview has a degree so it just isn’t worth anything and puts you at the starting line, internships are there to mold nothing into something and if that values too low for you there is a queue of people behind you also with degrees who would be happy for the opportunity. If your focus is money then higher education is the wrong path anyway, it’s oversubscribed.

petesergeant 2y ago

> These days, what are your options realistically in this country? Particularly if you want to hang around your family in the south? In 2013 I was working as a CTO in London, managing a team of 40, and I could just about afford a run-down 2-bedroom in a just-ok part of Zone 1, assuming I wanted to make some savings too. My salary wasn't bad for the role, outside of banking. Anyway, that was pretty much the end of living in the UK for me.

ta1243 2y ago
90% of the problems in the UK come down to the cost of housing in London (and maybe a couple of other key cities, but mainly London) This cost is driven by relatively high wages in London, so people on good salaries can afford more, so prices go up as supply is constrained and demand increases. The rest of the western world is starting to see this, and before London had the issue, city states in the far east like Hong Kong and Singapore had the same problem.
- petesergeant 2y ago
  > This cost is driven by relatively high wages in London I disagree on this cause, FWIW, and would say the cost is driven entirely by the constrained supply you mention. It's a very, very politically difficult problem to fix, because if you increase the housing supply, people who already own houses see their net-worth decrease. I am sure there are some smart solutions, but most MPs and many voters already own homes and don't have much of an interest in fixing it yet.

mellosouls 2y ago

If you are only doing it for the money, your point is fair - but there are many of us for whom - beyond reasonable necessities - that is at best a secondary consideration. Anybody who moves from engineering to finance doesn't have their heart in engineering - which is fine, but its not like they had no choice. Agree though that London and parts of the South place extra pressures on people looking to build a life and home.

officialchicken 2y ago
> Anybody who moves from engineering to finance doesn't have their heart in engineering - which is fine, but its not like they had no choice. Ahhh, the classic no true engineer / scotsman argument ... I couldn't possible be an Engineer because I like hard software projects with smart people, good budgets, and tight deadlines.
StefanBatory 2y ago
Passion does not pay the bills; or later on, a comfy lifestyle.

rich_sasha 2y ago

Senior doctors are paid OK actually. Consultants are paid between 105-140k [1] with a big pension contribution too. That's not Goldman pay, but also quite secure and a big pension contribution from the employer which isn't included in the salaey. Also scope for very nice NHS/private combo. Also at this point, to have any medical care in the UK, you basically need to know a doctor... Now, sure, that salary might be too low, and working for the NHS seems like hell but it would seem the money isn't the main obstacle. Maybe not right now for 2 years ago that was a very good pay. There are other pay-related issues. Marginal tax between 100 and 150 or so is incredibly high, around 60-70%. This is because many nasty things kick in there. Tax free allowance shrinking for example. Doctors are double screwed in some cases, as by law they have to contribute a lot of their salary to pension, and in this threshold often exceed their allowance - which is a real kick in the nuts, seeing how they can't reduce it, and anyway, pension saving should always be seen favourably in a place like UK. These are by the way some of the reasons for doctor shortages in the UK, senior doctors have little incentive to work harder, many cut their hours with little difference to their net pay. But these aren't strictly linked to their headline salary. [1] https://www.healthcareers.nhs.uk/explore-roles/doctors/pay-doctors https://www.healthcareers.nhs.uk/explore-roles/doctors/pay-d...

Symbiote 2y ago

In ~2006 I had a similar experience arranging my work placement during university, although I was earning a bit more — £16k for software development in the South East, just outside London. The banks were certainly offering a lot more, £30-something-k. The university careers person said five banks would each take all fifty of us, just on the basis of us being Imperial College students, so we should apply them and forget anything else we were interested in as it wouldn't pay well. She couldn't understand the person who wanted to work at a computer game company. We complained to the head of department, who was furious. A short time later there was a new careers person.

SkiFire13 2y ago

I also had a similar experience in Northern Italy. I did an unpaid internship for 2 months during my bachelor (you don't really have a choice here) and then remained working part-time from time to time while getting my master. When I graduated they offered me €17k, meanwhile I got a €65k internship offer in Milan...