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.
The largest problem I see is shipping times. If I need to download a new software "part" (library or other), the shipping time is the download time, nearly instant.
If I need new hardware pieces, its either next day shipping, a few days by air-freight or three weeks on a boat from china.
This limits prototype turnover time, and means iterating quick is much harder.
Finally you have the problem that hardware is expensive and an additional cost. A hardware startup has all the same costs as a software company but with the addition of hardware.
Parts are pretty much instant, pcb turn around times are 3 to 15 days depending on how complex they are.
Even in the bad old days of punch cards and priesthoods the turn around for software was faster.
I have a little pcb mill in the garage that I use for prototypes.
To this day I've not met another EE that knows what a voronoi mapping is, or why you'd want one. In a previous startup where I was the software engineer I got through more prototypes for the analogue signal paths in an afternoon than the two other EEs had in the previous week.
Only for simple pcb. If you are making multi-layer pcb with complex stacks, pcb manufacturing and soldering (with associated tooling setup, validation and so) are easily 2 months of turnaround
That’s a big part of it. But mostly it’s that your dev+deploy+evaluate cycle is so much slower. With web software you can write a feature or bug-fix and push to prod in minutes - and repeat that many times a day. With hardware each equivalent cycle is weeks or months (especially in my vertical - farms).
Some of us write software for embedded devices where a mistake in programning means a critical machine in a remote area needs someone to physically go there and thus spend months in test before we dare deploy. Some of us care about quality and won't allow a customer to see bugs thus even though we can deploy in seconds our reputation won't allow it. There is also software that bugs can kill people so again we won't deploy without evtensive testing - much of this is regulated and we would go to prison for deploying at will even if it works.
those who work in any of the above react in horror to stories of how the web deploys to production so fast. we know we are not perfect and don't understand how you would risk it.
The pace is not really parts supply constrained in my experience. It just takes much longer to build and validate even relatively modest design changes.
Investors are generally wanting to see little existing competition so that’s not really the issue.
They’re more concerned with factors that will cause the company to self-destruct. Running out of money before hitting PMF and growth is the most common failure mode for any startup, and is much more likely with any hardware startup, due to the dramatically slower iteration times.
Just to chime in and say that bootstrapping does work in this domain, I say that as someone who's had a few friends go down that route, but yes, it's really tough.
There's also people I know who built small scale solutions and then managed to push that into funding and funnily enough a Kickstarter as well though I don't think he'd recommend anyone follow that route.
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)
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.
Totally anecdotal but to your point, the engineering jobs in my hometown followed the manufacturing jobs in leaving town in the 1990s after NAFTA.
Engineering seems to be returning as domestic manufacturing increases thanks to foreign auto companies setting up shop across the state, replacing what the US companies left behind.
Being an engineer means mastering your production tool. For everything to do with physical production, you need to be close to the means of production to gather essential information on quality, capacity, operator feedback (machine and quality operators are invaluable sources of information.), etc.
Most information is not digital or hardly digitizable.
I don't completely agree with the article's classification of ARM as a hardware company. ARM produces VHDL and resells licenses, but does not produce any chips. It's closer to a software company than a TSMC.
I'd go one further and say you have to be at least a journeyman in whatever tools your process is using.
The difference between someone designing a part in cad and someone designing the tool paths for the machine that makes the part in cam is night and day.
We could discuss this at length, but I completely share your point of view. Anyone can design a part that's impossible to produce.
The real added value is knowing how something is actually going to be made, in how many stages, with what tools, what controls will be carried out, with what tools, what the acceptance and rejection criteria are, and how these criteria have been determined, are essential points.
The fact that it exists doesn’t mean it’s the best. You see it all the time that businesses do something just because everyone does it too. For example, the current AI investments, collatoral debt obligations in the 2000s, and conglomerates in the 1960s.
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.
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.
Very weird comment. Article talks about hardware talent in UK. Your comment tries to prove "engineering jobs" are not in the US by providing the job listing of a single supplier, when everybody knows that there are a huge amount of hardware talent in the US working at great companies that deliver amazing products. Your comment seems to equate "manufacturing jobs" to "hardware engineering jobs" which apparently isn't correct.
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
Was a MechE for 10 years here in the US and now I’m a SWE. Even here, no one cares about hardware engineers. Don’t get me wrong, you can make enough to be “comfortable”. But anecdotally, maybe 10% of MechE do design. 10% of that are paid handsomely to be in tech and are “Product Designers”. Even then, almost every tech company want to be a predominantly software company. They just happen to need hardware to execute their product. Admittedly, it’s really hard to do hardware in this economy when one country has 60% of the global manufacturing output and can copy your design, make it cheaper, and make it better. Ironically, the biggest dividing line that makes a hardware product better is good software.
That's what happens when there is not much manufacturing in the country anymore, and everyone is encouraged to go to college. I don't know why the software industry hasn't suffered more along the same lines. Maybe the profit margins for software are higher.
Interesting that you say that, my understand of the data is that manufacturing output has never been higher - ignoring lingering Covid shocks - https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/IPMANSICS
But because productivity is higher https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/M0100CUSM070NNBR - which doesn’t mean the workers are working harder: a man with a shovel can work as hard as he likes, but he’s never going to compete with the business owner who invested in productivity and gave his worker an excavator.
Therefore employment in the sector is down due to increased productivity, not decreased output.
But increased productivity is a radically different thing from decreased output. A claim that manufacturing should employ more, in the face of increased productivity, That’s a claim that manufacturing should replace other endeavours in the economy which, is a complex claim at the very least.
The nominal value of highly automated processes has never been higher. Meanwhile, ordinary people are not able to find as many good jobs as they once did. Wages in almost every industry are stagnant at best, at least when adjusted for inflation.
>A claim that manufacturing should employ more, in the face of increased productivity, That’s a claim that manufacturing should replace other endeavours in the economy which, is a complex claim at the very least.
It is a complex claim but I'll make it really simple. We import most of the things we rely on. Everything from plastic toys to car parts to critical medicines are all imported. Letting yourself become totally dependent on other countries while our STEM grads are underemployed, and would-be manufacturing line workers are forced to do bullshit like driving for Uber, is no way to run a country. It is going to backfire one day unless there is a major reversal in the trend.
Eh, well, this is a bit embarrassing! On mobile, I can’t local a chart that covers the post war until now, best I can find is https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/OUTMS which shows late 80s onwards BUT shows a drop at 2008 onwards which goes against my argument (notwithstanding the big gap between both charts)
Production of software is nearly 100% R&D. Making a million copies of a software product has a trivial cost. There are no assembly line workers in software (and the very word "assembly" means a different thing). A software engineer very often brings in revenue many times their salary.
Production of hardware is some R&D, and then actual manufacturing. Production of each physical item costs you. Production of every physical item has a chance to go wrong. Production of each physical item requires a number of humans (often a large number) to do repetitive, high-precision, high-skill work, as fast as practical. You can augment or replace some of them with robots but it also costs you, and you can't replace all the humans with satisfactory results.
So, with hardware, the cost of the workforce plays a major role, while with software it does much less. To produce physical things, you need a lot of people who are not well-off, and for whom factory work is an upgrade of their financial and social standing. A "developing country", with huge swaths of population leaving rural life for a better city life and factory work, is best in this regard. Ideally you sell your product to richer folks, maybe outside the country of production.
Of course there can be situations where the workers are highly paid, and produce very valuable things through their skilled work. Ford in 1950s famously paid the assembly line workers very well, so that they could buy the cars they produce, and valued their employment. But this does not always occur; people doing work that does not add a lot of resale value also want to live well, especially if the society does not want a flood of immigrants who are willing to work for much less. Check out how much the work of a plumber costs in Switzerland. So only high-precision, high-margin, low-volume manufacturing remains in Switzerland, such as precision optics, precision industrial and medical equipment, or premium mechanical Swiss watches. The US is in a somehow similar situation.
This all resonates very strongly with me. We have tons of automation - the proverbial "economies of scale", but we haven't managed to solve the last mile.
Auto assembly seems like a poster child. There's wild automation going on, but the typical plant still requires thousands of employees doing things by hand. Musk tried to automate a lot more of this away with newer/better robotics, but failed. (Tesla has still achieved a lot here, but it's been more towards creating designs that are more amenable to the current state of robotics).
IMO, this problem should be solvable now. I.E. we don't need "new physics" to reach another step-function in automation. We need more investment. We're still largely in the mindset of "special-purpose" automation.
Yeah I remember one of my friends working for a German auto company during the 2008 financial crisis and having insane stuff routinely happen like an auto manufacturer having to buy truckloads of sensors from a subcontractor that had nowhere to go as car manufacturing lines were stopped.
Failing to do so would have meant these manufacturers would go under, (along with their own subcontractors) and once demand shot back up, cars would be literally impossible to manufacture as key suppliers went out of business.
>So, with hardware, the cost of the workforce plays a major role, while with software it does much less. To produce physical things, you need a lot of people who are not well-off, and for whom factory work is an upgrade of their financial and social standing. A "developing country", with huge swaths of population leaving rural life for a better city life and factory work, is best in this regard. Ideally you sell your product to richer folks, maybe outside the country of production.
You don't need a lot of people who are not well-off. You can automate the entire process. The problem with automation and labor saving technology is that it is capital intensive. The higher the capital investment per job (higher capital intensity), the bigger the chunk of money that flows to capital rather than labor.
This means that the cost of the workforce in a software company plays a bigger role than in a hardware company, where financing costs to pay for labor saving technology play a bigger role.
There are mining companies in Africa, who have nothing but an army of people equipped with shovels digging a small scale open pit mine. There is no way the labor cost here is the biggest constraint. An excavator and wheel loader could accomplish more with less people, but it would mean getting a USD loan to import foreign equipment and then selling for export to pay the foreign debts, rather than local production.
> Production of software is nearly 100% R&D. Making a million copies of a software product has a trivial cost.
> Production of hardware is some R&D, and then actual manufacturing
Totally. And if you think deployment errors are bad, wait until you see how many production errors exist and how many items out of your line come out working and within spec
For a PCB it’s called a rework, and it’s very common for first spins of boards to have to do one.
Also common is to patch around issues, when possible, in firmware. This is often lower cost/effort, but can’t fix everything.
There are similar kinds of fixes for purely mechanical parts. Depending on the part and problem, mechanical can be easier than a PCB rework (eg: modify a part in CAD and 3D print or get your local machine shop to do a run).
The U.S. is still the second largest manufacturer in the world by a large margin [1][2]
Like, yes, manufacturing's % of US GDP is low (and has been decreasing for a long time) and manufacturing employment is flat or slowly increasing but we're still making a lot of stuff.
I don't think we make a lot of stuff but we do make some of the most expensive stuff. So a lot of stats really don't reflect how unbalanced our trade is in real terms.
I've been told that acceptable software margins are around 75%. Hardware focused yields closer to 20%-40%. Hence why there is such a strong push towards software-only.
>Maybe the profit margins for software are higher.
This is easily confirmed by checking public financials of publicly listed companies. The profit margins are much higher, and the liability is much lower. The only exception is for those hardware manufacturers at the cutting edge whose products cannot be commodified, such as TSMC and ASML and the ilk.
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.
motorsport is similarly low salary, at least specifically F1. It is like game-dev in software in that there are far more people who want to do it than the number of jobs available so they can afford to pay you in the cool experience of working on F1 rather than in cash terms.
Absolutely. No public transport, almost no culture, and housing anywhere nice is even less available than in London. For a young person working at one of these firms, where can you live? Where could you meet someone to date? What can you even do at the weekend?
JLR is based in the metro area of Britain's second city. It's not exactly the middle of nowhere. Rolls Royce is in Derby, on the edge of the Peak District with much to offer. Much cheaper housing with more space available. And unlike in London, driving a car isn't hounded by terminal congestion.
JLR Gaydon is not in the metro area of Birmingham. It's in nice countryside and near a motorway which helps, but it's a fair commute out of Birmingham at rush hour to there. The nice surrounding towns/villages are expensive, and even the shitty ones aren't cheap (hello Banbury) as they're on the edge of commuter distance to London.
Derby I haven't lived in but know people who have. It's an old manufacturing town and hasn't much to offer graduates. Or anyone really. The Peak District is great, and if you can live out that way and commute in then do it. But again, you won't have similar people for local friends.
There is a culture there. I am not sure what people mean when they say there isn't a culture outside of the London. If you mean things like events, art exhibs etc. We have those here. If you mean bars, pubs and restaurants we have those here to.
Is it as glitzy as London. No. But saying there is "no culture" is just absolutely asinine.
Sure, but at that point you're having to buy a car (which is much harder as a young person - car prices have gone up, insurance has gone up faster, the driving test is harder than it was and lessons cost more...), you'll need somewhere to park it which adds to your housing costs, you still can't go drinking, and in general you're cut off from a lot of what young people are doing.
The UK is two countries, you can either live in/around the prosperous one with high cultural capital, good quality public services inc transport, or you can live in the other one.
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.
Granted it's not the only city with those, the problem the UK has is that its small, desirable cities are unable to grow or reinvent themselves. Cambridge and Bristol should be ideal for hardware startups, but the cost of both housing and working space is insane for small, provincial cities, partly because NIMBYism and partly because building infrastructure is absurdly expensive when you're constantly having to work around 200 year old buildings and 800yo city plans.
you’ve got kids and can’t enjoy the nightlife and culture anyway
Having kids while living in the centre of a large city is great, as there is so much culture that is aimed at parents and children. When my kid was small we went to museums and concerts and events all the time that were aimed at kids. There were also several different parks, playgrounds, pools and similar activities to choose from all within easy access. Plus once the kids get slightly older they can use public transport to get around and you don't have to drive them anywhere near as much as if you live in the suburbs.
You have to earn (much) more to have the same standard of living as outside of it. Therefore you pay more income tax and the cost of living is higher anyway.
Depends what you mean by "Quality of Life". I literally won't go to see friends because that would mean travelling to London. I hate the place. It is expensive, hostile, dirty and everyone is rude.
I live on the outskirts of the peak district. I can walk/cycle less than 30 minutes out of town and be walking along the old canals, through old villages and get amazing views of the countryside.
To some extent, this also applies to software. Except for DeepMind and a few other select places like Altos Labs, getting past £100k is hard, especially outside London. Unless you go into finance, of course. But then, you have to stick to London. Finance is like a black hole that sucks a big chunk of the mathematical, CS and statistical UK talent. They have very proactive recruiters trying to e.g. connect with Oxbridge students when they are approaching graduation.
I know plenty of engineers (web application developers) making over £100-£150k outside of London, usually in fairly low-stress remote jobs.
The pay is clearly nothing compared to the US, but I wouldn’t say it was massively hard for them to get where they are. They all have 5+ years experience at a senior level, and are otherwise just reliable, capable, low-maintenance employees, but maybe that’s rare!
That is indeed very rare. A simple sanity check you can look at how many people earn about 100k in the UK, we know the figure for above 125k is 500,000 [1]. We can subtract the number of other jobs that we know for sure pay above this for example lawyers at magic circle firms which start on >150k for newly qualified lawyers, consultants in the NHS, directors of large corportaions, and we end up with a very small amount of people in other industries that earn these figures. Even before that we know the median is about £50k, and I can tell you from experience you can hire very very good software people on those wages, even in London.
From personal experience, I also know of software guys making that, but I also know far far more people earning below that, and these are oxford/cambridge/imperial/UCL grads....
Then they are very few and far between. Generally the absolute limit is £90k. I've never seen any role for more than 90K unless it was a company in London and those are typically hybrid and not remote.
I only have the figures for end of 2018[1], but meta employed around 2300 people in the UK, if we assume the same distribution of jobs as elsewhere in the world about half will be engineers, so 1150 engineers. There aren't that many of these jobs. At goldman its a lot higher, aboutn 10,000[2] globally, but they only have around 3,300 employees in the Uk so if its the same ratio as global (25% tech), then that means around 800 developers. Again you'll note this is a very small number compared to the number of top graduates a year, with class sizes of 100-200 per university.
So like I said originally these jobs are few and far between. The point is that in the UK the salaries are much lower than those in the US and this is across all experience ranges.
It’s shocking. Software engineers in the UK are treated like engineers in the US were in the 1960s. Low respect, low pay, while city boys strutting around in shiny suits snapping their fingers to get anything they want.
That's a weird statement considering I'd have guess the greatest amount of respect
and adoration (not necessarily money) (non-software) engineers have gotten in the US would've been during the Space Race and Cold War years.
It was real respect for the trade as well, not some secondhand respect that people who make a lot of money and wield a lot of social influence get.
I am a former Mech Eng who trod this path. Started at JLR, moved by self teaching into software. Engineering in the UK felt like it moved at a glacial pace that only made sense in the days of final salary pension schemes. Senior management really struggled to get their heads around why young people were so impatient, but we were not competing for the same rewards.
It seems like the salaries quoted here haven't changed much in the past couple of decades. It's a shame. I know in the past there was a brain drain of talent from the UK to Canada due to the salary disparity. Here's an example:
Been there, done that. I still frequently get sent Linkedin specs for companies where the hardware team lead is earning junior SWE money. UK junior SWE money.
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.
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).
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.
The culture sector in London is notoriously badly paid. Mostly staffed by the intellectual trophy husbands and wives of the financial sector.
Even similar sized public sector organisations (thinking education) pay far better. A senior headteacher with 50 or 100 staff will do a lot better than a cultural manager.
> Mostly staffed by the intellectual trophy husbands and wives of the financial sector.
Oh so true. Which helps to explain the number of levels of management in UK cultural institutions, because in London there are enough of these people who want a (poorly paid) role that it's better to have 3 layers of management when 1 would do.
Software engineers can usually expect to at least 2x their earnings, the median in the uk is £50k and in the US it is £100k, and that is not acounting for the significantly lower tax burden. (That pay excludes medical benefits, if you include the dollar value of that and bonuses and equity the difference rises).
>> 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.
Citation needed. No-one wants to live in Frankfurt.
What do you expect the Lord Mayor to say? "Yes we think Brexit was great and that the government is going a good job." They're a lobby, they want to lobby for more concessions.
Museum jobs are hideously badly paid. In many cases the real work is done for free by "volunteers" (really poor saps on a 2-5 year job interview) before finding out the actual job went to a buddy of the museum director who doesn't even need to show up most of the time.
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.
If your wife used to manage 60 people and now manages a third of that, it seems like her talent is being wasted NOW, not when she was in the UK.
I'll add that 70K is nothing to write home about in the US, especially if you're not in a low COL state.
The article is about people not going in the field that they're talented at, because it's low paid. Clearly it doesn't apply to your wife which is talented and went in the low paid field.
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.
> 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 (
Yes we have many comments on HN talking about how harmful the US VCs attitude is because they force good businesses into choosing between being unicorns and not getting funding.
I do not know the truth of it, but clearly its not obvious.
> Unfortunately the UK has not been well governed for 20 years or so, and hence economic outcomes as a whole have been abysmal.
I commented on this earlier. The UK's economic outcomes have been similar to comparable European economies (like Germany) and better than some (like France). Whatever the problem is, its not unique to the UK: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42766107
I do not think the UK is well run, but I think the west in general is badly run. Poorly thought out regulation, short termism in both politics and business, a focus on metrics subject to Goodhart's and Campbell's laws, and a poor understanding of the rest of the work (leading to bad foreign policy).
> Yes we have many comments on HN talking about how harmful the US VCs attitude is because they force good businesses into choosing between being unicorns and not getting funding.
HN has a very wide range of economic opinions, and some people are extremely uninformed about what it takes to do hard things that can't be grown organically, and what it takes to maintain a business running when it's done the hard thing in the face of competition.
Most of the issues here relate to scale and actual quality of the idea/business in the first place. Hard things can really be split into, challenging but a problem to solve, or this never should have become a business. The former will work well with the right sort of investors. The latter will eventually sink, the investors simply provide money and poor ideas such as trying to incorporate AI into every business model.
> Yes we have many comments on HN talking about how harmful the US VCs attitude is because they force good businesses into choosing between being unicorns and not getting funding.
Most of those are people complaining about a business having to make changes because it took $50+m in funding and now needs to justify it. The business was only "good" because it got $50m and didn't need to do things like charge enough money. If it hadn't gotten that $50m then those people wouldn't consider it such a good business or even know about it.
Under-rated comment. This is basically the whole explanation. 2008 did a huge amount of damage, not just immediately but to long-term mindsets. Ironically I think it's even entrenched the meme that the only real way to make money in the UK is property. We're all Georgists now.
(this includes property as an export industry! Leaving increasing areas of the UK owned by overseas absentee landlords.)
The problem is that people think property is a risk free way of making money - even if they borrow heavily to invest. Maybe what we need is a property price crash.
I'm not sure a property price crash would achieve this goal.
You will have to decide for yourself if I'm speaking from experience or have motivated reasoning, as I'm saying this as an overseas absentee landlord who bought a UK apartment around the tail end of the previous price crash, initially as a place to live in until I decided the UK wasn't for me any more, and was rich enough to do so without a mortgage.
(I left the UK in 2018 due to a mix of Brexit and technological incompetence in the form of the Investigatory Powers Act. Would have left UK sooner but for parent with Alzheimer's).
Reason being: the income from housing doesn't have to come from reselling houses (which a price crash would impact) — I'm collecting rent, not flipping property. Forecasts future increases to rental rates suggests it won't keep getting worse (relative to general inflation) than it already is for renters, but it's already obviously quite bad.
In the UK it more or less is a risk free way to make money. The government's hand is always seen when a danger to the property market prices hoves into sight.
For the last 20 or 25 years the UK has been coasting on the North Sea oil&gas money, I'd say that worked up until the early 2010s, and then on the almost complete financialization of its economy and on selling out whatever pieces of the economy could still be sold out (that includes part of their beloved NHS).
But that can only work for so long and is beneficial in the medium to long-term for a very limited number of people (basically the owners of said financial capital), at some point you have to produce some real wealth, wealth produced from real stuff via resources of the Earth + human ingenuity and, yes, + human work.
I agree, but my point is that the France, Germany, and other comparable European economies have the same or similar problems. The UK is not some exception, it is a typical western economy. The US is an outlier (doing better).
> that includes part of their beloved NHS
A more severe problem is that the NHS was debt funded (mostly through off balance sheet debt) in the 2000s. The government kept their promise not to increase national debt by disguising running up disguised debt in the NHS
Its also worth noting that a large chuck of NHS services, GP services in particular, were always subcontracted to private providers.
It's not a surprise that EU countries perform similarly as they have to abide by the same laws and therefore are all restricted in the same ways. For example EU drone regulations prohibit the flying of autonomous drones therefore killing innovation in that area.
Germany was quite fine until a couple of years ago, mostly thanks to very cheap Russian gas. About France I agree, they have the same problems as the Brits do, maybe because they lost access to cheap African mineral resources as a result of Francafrique [1] ending? I couldn't tell, to be honest.
But at the end of the day the point remains that if you want to have a world-beating economy you need to have access to relatively cheap inputs (which includes energy), in large enough amounts, otherwise your economy will just not make it. The Americans have that (people forget how much of an economic boom gas fracking brought with it), the Chinese have that (thanks to its very large population and access to natural resources that is reasonable enough, they're no 1930s Japan), India has that (thanks to its very large and young population), even Russia has that (thanks to its natural resources), meanwhile Europe has almost no demographic advantage and almost no natural resources left to exploit. "Innovation" (which is also lacking) and financialization alone can get you only so far.
Germany's number one economic problem is energy costs. Blaming the increase on Russian gas hits only a tiny slice of the problem.
The real problem is a completely botched "energy transition", which deprecated very important energy sectors, which were still absolutely needed.
To be clear, I am in favor of renewables. One benefit is that they create independence from the whims of the US and Russia. Nevertheless the transition has been completely botched, driving up energy costs and making certain industries essentially non-viable.
The government focused on two things, increasing renewable peak production and deprecating nuclear. What they completely neglected is how to actually have a sustainable grid, which can cheaply deliver energy even with little sunshine and little wind. What was needed was easily regulated power (e.g. nuclear) and sufficient storage. Nuclear was completely abandoned and most government incentives were focused on increasing peak production, neglecting the storage of energy.
This is obviously harmful to the German industry, which is electricity heavy. This problem has also been consistently ignored and actively made worse in recent years, by continuing to shut down nuclear plants, even if it was clear that more energy production was needed.
Completely agree, the problem in Europe is not regulations or anything like that - it is a mindset issue. It is one of things that europeans can learn from Americans.
My hypothesis is that this is a combination of old money and class consciousness. In other words, the rich are risk averse because all they care is preserving their wealth and the working class don’t believe and can’t even imagine that more is possible.
Regulations often stem from a particular mindset. However, they also serve to perpetuate that mindset.
As a member of the working class, I find there’s little incentive to build something new or innovate because the effort required to navigate through all the burdensome regulations is overwhelming. On top of that, any additional income I might generate from bringing my ideas or initiatives to market would be taxed at more than 50%. For many people like me, the effort simply isn’t worth it. Instead, we focus our energy on other pursuits, such as family, sports, or friendships.
This shift in focus isn’t inherently bad—a life balanced between family, friends, work, and leisure is often a recipe for happiness. However, societal progress relies heavily on the efforts of a small minority of individuals who are bold (or perhaps crazy) enough to pursue their ideas. When 90% of those individuals are discouraged from taking entrepreneurial risks, society’s capacity for innovation is severely stifled.
In short, it’s clear that excessive regulations and high taxes are holding Europe back from achieving its full potential for growth and innovation.
Which regulations exactly you find burdensome or overwhelming and stopping you from attempting the become wealthy, change your life and the world maybe?
Why would you skip having 1 billion Euros just because you could have had 2 Billion but the government took the rest? Up until 1960's rich Americans payed %91 tax, and yet they kept their entrepreneurial spirit - why you can't do the same at the stated %50?
We have global commerce; you are not only working on the creation part of something new, but also competing with similarly skilled people working with different more advantageous start conditions.
Nobody is talking about the difference between 1 and 2 billion, they are talking about the difference between 50 and 100 thousand, while competing.
> Why would you skip having 1 billion Euros just because you could have had 2 Billion but the government took the rest?
No one's making that choice. Most businesses fail, even in somewhere entrepreneur-friendly like America. Why not just work for someone else, given the rewards are capped even at relatively low level of success? Why take the risk, when taxation has failed to price risk into reward?
Does it? How many people skipped getting rich because they could have been richer? Any factual examples?
BTW, rich don't actually pay much taxes. The luxury life they live is usually not taxed, most of the things they do is considered business expense.
When a worker flies to Ibiza they first pay social security and income taxes, then they pay consumption taxes like VAT.
When a businessman flies to Ibiza they deduct whatever they can as an expense so they don't pay income tax and VAT. For whatever they can't claim that it is a business expense they will pay with a cheap loan against their assets and avoid paying income taxes. Since they still have those assents, they pay just the interest later when the assents increase in value. If their business fails those assets fail, the bank takes the assets and no taxation happens.
What the OP is trying to say is that to grow from 50k euros earned per year to 1 million euros earned per year is very, very cumbersome and, yes, mentally challenging and very stressful, and that a lot of people actively choose to stay/remain at the 50k euros per year level and they'll not take the risks of trying to get to more than 1 million per year.
Once you're at more than 1 million per year there are other challenges and you can probably afford to hire someone to take part of that burden off your shoulders, but until you get to that point you're on your own and it's very damn stressful (and by stressful I mean that that includes the possible inflated but all to real fear of getting to prison because of that tax-thingie that you didn't fill the 100% correct way or because some work your company did broke some municipal regulations or whatever and now you're on the hook for damages and, yes, personal liability).
Actually your VAT-skimming thing at the end is a very good example of that mentality, i.e. the innovators here having to have the Tax man front and center in their minds, before innovation and trying to build something useful off the ground, because if you don't know how to play the Tax man (at the limit of legality, as your example is) then you're toast. That "playing the Tax-man" thing consumes a lot of people's energy in the early stages, energy that would have been way better spent trying to actually make something new and innovative.
[the 50k and 1 million figures are just used as examples, maybe it's not 50k but 70k or 80k and maybe it's not 1 million but 5 to 10 million, but the idea stays the same]
For a married couple in Germany, they reach 40% in effective tax rate somewhere above 600,000€ in combined annual income.
My take would be that once people have 100k€ in net annual income per person, they just do other things and work less because it brings them more happiness than the additional money would.
You've fallen into the classic trap of thinking about the very very very tiny of people who are billionaires. Very few people are billionaires. Very few startup founders will ever be even if they succeed.
Life changing money is going from $50k/year to $1m/year. Not from $1b to $2b.
The vast majority of tax burden and complexity hits the middle class.
In Europe the capital gain tax ranges from %37 in Norway, %34 in France, %26 in Germany and Italy, %10 in Bulgaria and %0 with conditions in many other places. Tax heavens are a European invention anyway.
And no, millionaire or billionaire doesn't matter much. Europe lacks Billionaires not Millionaires. Europe is full of small businesses and by small I mean millions in profits and revenues.
In Europe %99 of the companies are small or medium sized enterprises, which is not different than the USA. In USA however, large companies have slightly higher number of employees which is an indicative of concentration of power and that's how you get your "USA has 5 unicorns in top 10 but EU has only 1" lists.
edit: And in the US there's no need to start a business to be a millionaire. You can become one by just working a regular job. Sales, consulting, tech, finance, etc. jobs can even pay you $1m per year.
With enough inflation the millionaires supply will increase, but that's not the point. Toplists and arbitrary round numbers doesn't mean anything. Let's stick with stuff that matter, like concentration of wealth.
Having less is different than lacking of. Europe lacks billionaires that can make large scale investments at whim like Elon Musk does. A more equal society has its positives but negatives too.
It's not so much any single regulation, as it is there's so many little ones that seem reasonable on the face of it. But it's also that what makes the ruling Canadian class so is the authority to bypass those regulations.
I can give one personal example; I was able to secure some public funding application for a non profit I'm affiliated with. But the only reason I was able to do that was because my parents were university classmates of the elected official that was able to pressure the staff that was handling the paperwork to prioritize and approve our application ahead of probably the hundreds in front of us. The official's going to get a nice thank you dinner out of it, but I also had to offer some information that the official could financially benefit from for him to even consider it, and a promise of some future favors.
For better or worst that's how a lot of Canadian system works. Grant applications, personal tax work, personal and business banking, etc. Anyone can get through it eventually for anything. But if you want it done quickly and in a way probably won't get tied up in the system itself, you better know someone that owes you a favor.
This is very interesting anecdote because it resonates with something that a friend of mine said when I pressured him to explain which regulations exactly are causing him problems in EU.
As it turns out, he also complained about excessive documentation he needs to get public funds for his project.
So both of you are actually complaining about accessing public funds and not actually doing private investment or starting a private company with private funds.
this is not what most of the Americans do and this is not what they mean by startups or business. Mostly.
What makes you think anything has changed here? Certainly in the UK, there are plenty of "loopholes". Outside of PAYE, there are plenty of ways to legally lower your tax burden, and plenty of wealthy business owners and shareholders make full use of those loopholes.
This is true and I believe it doesn't make sense to compare tax burdens of the people who are already wealthy.
It makes sense to compare tax burdens of well-paid employees, a favorite cash cow of most governments. These are the people who sometimes start new businesses, and use their savings to do so.
And there is a meaningful difference to the volume of their savings if their top tax bracket is 30 per cent or 55 per cent.
> As a member of the working class, I find there’s little incentive to build something new or innovate because the effort required to navigate through all the burdensome regulations is overwhelming. On top of that, any additional income I might generate from bringing my ideas or initiatives to market would be taxed at more than 50%. For many people like me, the effort simply isn’t worth it.
I find it ironic you mention "classes" (regarding "as a member of the working class"). There are problems everywhere (either as an employee or as an entrepreneur). Feeling overwhelmed is just a feeling, does not say anything about how much you can do or if you get a reasonable workload.
I think what is holding Europe back is the people not trying and understanding various things without having lots of fears (of being overwhelmed, of large tax, of what people will say, etc.).
A balance must be stricken also between what you can do (leisure, family) and how many resource you produce/consume. The purpose should be for more of leisure/family but that is ONLY IF we (I am also European) produce/consume enough. Too many smart and capable people want to "just be an employee", which results in gaps in other places (entrepreneurs, politicians, etc.).
I think this is a combination of a lack of supportive environment and a risk averse mindset. Employers will likely scoff at a CV with one or more entrepreneurial stints. The way I see it is this: if the prohibition era was implemented in the UK, people would still acquire alcohol against any and all barriers. The same drive doesn't exist for entrepreneurial goals. Regulations make things difficult but the critical problem is that the entrepreneurial mindset is not there
The 50% tax being a roadblock is exactly what the lack of ambition is about. There's an implicit assumption you're only ever achieve just over the tax limit rather than hundreds of thousands or milllions over with share options etc.
EU drone regulations ban autonomous drones from being flown. This made me stop work on them, this is not a mindset problem. It's actually a corruption problem as Google wanted to sell their software to coordinate drone flights and the EU people were "persuaded" to enact regulations to make this happen.
This is interesting, can you give a bit more details maybe? Which regulations are not allowing you to do what? I wasn’t able to find the ban, is it maybe more about safety and privacy requirements rather than outright ban?
In Germany, you can typically finance the first 1-3 years of your start-up through government gifts like "EXIST". That's why you don't need early seed investors.
EXIST is very narrowly tailored to technology start-ups founded by graduates based on their research.
Out of curiosity I was spot-checking the the founders of the latest YC 24 Winter batch at https://www.ycombinator.com/companies?batch=W24 , and the requirements would exclude at least 90% of them from EXIST if they lived in Germany.
Your sentence is not true as you present it. There are _a lot_ of constraints. Time wise, topic wise, biased wise. No typicality start-up will ever get the EXIST "gift".
Correct, that was meant as an example. There's also "Existenzgründungszuschuss" for the unemployed and various other EU funds for craftsmen and others:
"The grant covers personal living, material, and coaching expenses over 12 months, allowing founders to focus on developing their founding idea. While graduates receive personal funding of 2.500€, students can receive 1.000€ a month, additionally up to 30.000€ material and 5.000€ coaching budget that can be used to develop the founding project further."
So, 30k EUR (gross) with a maximum funding period of one year? Laughable. Also probably a little bit tragicomic.
Early seed rounds are usually measured in couple of USD millions. I wonder how these brilliant minds in the EU think they will attract the industry talent to leave their ~5x salary (outside FAANG) for such a pocket money.
Idk about the Netherlands, but in France you can take your unemployment benefits for 3 years upfront as a capital investment in a new business. And there are various grants and aid you can apply for.
In CAC40 company, It is possible to take unpaid leave with the possibility of returning to the company to set up a new business. The idea is that if the project fails, the original company recovers an employee who has learned a lot (free MBA).
If you're already unemployed, it's possible to keep your allowance longer for a business start-up or takeover.
It's also possible to sign a “rupture conventionée”, which entitles you to unemployment benefits.
But no, if the employee resigns, he or she is not entitled to unemployment benefits, nor to business start-up assistance.
the French system is generous, but not as generous.
I see this misconception a lot for resigning France.
First, there are some "protected classes" of resigning that allow you to be eligible for unemployment right after you resign, for example: moving to follow your spouse, resigning less than 3 months after having been laid off, going back to study or... creating a company!![1] :).
Second, you are entitled to unemployment benefits even if you resign without "a good reason". The issue is that you can only request your benefits 4 months after having resigned. This leads to many people believing that you just do not get anything if you resign; because who wants to eat the 4 months of no income?
This 4 months waiting period is not advertised at all, and my complotist self believes it might be on purpose; if you don't know about it and don't request it, that's less money for the government to spend :^).
[1] Conditions apply (having worked uninterrupted for the last 5 years)
It's more complicated than that [0]. The fact that you have the right to claim unemployment benefit does not mean that it will be accepted, that it will be accepted quickly or that the benefit will correspond to what you would have had if you had been laid off.
> In CAC40 company, It is possible to take unpaid leave with the possibility of returning to the company to set up a new business
It's not only CAC40, it's part of some collective bargaining agreements which apply to whole sectors (e.g. SYNTEC which applies to all consulting and most IT companies).
I think recently there's been a change which says that you can if you start a new company right away. But do check with an accountant for the inevitable pitfalls.
> don’t believe and can’t even imagine that more is possible.
And/or don't think that more is better/desirable. I wouldn't consider myself working class, but I was definitely raised with the idea that making obscene amounts of money is actually pretty selfish/immoral and not something one ought to strive for. That doesn't preclude going into business. But it is pretty antithetical to the VC funding model and the creation of billion dollar businesses.
In general, it seems that the culture in America is that wealth is virtuous and confers status, whereas in Europe that at least isn't so universal and some circles it is even seen as shameful (consider that variants on socialism are still mainstream political ideologies in Europe).
But we're not talking about obscene amounts of money. Just making enough to have some savings so you can do things like a career break or retire early is discouraged (and mostly impossible). Europe wants you to work, and keep working, forever.
Considering the differences in living prices in major capitals and other cities, I would claim you can do that (career break/retire early) even today in multiple countries in Europe.
But that would mostly mean changing places. If you go and work 10-15 years in an expensive/high pay city, you could retire in a less expensive city.
On the other hand if you expect that everything will be as when you were working (place, expenses, etc.), I am not sure it is the case even in the US for early retirements ...
Success is viewed differently by some. Being educated, having healthy lives, having access to many public servicesnare seen as a successful healthy life by many.
It’s not something that Americans in general explicitly believe, but you can see it in their attitudes and behavior towards the rich and successful. For example, HN (being somewhat weighted towards American cultural norms) collectively believes that people who have made lots of money are especially wise and hard working, and therefore have special insights to offer to the rest of us. True or not, this is a culturally specific belief.
I think this is just a bias. I've not seen much that makes me think Americans think rich people are more virtuous, at all. Certainly not enough to create a stereotype out of, even if I thought stereotypes were a good idea.
Yeah, I was raised with that idea. I did make some nice businesses, but I don't care for growing because of growing. If I catch a few 100k a year for everyone in the company (yep, it is the reason I like tiny companies: we can just decide to all make the same), I don't really care about the rest. Doing that for 10 years (even shorter but he) is enough for anyone to live out their life in comfort out of the (etfs etc) interest here. I keep on doing making new things as I like it, but need no more money, so that helps.
> it seems that the culture in America is that wealth is virtuous and confers status, whereas in Europe that at least isn't so universal and some circles it is even seen as shameful
Isn't this due to different types of Christian traditions? AFAIK In some, it is considered that the wealth is given by the God to the virtuous ones and they are merely guardians of it and responsible to use use the wealth in a virtuous ways and therefore getting rich is encouraged and the rich are treated with respect?
There's something similar among some Muslim sects too, in Muslim majority countries it is not uncommon to believe that the God chose someone to be rich and there's more to that person that the eye can see therefore must be respected. Some religious communities even get so obscenely rich and you can see poor servants having a religious experience when their leader arrives with an a luxury car.
The way I see it, at least in France, it's not really a question of religion. "The rich" are thought to have acquired their wealth doing dubious things, mostly by "exploiting the poor".
There's also a very strongly egalitarian way of thinking, as in pretty much everybody is interchangeable. So, if someone does better than somebody else, it's likely because of something "unfair" (or luck) and not thanks to being more competent.
I've never personally known any "very rich" people so I can't comment on them.
But the perception I'm talking about applies even to "reasonably confortable" people. Think your random engineer making 100k a year (which is a "good" salary in these parts). Basically, someone with some form of STEM degree.
I doubt most of these people are doing anything shady. Plus, this kind of income doesn't really give them any kind of financial independence: they wouldn't be able to afford not having a job.
> I doubt most of these people [random engineer making 100k a year] are doing anything shady.
I guess it depends what your level of "shady" is - I know a bunch of people in that kind of range who were all about "optimising their tax" (which I would consider to be "tax evasion" - morally wrong even if it is legal at the time.)
You know "optimizing" means different things for different people.
For example: France offers specific saving deposits with guaranteed interest rate and non-taxed. If a normal saving deposit would be taxed and has similar interest rate, "optimizing their tax" means just using the that specific deposit.
There are many other schemes that I can't believe they exist (example: in France if you create an investment account, after 5 years of the account existence you are not taxed on the gains! So what you can do is "create account with 100 euro", "wait 5 years", "invest more / potentially do gains" - and you will not be taxed!!!)
You will tell me "that is morally wrong!". I could agree with you, but I see nobody demanding better laws/regulations, probably because they don't know/care about details.
Yes, there are advantages of a stable and well functioning systems that don't have disruptors and we indeed benefit of it as having good lives but unfortunately this can't last as those who go hard on progress and tear down everything and rebuilding again will eventually get ahead on everything and won't let us just be as we now see with US billionaires having impact over Europe.
Americans feel more pain but are also rewarded, Europe has no option but to become progressive - otherwise tere will be no more Europe and the Americans and Chinese will make us adopt their ways.
Oh, BTW, America is also struggling. The latest political developments are an attempt to change course - they are trying to become a bit more like Europe with the race and class based politics holding roots. They say they are anti-regulation anti-discrimination(of whites specifically) but the core MAGA movement is all about putting barriers and preserving old ways for the benefit of a subset of people. Americans are too in soul searching. Their MAGA literally means fixing what is no longer great but their demands are actually quite conservative and they already begin falling off with their accelerations partners.
> unfortunately this can't last as those who go hard on progress and
tear down everything and rebuilding again
A notion of "bare progress" is the elephant in the room. Progress is a
vector. It has magnitude and direction. People talk of moving "forward
or back", but science also has a steering wheel.
> and the Americans and Chinese will make us adopt their ways.
This very notion of "progress" as a totalitarian force is also
dangerous. The boot is on the other foot from 80 years ago. When
Europe was starting a 1000 year technological master-race, more
measured minds had to extinguish that fire. I see many similarities
today - people seeing "progress" simply as dominance.
I liked the brain-dump in TFA, but I think it's over-complex and too
tied to a contemporary interpretation of capital investment.
We've been spooging away our talent for generations here. Look at how
we treated Turing. We mismanage or sell-off everything cool we invent.
What Britain still suffers from is class disloyalty. We still have a
strong but invisible class system which is now international
financiers. Those sorts "float above" the ordinary economy, they are
disconnected from UK interests and don't give a toss about
engineering, science, knowledge, education...
> When Europe was starting a 1000 year technological master-race, more measured minds had to extinguish that fire
A lot of the measured minds were saying eugenics was a good idea. It took the horror of seeing experiments and concentration camps to make it so deeply unfashionable the idea couldn't even survive in academia.
I believe you're right. Edwin Black's "IBM and the Holocaust" and
Kazuo Ishiguro's "The Remains of the Day" both played their part in
revising my naive ideas about simple narratives of WW2.
But look at this post made here a couple of days ago [0]. It's
absolutely back in fashion. I think technofascism really is a thing
now - you can feel certain people getting quite giddy with thoughts of
power.
Power's always in fashion. Academics seem to love socialism, because it (in practice) centralises decision-making nationally to a group of smart people (and the academics might imagine themselves to be these insanely powerful people).
Eugenics was the same. It was a Progressive way of thinking, if I remember correctly.
> Everyone wants to imagine themselves "insanely powerful people" now. It's part of the sell.
I'm not sure this is true. Socialism does have a surprising foothold, but I think that's largely due to the larger number of people flowing through academia.
>Yes, there are advantages of a stable and well functioning systems
Current EU is definitely not a stable and well functioning system. Look at economic conditions, political outcomes, illegal immigration, wealth inequality, societal and political trust, homelessness rates, birth rates, free speech suppression, welfare austerity, etc Everything has been going downhill since the 2008 crash. It's a powder keg.
>they are trying to become a bit more like Europe with the race and class based politics holding roots.
What are you on about? Europe doesn't have much race based politics, that's a thing America keeps pushing.
That's quite the conservative talk-radio shopping list.
Illegal immigration is a metric of the EUs economic success and social stability compared with North Africa, Eastern European Accession States, and the war-torn middle east. If America shared land borders and direct migration routes with Islamic caliphates and the like, they'd know all about it.
Economic Conditions and Political Outcomes are pretty sane and tolerable for all but a select group of (surprise surprise) US backed agitators like Hungary. You have to remember that the EU is run as a society rather than an economy, and must be judged on this ethos. People are very fond of using the comparable GDPs of Bavaria and Mississippi in this conversation - forgetting to mention the life expectancy is 10 years less and infant mortality 400% higher on the US side.
Societal and Political trust is still quite high - despite much fearmongering, the far-right are not gaining the political capital necessary to instigate significant change outside of Hungary.
Homelessness rates are a factor of illegal migration - and are laughably low compared to the US on a per capita basis; ditto whatever warped contention you have regarding 'welfare austerity'. We just call it social security. During Covid and in the period afterwards it was hugely ramped up across Europe - and not in a giveaway budget with a check personally signed by an Oligarch.
Re 'free speech suppression' I'm really not sure what you're aiming at. The current cultural friction regarding things like gender-identification and pronoun usage are uniquely american exports. On basically all other counts other than venue-shopping defamation cases, it's a moot point for any normal person.
Finally re birth rates - they tend to go down in wealthy and advanced societies outside of select religious groupings (looking at you Salt Lake City) so I'm not sure what your point is there.
It isn't a "conservative talk-radio shopping list". It is reality in quite a few areas in Europe and the UK.
> Economic Conditions and Political Outcomes are pretty sane and tolerable for all but a select group of (surprise surprise) US backed agitators like Hungary. You have to remember that the EU is run as a society rather than an economy, and must be judged on this ethos. People are very fond of using the comparable GDPs of Bavaria and Mississippi in this conversation - forgetting to mention the life expectancy is 10 years less and infant mortality 400% higher on the US side.
This isn't true. I know many people that have moved from Spain to Hungary. Most of these people where politically fairly normal e.g. either centre-left right or centre-left. I speak to people from all over Europe regularly and many of them do not feel the way that you are describing.
> Societal and Political trust is still quite high - despite much fearmongering, the far-right are not gaining the political capital necessary to instigate significant change outside of Hungary.
That isn't true. I know many areas of Europe where the electorate keep on voting for further right parties. The same is happening in the UK. Labour only won because the Conservatives lost and the Reform party did extremely well for what is a relatively new party. I know the same is happening in Belgium (I speak regularly with Belgian nationals). Areas of Spain that are most affected by immigration have voted for further right parties. So I know this isn't true.
> Re 'free speech suppression' I'm really not sure what you're aiming at.
Just look up the hate speech laws enacted throughout Europe and in the UK and some of the cases that have been prosecuted. We do not have a right to the free speech in the UK and the majority of Europe doesn't either.
>>This isn't true. I know many people that have moved from Spain to Hungary. Most of these people where politically fairly normal e.g. either centre-left right or centre-left. I speak to people from all over Europe regularly and many of them do not feel the way that you are describing.
The plural of anecdotes is not data, nor does your select social circle represent a cogent sample group.
Orbans stated position is to pivot Hungary from a democracy into an illiberal state, modeled after Putin's Russia. At the EU summit in mid-December, for example, he refused to agree to the extension of the Russia sanctions that expire at the end of January.
Hungary are on the brink of being kicked out of the Schengen Zone, have about 12 billion in EU funds frozen because of their stupidity, and are now getting loans off China like some sort of tinpot African dictatorship in order to bridge funding gaps.
The next biggest right-wing rise is - surprise surprise - bordering them and the ex-Soviet Bloc in Poland. That waned so quickly with the escalation of War in Ukraine that, even if they joined forces, Konfederacja + PiS could still not form a majority coalition for seat of the Polish Government.
>>That isn't true. I know many areas of Europe where the electorate keep on voting for further right parties. The same is happening in the UK.
You missed my key qualifier 'necessary to instigate significant change'. The Overton window shifts when society is impacted by War and mass refugee immigration, particularly in a period of high-taxes following high social spend (lockdown).
>> Just look up the hate speech laws enacted throughout Europe and in the UK and some of the cases that have been prosecuted.
Citations needed.
>> We do not have a right to the free speech in the UK and the majority of Europe doesn't either.
Well no, not explicitly, as they have a different legal and basis for law as the US - e.g. they don't have a codified constitution either as they came from a common law system based on the French Courts. Instead they hold the same proportional right as a negative right to freedom of expression under the common law.
Its a moot point anyway as since 1998, freedom of expression is guaranteed according to Article 10 of the European Convention on Human Rights across Europe.
Freedom o expression does not guarantee you freedom of consequence in Europe. If you make fun of a politicians they or the state can come back after you for it.
Political satire is one of the oldest and grandest cultural traditions in Europe. Hell, most European countries even have some variant of a political satire show like Spitting Image:
Yeah right, Reform AFD Rassemblement national Fratelli d'Italia and other risings stars have nothing to do with race and even if they do it's Americans behind it.
Everyone knows that Europeans are much more racist than Americans, it's just that we are much less explicit about it and its issues are different than the issues in the USA.
The governments of Europe no longer hold a monopoly of violence. Terror groups and MENAPT groups have brought a diverse range of violent threats to people.
Building a robot army to solve this is one viable solution that is hardware and software based.
The efficient & practical way is to stop renewing residence and work visas, making acquisition of visas harder through complex demands of high language proficiency, and a high amount of money as proof-of-funds, perhaps requiring a local referral too. It's what countries that don't want immigrants but don't want to say it out loud do.
Illegal immigration is a BS term, make immigration legal if you don't want illegal immigrants. It's not like people choose the hard, dangerous and expensive ways instead of buying a Ryanair ticket. When the illegal immigrants BS doesn't hold they all start complaining about legal immigrants as with the UK and their core Brexit reason.
Well no, its not. Specifically in relation to Asylum Seekers contravening the EU Dublin Regulation and tearing up their passports on an intra-EU flight so they can claim Asylum and the associated social welfare in Ireland rather than France or Germany due to our much higher rates.
Basically economic migrants - predominately young men from the middle east - disguising themselves as Refugees and taking social supports away from the families fleeing warzones.
That is one subset of immigration crime that is rightly frown upon and can be completely avoided abolition of the country borders concept that was introduced in the last 100 years or less. Want to help people in need? Instead of confining them into areas and then impose restriction on those and give some of them some money, help those in need. Or don't help, but at least don't pretend that you are bringing justice to the world without addressing the core problems.
In other words, this is actually welfare fraud that happens to have a travel component.
I don't support illegal immigration, I say that people traveling and seeking better lives should not be illegal.
I think we are done here since I don't feel spending time for positions I never claimed. I despise this type of argumentation, its a known fallacy and its useless.
You can count yourself as won an arguments if you feel like that.
That's a ridiculous way of thinking about it. Anyone who says they don't want illegal immigrants isn't objecting simply because of the legal status, they think the process should be upheld which prevented those people from immigrating legally.
It's the same reason we don't seek to improve crime rates by legalising theft. Sure, there'd be fewer people labelled as "criminal", but the original problem would remain (and in all probability would become worse).
And why the process of immigrating legally is more than buying a ticket and a security check at the border?
Obviously, it is the reason that matters and the reason is not benign.
People want other people to like people in certain way they and then castrate Alan Turing for illegal love. People want to have slaves then they have illegally free slaves problem.
I can understand this might make sense if race (or ethnicity) were the only factor in the world to consider, but since it's not, is there value in thinking as though it is?
What makes me think that it's about race(loosely speaking. IMHO it's more about xenophobia and feeling like losing privilege o identity as a nation etc) is that once you make the immigration legal they start complaining about numbers like in Britain.
BTW I don't disagree with the people who don't want everyone be welcome, I just think that their solution ideas and demands are misguided. My observation is that people from various ethnicities can function in cohesion and are about the same when they are from a similar educational background and rarely have ethnical or racial issues among themselves and IMHO all the problems will be resolved if you let people naturally find their appropriate group they belong to instead of having BS like country borders and visas and DEI or race based positive discrimination etc.
Thanks for your reply. I think I agree with at least some of it, but it is still solely talking about race.
The worries people have, especially in somewhere like Britain, is it's a country with a relatively small population compared to the level of immigration, and housing is an enormous problem. One outcome that I think can be to a considerable extent[0] attributed to high net immigration is that housing has become smaller (many houses divided into flats), and housing has become much more expensive. So anyone who already owned a house is sitting fairly pretty, as they get bouyed up by the housing market, but anyone looking to buy for the first time, or buy into a new market for the first time (e.g. moving to near schools for kids) is going to have a massive problem, as the competitive pressure has up-bidded housing and made it worthwhile to subdivide and sell/rent smaller dwellings.
This could be all white people doing it (somewhere like Cornwall in the UK is mostly annoyed because other Brits buy holiday homes there, driving up prices for locals and their kids who are coming up) - it doesn't matter. The housing costs are what matter. And they, a bit like fuel, drive up everything else: NHS workers need higher salaries to just be able to live in many places, which drives up taxes.
This isn't to avoid actual race/ethnicity-related tensions. But there's a giant clump of people who are just fed up with their money going far less far than their parents' and grandparents' money did when it comes to one of the fundamentals of life: housing yourself and your family. And their parents and grandparents are equally upset that their kids/grandkids have in a major sense a harder life than they did.
[0] definitely not fully; there are multiple factors. But if you net import the equivalent of the population of Liverpool each year, and you aren't building a Liverpool each your to house them, it's obvious that prices will start shooting up.
Leisure, that is, truly retaining time to encourage and develop the spirit that is not just work
> There is an Indian savagery, a savagery peculiar to the Indian blood, in the manner in which the Americans strive after gold: and the breathless hurry of their work - the characteristic vice of the New World - already begins to infect old Europe, and makes it savage also, spreading over it a strange loss of spirit (Geistlosigkeit). One is now ashamed of repose: even long reflection almost causes remorse of conscience. Thinking is done with a stop-watch, as dining is done with the eyes fixed on the financial newspaper; we live like men who are continually "afraid of letting opportunities slip." "Better do anything whatever, than nothing" - this principle also is a noose with which all culture and all higher taste may be strangled. And just as all form obviously disappears in this hurry of workers, so the sense for form itself, the ear and the eye for the melody of movement, also disappear.
Quality of life, if you define an actual proper life as something happening outside of work hours and sleep.
We don't worry whether my insurance will cover the next health issue that will happen to me, be it broken leg or lifelong costly treatment. I don't have to desperately try to save maybe 1.5 million $ to put my kids through decent university, if they desire to do so. I am not brutally tossed on the sidewalk when I am fired, both employer and state gives a LOT of support to not fall off the societal cliff and end up as typical US homeless person. We have way more resting time to recharge via holidays (this fellow from 1.1. is running on 90% corporate work contract and thus sporting 50 vacations days per year - now thats QOL improvement, I've already planned 6 week+ vacations for this year). We have on average simply healthier lifestyles and it shows literally massively.
I could go on for a long time. But you can ignore that - compare usage of mental health medication, from what I've seen its much more massive in US, manifesting the additional stress that US population is cca exposed to.
Its a balance - you add more money, you remove more 'humanity', and the additional stress is there and very real. Everybody has different ideal spot, and this also changes a lot during life. Isn't it better to have 2 systems next to each other, and everybody can pick how they want to live your life? Focus purely on money is stupid, their added value in life quickly diminishes once a person is not poor, then other aspects of life become much more important. The complete opposite is same, 0 progress. Something in between, as always, is the best road for most.
You also get your defence and healthcare advancements mostly paid for by Americans, either as taxes or healthcare costs that funnel into R&D spend. It's easy to give things away when you mostly only have maintenance costs to bear, and not very much risk.
People need examples of success in their network. Most people have frankly never met or heard of anyone who founded a successful startup- and therefore would never think of taking on such a risk. I agree that in some places there is a sense of malaise, but if we are to believe founders are a 1-2% outlier of the population, I don’t see why America’s 1-2% should be so much more ambitious than the UKs. I think it’s more a cycle induced by lack of funding.
Should individuals routinely risk their own livelihood to benefit a select few capitalist? Does this improve the life of the average American? Seeing how they vote it seems generally it does not?
Havent FAANG companies improved the lives of the average American? They definitely did, and all these companies were created by ambitious individuals with a bold vision and prospect of making lots of money!
By taking big risks, one might ascend to this capitalist class if they succeed.
"FAANG improved average lives" is by no means a safe assumption. It needs to be very carefully demonstrated for each individual company, with consideration of the worsenings as well. The forgotten sixth, Microsoft, is probably easier to make a case for.
>Completely agree, the problem in Europe is not regulations or anything like that - it is a mindset issue.
You can change mindsets with regulations that reward taking risks in new businesses/innovations, and punish rent seeking and sitting on inherited real estate for example.
But as long as EUrope is focused on maintaining the status quo of boomers and gentrified dynasties of billionaires that you probably played against in Assassins' Creed, nothing will change.
Let's make simple calculations. In California, near the start of the 20th century there were more than 34 million native Americans living in what was their land. Now there are in California 300-700.000 native Americans.
They were exterminated and replaced by a very small European population. Like sterilising a Petri dish and letting bacteria grow, the opportunities that population experienced were the biggest any population in the world ever had. Just look at a graph of the population growth of US OR California in the last century and compare it to others.
Now there is in California a population of near 40 million people.
That is not a "mindset", this is real growth that they could experience and the rest of the world could not.
These numbers are at least two orders of magnitude higher than typical estimates. What are you talking about? It's even higher than the typical all time max which is on the order of 10 million.
The safe job earns much much more unless you are the founder. Equity pay for start-ups in the UK for devs is very poor, or non-existent, and the base salary also very poor (and not even guaranteed to be paid if they go under). You can instead work for a company like nvidia, google or meta and get a huge base, and nice equity on top.
If UK startups paid equity to their devs, I would work a lot harder when I've worked at them, but startups require working hard and long hours and if I've got no skin in the game, what incetive do I have to make sure the company is successful.
I've been shocked in my career in the UK by just how much founders will rip people off on equity
In basically every UK startup I've worked at they've done 1 or all of the below:
1. Offered options in numbers with no valuation/percentage of ownership. "We offer you 40000 stock options!". When asked to clarify numbers, they delay and never tell you. Inevitably they have a value of a few pence each
2. Withdraw options unilaterally when you leave the company with no option to exercise
3. Never get round to filling in the paperwork so you never actually receive them
I was _shocked_ when i worked for my first US startup and they just...gave me the options. And I could exercise them whenever I wanted. And they expired 10 years after I left the company
I'm from EU and would be totally open to move to UK if there was an opportunity to make more there while working on something cool. But there simply isn't?
Then there are US startups where I could likely make 2 or 3x what I make in EU or UK.
So why would talent every consider moving to the UK to build a startup in 2025 anyway?
He means a safe wage job pays a third less in the UK than Germany.
Not sure if it's true so let's look at some stats:
Germany median for software engineer: €66,000
United kingdom median: €58,000
Note depending on source, these numbers both vary broadly within the same range, but with Germany salaries being about 10-15% higher on most sources, so nowhere near the figure claimed.
10-15% in the opposite direction. That is I stated they earn 10-15% more.
33% less equates to them earning roughly 50% more. The difference between 10-15% and 50% is huge!
(trivial example, if someone is earning £100,000, then someone earning 33% less makes £66,666. But Someone earning £100,000 makes 50% more than someone making £66,666)
You said that UK's salaries are 2/3 of the Germany ones, but this doesn't mean that the Germany ones are 1/3 more, they are 1/2 (or 50%) more. That's pretty far from 10-15%.
Something not talked about - you probably won't be able to lease suitable property if you are doing anything other than apps.
Doing soldering of prototypes? Good luck finding a landlord that would let you do it. The moment they hear "fumes" is a nope, fire hazard, safety risk and won't let you...
My view is that the US startup culture exists because of wealth inequality at the $1-$20m net worth level. Wealth inequality is socially incentivized at that level because of the lack of a decent social safety net. If you don't save money then at 50 you may end up homeless on the street due to bad luck. But if you don't get bad luck then you end up at 50 with a large amount of money that you don't have much to do with. So you start investing some in riskier things because who cares.
US founders not from wealthy backgrounds can often get $500k from friends and family. I doubt those in the UK can do so.
There's massive massive social costs due to this in the US so be careful what you wish for.
> 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.
This isn't just an EU thing, for what it's worth. The US is the outlier.
False. Even good jobs with American companies and what not are subject to ridiculous tax problems in the UK. You give you employees equity but then they have to raise vast sums of capital just to hold on to it to afford their taxes when there is virtually no real liquidity pre IPO.
It's anti success. And there is garbage everywhere, people keep voting for antisocial housing and bad cultures. It's a failing state.
Correct, but the tail of VC being fat is unique to the US. Pretty much the rest of the world is like the UK in all but a miniscule percentage preferring stability rather than moonshots.
Yeah but if it's not a moonshot SaaS factory they don't want to hear the reality.
For example, Ireland's state VC - Enterprise Ireland - ranked first in the world of venture capital investors by deal count in 2020 by Pitchbook. The average size of the deal compared to a Series A was laughable in context, but the ethos is there.
Not just in startups. Feels like Arm lost almost their whole software division over a few years. This was an extremely stable high-profit-margin business, and it was obvious that it was uncompetitive on the labour market. But something in the culture stopped management from increasing salaries, so everyone buggered off to foreign companies.
I hear they fixed it eventually but seems like an unnecessary loss.
Going through our pre-seed round atm and it is incredibly frustrating. I haven't raised in the US so it may be similar there, but the amount of time wasted for a relatively small amount of money is painful.
I'm also not sure what the government can do. SEIS/EIS is a great scheme, but the SEIS limit of £250k feels almost too small to do anything meaningful, and EIS funds are generally later stage or re-investment from SEIS.
I lived in Ireland for 10 years. It's not the same as the UK but there _is_ cultural overlap. Every time you shared a new idea with _anyone_, even things as simple as "I want to buy a site and build a house on it", the first thing you hear is how that's a bad idea, you will fail, it will never work, and you need to leave it to "professionals".
Not to mention the whole idea that trying to be successful is "notions" and should be sneered at.
Edit: To compare -
Me: "I want to build a house"
Irish friends: "That's a bad idea, you'll never make it work, you'll go bankrupt and it will kill you..."
California/Oregon friends: "Fuck yeah I'll bring a nailgun"
(UK resident, born and bread) Yes this drives me absolutely mad. I'm a poor risk taker and can come up with all those reasons something's a bad idea, but when I've made up my mind to take the risk I want supportive people around not people who would rather you never tried anything outside their "comfort zone".
And the problem runs in families. This is not therapy but every time I talked to my parents about an idea it would be dammed with faint praise or I'd be told I'm wasting my time. It's taken 20 years to work out that the more they dissed an idea is the better it actually was.
I don't know what the regulations are in the UK, but in many European countries, building a house isn't just about knowing how to build a house, it's also about knowing all the DIN requirements. These are necessary for insurance to pay out if something happens to your house. Let's take a simple example: You're wiring your house. Because of a mistake, the house burns down.
Insurance: “Okay sir, who did the electrical wiring?
you: “Me”.
Insurance: “Are you a professional?
you: “No"
Insurance: “Have you had your work certified by a third party?"
you: “Do my buddies count?”
insurance: "Have a good day sir"
There may never be a problem and you may have figured out everything that's required to get your butt covered (good for you in this case), but the fact is that a lot of people don't know about these things, do their own thing and get royally screwed if there's a problem and, God forbid, someone gets hurt.
> The UK lost Deep Mind - which could have been OpenAI!! -- to Google.
Deepmind is still in the UK. And more, including foreign, bidders driving up prices for acquisitions and investments, will lead to more people making the jump.
Profit goes out of the country, reducing investment and rich UK people to invest in new UK companies. It's the same problem with many of our companies being sold to foreign investors: profits are taken outside the country (as we did to other countries in the 19th century and earlier) so our labour enriches other countries while our country gets poorer.
> labour enriches other countries while our country gets poorer.
in reality, the UK isn't poorer than before. It is about the same - no growth. It is only poorer when compared to the US's growth.
One's labour, when being paid market rates, does not make one's country poorer. And those profits from said labour was paid for by the acquitition of the capital - money was invested.
So in essense, the "poorness" that the UK feels right now is not a result of these companies getting foreign ownership, but the UK gov't lack of industrial policy and investment. Brexit is the last straw probably.
Circa 80% of world trade is done in USD, and the US literally creates it out of thin air, and it will all bleed into the economy somehow, someway.
Without sovereign protection you just can not compete with that, ever. It's really that simple.
Simply look at China they may export loads of goods but it's predominantly priced in USD, and what do they do with all that excise USD, the only thing they can do, buy US debt. It's truly perverse.
Or look at every UK company that was bought up with those very same magic dollars.
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).
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.
> 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.
I think it was more about economics than competency.
By the end of WW2 the UK was bankrupt and completely ruined economically, while the US had become the industrial powerhouse of the world thanks to abundant resources, manpower, and the fact that the war largely took place far from its borders (a few tiny islands notwithstanding). By the end of WW2 the US owned nearly all the gold that Europe previously owned which led to the US Dollar the worldwide reserve currency.
If the UK wants to pretend that WW2 (or, indeed, WW1) happened like a shock storm, unforseen and unforseeable, with no involvement from them they are welcome to do that. The result of that attitude was that the UK parliament was only allowed to govern a small and increasingly irrelevant island with lousy weather and steadily worsening economic prospects instead of a global empire.
There is a lesson for people governing global empires here - don't allow major wars to blow up on your borders. Or, ideally, anywhere. Maybe spend some time promoting peace and prosperity. Train the diplomats in diplomacy.
You'll notice that the US solution at the end of WWII was completely different to the European settlement at the end of WWI. And the US approach to warring was a lot more staid than the UK's. These are basic matters of competence.
Some fair points, but remember that the US had the benefit of knowing that post-WW1 settlement was a failure. Of course, Wilson did object to the conditions of the Treaty of Versailles, so it's fair to say the US had a better perspective from the start -- though one can argue that the US' own failure to ratify the League of Nations was a contributing factor to WW2.
Another key factor is that the US had no empire to hold together, and, to its credit, wisely did not seek to expand its territory after WW2 in order to create one (which it could have easily done, and which the UK had done many times before).
British weather is great. Enough rain to keep the land green and pleasant, temperatures that don't get too hot nor too cold - the very definition of temperate.
We aren't without our annoying and extreme weather though. Eg in the north of England last week it was -10c for a few nights and a week of 0/1c daytime temperatures with a biting wind chill. Before that was heavy snow and ice.
Heat waves up to 35-38c aren't unheard of. Our houses aren't built for this so a heatwave is quite uncomfortable as houses stay 20-25c overnight
Plenty of flooding in various parts
This autumn and winter has seen a lot of storms
The south fares much better of course and without as much flooding
Nothing important Sudetenland, nothing important in Austria, nothing important in Poland. They tried your strategy in the 30s and it was not a success.
Also, family ties. European monarchs were a really tight bunch. For instance, the tzar of Russia and the king of the British Empire at the time of WWI were brothers.
> Their acceptance of poor performers over the last 20+ years has been striking
How many PMs has the UK been though in that time? _Way_ more than the average Western country. We don't accept poor oerformers more than anywhere else, we kick them out of office - but the talent pipeline is abysmal so the next one is usually awful too.
It's interesting that incompetence ... Fabians started in 1884 and a lot of insanely destructive ideas seem to defend from those circles. We don't have the great leap forward it's slower but something as bad on a longer timescale
That is a better graph, but the conclusion I would draw is much the same.
The EU gets a boost from the inclusion of Eastern European economies that have been fast growing from a lower base.
If you compare the US and the UK to the four biggest EU economies, the US is doing best by far, and the UK is doing better than three and worse than one:
If that's adjusted for cost of living and inflation then isn't that hiding the actual economic changes? If GDP falls then cost of living would likely go down and vice versa.
I'd say ruin - in great part from the costs of two World Wars - came before the end of the Empire. Wikipedia notes of WWII - "Britain was left essentially bankrupt, with insolvency only averted in 1946 after the negotiation of a US$3.75 billion loan from the United States". Vs. the Partition and dissolution of the British Raj were in 1947.
Most of the world's gold was in the US by the end of the war.
The flow of gold into the US starting in 1933 is thought to be why the Great Depression was moderating so much there and then: the money supply was inflating.
Yes, "winning" as in not being completely destroyed, occupied, and maybe even enslaved. Check out what Poland looked like in 1940 when it lost, or what Germany looked like in 1945, or, well, 1949.
USSR was also terribly battered by WWII, and its leadership was not highly competent either; I'd say both parameters were much worse than UK's. But it managed to remain a large empire with a high economic potential, and UK could not.
>USSR was also terribly battered by WWII, and its leadership was not highly competent either
The USSR moved all its industry eastward, as the German army advanced, waiting for the very last moment to do so. Quite an incredible feat that allowed them to beat Germany at industrial efficiency and secure victory.
Here's an analysis of the mechanisms underpinning this kind of achievement according to a Russian mathematician:
>One of the fathers of synergetics, G. Haken, in his article [9], recalls the following story from the Ancient Testament: “It was the custom in a certain community for the guests to bring their own wine to weddings, and all the wines were mixed before drinking. Then one guest thought that if all the other guests would bring wine, he would not notice when drinking if he brought water instead. Then the other guests did the same, and as the result they all drank water.”
>In this example, two situations are possible. In the first, everyone contributes his share, giving his equal part, and everyone will equally profit. In the second, each strives for the most advantageous conditions for himself. And this can lead to the kind of result mentioned in the story.
>Two different arithmetics correspond to these two situations. One arithmetic is the usual one, the one accepted in society, ensuring “equal rights,” and based on the principle “the same for everyone,” for instance in the social utopia described by Owen. In a more paradoxal form, this principle is expressed in M. Bulgakov’s Master and Margarita by Sharikov: “Grab everything and divide it up.”
>The aspiration to this arithmetic is quite natural for mankind, but if society is numerous and non-homogeneous, then it can hardly be ruled according to this principle. The ideology of complete equality and equal rights, which unites people and inspires to perform heroic deeds, can effectively work only in extremal situations and for short periods of time. During these periods such an organization of society can be very effective. An example is our own country, which, after the destructions and huge losses of World War II, rapidly became stronger than before the war.
>One of the authors personally witnessed such an atmosphere of psychological unity when he was working on the construction of the sarcophagus after the catastrophe of the Chernobyl nuclear facility. The forces of the scientists involved were so strongly polarized 2 that the output of each of them was increased tenfold as compared to that in normal times. During that period it was not unusual for us to call each other in the middle of the night.
>Nevertheless such heroism, self-denial, and altruism, when each wants to give (and not to take) as much as possible, is an extremal situation, a system that can function only for short intervals of time. Here the psychological aspect is crucial, everyone is possessed by the same idea — to save whatever may be saved at any cost. But the psychology of the masses, which was studied by the outstanding Russian emigr´e sociologist Pitirim Sorokin, is presently studied only outside of Russia.
A truck without a driver has no value in a war. Lend lease was important but the ambition and drive to defeat Germany required huge sacrifices on all sides that are impossible without shared cultural ideals.
Those "shared cultural ideals" amounted to very little beyond "conquer the Nazis, before they conquer us" - as late-war and post-war relations between the USSR and the Western Allies showed. Or, as pre-'39 Western policies showed. The '30's saw the Nazis as an evil...but a useful and "not too" evil, that would (mostly, in effect) protect the West from the greater evil of Soviet Communism.
You’ve watched too many Hollywood movies. Yes, Lend-Lease was very helpful - but only about 5% of Soviet GDP. For example, the Soviets produced more tanks than all other allies combined, and that was while under massive active attack and invasion - even moved entire factories.
The real myth is that the Soviets just threw meat waves and would have lost without Uncle Sam. Most of that was anti communist propaganda and any serious (ie non-narrative driven) historian knows the truth about the industrial and military achievements of the Soviets in that war.
"the Soviets produced more tanks than all other allies combined"
For such feats, factory equipment mattered. So did trucks. Studebakers were relatively cheap and probably wouldn't move the needle on your GDP-based meter, but they were very important to Soviet logistics.
The USSR also gained de facto control over relatively developed places like the Baltics, Czechoslovakia and East Germany, and exploited them.
Czechoslovak industry in the early 1950s was producing a shitton of products sold under their real price to the Soviets, or bargained for cheap agricultural products.
Exactly this. Great Britain colonized huge parts of the globe and had an empire. They were kings of trade and the world. Now they are just a surveillance nanny state and hollow shell of their former self.
I regularly see opinion pieces in the British Press advising young Brits to get out. In 2022 one writer wrote 'Britain is fed up, bitter, and practically broke – and it’s all going to get worse' and indeed it still is and getting worse. One basic problem: an unsustainable welfare and health system and overwrought bureaucracy. Today I learn that one major bank is considering leaving the UK in view of excessive 'red tape'.
Interestingly people, especially poor people, were better nourished during the WW 2 rationing than before the war. Also e.g. universal healthcare was establised post-war.
Is number of war ships, or billionaires, a good measure for a country?
I have not drilled down into the data, but I think it highly likely poor people did not benefit.
I have read that the Empire was a fiscal net negative. That was offset by it being a free market area with policies that favoured the UK, the benefits from that went primarily to a small minority.
Same. I grew up in Canada and my country didn't fund my dreams. The US did. It is a shame and the amount of loss that Canada has every single year because the dumb VCs who exist in Canada cannot look at that big picture.
For example, right now there is not a single VC in Canada who does large pre seed / seed investments based on an idea and the founding team.
In the US you can get a 1 million cheque within a week.
That is the real reason Canada is failing on a macro scale.
In the UK’s case, feudalism is alive and well. The entire tax system is designed so parasites descended from thugs like the Duke of Westminster or Charles of Battenberg-Saxe-Coburg und Gotha never have to pay property taxes on their extensive land holdings.
That was worse in the 18th and 19th century, and yet people were willing to ground new corporations back then.
I think the answer is something the left won't like - we (Europe) are killing ourselves with bureaucracy, often environmental bureaucracy. A road to hell paved with good intentions.
The documentation to the Lower Thames Crossing, a planned highway tunnel, already exceeds 360 000 pages. This is just crazy.
It is often accomplished enterpreneurs who complain of bureaucracy.
I remember reading a German enterpreneur's complaint that he was unable to build an extra electric connection between his two industrial buildings in Germany in less than a year, due to endless rounds of permiting for that single cable.
He contrasted the situation to Poland, where his application on a similar site was processed in two weeks and it took two more weeks to actually build the connection.
If you think complaints of bureacracy have no merit, maybe you never faced any. It now takes about 10 years to get all permits for a regular block of flats in Prague, Czechia. It used to be 3 years or so back in 2000, and it takes only about 9 months in Denmark.
These are experienced developers, and they are still stuck.
That's because risk-aversion and laziness are the smart things to do. Yes, it would be cool to come up with the next Facebook, but most financial advisors will tell you that the actually best thing you can do is some form of "SP500 and hold 20 years" because from the perspective of an individual, the safe option provides the best expected outcome.
Similarly, why work yourself to the bone for a miniscule chance of success, if you can... just chill instead? I used to be a highly-motivated go-getter, but then I realized, this shit ain't bringing happiness, and I turned into a work-avoider who spends time in the office mostly talking to coworkers and playing games in the toilet. My overall life satisfaction skyrocketed.
Yes, the society at large does need people to do the needful, but this ain't gonna be me.
I was also trying to raise recently. It's interesting to me that the UK has an absolutely incredibly generous startup investment scheme (SEIS)[0], and still hasn't managed to make this work. SEIS is ludicrously generous, and should make getting funding a breeze in the UK, and yet ... somehow it isn't.
0: If a few hurdles are jumped through, then an investor who gives you £250k can get £125k relief on their income tax (not what they'd have paid on £125k, literally the whole £125k), and then claim a further 50% back of the remainder from the government if you go bust.
There are definitely political - and ultimately, military-industrial - reasons for this. The UK is deeply, deeply embedded in the Anglo-centric 5-eyes criminal superstructure, and plays a huge part in the subversion of human rights at immense scale around the world, that this criminal entity commits every second of the day.
The spook factor bleeds into every technological advancement which occurs in the UK, from GCHQ outwards, like a kraken with deep, deep tentacles.
I've worked with multiple UK-based startups which, as soon as they start to gain traction in international waters/markets, immediately becomes the target for GCHQ embedding/plants. This kills the startup.
Until the British people start prosecuting their war criminals and seeks justice for the immense human rights abuses that occur, every millisecond of every day, as a result of their out of control military-industrial oppression apparatus, there is simply no hope for UK technological industry.
The world sees this, even if the people of the UK do not - and routes around it, accordingly.
Nobody really wants to work with UK-based technology groups, knowing that they are liable for immediate corruption the moment their technology becomes relevant to, say, the people of Brazil, or Africa, or China.
> The UK lost Deep Mind - which could have been OpenAI!! -- to Google.
You're focusing on one success story out of thousands.
90%, or more, of US startups only exist to be sold to the highest bidder or to coast indefinitely long in infinite investor money, and never turn a profit.
There's still expectation in Europe at large that your company should have an actual business plan and a path to profitability.
I agree and it's a real shame, we used to spearhead some of the most initiative companies in technology (Acorn, Arm, Sinclair, Sage, Deepmind). Now it's just a shadow, while places like Silicon Valley or Stockholm have jetted ahead the UK just sort of stagnated - it's kind of embarrassing.
Brit / American checking in and agreeing. My first startup was a B2B SaaS and hiring in the UK was fantastic - the arbitrage was just silly. Experienced software developers (10+ years) @ GBP 70k / year - and that was close to non-finance full-market pay. The same people were averaging $250k in NYC / SF.
And yet, the UK hires were often better off after all expenses than the US hires.
Largely due to housing being slightly cheaper (other posters have pointed out, London is on par with SF / NY - the big difference being London expands, NYC and SF are both "islands" - yes SF is a peninsula, but commuting up 280 or 101 is not a pleasant experienced).
Also, even offering private healthcare (BUPA) - the UK hires were cheaper. I'm in my late 30s and reasonably healthy - my all-in, gold-plated UK policy was GBP 2k / year - I was at $2,000 / month in the US.
*However* - salaries in the UK are unsustainably low.
Three reasons:
[1] BOMAD - The Bank of Mom and Dad (parents paying / lending the deposit for a house so the mortgage is at a low rate) is effectively exhausted. This means that current entrants into the housing market are either renting (which is nearly as expensive as NYC, especially after the inflationary / interest rate jump), or saving to "buy" a house (I enclose in quotes because at a 95% mortgage you don't own much of your house).
[2]
Professional salaries outside of finance are way too low. My fiancee works in a highly skilled, professional field and her salary in 2024 was, in nominal terms the same as my starting salary in NYC 17 years ago working for a large investment bank IN THE BACK OFFICE - where salaries were decidedly blue-collar. My unproven hypothesis is that the UK professional world is still largely geared towards those with alternative assets, private incomes (especially high-prestige non-professional jobs, especially around politics). This makes it impossible to compete with US venture backed startups, even post-ZIRP, because the offer is always going to be better. And yet that private-income driven base has largely been eroded through capital gains, inheritance tax and general downward social mobility (or, perhaps, less doom-and-gloom - averaging towards the center. The difference in wealth and income between the upper-middle class and the lower-middle class has narrowed significantly).
[3] There has been over the last 5-7 years significant negative messaging and tax policy against economic success. A confiscatory top-tax band, an erosion of a "job perks" friendly tax regime and a political climate that is very anti-success, even prior to the labour govt (largely started at the same time, though perhaps not by, Theresa May's 2015 speech and focus on "Just about managing").
VC in the UK is hard, largely because the majority (though by no means all) VCs are focused on aping mid-market pension managers. Their ambition is limited to businesses that already work (and yet anything transformative by definition does not work yet) - and are interested mostly in post-revenue companies with linear or lightly superlinear growth.
This, IMNSHO, is largely caused by the fact that, given state expenditure and the corp and personal tax burden, there simply isn't enough capital for US style VC - the portfolio approach requires capital to absorb failures. Most VCs here cannot afford failure.
The closest we get is the EIS / SEIS tax policy, which allows the offsetting of losses in failed businesses (by the equivalent of Accredited Investors) - as well as a friendly Cap Gains treatment of successes. But these are largely made as common stock investments by individuals - and limited to a very small scale.
Which brings me to my final point - the SAFE note is not only not ubiquitous here, it's rare. Even pre-seed investments are either common stock or (more rarely) convertible notes. This requires a level of diligence (even on small tickets) that make capital formation incredibly burdensome.
There's absolutely a path to resolving this - but the UK first has to make a political and cultural decision to embrace startup-led GDP growth, which is has not yet made.
Quite frankly, it's cultural and the thing I hear a lot is simply: fuck that for a job!
I could quite happily get on fine at one of those big American style startups but I don't get excited about hype, I don't have the work culture it demands and I don't have a price on my soul. I'd rather earn a lot less, have extreme stability, have better family time and balance. On top of that there's something tasteless and unethical about a lot of the big startups. Do they really bring good things to society? Do I really want to be part of that?
If I can walk away with half the money, live a modest life and stand with my principles intact, I will take that over twice the money.
I don't think this is political at all. It's not a race either and we have no innate responsibility to build things like this.
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.
Finance jobs in London / New York (partially) can afford those pay rates because they extract wealth from the rest of the world.
Whether they do so in return for services rendered or are extracting rents by acting as gatekeepers is a question that never quite gets resolved. A little of each I suspect, depending on the context.
The job of secondary financial markets is to redirect areas of surplus unproductive wealth (that makes no return), to productive areas. By the magic of markets, sustained profitability = productive use of resources.
The problem with labourers who work in these secondary markets however, is the same as the guards who watch the gate: they can extract large tolls for being in the right place at the right time.
People in finance are rich because they're well-placed to skim highly productive traffic. However, it is -- in the vast majority of cases -- only skimming. The system functions very well to take unproductive surplus and allocate it effectively.
Though admittedly today, the larger beneficiaries are increasingly monpolies, and so on. But this isnt a side effect of the finance industry, but of the state.
> Though admittedly today, the larger beneficiaries are increasingly monpolies, and so on. But this isnt a side effect of the finance industry, but of the state.
For markets to exist, monopolies must be avoided. As you can't expect large companies to police themselves, this was generally the role of the state. The states must strike a balance between keeping large companies happy (that want monopolies and have cash today) and true markets (which are efficient on the long run).
The finance industry is probably just a side effect of everybody focusing on short term (both public traded companies and politicians/states)
In much of the developed world, economic productivity seems to correlate strongly with availability of free capital (I don't have a source but I imagine it's fairly straightforward to cook one up). Even US vs Europe, kind of similar economies, but with capital so much easier to come by in the US, and US productivity per capita is flying compared to Europe.
Availability of free capital is a function of both just general wealth of a society, and how well lubricated the wheels of finance are.
I don't think this is a controversial theory, even if it comes with unpleasant side effects (white collar crime, inequality etc). Just as having a buoyant defence industry that can churn out a lot of boom is great for a country's war fighting potential.
It's essentially the willingness of a society to fund what looks like and could actually be a complete waste of time and money.
In the US there's plenty of money to throw on seemingly frivolous pursuits, because stagnant money is generally considered wasted money. It's considered better to have that money "working for you" invested in something, anything. You could lose out, you could also win big, at least you tried. Can't have omelets without cracking eggs, as the saying goes.
Another Europe-like example is Japan: A rich society with lots of money, but society doesn't want to waste it. So most of the money is stagnant, stored in deposit accounts or in a bedroom drawer (literally, see: Tansu Yokin[1]) instead of being invested in something consequently leading to a stagnant economy.
This...but a twisted, bloated, incompetent, and malevolently self-serving version of it.
Actual efficiency would dictate that there be only a relative handful of finance jobs, let alone very well-paid finance jobs. And that the vast majority of the money go to actually productive industries. And that the financial markets understand the principles and timescales of other industries, so they don't screw everything up with decisions equivalent to "Fiscal quarter ends in June, and Farmer Jones says he can harvest zero corn by then. Shut him down."
It's actually Pretty Bloody Hard(tm) to store or move money/wealth safely and properly, not the least because most of us are all highwaymen when given the opportunity. Banks exist to try and bring some civility to that madness, with the cost being (ideally) a pittance skimmed from the top to keep their highwaymen tendencies at bay.
If you want to call them a protection racket akin to the mafia... you're probably right.
Of course, banks these days are much more than that and there's plenty to rightfully crucify them for. But even still, there's a reason being called a third-rate bank clerk is an insult among the highest order.
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.
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.
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.
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]
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.
>>A doctor is also a kid who got full A grades as a high school graduate.
Yes, because the number of med school places in the UK is limited by the government (because they have to fund the extra cost of the course over what students pay in tuition fees). You don't really need to be that smart to be a doctor.
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.
The pound is slightly heavier than the dollar and overall UK wages are lower. But truth is in most of the world being a doctor is a good career but not something you can build outstanding wealth on. Hence Europeans are often puzzled with "I want my kid become a doctor" cliche from American media.
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.
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
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).
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.
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.
>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
That bottleneck is unrelated to the baumol effect.
The bottleneck is the cause of the Baumol effect. If medicine didn't require qualified and licensed human labour to provide then we wouldn't have such high healthcare costs.
Now admittedly, there is a gap between the increase in labour productivity of wait-staff and the labour productivity of healthcare providers over the period since, say, the industrial revolution, but both are outstripped by orders of magnitude by the increase in productivity in the manufacturing and IT sectors. Manufacturing is no longer bottlenecked, because we offshore it, and IT is not bottlenecked because new technology is continuing to rapidly increase labour productivity.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.)
It feels like it's got more expensive though, and worse quality. A lot of the garlic I've had this year has been in a sorry state to use a random example, and as well as food you buy to cook things like fish and chips which used to be a cheap takeaway meal cost a fortune now.
The depressing thing is that it'd rise a lot more if supermarkets weren't using their weight to squeeze farmers.
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.
I literally just came back from a month in Poland, and UK food prices in supermarkets are just as low if not lower. Certainly Aldi prices easily beat Polish supermarket prices on nearly everything, maybe with the exception of baked goods.
Don't get me wrong - M&S and Sainsburys are very expensive places to shop. But I don't see the quality at Morrisons or Asda or yes, even Aldi as being any worse and the prices are very low. Go to France or Germany and try to compare, I can bet that for your average buyer groceries will be cheaper.
Its true i can't eat steak 4 nights a week as god intended but we manage to scratch cook 3 meals a day for 2 people for £70 a week, £85 with a wine pairing.
If you want to forgo eight different vegetables and four different proteins im sure you can do it for less.
I know too many people complaining "food is expensive" when all they live off is gas mark 6 / 25 mins beige rubbish.
>Unfortunately, UK property prices, food prices, utilities etc make Silicon Valley look cheep.
That's not true - UK food is _very_ cheap, and overall living costs are quite a lot less than the UK. Property is the real killer in the UK (and eating out I suppose).
Did you at least get to play with the demo computers? Some of the most fun times before everyone had a super powerful machine were when we got to borrow the top-of-the-line demo machines to play on all weekend. Set up in one of those conference rooms, pizza for everyone.
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).
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.
The UK cannot just "be Singapore". What happened in Singapore was a specific, unrepeatable combination of its geography, the needs of the region, the size of the country, and the culture.
To maintain its wealth today, Singapore relies on a large underclass of underpaid non-citizens. Around 40% of the country are non-citizens.
In addition, London sort of has its own Singapore(s) in the form of the City and Canary Wharf. That's great for those who work there, but it's not feasible for a country of nearly 70 million for everyone to just work in finance.
Final comment:
> Singapore did not depend on neighboring countries to climb out of 3rd world poverty
Singapore's wealth is built on trade and foreign investment. To assume that without other countries it would be equally successful is absurd.
This is true but there are many policies that the UK could copy from other countries like Singapore that would work much better than what they are currently doing
It's a political issue. There are things the UK is good at - finance, culture/media, software and yes hardware innovation, legal services, tourism. But since the GFC especially, none of these things are considered "right" by the electorate.
Instead we romanticise unproductive legacy stuff, and an NHS which, while its staff are in many cases heroic, spends most of its vast budget cleaning up the mess of a population who thinks eating a sensible diet and enacting basic public health policy is "woke".
It's a good thing we banned indoor smoking in public buildings in the early aughts, there's no way you'd get that through in today's political climate.
You're not thinking like an economist :) Here's something I saw on Twitter (no source):
The bicycle is the slow death of the planet.
General Director of Euro Exim Bank Ltd. got economists thinking when he said:
"A cyclist is a disaster for the country's economy: he does not buy cars and does not borrow money to buy. He does not pay for insurance policies. He does not buy fuel, does not pay for the necessary maintenance and repairs. He does not use paid parking. He does not cause serious accidents. He does not require multi-lane highways. He does not get fat. Healthy people are neither needed nor useful for the economy. They don't buy medicine. They do not go to hospitals or doctors. Nothing is added to the country's GDP (gross domestic product). On the contrary, every new McDonald's restaurant creates at least 30 jobs: 10 cardiologists, 10 dentists, 10 dietary experts and nutritionists, and obviously, people who work at the restaurant itself." Choose carefully: cyclist or McDonald's? It is worth considering.
P.S. Walking is even worse. Pedestrians don't even buy bicycles.
>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.
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.
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?
Not worth it. Maori rights are an intractable problem - the only way to win is to avoid the topic and punt it to a future government. I'm sure you've worked on projects sunk by a non-technical distraction so you surely understand the mechanics.
National says they (and ACT) are the business party but they seem to be mostly windbags. The NZ government traditionally screws over businesses and founders - they certainly fail to encourage businesses while producing a lot of ineffectual programmes.
I don't recommend anyone try and start a business here. Plus NZ society generally cuts down tall poppies - especially capitalists (sportspeople is the main way to achieve without approbation). Be an employee or leech on the welfare state are the usual alternatives.
> • £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.
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.
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.
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).
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
> The other problem is the welfare state or just the state. So much graft and just living off printed money. It pushes out success.
I see these uninformed comments all the time, and to be they suggest that the person in question has an intense ideological bent, but an aversion to evidence. As another commenter pointed out, a large amount of UK benefits spending (~£100bn) is on the state pension (the single largest benefit).
You are correct that there are a large number of economically inactive people in the UK (something like 20% of working-age people). We have had at least 50 years of government presupposing that the problem here is that these people are lazy, and a little stick will motivate them back to work. The mere fact that this has not worked (and we have tried it repeatedly) might suggest that the problem is a bit more complex than this.
One issue is that the general health of the population is very poor. Unfortunately, improving this is a very hard problem. I think people underestimate just how hard. If you could solve this, you would create hundreds of billions of pounds in value (I am not underestimating). Presumably some starting points would be working out how to lower the costs of fruit and vegetables and increase the cost of ultra-processed fast food. Not sure what else helps here. I would give this a read: https://billmitchell.org/blog/?p=61595
The other problem is that there are no jobs for the people in question, so even if they want to work (or are heavily incentivised to do so) they are not able to. The government can create some employment for these people, but a better vocational training system might help here.
The graft and living off printed money I do see is mostly in housing – people in the UK love to own and rent out houses. This means that (compared to e.g. Germany/Switzerland/Austria) there are very weak protections for renters. Additionally, when house prices are really high it makes it very challenging to build industries on top of this.
Most of the benefits bill in the UK is paid to people who receive the the state pension
Of the others it's split between those who don't earn enough from work i.e. their employers don't pay them enough to live on so those benefits are essentially subsidising companies
And the other large chunk is people who aren't fit to work, this increased as a result of Covid but also the underfunding of health / social care by the previous government
The civil service isn't that big but the largest influx of people was caused by Brexit and the need to duplicate many of the things that didn't need to be separate when part of the EU
The people who've been living off printed money as those with assets, almost all the gains from the cheap money supply over the last 15 or so years has gone to the well off
A few here have commented on different aspects, and they have their part to play but I agree with you, market fragmentation is the scale killer.
From an outside perspective it might appear like Europe is a true single market like the US but it isn't. Scaling to a European level isn't impossible but it is difficult. Some of that will just be difficult to do anything about, language, different cultures, etc.
On the political side I'm sure there is plenty more the EU can do but I don't see the will.
Market fragmentation is a measurable phenomenon, as far as a language goes. The language barrier is just the cost of a translator. Is that cost prohibitively high in Europe? I hear a lot of explanations of why Europe has fewer tech companies than America, but they are almost never backed by statistics. The most obvious answer continues to be the Bretton Woods system, by which large amounts of money are funnelled into America, seemingly without reason. China inverts this flow by debasing its currency, and Europe does not.
> The language barrier is just the cost of a translator.
Is it?
> Market fragmentation is a measurable phenomenon, as far as a language goes.
Market fragmentation isn't about language fragmentation – the EU has no single market for services currently, which means if you want to launch a product EU-wide you are effectively launching a product in 27 different countries. There is some harmonization, but not much. If you launch a product in the US you have a large fully harmonized single market.
Well specifically for engineering-related products (both software and hardware).
How can you thrive and be competitive when your competitors in the far-east work for >60 hours per week with a solid ecosystem and generous support from the government?
I am specifically worried about the future of European engineering, unlike US you have much smaller capitals and moats. Many of the products are sustained mainly by legacy built by your predecessors.
If nothing changes then by next-generation most if not all would be devoured by chaebols, Asian Sovereign Wealth Funds, or American PEs. You'll have to work for >60 hours but they not you will enjoy the surplus. Take your poison.
It’s exhausting trying to explain this to American leftists. They believe the UK / EU is rich, their healthcare is amazing and “free”, and no one has to work more than 35 hours a week. They visit London and Paris once in 10 years for vacation and think they understand the economic order.
European corporations and political class are rich and benefit from high GDP stimulated by mass migration and foreign funds cornering the housing market.
But European salaries are stagnating and job security is dropping like a stone, while the cost of living is steadily rising. And public healthcare is getting terrible with months of wait for an appointment.
Spain is now used as example of a growing economy in EU but youth unemployment is high and rising and wages are peanuts compared to housing. A lot of native Spanish kids are just checking out. I guess the Spanish corporations and foreign investors are having a blast. And the boomers with their fat pensions and renting their real estate portfolio.
Of note, the same is happening even in China. I feel really bad for Gen Z.
You should understand that the American situation is, in fact, much worse than ours in many ways. For instance, the average American pays a 40% tax rate compared to our 25% once you account for healthcare.
Sounds like the non-existent British NHS where getting an appointment to see a doctor is about as likely as meeting the Loch Ness Monster for a spot of tea and crumpets.
Ironically when we were living in Ireland and my daughter was going to have to wait 16 months to get a suspicious growth checked for cancer it was the UK that made it possible for us to go to a private clinic near Belfast and have her checked in a week. And it still wasn't even expensive. Free healthcare isn't actually free if you die waiting.
It used to be the jewel in the crown of empire though.
Thatcher and the more recent 14 years of UK Conservative government seemed to have kicked it bloody and senseless like Alex and his droogs from the Korova Milkbar.
Only the Conservatives? You think Blair, Brown, and now Starmer did great things for the country? Give me a break. The whole political class is rotten. And the upcoming "Reform UK" is a joke, to say the least.
> You think Blair, Brown, and now Starmer did great things for the country?
No, but apparently you think that I think that. Perhaps you might like to work through that again ...
Leaving the state of the UK as a whole to one side, the NHS was actively kicked like a dog prior to Blair who did at least stop kicking it and attempt to reverse the decline with some, albeit limited, success.
The good news is that a relatively small amount of aggressive planning reform (namely, firing everyone involved and never calling it "planning" ever again) will fix most of the (fixable...) worst aspects of modern Britain.
The problem isn't building stuff, it's building stuff where stuff needs to be.
We built plenty of out-of-town shopping centres, business parks and industrial estates in the 70s, 80s, 90s. We stopped because it turns out they're, for the most part, shit. Given the choice, people will WFH and order off Amazon rather than go within a mile of these places.
What we need is to tackle the vested interests in the towns and cities themselves, as an example you can't grow most of our university cities at the edges without much better transit through the centres (trams at least, maybe metro rail). But the very suggestion and the preservation crowd as well as the existing suburbanites lose their shit.
And this is against a backdrop of rural and less educated people mistrusting anything going on in the growth cities, and I don't just mean London.
BUUUT MuHHH PAAARRRKiiiiNNNGGGG!! (And house values). And we can't _possibly_ make the town look different than it did in 1972 because "heritage".
We're talking about a bunch of crusty old church biddies who will literally force you to put the most godawful, hideous house covering in the history of man BACK on your house because they're terrified of being reminded it's not the 70's.
In fact, the only post 1972 thing you ARE allowed to do is pave over your front garden and park two Jeep Cherokees (neither of which actually fit in the available space) on it.
Ah yes, it's a delight that the pavements are now covered in SUV's too because they're too big to park legally. Very in keeping with the distinct cultural heritage of the area.
But build a bike lane or even a bike shed, and they'll drag the city council all the way to the EU Supreme Court, even though half of that demographic voted Brexit.
Yes there are ridiculous rules like that are enforced. However tbh she should have checked first.
Rules around how the area should look, should be decided by people that live there. There are many better examples where it makes a lot of sense for the locals to be strict about rules about what can be erected.
I used to live near the Village of Corfe Castle. Generally the argument is that the place would lose its character and it won't be the same place anymore if it didn't keep its distinctive look.
If you would just start building places that don't fit in with the rest of the village. The village wouldn't have it character and thus it wouldn't have its tourism in the Summer as a result.
There countless towns and village with a bunch of heritage that literally goes back maybe a millennia and the argument that we should throw this away to build a load of crap houses (new houses BTW are awful, I've looked at many in the last few years) is completely asinine.
That's fair when it comes to villages, but it's mostly the edge of small cities, and within larger ones, that growth needs to happen - because that's where infrastructure exists or can be added on.
Let the Cotswolds and Kent Weald be chocolate-box nimbyland, but keep it out of places that are trying to get work done.
But it's _good_ when houses look different. Growing up my family would drive around new developments and say "ugg, these cookie-cutter houses all look the same, I miss when you we built unique and individual houses" and then it's jarring to move somewhere where people value conformity above all else and being different is considered bad. God forbid your house has eaves.
Explains a lot, actually.
I'm not talking about knocking down thousand-year old houses. I note that your example doesn't seem to have a problem putting car parks in, incidentally. But "locals" (aka old people with enormous amounts of time on their hands who bizarrely feel the right to tell other people what their home should look like) insisting that everything stay mediocre forever because they grew up with it this way is a bit much.
I think it is perfectly fine that people that actually live in an area get to decide what it looks like. If people don't involve themselves in that process and it is monopolized by people "with too much time on their hands" that is their fault. If they don't like the busy bodies then they should make time and actually go to the meetings.
You decide you own level of involvement in the community.
> I note that your example doesn't seem to have a problem putting car parks in, incidentally.
It is very interesting that whenever you bring up an example where it illustrates a particular point well, they will try to find anything they can point to so they can dismiss the general point being made. Guess what, a place in rural England that you can only travel easily to via car or coach will prioritise parking.
BTW I suspect knowing that area, you probably couldn't build anything other than parking in those places.
The challenge is that the people who live in an area use the rules in such a way as to make building new homes very expensive or outright impossible. The people who would like to live in that area have no say, and lack representation.
The bigger picture here is that it means even two rational people can inadvertently make the situation worse for themselves.
Person A lives in City A, but wants to move to City B
Person B lives in City B, but wants to move to City A
Person A votes to make it hard to build new homes in city A, because it makes their own home worth more.
Person B votes to make it hard to build new homes in City B, because it makes their own home worth more.
It makes sense in a self-interested way but both wind up worse off.
And I just meant that the car park is butt-ugly and shows the council's true priorities. They could at least put it on the edge of the village.
> The challenge is that the people who live in an area use the rules in such a way as to make building new homes very expensive or outright impossible. The people who would like to live in that area have no say, and lack representation.
Okay so what? I think that is perfectly fine. It isn't necessary for everyplace to cater for everyone.
> The bigger picture here is that it means even two rational people can inadvertently make the situation worse for themselves.
>
> Person A lives in City A, but wants to move to City B
>
> Person B lives in City B, but wants to move to City A
>
> Person A votes to make it hard to build new homes in city A, because it makes their own home worth more.
>
> Person B votes to make it hard to build new homes in City B, because it makes their own home worth more.
>
> It makes sense in a self-interested way but both wind up worse off.
These seems like a fantasy scenario to me. Typically people are either moving to a particular area, or out of a particular area, not swapping one nice affluent area for another equally affluent area (which is somewhat assumed in your scenario).
The reason btw housing is expensive is because housing became an investment vehicle isn't because of nimby's and we have about 600,000 (net) people entering the UK every year.
It's also the quality of the build… most new build houses are shit because the house building companies are more interested in their profit than the quality of the product
If we made cars like we make houses there'd be a long queue outside every car dealer as people returned them to get their money back
The problem is the institutions are unaccountable and can't be easily made controllable by the electorate again. Bank of England, the judiciary etc. These control the country not the MPs. Blair onward
It's not quite that bad - the news obviously makes it seem like it's worse than it is. Also we finally got rid of the Tories, so at least things are heading in the right direction. I made a list of some positive changes Labour have made already:
* Allow onshore wind
* Means tested winter fuel allowance
* Inheritance tax for farms
* Assisted dying bill (controversial but I think generally people are in favour of this)
* Scrapping the public footpath registration deadline
The only stupid thing I think they've done is the porn site age testing thing, but that was also a Tory policy.
IMO the big problem is the right-wing media. Take something like the winter fuel allowance. Very obviously the right thing to do, and even pensioners were generally in favour (check this article: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/c4gegy4r9ndo ), yet it still somehow a huge controversy with disingenuous articles even on the BBC like this one fuelling the faux outrage: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/c80l9lde5yjo
How can we make any improvements if such obviously good changes meet such an irrational reaction?
It's not, its just that you are swept into the news cycle of doomerism where engagement is established with FUD. The UK is fine compared to many of its peer nations in many areas.
Exactly. It's not merely the Fabian state, being ruled by lawyers, by socialist agitators, it is the vast swathes of proles who cheer every time they crush success or do wealth appropriations. It feels like you are always just two steps away from being rounded up in a pogrom for merely having savings.
The PM himself defines working class as people with no savings. It's horrid.
How much savings do you have? Is it used for rent-seeking behaviour? I think that's the key issue the country is facing.
If you have a little padding no-one will be coming for you.
Everyone in power is desparately trying dance around tax reform. When you tax productive work much more heavily than unproductive work (looking at our etf holdings grow and crowding out home/business owners with buy-to-lets), you are going to get stagnation.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
When management decides to launch a new product, they bring in an UK-based 'analyst' who usually does a piss poor job of gathering requirements/docs/building up the project, so you have to step in and 'shadow manage' the whole thing, from producing architecture diagrams to talking to customers, writing specs, writing Jira tickets, besides actually doing the job you're supposed to do.
The only thing they do do is act as an interface layer to upper management and giving each other reacharounds.
But when it comes to handshakes and glitzy product announcement galas, they're all over the place and you are not even invited, the best you can get is having your (usually misspelled) name show up in context of 5 other high-ranking ne-er-do-wells, who they want to suck up to.
Then they leave for a higher paying position to another UK company, and post on linkedin about leadership and inspiring teams.
You are forgotten, but not for long, since people actually start using the stuff you wrote and support tickets start rolling in.
Poor poor UK people having to sit in all those executive positions while contributing nothing.
It also doesn't help that for most West Europeans, places like Romania is synonimous with the Shadow Realm.
The funny thing is, having them spit in your face like this is actually a privileged position, since that means you're usually out of the trenches, where you only see the Jira tickets that you need to solve.
> The UK has the 3rd largest tech VC sector worldwide - only after the US and China
And as I mentioned before, most startups tend to only be UK domiciled for funding reasons, but majority of their operations and leadership are located outside the UK.
Foreign (read: American) VCs tend to conduct transactions in a handful of very well regulated markets, so a Chinese, Indian, or Romanian startup will often have to make a domiciled corporation in a financial hub like the UK or Singapore in order to raise.
For example, Revolut has around 16,000 employees, but barely 2k in the UK and around 7k in Poland+India - and most of these roles are engineering AND strategy roles.
> London also has the largest software sector outside the US, after the Bay Area, Boston, and NYC
Source? Boston is nowhere near a top software hub - both Seattle and Austin are much larger in the software space than Boston.
And I would be shocked if the net amount of SWE roles in London is higher than Tel Aviv or Bangalore.
I think the large software sector here might actually be part of the problem. If you're smart, want to stay in London (expensive), but don't want to work in finance then it's going to be software. There's no interesting hardware jobs here (FPGA trading platforms do not qualify). These jobs do exist in other European countries so I think the parent was correct.
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.
I think "capital" is the wrong word for it. We've got a lot of money lying around, but capital implies something productive can be done with it. We can't eat money, and we can't tax it or else they'll screw off. Perhaps if we stopped acting as the worlds fixer for tax dodging we would end up being better off. I can't help but view the City as a kind of tumour, sucking the life out of the rest of the country to enlarge itself.
I think most folks when say Capital they mean “Finance Capital” which UK is really good at. Even historically speaking UK was at the forefront of financial engineering which complimented their physical engineering and enabled to spread their empire and colonize so much.
But UK post WW-2 and specifically post Thatcher stopped investing in physical engineering and overindexed on financial services the results are for all to see now.
But you are right. I think the financial engineering has reached its limits and we see China’s investment in physical engineering over last couple of decades beginning to pay off.
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.
> I don't understand why it's so bad in a country that's supposedly amazing at financial services.
Because it's focused on predatory finance: funds cornering housing markets, money laundering, debt markets (think public debt and CDS), currency/rates speculation, etc.
It's not about predatory or non-predatory finance.
In order to become a major financial hub, UK has very favorable foreign transaction laws.
A significant amount of British-domiciled capital is foreign originated but only parked in the UK because of strong contracts law and linkages to just about every major investable market.
This is both a boon and a curse, because why would you finance a $1M seed in London when you can deploy that same capital for a similar sized seed in Tel Aviv or New York and get a better return on investment by exiting or funding additional rounds.
There is no innovation ecosystem in the UK, and it's too late to build one because other markets are just too competitive at this point - India, Israel, Czechia, Poland, etc provide very competitive tax incentives and subsidizes for foreign R&D investment and have done so for decades now.
You might assume the answer is to add additional roadblocks, but that makes British financial services extremely non-competitive, and puts 2.5 million jobs (and voters) at risk.
This is the exact same trap that Singapore and Hong Kong has fallen into, and both are trying to minimize it by becoming the goto financial hubs for target startup scenes (China for Hong Kong, India+ASEAN for Singapore) and investing in foreign startups (eg. Temasek Holdings in Singapore).
The UK needs to do something similar - it needs to give up ambitions of being a peer of the "big boys" in innovation, and concentrate on becoming competitive in international dealmaking, maybe by making a public-private international VC fund like Temasek.
Baillie Gifford (HQed in Edinburgh) and Index Ventures (HQed in London) are competitive in Tech Growth Equity globally (and especially in the Bay). There's no reason there can't be more Baillie Giffords or Index Ventures in the UK.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
> 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:
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.
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.
> 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:
> French engineering peers were not even aware that companies in France (Big Tech or Fortune 500) could offer six-figure salaries.
I know senior engineer at Airbus who don't earn six-figure salaries.
French human resources are cowards and hide behind diplomas to justify pay scales and recruitment. “Nobody gets fired for buying IBM“/”Nobody gets fired for recruiting a polytechnicien”.
I trained as a mechanical/nuclear engineer. It took destroying all the other competitors at my company's internal hackathon, Master Dev France and a project involving several thousand lines of python, for HR at my company to admit that I knew how to code without a software dev diploma.
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?
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
In the US, most of those suppliers understand the nature of startups and are accustomed to working with them, fully aware they are likely to fail. The deals are structured appropriate for those realities and some suppliers specialize in or have a preference for startups.
In the UK, many suppliers still treat startups like an exotic beast, or worse, a corner shop. US business has a familiarity and comfort with startups, due in no small part from being an increasingly prominent part of the American business landscape since the Second World War. It is the water they swim in.
Here, failing to pay your bills is both a breach of fair play, and what "dodgy" people i.e. criminals and con-artists do.
But equally it means we can operate a bit more of an honour system in terms of lines of credit. Small businesses typically allow one another at least some amount of credit terms, which they would not offer a private individual.
Anecdotally, the British people I have interacted with in a business setting seem to have a dearth of ambition. These people weren’t depressed, but I sensed a kind of defeatist cynicism.
As an American I realize our culture encourages taking risks and we are remarkably forgiving of failure. In fact, we seem to congratulate people for the fact that they tried in addition to overlooking the failure. I’m not sure if this comes from “the frontier spirit” or if this mindset used to exist throughout the Anglosphere. In any event, I do feel bad for the UK as a whole. It just seems like things keep getting worse and at some point the national mood becomes a self fulfilling cycle.
American parents:
"You can do anything you set your mind to! Anyone can be president! If you fail, pick yourself back up and try again! Your cousin with the big house started out washing cars and built an amazing success from nothing!"
British (and Irish) parents:
"The whole system is rigged so don't even try, the guy in the big house up the road got it through shady government contracts, my uncle can get you a job at the council so you'll never, ever get fired, the only reason to ever save money is for retirement or a house, your cousin who tried to start a company thinks he's better than us...."
I remember playing (my) football (your soccer) in school and my neighbourhood as a kid.
If you were going to strike you needed to be pretty sure that you can score or that you can take the heat from your team mates if you fail.
In contrast watching kids play sports in the US, everyone is constantly trying to lift each other up after failure.
These small cultural differences easily add up in how you carry yourself in business.
Negativity seems to be culturally frowned upon in the US (what a downer). Positivity seems to be culturity frowned in Europe (naive 'happy go lucky' kind of guy).
Spot on. I’ve met several foreign exchange students during my time at university. A simple observation from one of them really stuck with me: “You Americans really like to help strangers.”
The “happy go lucky” observation squares with what I have been told by my Eastern European friend. Any stranger, or mere acquaintance, who is friendly and offering help is likely trying to obligate you into repaying the favor later on. People who for fall for this are naïve or simpletons. There’s definitely a level of trust that needs to be earned before you experience the same kind of positivity and goodwill that Americans seem to dole out to “randos” they just met.
Right after that “like to help” comment he followed it up with: “It is like you are all Golden Retrievers”. Which I found both hilarious and fitting.
It's the UK's aristocracy, most likely. They own nearly everything in the UK, haven't earned any of it, and the last thing they need is the invasion of rich self-made entrepreneurs.
> 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.
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.
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…
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
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.
> 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.
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.
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?
>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.
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.
That is equivalent to half of [all the electricity consumed by the United States](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.
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?"
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
I'm a British-American hardware engineer, I've lived in the UK nearly all my life. I've a home, and a family with kids here, I'm very settled. I've had plenty opportunity to move to the US, even before I had a family (with my current employer or under my own steam as a citizen) and I've no interest. I visit the US every few years and by the end of the trip I'm very much done with it all. Other than the much larger job market, I don't think there's a single US thing I want. Everything we have here is either better, or I'm sufficiently used to it. American is an unappealing place to live for many social reasons, I'd much rather move to France or Germany if I had to leave (and wasn't worried about the language barriers).
Ironically, other countries (former British colonies) have more access to US "specialty occupation" working visas than the UK does -- none of these are H1-B.
Canadians and Mexicans have TN, Australians have E3, Singapore and Chile have H-1B1 (a subcategory of H1-B but with its own quotas).
I'm under the impression that tech people working in the US on visas are exploited. The end of year review / firing round which is so popular in the US means you can lose your job, which means you lose your visa, and you get something like 4 weeks to land a replacement or have to move out of the country.
At 20? Sure, who cares. If you've got a house, kids in a local school? The level of stress about being abruptly thrown out of the country seems untenable.
I would expect that dynamic to suppress wages for immigrants (as you have fear to keep them in line instead). Healthcare seems to be similarly set up to frighten people into staying in their current employment.
This perspective might not be accurate, but it's why this British engineer is unwilling to move to the US.
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.
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.
My cousin (an American living and working in France) married a guy originally from Morocco. After eventually realizing that they might want to move to the US, they couldn't, because he couldn't get a visa.
It would have taken quite a bit of time- my cousin would have had to move back to the US first, established residence, and gotten a job and some other requirements. Only then could they have qualified to apply, and the wait time for the application to be approved would be in the 9-14 months range.
Once they applied, he could have moved here with her, but not gotten a job, I think, until the application for the visa was approved.
> It would have taken quite a bit of time- my cousin would have had to move back to the US first, established residence, and gotten a job and some other requirements.
That's strange. A spouse green card doesn't require the residence and there is no wait time for the spouses of US Citizens. However, the processing time (especially via consular processing) is ridiculous, around 2 years now.
Some people don’t focus primarily on the money. When that’s the case, many things (love, pride, comfort, dreams, fears, etc) might keep someone from moving.
Hardware engineer here, from a qualification perspective. I worked for a large American defence company and was invited to work in the US. I declined.
The work culture, social and economic stability are terrible. Education is expensive or poor. Regulation and standards are poor. Not a good place to bring up a family.
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.
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).
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)
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)
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Putting more layers of privatisation between the government and the service it provides will decrease the quality and increase the costs. Sewage is now in our rivers and we pay more for water. Trains are obscenely expensive compared to Europe. Energy is expensive. All of these things cost boatloads because we sold them off and drag the rest of the economy down with them. We wouldn't be spending so much today if we'd invested more in the past.
Capitalism is not the problem so much as policies that promote trade imbalances and outsourcing of jobs. If there are people somewhere willing to work for much less than you are, there are far fewer opportunities to do anything. It is not normal to get a ton of cheap imports forever, and a reversion to the mean is not a sign that capitalism is failing.
Unless the whole world was to demand the same standard of living (which is impossible), or global trade is limited, there will be nations where the wealth of the average person is on the decline.
What we are seeing is a great levelling out of living standards across the world. Poor countries are unquestionably getting richer, while rich countries are stagnating and decaying. It's a period of readjustment, but self-limiting.
There's no need for the West to stagnate like this. We could let the rest of the world develop itself while we continue to be self-sufficient. That requires tough decisions like choosing to limit imports of foreign goods and labor. But that is unfortunately not how it's going. Some people have been selling out their own countries for decades to make a quick buck, or perhaps to defend some economic theory that the plan with the highest cost efficiency is always the best.
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.)
The NHS is not dying an entirely natural death. Murder most foul.
Your question is coupling a matter of our policy preference, our tactical planning to arrive at that preference, and a hypothetical predictive model. If like some supervillain I had come up with a satisfactory answer to all those questions I would have enacted it twenty minutes 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.
Well everytime somebody wants to build high density housing or really anything to alleviate the housing crisis we get the usual NIMBY screaming similar to OP about evil corporations coming to destroy the character of their local neighborhood.
Returning by right development to the UK is very possibly the single largest policy measure that might enable a way forward, not because it's so intimately tied to the financialization of the economy, but because it's such an enormous capital concentration that its limitations overshadow a lot of other issues.
It may be hard to see it from where we're standing, but the current housing situation is one extreme of a catastrophic ongoing crisis.
"Reasonably" is doing a lot of work there. It sounds an awful like you're defining the boundaries of reasonability at "Exactly what is built right now and using the exact borders of current municipalities", which is a tautology. Even if we limit ourselves to the current municipal boundaries of London, population density is ~6000 people per square kilometer. Kowloon Walled City survived with 3,000,000 people per square kilometer, Manhattan has 75,000, Dhaka 23,000, San Francisco 19,000.
Their system is a much better one than we tend to have in the US, but "All-in on public transit" looks more like Trantor than London. A majority of the TFL system was constructed more than a century ago.
Yeah.. no. Have you been to Asian cities? It's rows and rows of 100 floor apartments, it's urban centers consolidated into high density malls and commercial centers. We're talking about dozens of high rises where every floor contains restaurants and shops. I daresay there is more to eat and shop in the 1km Radius around Ikebukuro Station then entire borough of Westminster!
Nobody wants to work in some backwater in the middle of nowhere either, especially if you are young and want to meet new people.
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.
I strongly suspect it's a variant on capitalism that:
1. Recognises that some industries (utilities, healthcare, etc) are not well suited to market provision and are state funded. i.e. the sort social provisions that many of the nordic countries have.
2. Recognises that extreme wealth inequalities invalidate the key principle that capitalist economics is premised on (that the market value of a good or service closely approximates it's societal value) and therefore imposes much stronger progressive taxes on very high earners to effective cap how much wealth a single individual can control.
> early stage capitalism (lack of regulation and all)
The 'Laffer Curve' concept is treated at first glance as some kind of complex model created by experts that Explains A Lot, at second glance as something a bunch of drunk political operatives scrawled on a cocktail napkin in 1974 that doesn't necessarily have any relation to reality, and at third glance as a tautology whose dishonest core is the labelling of the x axis.
Academic attempts to identify the optimal maxima of tax receipts, which conservative political operatives will always implicitly assume is "half whatever the current rate is", suggest something on the order of 60%.
> In economics, the Laffer curve illustrates a theoretical relationship between rates of taxation and the resulting levels of the government's tax revenue.
I would dispute the premise of the Laffer Curve: that the goal of setting a (high) taxation rate is to maximise government revenue. I think that reducing wealth inequality is a good in and of itself. And especially under a capitalist system that depends on it's citizens having vaguely equal purchasing power to function efficiently.
Assuming that our starting point is our current situation where wealth is very unequally distributed, that is. I would agree with the suggestion that things being too equal, and there being no reward for hard work and/or ingenuity also leads to problems.
Optimisation that tries to balance that trade-off would interest me greatly.
Point 1 tends to fall apart when the government can't control its own coffers and after a few decades of mismanagement decides that privatisation is the main way to reduce their debt burden. So I think this one ebbs and flows over time generally.
See South Africa for an example. Power production is slowly opening up to market forces as an alleviation to the extreme mismanagement and corruption of the last 2-3 decades.
On the other hand, there are also some alternatives, like "devolution" of state services to the provincial or municipal level. The local Cape Town government is busy trying to gain control over the city's train lines from the government org that owns them, to provide better service.
There's no substitute for competence and integrity, but private entities are just as capable of being inept and corrupt. Look at companies like Enron or Comcast.
In the case of the UK the solution in effect since the mid 2010s is increase taxation, replace the natives completely with someone more desperate, and suppress wages.
Socialism isn't the solution, it's the problem. People deserve to be paid for work and the better the work that they do, the more they deserve to be paid, even though that can be much more than the average person earns.
Capitalism seeks rent from having capital, so the obvious optimization is to squash the ability to demand higher wages (original Marxist argument about "ownership of means of production" was how big capitalist controlled access to machines you needed to the work, thus being able to depress the wages)
I don't think you understand socialism and capitalism.
Suppression of wages is very much a feature of capitalism (the company's mission is to acquire capital for shareholders; technology that lowers costs by reducing the need for labor, or reducing the payment for labor, is a goal); whereas socialism holds that those who do the work should benefit from their labor (workers should own the means of production).
A "socialist" company in the U.S. would be an employee-owned company or a co-op (like REI) though they would never call themselves that because Americans don't understand what socialism is (and have been taught that it's "evil").
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.
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…
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
UK has long pursued a strategy of "social mobility", which is shorthand for: some places will be shit, and if you're hardworking or clever you can and should leave.
So the bright, capable people from white working-class towns either joined the middle classes or skipped the country entirely a generation or two ago.
Leaving behind a bunch of people for whom no wage will tempt them to London to do the hard, menial work needed to keep the city running. So on that front we have no choice but to import.
The people left behind either have caring responsibilities that means they can't move, long term health problems and disabilities, or just lack the basic work ethic, motivation and so on to get on in life.
Ultimately who's going to mop the floors at City banks and so on? It won't be the bright, ambitious kids of second and third generation immigrant families, not if they can at all help it, nor the sons and daughters of white middle classes, whether that's metropolitan elites or the trades and services people.
(This, btw, is why immigrants are generally hard working: "people willing to relocate their lives halfway around the world to an often hostile culture where they'll never truly be at home" is a strong filter for people with drive and motivation. Those lacking it stay home, regardless of which host and guest culture we're talking about).
There is a constant narrative that is pushed on everyone that immigration is necessary because people won't do the menial jobs. There is a huge number of problems with this this narrative.
* Menial jobs were/are normally done in the past by younger more inexperienced people. These were usually done part time while in education. This allows younger people to build basic competency and money management skills. They aren't supposed to be jobs for life and everyone knew this in the past. By constantly importing people from to do these jobs, you stop younger people from building up this basic competency. This stuff is important btw, as I know many people who never had these jobs and had the bank of Mum and Dad pay for them for far too long, they don't know how to manage money.
* A lot of more menial jobs are done by people that are part retired. When I was younger I worked with many part retired people that had a stressful job and moved away and part retired and were on the checkouts out the supermarket, cleaning, pushing trolleys or delivering things.
* A lot of immigrants seem to do jobs like Uber Eats, Deliveroo and other zero hour contract food delivery jobs. If you don't believe me, go to your local McDonalds at 8am on a Saturday morning and every driver picking up food will be a immigrant of one sort or another. These are jobs where people are literally too lazy to drive 5 minutes to the McDonalds drive through on a Saturday morning. I am normally very pro-free market however do we really need to immigrants to do these jobs? I don't use Uber Eats and I have no idea how much it costs, but I think the guy up the road that has a small mansion a Jag and Two Teslas can probably afford to pay a bit more for delivery.
* I am from the South of the UK. If you aren't from London or another big city, London is one of the most horrid places to visit, work. I spent maybe a 4 months working as a freelancer in London (travelling in). People are downright rude, everything is a ripoff. I'd rather be slightly worse off and live here than be "better" off an live in London.
Menial routine work for juniors has been eliminated or automated to the margins, that much is true. No office-boys and far fewer supermarket cashiers. For those with people skills, there's plenty of café work, but that's about it.
On the flip side though, the educational/academic landscape for the upper quartile of young adults is hugely more competitive. Nobody is making it to a Russell Group uni on cruise control, and getting top grades AND having a part time job AND hobbies and a social life isn't easy.
Then you have menial work that's actually fairly skilled. Social care, childcare and so on. That's not something a student is going to do for a couple of years on the way to something better.
And a shift, for various reasons, to the contracted-out agency model for cleaning. Mostly done by immigrants, but they work harder than most semi-retired Brits would be willing to. Even if they're less flexible than the old boy who'd fix a bad door or window as well as sweeping the floor, and have none of his loyalty.
UberEats on the other hand is taking the mick. A lot of their workers are undocumented, the self-employed contractor status allows the operator to avoid the normally stringent penalties for immigration law breaches. I don't know if they lobbied for the law to be that way, but it's a massive loophole. So this is illegal work and maybe shouldn't be conflated with legit immigration. How much it's a problem I'm not sure.. the actual numbers are quite small, but like the loudspeakers on the bus thing, it's a very visible breach of the norms and rules, so there's an argument that it's bad for society on that basis. And like I say, the operator is blatantly exploiting it, they can't be blind to what's going on. I'm pretty liberal on immigration, miss the positive contribution the former Eastern Bloc countries made prior to Brexit, but the whole food delivery sector is overdue a clean out.
Not really. I am talking generally about this notion that we need to keep importing people.
> Menial routine work for juniors has been eliminated or automated to the margins, that much is true. No office-boys and far fewer supermarket cashiers. For those with people skills, there's plenty of café work, but that's about it.
That is often repeated but I don't think that is quite as true as people make out. There aren't robots yet (or likely to be) stacking the supermarket shelves. Yes self service has taken most of the cashier jobs (not all btw).
> And a shift, for various reasons, to the contracted-out agency model for cleaning. Mostly done by immigrants, but they work harder than most semi-retired Brits would be willing to. Even if they're less flexible than the old boy who'd fix a bad door or window as well as sweeping the floor, and have none of his loyalty.
In other countries to emigrate there you need to have skills they need. When I moved abroad previously the company had to justify looking outside of the country to employ me. I don't understand how it can be justified that they can't find cleaning staff. BTW I employ a cleaner so I know roughly how much they cost.
> UberEats on the other hand is taking the mick. A lot of their workers are undocumented, the self-employed contractor status allows the operator to avoid the normally stringent penalties for immigration law breaches. I don't know if they lobbied for the law to be that way, but it's a massive loophole. So this is illegal work and maybe shouldn't be conflated with legit immigration. How much it's a problem I'm not sure.. the actual numbers are quite small, but like the loudspeakers on the bus thing, it's a very visible breach of the norms and rules, so there's an argument that it's bad for society on that basis. And like I say, the operator is blatantly exploiting it, they can't be blind to what's going on. I'm pretty liberal on immigration, miss the positive contribution the former Eastern Bloc countries made prior to Brexit, but the whole food delivery sector is overdue a clean out.
It doesn't matter whether it is small or not (I don't think it as small as you are making out). It shouldn't be happening. Also just because you don't like the people that are highlighting this issue, doesn't mean that the issue isn't important.
The reason why things are a mess is that nothing gets sorted out properly in the UK. We have had leadership failures now for years.
Could you elaborate further? I am a skilled immigrant in the UK. I pay my taxes and have not used any benefits. I even pay for my medication; the only free service I have used is a GP appointment or a hospital scan, which was likely covered by the IHS (Immigration Health Surcharge).
It's nothing against you personally. I'm sure many immigrants are good people and some scarce skilled workers must be imported. But there seems to be a desire from the top to import too many foreign workers across the West. This contributes to the low wages and lack of opportunities described in the article.
The UK also has outsourced a lot of manufacturing, which further worsens the job market. I don't know how many hardware engineers are imported unnecessarily or else part of "offshoring," but by all indications I've seen personally the number may be significant. This is from an outside US perspective, so take it with a grain of salt.
> Talk too much about these things and you're probably getting sent to prison.
This trope is getting a bit ridiculous. For the record, the event that inspired the notion that complaining online could get you sent to person involved individuals encouraging the public to burn down council offices[1] and a hotel[2].
Conspiracy to commit arson has been one of the most serious offences in English law for centuries, and that's even before you add the murder part to it.
>VERDICT Missing context. The clip shows a June 2024 arrest, according to Devon and Cornwall Police, and predates the Southport knife attack by around a month.
Hence not debunked (a strategy we're used too).
Times article on the subject: https://archive.ph/3OkeG Police arresting nine people a day in fight against web trolls
>More than 3,300 people were detained and questioned last year over so-called trolling on social media and other online forums, a rise of nearly 50 per cent in two years, according to figures obtained by The Times.
>About half of the investigations were dropped before prosecutions were brought, however, leading to criticism from civil liberties campaigners that the authorities are over-policing the internet and threatening free speech.
>Jim Killock, executive director of the Open Rights Group, said the Crown Prosecution Service emphasised section 127 was to be used only in “extreme circumstances”. “But the problem is ‘grossly offensive’ is not something you should normally be prosecuted for. It’s not showing harm to other people. It’s not showing that somebody is being harassed ... attacked or threatened.”
This gaslighting is getting a bit ridiculous. The oppression did not start in the wake of Southport, it has been in place for years. But I'm going to talk about Southport first. People were arrested for pointing out that the Southport murderer was a Muslim terrorist. Well guess what, he was: https://news.sky.com/story/southport-stabbings-suspect-faces... The media said it was all disinformation and put forth many straw man claims to smear people who are fed up with their government covering for the crimes for immigrants.
>Conspiracy to commit arson has been one of the most serious offences in English law for centuries, and that's even before you add the murder part to it.
I'm not defending conspiracy to commit arson. It is a fact that people have been jailed for far less serious things. I heard some reports that people were jailed for recording the riots or even posting about the existence of the riots.
As the article says, "section 127 of the Communications Act 2003, [...] makes it illegal to intentionally “cause annoyance, inconvenience or needless anxiety to another”" and that can be and regularly is used to punch down on people expressing simple grievances. It is entirely subjective what causes "annoyance, inconvenience or needless anxiety" or is intended to do so. Our mere existence probably causes annoyance and inconvenience to some people. Got a problem with immigrants who don't respect your culture and disproportionately commit all the crimes? Well, it is going to cause some brown people to be anxious if you talk about it, so off to the slammer you go. That is truly how it goes, unless you're in a good position to fend off political attacks.
Just because someone was "brought up as a Christian" doesn't mean they are one. And he WAS a terrorist or wannabe terrorist, as evidenced by everything said in that article. You're over here whining about Breitbart as your neighbors are being jailed for merely talking about these issues in a way that displeases your overlords.
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 :)
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.
> 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).
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.
The largest problem I see is shipping times. If I need to download a new software "part" (library or other), the shipping time is the download time, nearly instant.
If I need new hardware pieces, its either next day shipping, a few days by air-freight or three weeks on a boat from china.
This limits prototype turnover time, and means iterating quick is much harder.
Finally you have the problem that hardware is expensive and an additional cost. A hardware startup has all the same costs as a software company but with the addition of hardware.
Parts are pretty much instant, pcb turn around times are 3 to 15 days depending on how complex they are.
Even in the bad old days of punch cards and priesthoods the turn around for software was faster.
I have a little pcb mill in the garage that I use for prototypes.
To this day I've not met another EE that knows what a voronoi mapping is, or why you'd want one. In a previous startup where I was the software engineer I got through more prototypes for the analogue signal paths in an afternoon than the two other EEs had in the previous week.
Only for simple pcb. If you are making multi-layer pcb with complex stacks, pcb manufacturing and soldering (with associated tooling setup, validation and so) are easily 2 months of turnaround
Well to be fair if you add "validation" the turnaround for any noncomplex piece of software can reach months pretty quickly as well.
But yeah I'm not gonna argue that sw isn't faster than hw in 99% of the cases.
That’s a big part of it. But mostly it’s that your dev+deploy+evaluate cycle is so much slower. With web software you can write a feature or bug-fix and push to prod in minutes - and repeat that many times a day. With hardware each equivalent cycle is weeks or months (especially in my vertical - farms).
Some of us write software for embedded devices where a mistake in programning means a critical machine in a remote area needs someone to physically go there and thus spend months in test before we dare deploy. Some of us care about quality and won't allow a customer to see bugs thus even though we can deploy in seconds our reputation won't allow it. There is also software that bugs can kill people so again we won't deploy without evtensive testing - much of this is regulated and we would go to prison for deploying at will even if it works.
those who work in any of the above react in horror to stories of how the web deploys to production so fast. we know we are not perfect and don't understand how you would risk it.
That's what I meant by prototype turnover time, your iteration cycle.
The pace is not really parts supply constrained in my experience. It just takes much longer to build and validate even relatively modest design changes.
True but that reality applies to all your competitors. Your investors should care about your performance relative to the market.
Not to your competitors in Shenzhen, they can get basically any part within one day or can get any prototype made easily.
They also get it stolen even faster.
Investors are generally wanting to see little existing competition so that’s not really the issue.
They’re more concerned with factors that will cause the company to self-destruct. Running out of money before hitting PMF and growth is the most common failure mode for any startup, and is much more likely with any hardware startup, due to the dramatically slower iteration times.
Just to chime in and say that bootstrapping does work in this domain, I say that as someone who's had a few friends go down that route, but yes, it's really tough.
There's also people I know who built small scale solutions and then managed to push that into funding and funnily enough a Kickstarter as well though I don't think he'd recommend anyone follow that route.
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)
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-sur...
[2] https://jobs.bourns.com/go/Engineering/9254400/
Totally anecdotal but to your point, the engineering jobs in my hometown followed the manufacturing jobs in leaving town in the 1990s after NAFTA.
Engineering seems to be returning as domestic manufacturing increases thanks to foreign auto companies setting up shop across the state, replacing what the US companies left behind.
Being an engineer means mastering your production tool. For everything to do with physical production, you need to be close to the means of production to gather essential information on quality, capacity, operator feedback (machine and quality operators are invaluable sources of information.), etc.
Most information is not digital or hardly digitizable.
I don't completely agree with the article's classification of ARM as a hardware company. ARM produces VHDL and resells licenses, but does not produce any chips. It's closer to a software company than a TSMC.
I'd go one further and say you have to be at least a journeyman in whatever tools your process is using.
The difference between someone designing a part in cad and someone designing the tool paths for the machine that makes the part in cam is night and day.
We could discuss this at length, but I completely share your point of view. Anyone can design a part that's impossible to produce.
The real added value is knowing how something is actually going to be made, in how many stages, with what tools, what controls will be carried out, with what tools, what the acceptance and rejection criteria are, and how these criteria have been determined, are essential points.
There are plenty of industries where product engineering is done at a different company or place than product manufacturing.
For example, consumer electronics, industrial machines and robotics, telecom and medical devices.
The fact that it exists doesn’t mean it’s the best. You see it all the time that businesses do something just because everyone does it too. For example, the current AI investments, collatoral debt obligations in the 2000s, and conglomerates in the 1960s.
>the current AI investments
As someone whose done both hardware and AI, the current AI investments are at worst a repeat of the 2000 dot com boom.
They aren't wrong, but they may be premature with how terrible our compute substrate is.
Taiwan is kinda nice though? And just a short hop to Japan for holidays or even long weekends.
> 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.
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.
So everyone fully admits that these countries are in fact "worse" in every way?
I’m not sure what “admission” you’re looking for? That life is generally better in wealthy countries? Wow big surprise
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.
Very weird comment. Article talks about hardware talent in UK. Your comment tries to prove "engineering jobs" are not in the US by providing the job listing of a single supplier, when everybody knows that there are a huge amount of hardware talent in the US working at great companies that deliver amazing products. Your comment seems to equate "manufacturing jobs" to "hardware engineering jobs" which apparently isn't correct.
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
Was a MechE for 10 years here in the US and now I’m a SWE. Even here, no one cares about hardware engineers. Don’t get me wrong, you can make enough to be “comfortable”. But anecdotally, maybe 10% of MechE do design. 10% of that are paid handsomely to be in tech and are “Product Designers”. Even then, almost every tech company want to be a predominantly software company. They just happen to need hardware to execute their product. Admittedly, it’s really hard to do hardware in this economy when one country has 60% of the global manufacturing output and can copy your design, make it cheaper, and make it better. Ironically, the biggest dividing line that makes a hardware product better is good software.
That's what happens when there is not much manufacturing in the country anymore, and everyone is encouraged to go to college. I don't know why the software industry hasn't suffered more along the same lines. Maybe the profit margins for software are higher.
Interesting that you say that, my understand of the data is that manufacturing output has never been higher - ignoring lingering Covid shocks - https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/IPMANSICS
But because productivity is higher https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/M0100CUSM070NNBR - which doesn’t mean the workers are working harder: a man with a shovel can work as hard as he likes, but he’s never going to compete with the business owner who invested in productivity and gave his worker an excavator.
Therefore employment in the sector is down due to increased productivity, not decreased output.
But increased productivity is a radically different thing from decreased output. A claim that manufacturing should employ more, in the face of increased productivity, That’s a claim that manufacturing should replace other endeavours in the economy which, is a complex claim at the very least.
The nominal value of highly automated processes has never been higher. Meanwhile, ordinary people are not able to find as many good jobs as they once did. Wages in almost every industry are stagnant at best, at least when adjusted for inflation.
>A claim that manufacturing should employ more, in the face of increased productivity, That’s a claim that manufacturing should replace other endeavours in the economy which, is a complex claim at the very least.
It is a complex claim but I'll make it really simple. We import most of the things we rely on. Everything from plastic toys to car parts to critical medicines are all imported. Letting yourself become totally dependent on other countries while our STEM grads are underemployed, and would-be manufacturing line workers are forced to do bullshit like driving for Uber, is no way to run a country. It is going to backfire one day unless there is a major reversal in the trend.
Engineers are not ordinary jobs though and so the plite of the 'common man' is irrelavent.
Nice charts, but M0100CUSM070NNBR is from 1948 to 1963 :)
Eh, well, this is a bit embarrassing! On mobile, I can’t local a chart that covers the post war until now, best I can find is https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/OUTMS which shows late 80s onwards BUT shows a drop at 2008 onwards which goes against my argument (notwithstanding the big gap between both charts)
Production of software is nearly 100% R&D. Making a million copies of a software product has a trivial cost. There are no assembly line workers in software (and the very word "assembly" means a different thing). A software engineer very often brings in revenue many times their salary.
Production of hardware is some R&D, and then actual manufacturing. Production of each physical item costs you. Production of every physical item has a chance to go wrong. Production of each physical item requires a number of humans (often a large number) to do repetitive, high-precision, high-skill work, as fast as practical. You can augment or replace some of them with robots but it also costs you, and you can't replace all the humans with satisfactory results.
So, with hardware, the cost of the workforce plays a major role, while with software it does much less. To produce physical things, you need a lot of people who are not well-off, and for whom factory work is an upgrade of their financial and social standing. A "developing country", with huge swaths of population leaving rural life for a better city life and factory work, is best in this regard. Ideally you sell your product to richer folks, maybe outside the country of production.
Of course there can be situations where the workers are highly paid, and produce very valuable things through their skilled work. Ford in 1950s famously paid the assembly line workers very well, so that they could buy the cars they produce, and valued their employment. But this does not always occur; people doing work that does not add a lot of resale value also want to live well, especially if the society does not want a flood of immigrants who are willing to work for much less. Check out how much the work of a plumber costs in Switzerland. So only high-precision, high-margin, low-volume manufacturing remains in Switzerland, such as precision optics, precision industrial and medical equipment, or premium mechanical Swiss watches. The US is in a somehow similar situation.
This all resonates very strongly with me. We have tons of automation - the proverbial "economies of scale", but we haven't managed to solve the last mile.
Auto assembly seems like a poster child. There's wild automation going on, but the typical plant still requires thousands of employees doing things by hand. Musk tried to automate a lot more of this away with newer/better robotics, but failed. (Tesla has still achieved a lot here, but it's been more towards creating designs that are more amenable to the current state of robotics).
IMO, this problem should be solvable now. I.E. we don't need "new physics" to reach another step-function in automation. We need more investment. We're still largely in the mindset of "special-purpose" automation.
Yeah I remember one of my friends working for a German auto company during the 2008 financial crisis and having insane stuff routinely happen like an auto manufacturer having to buy truckloads of sensors from a subcontractor that had nowhere to go as car manufacturing lines were stopped.
Failing to do so would have meant these manufacturers would go under, (along with their own subcontractors) and once demand shot back up, cars would be literally impossible to manufacture as key suppliers went out of business.
I disagree very slightly. Mostly with this part:
>So, with hardware, the cost of the workforce plays a major role, while with software it does much less. To produce physical things, you need a lot of people who are not well-off, and for whom factory work is an upgrade of their financial and social standing. A "developing country", with huge swaths of population leaving rural life for a better city life and factory work, is best in this regard. Ideally you sell your product to richer folks, maybe outside the country of production.
You don't need a lot of people who are not well-off. You can automate the entire process. The problem with automation and labor saving technology is that it is capital intensive. The higher the capital investment per job (higher capital intensity), the bigger the chunk of money that flows to capital rather than labor.
This means that the cost of the workforce in a software company plays a bigger role than in a hardware company, where financing costs to pay for labor saving technology play a bigger role.
There are mining companies in Africa, who have nothing but an army of people equipped with shovels digging a small scale open pit mine. There is no way the labor cost here is the biggest constraint. An excavator and wheel loader could accomplish more with less people, but it would mean getting a USD loan to import foreign equipment and then selling for export to pay the foreign debts, rather than local production.
> Production of software is nearly 100% R&D. Making a million copies of a software product has a trivial cost.
> Production of hardware is some R&D, and then actual manufacturing
Totally. And if you think deployment errors are bad, wait until you see how many production errors exist and how many items out of your line come out working and within spec
Indeed. You cannot release a patch for a mechanical part or a PCB.
For a PCB it’s called a rework, and it’s very common for first spins of boards to have to do one.
Also common is to patch around issues, when possible, in firmware. This is often lower cost/effort, but can’t fix everything.
There are similar kinds of fixes for purely mechanical parts. Depending on the part and problem, mechanical can be easier than a PCB rework (eg: modify a part in CAD and 3D print or get your local machine shop to do a run).
You can and people do.
It’s just a lot more expensive and labor intensive to apply.
The U.S. is still the second largest manufacturer in the world by a large margin [1][2]
Like, yes, manufacturing's % of US GDP is low (and has been decreasing for a long time) and manufacturing employment is flat or slowly increasing but we're still making a lot of stuff.
[1] https://www.nist.gov/el/applied-economics-office/manufacturi...
[2] https://worldpopulationreview.com/country-rankings/manufactu...
I don't think we make a lot of stuff but we do make some of the most expensive stuff. So a lot of stats really don't reflect how unbalanced our trade is in real terms.
I've been told that acceptable software margins are around 75%. Hardware focused yields closer to 20%-40%. Hence why there is such a strong push towards software-only.
> I don't know why the software industry hasn't suffered more along the same lines
Growth of the software industry isn't constrained by the cost of capital
>Maybe the profit margins for software are higher.
This is easily confirmed by checking public financials of publicly listed companies. The profit margins are much higher, and the liability is much lower. The only exception is for those hardware manufacturers at the cutting edge whose products cannot be commodified, such as TSMC and ASML and the ilk.
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.
My impression is that top aerospace people do not now work in aerospace, but in Motorsport.
motorsport is similarly low salary, at least specifically F1. It is like game-dev in software in that there are far more people who want to do it than the number of jobs available so they can afford to pay you in the cool experience of working on F1 rather than in cash terms.
Wait what. Quality of life in rural UK is worse than rat race of London?
Absolutely. No public transport, almost no culture, and housing anywhere nice is even less available than in London. For a young person working at one of these firms, where can you live? Where could you meet someone to date? What can you even do at the weekend?
JLR is based in the metro area of Britain's second city. It's not exactly the middle of nowhere. Rolls Royce is in Derby, on the edge of the Peak District with much to offer. Much cheaper housing with more space available. And unlike in London, driving a car isn't hounded by terminal congestion.
JLR Gaydon is not in the metro area of Birmingham. It's in nice countryside and near a motorway which helps, but it's a fair commute out of Birmingham at rush hour to there. The nice surrounding towns/villages are expensive, and even the shitty ones aren't cheap (hello Banbury) as they're on the edge of commuter distance to London.
Derby I haven't lived in but know people who have. It's an old manufacturing town and hasn't much to offer graduates. Or anyone really. The Peak District is great, and if you can live out that way and commute in then do it. But again, you won't have similar people for local friends.
Can confirm, I grew up in Derby and it's an absolute desolate wasteland for anyone with any ambition, intelligence or a need for a modicum of culture.
Saying the peak district is good for young people is like saying there's a great lake near Detroit, it's not exactly what they're after.
There's a huge JLR presence in Solihull right next to Birmingham.
It's also one of the wealthiest areas outside of London. But house prices in the really nice parts of Solihull are also high.
There is a culture there. I am not sure what people mean when they say there isn't a culture outside of the London. If you mean things like events, art exhibs etc. We have those here. If you mean bars, pubs and restaurants we have those here to.
Is it as glitzy as London. No. But saying there is "no culture" is just absolutely asinine.
> No public transport
When I live in London I didn't drive, which was kinda nice but also meant I've only been out of city like once a year.
Sitting in traffic sucks of course, but driving rurally opens so much.
As for weekends - driving and hiking I guess?
Wherever you live in London, there are commuter (and intercity) railway lines that can take you out of it.
For example I lived not far from Putney. Putney to Windsor & Eton Riverside takes 39 minutes and costs £6.90.
https://www.openstreetmap.org/#map=11/51.5330/-0.1146&layers...
Sure, but at that point you're having to buy a car (which is much harder as a young person - car prices have gone up, insurance has gone up faster, the driving test is harder than it was and lessons cost more...), you'll need somewhere to park it which adds to your housing costs, you still can't go drinking, and in general you're cut off from a lot of what young people are doing.
What makes you think QoL in London is bad? I grew up in a rural farming town and much prefer London. Housing is expensive but that's about it.
The UK is two countries, you can either live in/around the prosperous one with high cultural capital, good quality public services inc transport, or you can live in the other one.
Meh. Having lived in both I much prefer the latter.
When a man is tired of London he is tired of life.
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.
Plenty of culture isn't gigs and nightclubs - London isn't terribly good, for its population size and economy, for those anyway.
Think museums, parks, galleries, theatre, exhibitions.
Granted it's not the only city with those, the problem the UK has is that its small, desirable cities are unable to grow or reinvent themselves. Cambridge and Bristol should be ideal for hardware startups, but the cost of both housing and working space is insane for small, provincial cities, partly because NIMBYism and partly because building infrastructure is absurdly expensive when you're constantly having to work around 200 year old buildings and 800yo city plans.
you’ve got kids and can’t enjoy the nightlife and culture anyway
Having kids while living in the centre of a large city is great, as there is so much culture that is aimed at parents and children. When my kid was small we went to museums and concerts and events all the time that were aimed at kids. There were also several different parks, playgrounds, pools and similar activities to choose from all within easy access. Plus once the kids get slightly older they can use public transport to get around and you don't have to drive them anywhere near as much as if you live in the suburbs.
> Having kids while living in the center of a large city is great
If you can afford a flat that's big enough for you and the kids
We drop the kids off at my parents and go for dinner at any one of hundreds of top quality restaurants. Can't do that in Kettering.
https://www.samueljohnson.com/tiredlon.html
How do you get kids if you can’t meet someone your age to partner up with?
Or tired of 63% income tax rates in the middle of the income bands
Does London have a different tax policy to where Jaguar Land Rover is based?
You have to earn (much) more to have the same standard of living as outside of it. Therefore you pay more income tax and the cost of living is higher anyway.
Depends what you mean by "Quality of Life". I literally won't go to see friends because that would mean travelling to London. I hate the place. It is expensive, hostile, dirty and everyone is rude.
I live on the outskirts of the peak district. I can walk/cycle less than 30 minutes out of town and be walking along the old canals, through old villages and get amazing views of the countryside.
To some extent, this also applies to software. Except for DeepMind and a few other select places like Altos Labs, getting past £100k is hard, especially outside London. Unless you go into finance, of course. But then, you have to stick to London. Finance is like a black hole that sucks a big chunk of the mathematical, CS and statistical UK talent. They have very proactive recruiters trying to e.g. connect with Oxbridge students when they are approaching graduation.
I know plenty of engineers (web application developers) making over £100-£150k outside of London, usually in fairly low-stress remote jobs.
The pay is clearly nothing compared to the US, but I wouldn’t say it was massively hard for them to get where they are. They all have 5+ years experience at a senior level, and are otherwise just reliable, capable, low-maintenance employees, but maybe that’s rare!
That is indeed very rare. A simple sanity check you can look at how many people earn about 100k in the UK, we know the figure for above 125k is 500,000 [1]. We can subtract the number of other jobs that we know for sure pay above this for example lawyers at magic circle firms which start on >150k for newly qualified lawyers, consultants in the NHS, directors of large corportaions, and we end up with a very small amount of people in other industries that earn these figures. Even before that we know the median is about £50k, and I can tell you from experience you can hire very very good software people on those wages, even in London.
From personal experience, I also know of software guys making that, but I also know far far more people earning below that, and these are oxford/cambridge/imperial/UCL grads....
[1]: https://www.gov.uk/government/statistics/personal-incomes-st...
They are almost always contractors. If you work permanent it tops out max at about £75,000-90,000.
They’re not, they’re full time employees.
Then they are very few and far between. Generally the absolute limit is £90k. I've never seen any role for more than 90K unless it was a company in London and those are typically hybrid and not remote.
The jobs above 90k generally don't specify a salary on the job posting. Just two examples: Goldman Sachs and Meta.
I only have the figures for end of 2018[1], but meta employed around 2300 people in the UK, if we assume the same distribution of jobs as elsewhere in the world about half will be engineers, so 1150 engineers. There aren't that many of these jobs. At goldman its a lot higher, aboutn 10,000[2] globally, but they only have around 3,300 employees in the Uk so if its the same ratio as global (25% tech), then that means around 800 developers. Again you'll note this is a very small number compared to the number of top graduates a year, with class sizes of 100-200 per university.
[1]: https://engineering.fb.com/2018/11/16/production-engineering...
[2]: https://brainstation.io/magazine/goldman-sachs-digital-team-...
[3]: https://www.fnlondon.com/articles/goldman-sachs-internationa...
So like I said originally these jobs are few and far between. The point is that in the UK the salaries are much lower than those in the US and this is across all experience ranges.
They're in the extreme minority. Most software dev roles in the UK top out between £40 and £50k, £60k if you're lucky.
It’s shocking. Software engineers in the UK are treated like engineers in the US were in the 1960s. Low respect, low pay, while city boys strutting around in shiny suits snapping their fingers to get anything they want.
That's a weird statement considering I'd have guess the greatest amount of respect and adoration (not necessarily money) (non-software) engineers have gotten in the US would've been during the Space Race and Cold War years.
It was real respect for the trade as well, not some secondhand respect that people who make a lot of money and wield a lot of social influence get.
> Rolls Royce in the middle of nowhere
100 miles north of London. 1 hour on the train.
> Jaguar Land Rover in the middle of nowhere
100 miles north of London. 1 hour on the train.
I am a former Mech Eng who trod this path. Started at JLR, moved by self teaching into software. Engineering in the UK felt like it moved at a glacial pace that only made sense in the days of final salary pension schemes. Senior management really struggled to get their heads around why young people were so impatient, but we were not competing for the same rewards.
It seems like the salaries quoted here haven't changed much in the past couple of decades. It's a shame. I know in the past there was a brain drain of talent from the UK to Canada due to the salary disparity. Here's an example:
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Terry_Matthews
And in general engineering jobs in Canada don't even pay as well as in the USA.
Hey now you could also go and work for Airbus...but it does mean having to go to Stevenage, as well as getting terrible pay.
I even know a decent amount of people who did engineering at the top unis in the UK, only to go into audit at the big 4....
In the end, it's a results business. Software just get higher pay earlier in the career so people will have to go for it.
Been there, done that. I still frequently get sent Linkedin specs for companies where the hardware team lead is earning junior SWE money. UK junior SWE money.
Coventry is hardly the middle of nowhere
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.
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).
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.
The culture sector in London is notoriously badly paid. Mostly staffed by the intellectual trophy husbands and wives of the financial sector.
Even similar sized public sector organisations (thinking education) pay far better. A senior headteacher with 50 or 100 staff will do a lot better than a cultural manager.
> Mostly staffed by the intellectual trophy husbands and wives of the financial sector.
Oh so true. Which helps to explain the number of levels of management in UK cultural institutions, because in London there are enough of these people who want a (poorly paid) role that it's better to have 3 layers of management when 1 would do.
Software engineers can usually expect to at least 2x their earnings, the median in the uk is £50k and in the US it is £100k, and that is not acounting for the significantly lower tax burden. (That pay excludes medical benefits, if you include the dollar value of that and bonuses and equity the difference rises).
>> 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.
Citation needed. No-one wants to live in Frankfurt.
That's a shame, Frankfurt (am Main) is a pretty nice place
A quick Google search will return many: https://www.reuters.com/world/uk/city-london-chief-says-brex...
TLDR: They're not moving to Frankfurt but they are moving out of the UK.
What do you expect the Lord Mayor to say? "Yes we think Brexit was great and that the government is going a good job." They're a lobby, they want to lobby for more concessions.
Museum jobs are hideously badly paid. In many cases the real work is done for free by "volunteers" (really poor saps on a 2-5 year job interview) before finding out the actual job went to a buddy of the museum director who doesn't even need to show up most of the time.
I'm pretty sure engineers are also 230% increase or more.
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.
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.
If your wife used to manage 60 people and now manages a third of that, it seems like her talent is being wasted NOW, not when she was in the UK.
I'll add that 70K is nothing to write home about in the US, especially if you're not in a low COL state.
The article is about people not going in the field that they're talented at, because it's low paid. Clearly it doesn't apply to your wife which is talented and went in the low paid field.
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.
> 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 (
Yes we have many comments on HN talking about how harmful the US VCs attitude is because they force good businesses into choosing between being unicorns and not getting funding.
I do not know the truth of it, but clearly its not obvious.
> Unfortunately the UK has not been well governed for 20 years or so, and hence economic outcomes as a whole have been abysmal.
I commented on this earlier. The UK's economic outcomes have been similar to comparable European economies (like Germany) and better than some (like France). Whatever the problem is, its not unique to the UK: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42766107
I do not think the UK is well run, but I think the west in general is badly run. Poorly thought out regulation, short termism in both politics and business, a focus on metrics subject to Goodhart's and Campbell's laws, and a poor understanding of the rest of the work (leading to bad foreign policy).
> Yes we have many comments on HN talking about how harmful the US VCs attitude is because they force good businesses into choosing between being unicorns and not getting funding.
HN has a very wide range of economic opinions, and some people are extremely uninformed about what it takes to do hard things that can't be grown organically, and what it takes to maintain a business running when it's done the hard thing in the face of competition.
Most of the issues here relate to scale and actual quality of the idea/business in the first place. Hard things can really be split into, challenging but a problem to solve, or this never should have become a business. The former will work well with the right sort of investors. The latter will eventually sink, the investors simply provide money and poor ideas such as trying to incorporate AI into every business model.
> Yes we have many comments on HN talking about how harmful the US VCs attitude is because they force good businesses into choosing between being unicorns and not getting funding.
Most of those are people complaining about a business having to make changes because it took $50+m in funding and now needs to justify it. The business was only "good" because it got $50m and didn't need to do things like charge enough money. If it hadn't gotten that $50m then those people wouldn't consider it such a good business or even know about it.
It's because post GFC the USA stimulated and the EU went all in on austerity.
It is fairly clear what was the best option.
Under-rated comment. This is basically the whole explanation. 2008 did a huge amount of damage, not just immediately but to long-term mindsets. Ironically I think it's even entrenched the meme that the only real way to make money in the UK is property. We're all Georgists now.
(this includes property as an export industry! Leaving increasing areas of the UK owned by overseas absentee landlords.)
The problem is that people think property is a risk free way of making money - even if they borrow heavily to invest. Maybe what we need is a property price crash.
I'm not sure a property price crash would achieve this goal.
You will have to decide for yourself if I'm speaking from experience or have motivated reasoning, as I'm saying this as an overseas absentee landlord who bought a UK apartment around the tail end of the previous price crash, initially as a place to live in until I decided the UK wasn't for me any more, and was rich enough to do so without a mortgage.
(I left the UK in 2018 due to a mix of Brexit and technological incompetence in the form of the Investigatory Powers Act. Would have left UK sooner but for parent with Alzheimer's).
Reason being: the income from housing doesn't have to come from reselling houses (which a price crash would impact) — I'm collecting rent, not flipping property. Forecasts future increases to rental rates suggests it won't keep getting worse (relative to general inflation) than it already is for renters, but it's already obviously quite bad.
Nearest we came was ... 2008, with all that implies. I don't think we can have a property price crash until the population starts net-declining.
In the UK it more or less is a risk free way to make money. The government's hand is always seen when a danger to the property market prices hoves into sight.
The UK did not choose austerity:
https://commonslibrary.parliament.uk/research-briefings/sn06...
but still has worse growth than the US.
They most certainly did
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_Kingdom_government_aust...
What they didn't do, unlike PIGS, was also tough reforms which are paying back now
https://www.reuters.com/breakingviews/flying-piigs-nations-s...
The UK government did, for all intents and purposes, choose austerity after the pandemic: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_Kingdom_government_au....
Can you explain how your link supports your argument?
The conservatives ran austerity-based policies for the last 14 years. Is your argument that they did not have a choice?
Have you seen the national debt under the conservatives? It's massively increased.
For the last 20 or 25 years the UK has been coasting on the North Sea oil&gas money, I'd say that worked up until the early 2010s, and then on the almost complete financialization of its economy and on selling out whatever pieces of the economy could still be sold out (that includes part of their beloved NHS).
But that can only work for so long and is beneficial in the medium to long-term for a very limited number of people (basically the owners of said financial capital), at some point you have to produce some real wealth, wealth produced from real stuff via resources of the Earth + human ingenuity and, yes, + human work.
I agree, but my point is that the France, Germany, and other comparable European economies have the same or similar problems. The UK is not some exception, it is a typical western economy. The US is an outlier (doing better).
> that includes part of their beloved NHS
A more severe problem is that the NHS was debt funded (mostly through off balance sheet debt) in the 2000s. The government kept their promise not to increase national debt by disguising running up disguised debt in the NHS
Its also worth noting that a large chuck of NHS services, GP services in particular, were always subcontracted to private providers.
It's not a surprise that EU countries perform similarly as they have to abide by the same laws and therefore are all restricted in the same ways. For example EU drone regulations prohibit the flying of autonomous drones therefore killing innovation in that area.
Germany was quite fine until a couple of years ago, mostly thanks to very cheap Russian gas. About France I agree, they have the same problems as the Brits do, maybe because they lost access to cheap African mineral resources as a result of Francafrique [1] ending? I couldn't tell, to be honest.
But at the end of the day the point remains that if you want to have a world-beating economy you need to have access to relatively cheap inputs (which includes energy), in large enough amounts, otherwise your economy will just not make it. The Americans have that (people forget how much of an economic boom gas fracking brought with it), the Chinese have that (thanks to its very large population and access to natural resources that is reasonable enough, they're no 1930s Japan), India has that (thanks to its very large and young population), even Russia has that (thanks to its natural resources), meanwhile Europe has almost no demographic advantage and almost no natural resources left to exploit. "Innovation" (which is also lacking) and financialization alone can get you only so far.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fran%C3%A7afrique
Germany's number one economic problem is energy costs. Blaming the increase on Russian gas hits only a tiny slice of the problem.
The real problem is a completely botched "energy transition", which deprecated very important energy sectors, which were still absolutely needed.
To be clear, I am in favor of renewables. One benefit is that they create independence from the whims of the US and Russia. Nevertheless the transition has been completely botched, driving up energy costs and making certain industries essentially non-viable.
The government focused on two things, increasing renewable peak production and deprecating nuclear. What they completely neglected is how to actually have a sustainable grid, which can cheaply deliver energy even with little sunshine and little wind. What was needed was easily regulated power (e.g. nuclear) and sufficient storage. Nuclear was completely abandoned and most government incentives were focused on increasing peak production, neglecting the storage of energy.
This is obviously harmful to the German industry, which is electricity heavy. This problem has also been consistently ignored and actively made worse in recent years, by continuing to shut down nuclear plants, even if it was clear that more energy production was needed.
> The UK's economic outcomes have been similar to comparable European economies (like Germany) and better than some (like France)
Who says those countries were well governed though? IMO they are all run by idealogical morons
I agree they were also badly governed - that is my point.
Completely agree, the problem in Europe is not regulations or anything like that - it is a mindset issue. It is one of things that europeans can learn from Americans.
My hypothesis is that this is a combination of old money and class consciousness. In other words, the rich are risk averse because all they care is preserving their wealth and the working class don’t believe and can’t even imagine that more is possible.
Regulations often stem from a particular mindset. However, they also serve to perpetuate that mindset.
As a member of the working class, I find there’s little incentive to build something new or innovate because the effort required to navigate through all the burdensome regulations is overwhelming. On top of that, any additional income I might generate from bringing my ideas or initiatives to market would be taxed at more than 50%. For many people like me, the effort simply isn’t worth it. Instead, we focus our energy on other pursuits, such as family, sports, or friendships.
This shift in focus isn’t inherently bad—a life balanced between family, friends, work, and leisure is often a recipe for happiness. However, societal progress relies heavily on the efforts of a small minority of individuals who are bold (or perhaps crazy) enough to pursue their ideas. When 90% of those individuals are discouraged from taking entrepreneurial risks, society’s capacity for innovation is severely stifled.
In short, it’s clear that excessive regulations and high taxes are holding Europe back from achieving its full potential for growth and innovation.
Which regulations exactly you find burdensome or overwhelming and stopping you from attempting the become wealthy, change your life and the world maybe?
Why would you skip having 1 billion Euros just because you could have had 2 Billion but the government took the rest? Up until 1960's rich Americans payed %91 tax, and yet they kept their entrepreneurial spirit - why you can't do the same at the stated %50?
When Apple was founded, the tax rates were %70.
We have global commerce; you are not only working on the creation part of something new, but also competing with similarly skilled people working with different more advantageous start conditions.
Nobody is talking about the difference between 1 and 2 billion, they are talking about the difference between 50 and 100 thousand, while competing.
> Why would you skip having 1 billion Euros just because you could have had 2 Billion but the government took the rest?
No one's making that choice. Most businesses fail, even in somewhere entrepreneur-friendly like America. Why not just work for someone else, given the rewards are capped even at relatively low level of success? Why take the risk, when taxation has failed to price risk into reward?
The highest marginal tax brackets tend to kick in very, very early in Europe. That makes a huge difference.
Does it? How many people skipped getting rich because they could have been richer? Any factual examples?
BTW, rich don't actually pay much taxes. The luxury life they live is usually not taxed, most of the things they do is considered business expense.
When a worker flies to Ibiza they first pay social security and income taxes, then they pay consumption taxes like VAT.
When a businessman flies to Ibiza they deduct whatever they can as an expense so they don't pay income tax and VAT. For whatever they can't claim that it is a business expense they will pay with a cheap loan against their assets and avoid paying income taxes. Since they still have those assents, they pay just the interest later when the assents increase in value. If their business fails those assets fail, the bank takes the assets and no taxation happens.
What the OP is trying to say is that to grow from 50k euros earned per year to 1 million euros earned per year is very, very cumbersome and, yes, mentally challenging and very stressful, and that a lot of people actively choose to stay/remain at the 50k euros per year level and they'll not take the risks of trying to get to more than 1 million per year.
Once you're at more than 1 million per year there are other challenges and you can probably afford to hire someone to take part of that burden off your shoulders, but until you get to that point you're on your own and it's very damn stressful (and by stressful I mean that that includes the possible inflated but all to real fear of getting to prison because of that tax-thingie that you didn't fill the 100% correct way or because some work your company did broke some municipal regulations or whatever and now you're on the hook for damages and, yes, personal liability).
Actually your VAT-skimming thing at the end is a very good example of that mentality, i.e. the innovators here having to have the Tax man front and center in their minds, before innovation and trying to build something useful off the ground, because if you don't know how to play the Tax man (at the limit of legality, as your example is) then you're toast. That "playing the Tax-man" thing consumes a lot of people's energy in the early stages, energy that would have been way better spent trying to actually make something new and innovative.
[the 50k and 1 million figures are just used as examples, maybe it's not 50k but 70k or 80k and maybe it's not 1 million but 5 to 10 million, but the idea stays the same]
For a married couple in Germany, they reach 40% in effective tax rate somewhere above 600,000€ in combined annual income.
My take would be that once people have 100k€ in net annual income per person, they just do other things and work less because it brings them more happiness than the additional money would.
You've fallen into the classic trap of thinking about the very very very tiny of people who are billionaires. Very few people are billionaires. Very few startup founders will ever be even if they succeed.
Life changing money is going from $50k/year to $1m/year. Not from $1b to $2b.
The vast majority of tax burden and complexity hits the middle class.
> When Apple was founded, the tax rates were %70.
It was 35% on capital gains.
In Europe the capital gain tax ranges from %37 in Norway, %34 in France, %26 in Germany and Italy, %10 in Bulgaria and %0 with conditions in many other places. Tax heavens are a European invention anyway.
And no, millionaire or billionaire doesn't matter much. Europe lacks Billionaires not Millionaires. Europe is full of small businesses and by small I mean millions in profits and revenues.
In Europe %99 of the companies are small or medium sized enterprises, which is not different than the USA. In USA however, large companies have slightly higher number of employees which is an indicative of concentration of power and that's how you get your "USA has 5 unicorns in top 10 but EU has only 1" lists.
Contrary to the narrative, Europe has much more small and medium sized enterprises per capita: https://www.nationmaster.com/country-info/stats/Economy/Micr...
> Europe lacks Billionaires not Millionaires.
It lacks both.
The US has 8.5% millionaires. Germany has 4.1. France has 5.6. Norway has 5.9. The UK has 5.8. Once you include the rest of the EU it goes even lower.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_number_of...
edit: And in the US there's no need to start a business to be a millionaire. You can become one by just working a regular job. Sales, consulting, tech, finance, etc. jobs can even pay you $1m per year.
With enough inflation the millionaires supply will increase, but that's not the point. Toplists and arbitrary round numbers doesn't mean anything. Let's stick with stuff that matter, like concentration of wealth.
> but that's not the point
You made it a point, not me. If you're going to try changing the goal post when proven wrong then there's no point in talking further.
Having less is different than lacking of. Europe lacks billionaires that can make large scale investments at whim like Elon Musk does. A more equal society has its positives but negatives too.
Canadian here.
It's not so much any single regulation, as it is there's so many little ones that seem reasonable on the face of it. But it's also that what makes the ruling Canadian class so is the authority to bypass those regulations.
I can give one personal example; I was able to secure some public funding application for a non profit I'm affiliated with. But the only reason I was able to do that was because my parents were university classmates of the elected official that was able to pressure the staff that was handling the paperwork to prioritize and approve our application ahead of probably the hundreds in front of us. The official's going to get a nice thank you dinner out of it, but I also had to offer some information that the official could financially benefit from for him to even consider it, and a promise of some future favors.
For better or worst that's how a lot of Canadian system works. Grant applications, personal tax work, personal and business banking, etc. Anyone can get through it eventually for anything. But if you want it done quickly and in a way probably won't get tied up in the system itself, you better know someone that owes you a favor.
This is very interesting anecdote because it resonates with something that a friend of mine said when I pressured him to explain which regulations exactly are causing him problems in EU.
As it turns out, he also complained about excessive documentation he needs to get public funds for his project.
So both of you are actually complaining about accessing public funds and not actually doing private investment or starting a private company with private funds.
this is not what most of the Americans do and this is not what they mean by startups or business. Mostly.
Nominal tax rates were 70 or 90 per cent, but no one really paid them. The tax code was full of loopholes for that purpose.
You can't rely on such paper figures to determine real tax burden in the past.
Which is still the case. No one is skipping getting rich because of taxes, they end up paying very little anyway.
What makes you think anything has changed here? Certainly in the UK, there are plenty of "loopholes". Outside of PAYE, there are plenty of ways to legally lower your tax burden, and plenty of wealthy business owners and shareholders make full use of those loopholes.
This is true and I believe it doesn't make sense to compare tax burdens of the people who are already wealthy.
It makes sense to compare tax burdens of well-paid employees, a favorite cash cow of most governments. These are the people who sometimes start new businesses, and use their savings to do so.
And there is a meaningful difference to the volume of their savings if their top tax bracket is 30 per cent or 55 per cent.
> As a member of the working class, I find there’s little incentive to build something new or innovate because the effort required to navigate through all the burdensome regulations is overwhelming. On top of that, any additional income I might generate from bringing my ideas or initiatives to market would be taxed at more than 50%. For many people like me, the effort simply isn’t worth it.
I find it ironic you mention "classes" (regarding "as a member of the working class"). There are problems everywhere (either as an employee or as an entrepreneur). Feeling overwhelmed is just a feeling, does not say anything about how much you can do or if you get a reasonable workload.
I think what is holding Europe back is the people not trying and understanding various things without having lots of fears (of being overwhelmed, of large tax, of what people will say, etc.).
A balance must be stricken also between what you can do (leisure, family) and how many resource you produce/consume. The purpose should be for more of leisure/family but that is ONLY IF we (I am also European) produce/consume enough. Too many smart and capable people want to "just be an employee", which results in gaps in other places (entrepreneurs, politicians, etc.).
I think this is a combination of a lack of supportive environment and a risk averse mindset. Employers will likely scoff at a CV with one or more entrepreneurial stints. The way I see it is this: if the prohibition era was implemented in the UK, people would still acquire alcohol against any and all barriers. The same drive doesn't exist for entrepreneurial goals. Regulations make things difficult but the critical problem is that the entrepreneurial mindset is not there
The 50% tax being a roadblock is exactly what the lack of ambition is about. There's an implicit assumption you're only ever achieve just over the tax limit rather than hundreds of thousands or milllions over with share options etc.
EU drone regulations ban autonomous drones from being flown. This made me stop work on them, this is not a mindset problem. It's actually a corruption problem as Google wanted to sell their software to coordinate drone flights and the EU people were "persuaded" to enact regulations to make this happen.
This is interesting, can you give a bit more details maybe? Which regulations are not allowing you to do what? I wasn’t able to find the ban, is it maybe more about safety and privacy requirements rather than outright ban?
In Germany, you can typically finance the first 1-3 years of your start-up through government gifts like "EXIST". That's why you don't need early seed investors.
EXIST is very narrowly tailored to technology start-ups founded by graduates based on their research.
Out of curiosity I was spot-checking the the founders of the latest YC 24 Winter batch at https://www.ycombinator.com/companies?batch=W24 , and the requirements would exclude at least 90% of them from EXIST if they lived in Germany.
Your sentence is not true as you present it. There are _a lot_ of constraints. Time wise, topic wise, biased wise. No typicality start-up will ever get the EXIST "gift".
EXIST in particular targets universities, though, so not every founder is eligible.
Correct, that was meant as an example. There's also "Existenzgründungszuschuss" for the unemployed and various other EU funds for craftsmen and others:
https://europa.eu/youreurope/business/running-business/start...
"The grant covers personal living, material, and coaching expenses over 12 months, allowing founders to focus on developing their founding idea. While graduates receive personal funding of 2.500€, students can receive 1.000€ a month, additionally up to 30.000€ material and 5.000€ coaching budget that can be used to develop the founding project further."
So, 30k EUR (gross) with a maximum funding period of one year? Laughable. Also probably a little bit tragicomic.
Early seed rounds are usually measured in couple of USD millions. I wonder how these brilliant minds in the EU think they will attract the industry talent to leave their ~5x salary (outside FAANG) for such a pocket money.
Do you know any equivalent for the Netherlands by any chance? Everything I see is tiny amounts.
There is the SeedCapital route: https://english.rvo.nl/subsidies-financing/seed-capital
Isnt this just a private loan?
Thanks!
Idk about the Netherlands, but in France you can take your unemployment benefits for 3 years upfront as a capital investment in a new business. And there are various grants and aid you can apply for.
Can you get unemployment if you quit?
Annoyingly, in 20 years of working I've never been fired or laid off.
In CAC40 company, It is possible to take unpaid leave with the possibility of returning to the company to set up a new business. The idea is that if the project fails, the original company recovers an employee who has learned a lot (free MBA).
If you're already unemployed, it's possible to keep your allowance longer for a business start-up or takeover.
It's also possible to sign a “rupture conventionée”, which entitles you to unemployment benefits.
But no, if the employee resigns, he or she is not entitled to unemployment benefits, nor to business start-up assistance.
the French system is generous, but not as generous.
I see this misconception a lot for resigning France.
First, there are some "protected classes" of resigning that allow you to be eligible for unemployment right after you resign, for example: moving to follow your spouse, resigning less than 3 months after having been laid off, going back to study or... creating a company!![1] :).
Second, you are entitled to unemployment benefits even if you resign without "a good reason". The issue is that you can only request your benefits 4 months after having resigned. This leads to many people believing that you just do not get anything if you resign; because who wants to eat the 4 months of no income?
This 4 months waiting period is not advertised at all, and my complotist self believes it might be on purpose; if you don't know about it and don't request it, that's less money for the government to spend :^).
[1] Conditions apply (having worked uninterrupted for the last 5 years)
It's more complicated than that [0]. The fact that you have the right to claim unemployment benefit does not mean that it will be accepted, that it will be accepted quickly or that the benefit will correspond to what you would have had if you had been laid off.
[0] https://www.service-public.fr/particuliers/vosdroits/F34991/...
> In CAC40 company, It is possible to take unpaid leave with the possibility of returning to the company to set up a new business
It's not only CAC40, it's part of some collective bargaining agreements which apply to whole sectors (e.g. SYNTEC which applies to all consulting and most IT companies).
I think recently there's been a change which says that you can if you start a new company right away. But do check with an accountant for the inevitable pitfalls.
> don’t believe and can’t even imagine that more is possible.
And/or don't think that more is better/desirable. I wouldn't consider myself working class, but I was definitely raised with the idea that making obscene amounts of money is actually pretty selfish/immoral and not something one ought to strive for. That doesn't preclude going into business. But it is pretty antithetical to the VC funding model and the creation of billion dollar businesses.
In general, it seems that the culture in America is that wealth is virtuous and confers status, whereas in Europe that at least isn't so universal and some circles it is even seen as shameful (consider that variants on socialism are still mainstream political ideologies in Europe).
But we're not talking about obscene amounts of money. Just making enough to have some savings so you can do things like a career break or retire early is discouraged (and mostly impossible). Europe wants you to work, and keep working, forever.
Considering the differences in living prices in major capitals and other cities, I would claim you can do that (career break/retire early) even today in multiple countries in Europe.
But that would mostly mean changing places. If you go and work 10-15 years in an expensive/high pay city, you could retire in a less expensive city.
On the other hand if you expect that everything will be as when you were working (place, expenses, etc.), I am not sure it is the case even in the US for early retirements ...
Exactly. Half the population are saboteurs and vote to suppress success
Success is viewed differently by some. Being educated, having healthy lives, having access to many public servicesnare seen as a successful healthy life by many.
> it seems that the culture in America is that wealth is virtuous
I don't think I've ever seen this claimed anywhere except as a criticism.
It’s not something that Americans in general explicitly believe, but you can see it in their attitudes and behavior towards the rich and successful. For example, HN (being somewhat weighted towards American cultural norms) collectively believes that people who have made lots of money are especially wise and hard working, and therefore have special insights to offer to the rest of us. True or not, this is a culturally specific belief.
I think this is just a bias. I've not seen much that makes me think Americans think rich people are more virtuous, at all. Certainly not enough to create a stereotype out of, even if I thought stereotypes were a good idea.
Yeah, I was raised with that idea. I did make some nice businesses, but I don't care for growing because of growing. If I catch a few 100k a year for everyone in the company (yep, it is the reason I like tiny companies: we can just decide to all make the same), I don't really care about the rest. Doing that for 10 years (even shorter but he) is enough for anyone to live out their life in comfort out of the (etfs etc) interest here. I keep on doing making new things as I like it, but need no more money, so that helps.
> it seems that the culture in America is that wealth is virtuous and confers status, whereas in Europe that at least isn't so universal and some circles it is even seen as shameful
Isn't this due to different types of Christian traditions? AFAIK In some, it is considered that the wealth is given by the God to the virtuous ones and they are merely guardians of it and responsible to use use the wealth in a virtuous ways and therefore getting rich is encouraged and the rich are treated with respect?
There's something similar among some Muslim sects too, in Muslim majority countries it is not uncommon to believe that the God chose someone to be rich and there's more to that person that the eye can see therefore must be respected. Some religious communities even get so obscenely rich and you can see poor servants having a religious experience when their leader arrives with an a luxury car.
The way I see it, at least in France, it's not really a question of religion. "The rich" are thought to have acquired their wealth doing dubious things, mostly by "exploiting the poor".
There's also a very strongly egalitarian way of thinking, as in pretty much everybody is interchangeable. So, if someone does better than somebody else, it's likely because of something "unfair" (or luck) and not thanks to being more competent.
> "The rich" are thought to have acquired their wealth doing dubious things, mostly by "exploiting the poor".
To be fair, that's probably true in the vast majority of cases.
I've never personally known any "very rich" people so I can't comment on them.
But the perception I'm talking about applies even to "reasonably confortable" people. Think your random engineer making 100k a year (which is a "good" salary in these parts). Basically, someone with some form of STEM degree.
I doubt most of these people are doing anything shady. Plus, this kind of income doesn't really give them any kind of financial independence: they wouldn't be able to afford not having a job.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Petite_bourgeoisie
> I doubt most of these people [random engineer making 100k a year] are doing anything shady.
I guess it depends what your level of "shady" is - I know a bunch of people in that kind of range who were all about "optimising their tax" (which I would consider to be "tax evasion" - morally wrong even if it is legal at the time.)
You know "optimizing" means different things for different people.
For example: France offers specific saving deposits with guaranteed interest rate and non-taxed. If a normal saving deposit would be taxed and has similar interest rate, "optimizing their tax" means just using the that specific deposit.
There are many other schemes that I can't believe they exist (example: in France if you create an investment account, after 5 years of the account existence you are not taxed on the gains! So what you can do is "create account with 100 euro", "wait 5 years", "invest more / potentially do gains" - and you will not be taxed!!!)
You will tell me "that is morally wrong!". I could agree with you, but I see nobody demanding better laws/regulations, probably because they don't know/care about details.
Well it’s not necessarily a good thing. In Europe we are traditionalists and we retain a lot of spirit (Geist) by not striving for pure progress
Yes, there are advantages of a stable and well functioning systems that don't have disruptors and we indeed benefit of it as having good lives but unfortunately this can't last as those who go hard on progress and tear down everything and rebuilding again will eventually get ahead on everything and won't let us just be as we now see with US billionaires having impact over Europe.
Americans feel more pain but are also rewarded, Europe has no option but to become progressive - otherwise tere will be no more Europe and the Americans and Chinese will make us adopt their ways.
Oh, BTW, America is also struggling. The latest political developments are an attempt to change course - they are trying to become a bit more like Europe with the race and class based politics holding roots. They say they are anti-regulation anti-discrimination(of whites specifically) but the core MAGA movement is all about putting barriers and preserving old ways for the benefit of a subset of people. Americans are too in soul searching. Their MAGA literally means fixing what is no longer great but their demands are actually quite conservative and they already begin falling off with their accelerations partners.
> unfortunately this can't last as those who go hard on progress and tear down everything and rebuilding again
A notion of "bare progress" is the elephant in the room. Progress is a vector. It has magnitude and direction. People talk of moving "forward or back", but science also has a steering wheel.
> and the Americans and Chinese will make us adopt their ways.
This very notion of "progress" as a totalitarian force is also dangerous. The boot is on the other foot from 80 years ago. When Europe was starting a 1000 year technological master-race, more measured minds had to extinguish that fire. I see many similarities today - people seeing "progress" simply as dominance.
I liked the brain-dump in TFA, but I think it's over-complex and too tied to a contemporary interpretation of capital investment.
We've been spooging away our talent for generations here. Look at how we treated Turing. We mismanage or sell-off everything cool we invent.
What Britain still suffers from is class disloyalty. We still have a strong but invisible class system which is now international financiers. Those sorts "float above" the ordinary economy, they are disconnected from UK interests and don't give a toss about engineering, science, knowledge, education...
> When Europe was starting a 1000 year technological master-race, more measured minds had to extinguish that fire
A lot of the measured minds were saying eugenics was a good idea. It took the horror of seeing experiments and concentration camps to make it so deeply unfashionable the idea couldn't even survive in academia.
I believe you're right. Edwin Black's "IBM and the Holocaust" and Kazuo Ishiguro's "The Remains of the Day" both played their part in revising my naive ideas about simple narratives of WW2.
But look at this post made here a couple of days ago [0]. It's absolutely back in fashion. I think technofascism really is a thing now - you can feel certain people getting quite giddy with thoughts of power.
[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42735539
Power's always in fashion. Academics seem to love socialism, because it (in practice) centralises decision-making nationally to a group of smart people (and the academics might imagine themselves to be these insanely powerful people).
Eugenics was the same. It was a Progressive way of thinking, if I remember correctly.
> academics might imagine themselves to be these insanely powerful people
It long ago escaped academia. Everyone wants to imagine themselves "insanely powerful people" now. It's part of the sell.
But based on experience I'm with Chomsky, that the majority of academics are abject cowards (if we weren't we'd take back the universities)
> Eugenics was the same. It was a Progressive way of thinking.
Again I think you're right, painful as the truth is. I met many oh-so humane "Humanists" eager to stop the suffering of those poor untermensch.
> Everyone wants to imagine themselves "insanely powerful people" now. It's part of the sell.
I'm not sure this is true. Socialism does have a surprising foothold, but I think that's largely due to the larger number of people flowing through academia.
>Yes, there are advantages of a stable and well functioning systems
Current EU is definitely not a stable and well functioning system. Look at economic conditions, political outcomes, illegal immigration, wealth inequality, societal and political trust, homelessness rates, birth rates, free speech suppression, welfare austerity, etc Everything has been going downhill since the 2008 crash. It's a powder keg.
>they are trying to become a bit more like Europe with the race and class based politics holding roots.
What are you on about? Europe doesn't have much race based politics, that's a thing America keeps pushing.
That's quite the conservative talk-radio shopping list.
Illegal immigration is a metric of the EUs economic success and social stability compared with North Africa, Eastern European Accession States, and the war-torn middle east. If America shared land borders and direct migration routes with Islamic caliphates and the like, they'd know all about it.
Economic Conditions and Political Outcomes are pretty sane and tolerable for all but a select group of (surprise surprise) US backed agitators like Hungary. You have to remember that the EU is run as a society rather than an economy, and must be judged on this ethos. People are very fond of using the comparable GDPs of Bavaria and Mississippi in this conversation - forgetting to mention the life expectancy is 10 years less and infant mortality 400% higher on the US side.
Societal and Political trust is still quite high - despite much fearmongering, the far-right are not gaining the political capital necessary to instigate significant change outside of Hungary.
Homelessness rates are a factor of illegal migration - and are laughably low compared to the US on a per capita basis; ditto whatever warped contention you have regarding 'welfare austerity'. We just call it social security. During Covid and in the period afterwards it was hugely ramped up across Europe - and not in a giveaway budget with a check personally signed by an Oligarch.
Re 'free speech suppression' I'm really not sure what you're aiming at. The current cultural friction regarding things like gender-identification and pronoun usage are uniquely american exports. On basically all other counts other than venue-shopping defamation cases, it's a moot point for any normal person.
Finally re birth rates - they tend to go down in wealthy and advanced societies outside of select religious groupings (looking at you Salt Lake City) so I'm not sure what your point is there.
It isn't a "conservative talk-radio shopping list". It is reality in quite a few areas in Europe and the UK.
> Economic Conditions and Political Outcomes are pretty sane and tolerable for all but a select group of (surprise surprise) US backed agitators like Hungary. You have to remember that the EU is run as a society rather than an economy, and must be judged on this ethos. People are very fond of using the comparable GDPs of Bavaria and Mississippi in this conversation - forgetting to mention the life expectancy is 10 years less and infant mortality 400% higher on the US side.
This isn't true. I know many people that have moved from Spain to Hungary. Most of these people where politically fairly normal e.g. either centre-left right or centre-left. I speak to people from all over Europe regularly and many of them do not feel the way that you are describing.
> Societal and Political trust is still quite high - despite much fearmongering, the far-right are not gaining the political capital necessary to instigate significant change outside of Hungary.
That isn't true. I know many areas of Europe where the electorate keep on voting for further right parties. The same is happening in the UK. Labour only won because the Conservatives lost and the Reform party did extremely well for what is a relatively new party. I know the same is happening in Belgium (I speak regularly with Belgian nationals). Areas of Spain that are most affected by immigration have voted for further right parties. So I know this isn't true.
> Re 'free speech suppression' I'm really not sure what you're aiming at.
Just look up the hate speech laws enacted throughout Europe and in the UK and some of the cases that have been prosecuted. We do not have a right to the free speech in the UK and the majority of Europe doesn't either.
>>This isn't true. I know many people that have moved from Spain to Hungary. Most of these people where politically fairly normal e.g. either centre-left right or centre-left. I speak to people from all over Europe regularly and many of them do not feel the way that you are describing.
The plural of anecdotes is not data, nor does your select social circle represent a cogent sample group.
Orbans stated position is to pivot Hungary from a democracy into an illiberal state, modeled after Putin's Russia. At the EU summit in mid-December, for example, he refused to agree to the extension of the Russia sanctions that expire at the end of January.
https://edition.cnn.com/2022/04/02/europe/hungary-election-v...
Hungary are on the brink of being kicked out of the Schengen Zone, have about 12 billion in EU funds frozen because of their stupidity, and are now getting loans off China like some sort of tinpot African dictatorship in order to bridge funding gaps.
The next biggest right-wing rise is - surprise surprise - bordering them and the ex-Soviet Bloc in Poland. That waned so quickly with the escalation of War in Ukraine that, even if they joined forces, Konfederacja + PiS could still not form a majority coalition for seat of the Polish Government.
>>That isn't true. I know many areas of Europe where the electorate keep on voting for further right parties. The same is happening in the UK.
You missed my key qualifier 'necessary to instigate significant change'. The Overton window shifts when society is impacted by War and mass refugee immigration, particularly in a period of high-taxes following high social spend (lockdown).
>> Just look up the hate speech laws enacted throughout Europe and in the UK and some of the cases that have been prosecuted.
Citations needed.
>> We do not have a right to the free speech in the UK and the majority of Europe doesn't either.
Well no, not explicitly, as they have a different legal and basis for law as the US - e.g. they don't have a codified constitution either as they came from a common law system based on the French Courts. Instead they hold the same proportional right as a negative right to freedom of expression under the common law.
Its a moot point anyway as since 1998, freedom of expression is guaranteed according to Article 10 of the European Convention on Human Rights across Europe.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Article_10_of_the_European_Con...
Freedom o expression does not guarantee you freedom of consequence in Europe. If you make fun of a politicians they or the state can come back after you for it.
Ehm... what?
Political satire is one of the oldest and grandest cultural traditions in Europe. Hell, most European countries even have some variant of a political satire show like Spitting Image:
https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/01439685.2024.2...
Yeah right, Reform AFD Rassemblement national Fratelli d'Italia and other risings stars have nothing to do with race and even if they do it's Americans behind it.
Everyone knows that Europeans are much more racist than Americans, it's just that we are much less explicit about it and its issues are different than the issues in the USA.
You might want to look more at why people are against the waves of illegal immigration and less on the color of their skin.
Even legal migration is bad now.
The governments of Europe no longer hold a monopoly of violence. Terror groups and MENAPT groups have brought a diverse range of violent threats to people.
Building a robot army to solve this is one viable solution that is hardware and software based.
Building a robot army is a ridiculous idea.
The efficient & practical way is to stop renewing residence and work visas, making acquisition of visas harder through complex demands of high language proficiency, and a high amount of money as proof-of-funds, perhaps requiring a local referral too. It's what countries that don't want immigrants but don't want to say it out loud do.
They add job requirements (aka skilled migration) and lottery system on top too !
Illegal immigration is a BS term, make immigration legal if you don't want illegal immigrants. It's not like people choose the hard, dangerous and expensive ways instead of buying a Ryanair ticket. When the illegal immigrants BS doesn't hold they all start complaining about legal immigrants as with the UK and their core Brexit reason.
Well no, its not. Specifically in relation to Asylum Seekers contravening the EU Dublin Regulation and tearing up their passports on an intra-EU flight so they can claim Asylum and the associated social welfare in Ireland rather than France or Germany due to our much higher rates.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dublin_Regulation
Basically economic migrants - predominately young men from the middle east - disguising themselves as Refugees and taking social supports away from the families fleeing warzones.
That is one subset of immigration crime that is rightly frown upon and can be completely avoided abolition of the country borders concept that was introduced in the last 100 years or less. Want to help people in need? Instead of confining them into areas and then impose restriction on those and give some of them some money, help those in need. Or don't help, but at least don't pretend that you are bringing justice to the world without addressing the core problems.
In other words, this is actually welfare fraud that happens to have a travel component.
>can be completely avoided abolition of the country borders
Home break-ins can be avoided by abolishing locks on your front door and leaving them open for the public. You go first please.
I won’t reply to this strawman argument.
It's the same champaign socialist argumentation you are using, just that it's not affecting you, but when it does affect you, you have no argument.
The question was simple, why do you support illegal immigration in a country's borders as being OK, but not crossing in the borders of your house?
It's easy to be virtuous and generous with other people's money/resources.
I don't support illegal immigration, I say that people traveling and seeking better lives should not be illegal.
I think we are done here since I don't feel spending time for positions I never claimed. I despise this type of argumentation, its a known fallacy and its useless.
You can count yourself as won an arguments if you feel like that.
That's a ridiculous way of thinking about it. Anyone who says they don't want illegal immigrants isn't objecting simply because of the legal status, they think the process should be upheld which prevented those people from immigrating legally.
It's the same reason we don't seek to improve crime rates by legalising theft. Sure, there'd be fewer people labelled as "criminal", but the original problem would remain (and in all probability would become worse).
And why the process of immigrating legally is more than buying a ticket and a security check at the border?
Obviously, it is the reason that matters and the reason is not benign.
People want other people to like people in certain way they and then castrate Alan Turing for illegal love. People want to have slaves then they have illegally free slaves problem.
Why pretend that this is about upholding the law?
> make immigration legal if you don't want illegal immigrants
As a philosophy of law point, aren't laws passed to make things illegal if they aren't wanted? Rather than legal?
That's the point, illegal immigration is just a veil so some people can feel better for them selves.
"it's not that I don't like them - I am not like that, its just that I don't want illegal immigration"
I can understand this might make sense if race (or ethnicity) were the only factor in the world to consider, but since it's not, is there value in thinking as though it is?
What makes me think that it's about race(loosely speaking. IMHO it's more about xenophobia and feeling like losing privilege o identity as a nation etc) is that once you make the immigration legal they start complaining about numbers like in Britain.
BTW I don't disagree with the people who don't want everyone be welcome, I just think that their solution ideas and demands are misguided. My observation is that people from various ethnicities can function in cohesion and are about the same when they are from a similar educational background and rarely have ethnical or racial issues among themselves and IMHO all the problems will be resolved if you let people naturally find their appropriate group they belong to instead of having BS like country borders and visas and DEI or race based positive discrimination etc.
Thanks for your reply. I think I agree with at least some of it, but it is still solely talking about race.
The worries people have, especially in somewhere like Britain, is it's a country with a relatively small population compared to the level of immigration, and housing is an enormous problem. One outcome that I think can be to a considerable extent[0] attributed to high net immigration is that housing has become smaller (many houses divided into flats), and housing has become much more expensive. So anyone who already owned a house is sitting fairly pretty, as they get bouyed up by the housing market, but anyone looking to buy for the first time, or buy into a new market for the first time (e.g. moving to near schools for kids) is going to have a massive problem, as the competitive pressure has up-bidded housing and made it worthwhile to subdivide and sell/rent smaller dwellings.
This could be all white people doing it (somewhere like Cornwall in the UK is mostly annoyed because other Brits buy holiday homes there, driving up prices for locals and their kids who are coming up) - it doesn't matter. The housing costs are what matter. And they, a bit like fuel, drive up everything else: NHS workers need higher salaries to just be able to live in many places, which drives up taxes.
This isn't to avoid actual race/ethnicity-related tensions. But there's a giant clump of people who are just fed up with their money going far less far than their parents' and grandparents' money did when it comes to one of the fundamentals of life: housing yourself and your family. And their parents and grandparents are equally upset that their kids/grandkids have in a major sense a harder life than they did.
[0] definitely not fully; there are multiple factors. But if you net import the equivalent of the population of Liverpool each year, and you aren't building a Liverpool each your to house them, it's obvious that prices will start shooting up.
Immigration is legal though, in most countries.
What is this spirit we retain that US looses ?
Leisure, that is, truly retaining time to encourage and develop the spirit that is not just work
> There is an Indian savagery, a savagery peculiar to the Indian blood, in the manner in which the Americans strive after gold: and the breathless hurry of their work - the characteristic vice of the New World - already begins to infect old Europe, and makes it savage also, spreading over it a strange loss of spirit (Geistlosigkeit). One is now ashamed of repose: even long reflection almost causes remorse of conscience. Thinking is done with a stop-watch, as dining is done with the eyes fixed on the financial newspaper; we live like men who are continually "afraid of letting opportunities slip." "Better do anything whatever, than nothing" - this principle also is a noose with which all culture and all higher taste may be strangled. And just as all form obviously disappears in this hurry of workers, so the sense for form itself, the ear and the eye for the melody of movement, also disappear.
Nietzsche, The Gay Science, §329
Quality of life, if you define an actual proper life as something happening outside of work hours and sleep.
We don't worry whether my insurance will cover the next health issue that will happen to me, be it broken leg or lifelong costly treatment. I don't have to desperately try to save maybe 1.5 million $ to put my kids through decent university, if they desire to do so. I am not brutally tossed on the sidewalk when I am fired, both employer and state gives a LOT of support to not fall off the societal cliff and end up as typical US homeless person. We have way more resting time to recharge via holidays (this fellow from 1.1. is running on 90% corporate work contract and thus sporting 50 vacations days per year - now thats QOL improvement, I've already planned 6 week+ vacations for this year). We have on average simply healthier lifestyles and it shows literally massively.
I could go on for a long time. But you can ignore that - compare usage of mental health medication, from what I've seen its much more massive in US, manifesting the additional stress that US population is cca exposed to.
Its a balance - you add more money, you remove more 'humanity', and the additional stress is there and very real. Everybody has different ideal spot, and this also changes a lot during life. Isn't it better to have 2 systems next to each other, and everybody can pick how they want to live your life? Focus purely on money is stupid, their added value in life quickly diminishes once a person is not poor, then other aspects of life become much more important. The complete opposite is same, 0 progress. Something in between, as always, is the best road for most.
You also get your defence and healthcare advancements mostly paid for by Americans, either as taxes or healthcare costs that funnel into R&D spend. It's easy to give things away when you mostly only have maintenance costs to bear, and not very much risk.
(Not an American.)
>thus sporting 50 vacations days per year
Where and how do you get 50 vacation days/year.
humanism
People need examples of success in their network. Most people have frankly never met or heard of anyone who founded a successful startup- and therefore would never think of taking on such a risk. I agree that in some places there is a sense of malaise, but if we are to believe founders are a 1-2% outlier of the population, I don’t see why America’s 1-2% should be so much more ambitious than the UKs. I think it’s more a cycle induced by lack of funding.
Should individuals routinely risk their own livelihood to benefit a select few capitalist? Does this improve the life of the average American? Seeing how they vote it seems generally it does not?
Havent FAANG companies improved the lives of the average American? They definitely did, and all these companies were created by ambitious individuals with a bold vision and prospect of making lots of money!
By taking big risks, one might ascend to this capitalist class if they succeed.
"FAANG improved average lives" is by no means a safe assumption. It needs to be very carefully demonstrated for each individual company, with consideration of the worsenings as well. The forgotten sixth, Microsoft, is probably easier to make a case for.
>Completely agree, the problem in Europe is not regulations or anything like that - it is a mindset issue.
You can change mindsets with regulations that reward taking risks in new businesses/innovations, and punish rent seeking and sitting on inherited real estate for example.
But as long as EUrope is focused on maintaining the status quo of boomers and gentrified dynasties of billionaires that you probably played against in Assassins' Creed, nothing will change.
Let's make simple calculations. In California, near the start of the 20th century there were more than 34 million native Americans living in what was their land. Now there are in California 300-700.000 native Americans.
They were exterminated and replaced by a very small European population. Like sterilising a Petri dish and letting bacteria grow, the opportunities that population experienced were the biggest any population in the world ever had. Just look at a graph of the population growth of US OR California in the last century and compare it to others.
Now there is in California a population of near 40 million people.
That is not a "mindset", this is real growth that they could experience and the rest of the world could not.
These numbers are at least two orders of magnitude higher than typical estimates. What are you talking about? It's even higher than the typical all time max which is on the order of 10 million.
Do you have a source for 34 million Native Americans?
California is only 34% European/white https://www.ppic.org/publication/californias-population/
The safe job earns much much more unless you are the founder. Equity pay for start-ups in the UK for devs is very poor, or non-existent, and the base salary also very poor (and not even guaranteed to be paid if they go under). You can instead work for a company like nvidia, google or meta and get a huge base, and nice equity on top.
If UK startups paid equity to their devs, I would work a lot harder when I've worked at them, but startups require working hard and long hours and if I've got no skin in the game, what incetive do I have to make sure the company is successful.
I've been shocked in my career in the UK by just how much founders will rip people off on equity
In basically every UK startup I've worked at they've done 1 or all of the below:
1. Offered options in numbers with no valuation/percentage of ownership. "We offer you 40000 stock options!". When asked to clarify numbers, they delay and never tell you. Inevitably they have a value of a few pence each
2. Withdraw options unilaterally when you leave the company with no option to exercise
3. Never get round to filling in the paperwork so you never actually receive them
I was _shocked_ when i worked for my first US startup and they just...gave me the options. And I could exercise them whenever I wanted. And they expired 10 years after I left the company
Isn't it also an income issue?
I'm from EU and would be totally open to move to UK if there was an opportunity to make more there while working on something cool. But there simply isn't?
Then there are US startups where I could likely make 2 or 3x what I make in EU or UK.
So why would talent every consider moving to the UK to build a startup in 2025 anyway?
> So why would talent every consider moving to the UK to build a startup in 2025 anyway?
A lot of people choose to start businesses near their friends or families.
Right, but that would mean not moving.
Some people live in the UK already.
Also even the safe job wage in the UK is perhaps only 2/3 of in Germany for example
What do you mean by that?
He means a safe wage job pays a third less in the UK than Germany.
Not sure if it's true so let's look at some stats: Germany median for software engineer: €66,000 United kingdom median: €58,000
Note depending on source, these numbers both vary broadly within the same range, but with Germany salaries being about 10-15% higher on most sources, so nowhere near the figure claimed.
10-15% is not hugely far from 1/3 ;)
10-15% in the opposite direction. That is I stated they earn 10-15% more.
33% less equates to them earning roughly 50% more. The difference between 10-15% and 50% is huge!
(trivial example, if someone is earning £100,000, then someone earning 33% less makes £66,666. But Someone earning £100,000 makes 50% more than someone making £66,666)
You said that UK's salaries are 2/3 of the Germany ones, but this doesn't mean that the Germany ones are 1/3 more, they are 1/2 (or 50%) more. That's pretty far from 10-15%.
Oh sorry, then I didn't maths properly. I always forget about the asymmetry of fractions
EDIT: Please don't downvote me for admitting a mistake
Something not talked about - you probably won't be able to lease suitable property if you are doing anything other than apps.
Doing soldering of prototypes? Good luck finding a landlord that would let you do it. The moment they hear "fumes" is a nope, fire hazard, safety risk and won't let you...
Why downvotes? This is my real world experience.
My view is that the US startup culture exists because of wealth inequality at the $1-$20m net worth level. Wealth inequality is socially incentivized at that level because of the lack of a decent social safety net. If you don't save money then at 50 you may end up homeless on the street due to bad luck. But if you don't get bad luck then you end up at 50 with a large amount of money that you don't have much to do with. So you start investing some in riskier things because who cares.
US founders not from wealthy backgrounds can often get $500k from friends and family. I doubt those in the UK can do so.
There's massive massive social costs due to this in the US so be careful what you wish for.
> 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.
This isn't just an EU thing, for what it's worth. The US is the outlier.
False. Even good jobs with American companies and what not are subject to ridiculous tax problems in the UK. You give you employees equity but then they have to raise vast sums of capital just to hold on to it to afford their taxes when there is virtually no real liquidity pre IPO.
It's anti success. And there is garbage everywhere, people keep voting for antisocial housing and bad cultures. It's a failing state.
You didn't read what I quoted and replied to. Please do so before responding with "false".
Even internally in the USA, you will see the full spectrum of EU-like VCs to Sand Hill-like VCs.
Correct, but the tail of VC being fat is unique to the US. Pretty much the rest of the world is like the UK in all but a miniscule percentage preferring stability rather than moonshots.
My point is that the VCs located in a few specific zip codes prefer moonshots. The vast majority of VCs in the remainder of the USA prefer stability.
You don't hear about the small capital firms investing in boring slow growing companies, because they are boring and slow growing.
WOrth ponting out the UK is 3rd worldwide in VC tech investment. The US is the outlier, but if you think the UK is bad you haven't seen shit.
Yeah but if it's not a moonshot SaaS factory they don't want to hear the reality.
For example, Ireland's state VC - Enterprise Ireland - ranked first in the world of venture capital investors by deal count in 2020 by Pitchbook. The average size of the deal compared to a Series A was laughable in context, but the ethos is there.
Not just in startups. Feels like Arm lost almost their whole software division over a few years. This was an extremely stable high-profit-margin business, and it was obvious that it was uncompetitive on the labour market. But something in the culture stopped management from increasing salaries, so everyone buggered off to foreign companies.
I hear they fixed it eventually but seems like an unnecessary loss.
Going through our pre-seed round atm and it is incredibly frustrating. I haven't raised in the US so it may be similar there, but the amount of time wasted for a relatively small amount of money is painful.
I'm also not sure what the government can do. SEIS/EIS is a great scheme, but the SEIS limit of £250k feels almost too small to do anything meaningful, and EIS funds are generally later stage or re-investment from SEIS.
I lived in Ireland for 10 years. It's not the same as the UK but there _is_ cultural overlap. Every time you shared a new idea with _anyone_, even things as simple as "I want to buy a site and build a house on it", the first thing you hear is how that's a bad idea, you will fail, it will never work, and you need to leave it to "professionals".
Not to mention the whole idea that trying to be successful is "notions" and should be sneered at.
Edit: To compare -
Me: "I want to build a house"
Irish friends: "That's a bad idea, you'll never make it work, you'll go bankrupt and it will kill you..."
California/Oregon friends: "Fuck yeah I'll bring a nailgun"
(UK resident, born and bread) Yes this drives me absolutely mad. I'm a poor risk taker and can come up with all those reasons something's a bad idea, but when I've made up my mind to take the risk I want supportive people around not people who would rather you never tried anything outside their "comfort zone".
And the problem runs in families. This is not therapy but every time I talked to my parents about an idea it would be dammed with faint praise or I'd be told I'm wasting my time. It's taken 20 years to work out that the more they dissed an idea is the better it actually was.
What nobody tells you is that doing nothing is also very risky.
You could argue that doing nothing is actually more risky! Nothing stays static in nature! You move/change or you die!
I don't know what the regulations are in the UK, but in many European countries, building a house isn't just about knowing how to build a house, it's also about knowing all the DIN requirements. These are necessary for insurance to pay out if something happens to your house. Let's take a simple example: You're wiring your house. Because of a mistake, the house burns down.
Insurance: “Okay sir, who did the electrical wiring? you: “Me”. Insurance: “Are you a professional? you: “No" Insurance: “Have you had your work certified by a third party?" you: “Do my buddies count?” insurance: "Have a good day sir"
There may never be a problem and you may have figured out everything that's required to get your butt covered (good for you in this case), but the fact is that a lot of people don't know about these things, do their own thing and get royally screwed if there's a problem and, God forbid, someone gets hurt.
>"That's a bad idea, you'll never make it work, you'll go bankrupt and it will kill you..."
There is an element of truth to that, self build projects seem to go about was well as the typical software project.
We got ours built for what it’s worth. Beautiful house, though we ended up leaving.
> The UK lost Deep Mind - which could have been OpenAI!! -- to Google.
Deepmind is still in the UK. And more, including foreign, bidders driving up prices for acquisitions and investments, will lead to more people making the jump.
> Deepmind is still in the UK
they dont mean location, they mean ownership of the equity.
Yes, but what does it matter? Google has equity owners all over the world, but we still treat them as an American company, too.
Profit goes out of the country, reducing investment and rich UK people to invest in new UK companies. It's the same problem with many of our companies being sold to foreign investors: profits are taken outside the country (as we did to other countries in the 19th century and earlier) so our labour enriches other countries while our country gets poorer.
> Profit goes out of the country, reducing investment and rich UK people to invest in new UK companies.
Rich foreigners are happy to invest in the UK. See eg Deepmind itself, which was bought by Google.
> [...] so our labour enriches other countries while our country gets poorer.
Foreign investment is usually seen as a good thing. Especially foreign direct investment.
And: why do you care so much what passports these rich people hold?
> labour enriches other countries while our country gets poorer.
in reality, the UK isn't poorer than before. It is about the same - no growth. It is only poorer when compared to the US's growth.
One's labour, when being paid market rates, does not make one's country poorer. And those profits from said labour was paid for by the acquitition of the capital - money was invested.
So in essense, the "poorness" that the UK feels right now is not a result of these companies getting foreign ownership, but the UK gov't lack of industrial policy and investment. Brexit is the last straw probably.
It is far poorer after you account for the brain drain and the opportunity cost of the brains that choose to remain.
If the profits move out, the opportunity cost is that this money isn't spent in the UK which hits GDP which is how growth is calculated.
i think you will find the majority owner of google are american.
And i'm not saying it matters - i'm saying that the OP is lamenting that the UK is no longer owning innovative companies.
European countries do not want start-ups to exist. The barriers e.g. Germany puts up make it extremely difficult for any start up to exist.
Not only is the bureaucracy difficult, the labor laws make it very difficult to hire and compensate talent.
Germany wants innovation to be done by large corporations, not by start ups.
Been there before, and wrote about the experience - https://blog.jacobstechtavern.com/p/yes-actually-means-no-th...
US vs UK investors are night and day. UK investors only want to see profitability to protect their cautious capital
Circa 80% of world trade is done in USD, and the US literally creates it out of thin air, and it will all bleed into the economy somehow, someway.
Without sovereign protection you just can not compete with that, ever. It's really that simple.
Simply look at China they may export loads of goods but it's predominantly priced in USD, and what do they do with all that excise USD, the only thing they can do, buy US debt. It's truly perverse.
Or look at every UK company that was bought up with those very same magic dollars.
> 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).
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.
> 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_inst...
I think it was more about economics than competency.
By the end of WW2 the UK was bankrupt and completely ruined economically, while the US had become the industrial powerhouse of the world thanks to abundant resources, manpower, and the fact that the war largely took place far from its borders (a few tiny islands notwithstanding). By the end of WW2 the US owned nearly all the gold that Europe previously owned which led to the US Dollar the worldwide reserve currency.
If the UK wants to pretend that WW2 (or, indeed, WW1) happened like a shock storm, unforseen and unforseeable, with no involvement from them they are welcome to do that. The result of that attitude was that the UK parliament was only allowed to govern a small and increasingly irrelevant island with lousy weather and steadily worsening economic prospects instead of a global empire.
There is a lesson for people governing global empires here - don't allow major wars to blow up on your borders. Or, ideally, anywhere. Maybe spend some time promoting peace and prosperity. Train the diplomats in diplomacy.
You'll notice that the US solution at the end of WWII was completely different to the European settlement at the end of WWI. And the US approach to warring was a lot more staid than the UK's. These are basic matters of competence.
Some fair points, but remember that the US had the benefit of knowing that post-WW1 settlement was a failure. Of course, Wilson did object to the conditions of the Treaty of Versailles, so it's fair to say the US had a better perspective from the start -- though one can argue that the US' own failure to ratify the League of Nations was a contributing factor to WW2.
Another key factor is that the US had no empire to hold together, and, to its credit, wisely did not seek to expand its territory after WW2 in order to create one (which it could have easily done, and which the UK had done many times before).
The us wants at the end of wwi were similar to what we got with wwii.
British weather is great. Enough rain to keep the land green and pleasant, temperatures that don't get too hot nor too cold - the very definition of temperate.
I have a solid sheet of grey clouds over my head for what feels like 300 days of the year - would happily take some of that variability!
We aren't without our annoying and extreme weather though. Eg in the north of England last week it was -10c for a few nights and a week of 0/1c daytime temperatures with a biting wind chill. Before that was heavy snow and ice.
Heat waves up to 35-38c aren't unheard of. Our houses aren't built for this so a heatwave is quite uncomfortable as houses stay 20-25c overnight
Plenty of flooding in various parts
This autumn and winter has seen a lot of storms
The south fares much better of course and without as much flooding
Indeed. Choose peace if possible instead of rushing into war. Nothing that happened in the Balkans was important to the UK.
Nothing important Sudetenland, nothing important in Austria, nothing important in Poland. They tried your strategy in the 30s and it was not a success.
Are the Sudetenland, Austria, and Poland in the Balkans?
Possibly Balkans themselves were not important. The trade routes in Mediterranean likely were.
Also, there was a complex web of international treaties and alliances that eventually pulled the UK into the war.
This was back in the day when alliances, particularly European ones, meant something.
Also, family ties. European monarchs were a really tight bunch. For instance, the tzar of Russia and the king of the British Empire at the time of WWI were brothers.
> For instance, the tzar of Russia and the king of the British Empire at the time of WWI were brothers.
They were first cousins, along with the German Kaiser they went to war with.
How do you get the land for your empire to begin with, with peace and diplomacy? I guess war is a hard habit to break
> Their acceptance of poor performers over the last 20+ years has been striking
How many PMs has the UK been though in that time? _Way_ more than the average Western country. We don't accept poor oerformers more than anywhere else, we kick them out of office - but the talent pipeline is abysmal so the next one is usually awful too.
It's interesting that incompetence ... Fabians started in 1884 and a lot of insanely destructive ideas seem to defend from those circles. We don't have the great leap forward it's slower but something as bad on a longer timescale
Not greatly different from Germany or Nordic countries, or EU average, and better than France or Japan.
https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/gdp-per-capita-worldbank?...
Its a Europe wide problem.
Switching to % change - EU beats US.
https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/gdp-per-capita-worldbank?...
That is a better graph, but the conclusion I would draw is much the same.
The EU gets a boost from the inclusion of Eastern European economies that have been fast growing from a lower base.
If you compare the US and the UK to the four biggest EU economies, the US is doing best by far, and the UK is doing better than three and worse than one:
https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/gdp-per-capita-worldbank?...
If that's adjusted for cost of living and inflation then isn't that hiding the actual economic changes? If GDP falls then cost of living would likely go down and vice versa.
I'd say ruin - in great part from the costs of two World Wars - came before the end of the Empire. Wikipedia notes of WWII - "Britain was left essentially bankrupt, with insolvency only averted in 1946 after the negotiation of a US$3.75 billion loan from the United States". Vs. the Partition and dissolution of the British Raj were in 1947.
Most of the world's gold was in the US by the end of the war.
The flow of gold into the US starting in 1933 is thought to be why the Great Depression was moderating so much there and then: the money supply was inflating.
Yes, "winning" as in not being completely destroyed, occupied, and maybe even enslaved. Check out what Poland looked like in 1940 when it lost, or what Germany looked like in 1945, or, well, 1949.
USSR was also terribly battered by WWII, and its leadership was not highly competent either; I'd say both parameters were much worse than UK's. But it managed to remain a large empire with a high economic potential, and UK could not.
>USSR was also terribly battered by WWII, and its leadership was not highly competent either
The USSR moved all its industry eastward, as the German army advanced, waiting for the very last moment to do so. Quite an incredible feat that allowed them to beat Germany at industrial efficiency and secure victory.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Evacuation_in_the_Soviet_Union
Here's an analysis of the mechanisms underpinning this kind of achievement according to a Russian mathematician:
>One of the fathers of synergetics, G. Haken, in his article [9], recalls the following story from the Ancient Testament: “It was the custom in a certain community for the guests to bring their own wine to weddings, and all the wines were mixed before drinking. Then one guest thought that if all the other guests would bring wine, he would not notice when drinking if he brought water instead. Then the other guests did the same, and as the result they all drank water.”
>In this example, two situations are possible. In the first, everyone contributes his share, giving his equal part, and everyone will equally profit. In the second, each strives for the most advantageous conditions for himself. And this can lead to the kind of result mentioned in the story.
>Two different arithmetics correspond to these two situations. One arithmetic is the usual one, the one accepted in society, ensuring “equal rights,” and based on the principle “the same for everyone,” for instance in the social utopia described by Owen. In a more paradoxal form, this principle is expressed in M. Bulgakov’s Master and Margarita by Sharikov: “Grab everything and divide it up.”
>The aspiration to this arithmetic is quite natural for mankind, but if society is numerous and non-homogeneous, then it can hardly be ruled according to this principle. The ideology of complete equality and equal rights, which unites people and inspires to perform heroic deeds, can effectively work only in extremal situations and for short periods of time. During these periods such an organization of society can be very effective. An example is our own country, which, after the destructions and huge losses of World War II, rapidly became stronger than before the war.
>One of the authors personally witnessed such an atmosphere of psychological unity when he was working on the construction of the sarcophagus after the catastrophe of the Chernobyl nuclear facility. The forces of the scientists involved were so strongly polarized 2 that the output of each of them was increased tenfold as compared to that in normal times. During that period it was not unusual for us to call each other in the middle of the night.
>Nevertheless such heroism, self-denial, and altruism, when each wants to give (and not to take) as much as possible, is an extremal situation, a system that can function only for short intervals of time. Here the psychological aspect is crucial, everyone is possessed by the same idea — to save whatever may be saved at any cost. But the psychology of the masses, which was studied by the outstanding Russian emigr´e sociologist Pitirim Sorokin, is presently studied only outside of Russia.
Source: https://arxiv.org/pdf/0806.4164
Now the question is: to which extent and in which ways does this apply to the subject we're discussing.
This is a myth they tell themselves. USSR won by incredible amounts of American supplied material.
A truck without a driver has no value in a war. Lend lease was important but the ambition and drive to defeat Germany required huge sacrifices on all sides that are impossible without shared cultural ideals.
Those "shared cultural ideals" amounted to very little beyond "conquer the Nazis, before they conquer us" - as late-war and post-war relations between the USSR and the Western Allies showed. Or, as pre-'39 Western policies showed. The '30's saw the Nazis as an evil...but a useful and "not too" evil, that would (mostly, in effect) protect the West from the greater evil of Soviet Communism.
You’ve watched too many Hollywood movies. Yes, Lend-Lease was very helpful - but only about 5% of Soviet GDP. For example, the Soviets produced more tanks than all other allies combined, and that was while under massive active attack and invasion - even moved entire factories.
The real myth is that the Soviets just threw meat waves and would have lost without Uncle Sam. Most of that was anti communist propaganda and any serious (ie non-narrative driven) historian knows the truth about the industrial and military achievements of the Soviets in that war.
I think he's right though, the 5% figure isn't accurate. Perplexity answer below:
https://anonpaste.pw/v/6f99bf00-ab49-48fc-978a-27f656a37c02#...
Nonetheless, the production hell people working at those factories went through shouldn't be downplayed.
Documentary (2024): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tjGYMFVMeYo
"the Soviets produced more tanks than all other allies combined"
For such feats, factory equipment mattered. So did trucks. Studebakers were relatively cheap and probably wouldn't move the needle on your GDP-based meter, but they were very important to Soviet logistics.
The USSR also gained de facto control over relatively developed places like the Baltics, Czechoslovakia and East Germany, and exploited them.
Czechoslovak industry in the early 1950s was producing a shitton of products sold under their real price to the Soviets, or bargained for cheap agricultural products.
Sugar was rationed in England until 1953, and meat until 1954. Pretty rugged times.
Exactly this. Great Britain colonized huge parts of the globe and had an empire. They were kings of trade and the world. Now they are just a surveillance nanny state and hollow shell of their former self.
I regularly see opinion pieces in the British Press advising young Brits to get out. In 2022 one writer wrote 'Britain is fed up, bitter, and practically broke – and it’s all going to get worse' and indeed it still is and getting worse. One basic problem: an unsustainable welfare and health system and overwrought bureaucracy. Today I learn that one major bank is considering leaving the UK in view of excessive 'red tape'.
The UK has no shortage of good banks. Santander can fuck off for being worse than their competition.
Yes, it's difficult to overstate quite how bad their customer service is. They actually lost a big cheque I deposited.
> Today I learn that one major bank is considering leaving the UK in view of excessive 'red tape
Or failure to compete with startup banks...
The welfare state is horrid. Democracy is largely dead. The judiciary and bank of England are unaccountable and unassailable. The Fabians have won.
Interestingly people, especially poor people, were better nourished during the WW 2 rationing than before the war. Also e.g. universal healthcare was establised post-war.
Is number of war ships, or billionaires, a good measure for a country?
https://blog.nationalarchives.gov.uk/food-thought-rationing-...
I have not drilled down into the data, but I think it highly likely poor people did not benefit.
I have read that the Empire was a fiscal net negative. That was offset by it being a free market area with policies that favoured the UK, the benefits from that went primarily to a small minority.
UK also had a lot of colonies that contributed to their growth.
It's thought that most European colonies actually stymied growth in their home countries.
They spent the wealth of empire fighting a war and achieved what exactly? They would have been better off losing. Crazy when you think about it.
They would have been better off losing. Crazy when you think about it.
Better if they had let the Nazis won and ruled the UK? WTF?
That was never going to happen. And the Nazis didn't exist in 1914.
Nah the Germans were militaristic arseholes in 1914 too.
Same. I grew up in Canada and my country didn't fund my dreams. The US did. It is a shame and the amount of loss that Canada has every single year because the dumb VCs who exist in Canada cannot look at that big picture.
For example, right now there is not a single VC in Canada who does large pre seed / seed investments based on an idea and the founding team.
In the US you can get a 1 million cheque within a week.
That is the real reason Canada is failing on a macro scale.
@dang hopefully I have kept this well balanced.
I agree. But I wonder what’s the underlying cause?
Europe wasn’t like this for centuries. What is the cause of this mindset?
In the UK’s case, feudalism is alive and well. The entire tax system is designed so parasites descended from thugs like the Duke of Westminster or Charles of Battenberg-Saxe-Coburg und Gotha never have to pay property taxes on their extensive land holdings.
That was worse in the 18th and 19th century, and yet people were willing to ground new corporations back then.
I think the answer is something the left won't like - we (Europe) are killing ourselves with bureaucracy, often environmental bureaucracy. A road to hell paved with good intentions.
The documentation to the Lower Thames Crossing, a planned highway tunnel, already exceeds 360 000 pages. This is just crazy.
https://www.newcivilengineer.com/latest/lower-thames-crossin...
I think you’re right that was way worse before.
But on the bureaucracy: I don’t think that’s the real cause it’s rather a symptome.
The cause must be something related to expected rewards and opportunity costs.
The people who claim they didn't do something because of "bureaucracy" or "regulation" were never going to do anything anyway.
It is a generic handwavey excuse for losers who never tried.
It is often accomplished enterpreneurs who complain of bureaucracy.
I remember reading a German enterpreneur's complaint that he was unable to build an extra electric connection between his two industrial buildings in Germany in less than a year, due to endless rounds of permiting for that single cable.
He contrasted the situation to Poland, where his application on a similar site was processed in two weeks and it took two more weeks to actually build the connection.
If you think complaints of bureacracy have no merit, maybe you never faced any. It now takes about 10 years to get all permits for a regular block of flats in Prague, Czechia. It used to be 3 years or so back in 2000, and it takes only about 9 months in Denmark.
These are experienced developers, and they are still stuck.
That's because risk-aversion and laziness are the smart things to do. Yes, it would be cool to come up with the next Facebook, but most financial advisors will tell you that the actually best thing you can do is some form of "SP500 and hold 20 years" because from the perspective of an individual, the safe option provides the best expected outcome.
Similarly, why work yourself to the bone for a miniscule chance of success, if you can... just chill instead? I used to be a highly-motivated go-getter, but then I realized, this shit ain't bringing happiness, and I turned into a work-avoider who spends time in the office mostly talking to coworkers and playing games in the toilet. My overall life satisfaction skyrocketed.
Yes, the society at large does need people to do the needful, but this ain't gonna be me.
I definitely agree! But why is this different in the US?
Taxation. Socialism.
I was also trying to raise recently. It's interesting to me that the UK has an absolutely incredibly generous startup investment scheme (SEIS)[0], and still hasn't managed to make this work. SEIS is ludicrously generous, and should make getting funding a breeze in the UK, and yet ... somehow it isn't.
0: If a few hurdles are jumped through, then an investor who gives you £250k can get £125k relief on their income tax (not what they'd have paid on £125k, literally the whole £125k), and then claim a further 50% back of the remainder from the government if you go bust.
Why not hire US consultants to get from starting to mid-sized?
I’m curious, if you think the issue is cultural.
Yep. Bring Musk aboard. /s
>There are probably political reasons as well.
There are definitely political - and ultimately, military-industrial - reasons for this. The UK is deeply, deeply embedded in the Anglo-centric 5-eyes criminal superstructure, and plays a huge part in the subversion of human rights at immense scale around the world, that this criminal entity commits every second of the day.
The spook factor bleeds into every technological advancement which occurs in the UK, from GCHQ outwards, like a kraken with deep, deep tentacles.
I've worked with multiple UK-based startups which, as soon as they start to gain traction in international waters/markets, immediately becomes the target for GCHQ embedding/plants. This kills the startup.
Until the British people start prosecuting their war criminals and seeks justice for the immense human rights abuses that occur, every millisecond of every day, as a result of their out of control military-industrial oppression apparatus, there is simply no hope for UK technological industry.
The world sees this, even if the people of the UK do not - and routes around it, accordingly.
Nobody really wants to work with UK-based technology groups, knowing that they are liable for immediate corruption the moment their technology becomes relevant to, say, the people of Brazil, or Africa, or China.
> The UK lost Deep Mind - which could have been OpenAI!! -- to Google.
You're focusing on one success story out of thousands.
90%, or more, of US startups only exist to be sold to the highest bidder or to coast indefinitely long in infinite investor money, and never turn a profit.
There's still expectation in Europe at large that your company should have an actual business plan and a path to profitability.
+ DeepMind and its founders are the examples of founders who beat the game
I don't think thats's true in the UK as much. Loads of startups here follow the US model.
I agree and it's a real shame, we used to spearhead some of the most initiative companies in technology (Acorn, Arm, Sinclair, Sage, Deepmind). Now it's just a shadow, while places like Silicon Valley or Stockholm have jetted ahead the UK just sort of stagnated - it's kind of embarrassing.
Brit / American checking in and agreeing. My first startup was a B2B SaaS and hiring in the UK was fantastic - the arbitrage was just silly. Experienced software developers (10+ years) @ GBP 70k / year - and that was close to non-finance full-market pay. The same people were averaging $250k in NYC / SF.
And yet, the UK hires were often better off after all expenses than the US hires.
Largely due to housing being slightly cheaper (other posters have pointed out, London is on par with SF / NY - the big difference being London expands, NYC and SF are both "islands" - yes SF is a peninsula, but commuting up 280 or 101 is not a pleasant experienced).
Also, even offering private healthcare (BUPA) - the UK hires were cheaper. I'm in my late 30s and reasonably healthy - my all-in, gold-plated UK policy was GBP 2k / year - I was at $2,000 / month in the US.
*However* - salaries in the UK are unsustainably low.
Three reasons: [1] BOMAD - The Bank of Mom and Dad (parents paying / lending the deposit for a house so the mortgage is at a low rate) is effectively exhausted. This means that current entrants into the housing market are either renting (which is nearly as expensive as NYC, especially after the inflationary / interest rate jump), or saving to "buy" a house (I enclose in quotes because at a 95% mortgage you don't own much of your house). [2] Professional salaries outside of finance are way too low. My fiancee works in a highly skilled, professional field and her salary in 2024 was, in nominal terms the same as my starting salary in NYC 17 years ago working for a large investment bank IN THE BACK OFFICE - where salaries were decidedly blue-collar. My unproven hypothesis is that the UK professional world is still largely geared towards those with alternative assets, private incomes (especially high-prestige non-professional jobs, especially around politics). This makes it impossible to compete with US venture backed startups, even post-ZIRP, because the offer is always going to be better. And yet that private-income driven base has largely been eroded through capital gains, inheritance tax and general downward social mobility (or, perhaps, less doom-and-gloom - averaging towards the center. The difference in wealth and income between the upper-middle class and the lower-middle class has narrowed significantly). [3] There has been over the last 5-7 years significant negative messaging and tax policy against economic success. A confiscatory top-tax band, an erosion of a "job perks" friendly tax regime and a political climate that is very anti-success, even prior to the labour govt (largely started at the same time, though perhaps not by, Theresa May's 2015 speech and focus on "Just about managing").
VC in the UK is hard, largely because the majority (though by no means all) VCs are focused on aping mid-market pension managers. Their ambition is limited to businesses that already work (and yet anything transformative by definition does not work yet) - and are interested mostly in post-revenue companies with linear or lightly superlinear growth.
This, IMNSHO, is largely caused by the fact that, given state expenditure and the corp and personal tax burden, there simply isn't enough capital for US style VC - the portfolio approach requires capital to absorb failures. Most VCs here cannot afford failure.
The closest we get is the EIS / SEIS tax policy, which allows the offsetting of losses in failed businesses (by the equivalent of Accredited Investors) - as well as a friendly Cap Gains treatment of successes. But these are largely made as common stock investments by individuals - and limited to a very small scale.
Which brings me to my final point - the SAFE note is not only not ubiquitous here, it's rare. Even pre-seed investments are either common stock or (more rarely) convertible notes. This requires a level of diligence (even on small tickets) that make capital formation incredibly burdensome.
There's absolutely a path to resolving this - but the UK first has to make a political and cultural decision to embrace startup-led GDP growth, which is has not yet made.
Quite frankly, it's cultural and the thing I hear a lot is simply: fuck that for a job!
I could quite happily get on fine at one of those big American style startups but I don't get excited about hype, I don't have the work culture it demands and I don't have a price on my soul. I'd rather earn a lot less, have extreme stability, have better family time and balance. On top of that there's something tasteless and unethical about a lot of the big startups. Do they really bring good things to society? Do I really want to be part of that?
If I can walk away with half the money, live a modest life and stand with my principles intact, I will take that over twice the money.
I don't think this is political at all. It's not a race either and we have no innate responsibility to build things like this.
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.
At this point someone please explain to me how finance doesn't exist to extract wealth from the rest of us.
Finance jobs in London / New York (partially) can afford those pay rates because they extract wealth from the rest of the world.
Whether they do so in return for services rendered or are extracting rents by acting as gatekeepers is a question that never quite gets resolved. A little of each I suspect, depending on the context.
The job of secondary financial markets is to redirect areas of surplus unproductive wealth (that makes no return), to productive areas. By the magic of markets, sustained profitability = productive use of resources.
The problem with labourers who work in these secondary markets however, is the same as the guards who watch the gate: they can extract large tolls for being in the right place at the right time.
People in finance are rich because they're well-placed to skim highly productive traffic. However, it is -- in the vast majority of cases -- only skimming. The system functions very well to take unproductive surplus and allocate it effectively.
Though admittedly today, the larger beneficiaries are increasingly monpolies, and so on. But this isnt a side effect of the finance industry, but of the state.
> The system functions very well to take unproductive surplus and allocate it effectively.
How do you quantify this?
> Though admittedly today, the larger beneficiaries are increasingly monpolies, and so on. But this isnt a side effect of the finance industry, but of the state.
For markets to exist, monopolies must be avoided. As you can't expect large companies to police themselves, this was generally the role of the state. The states must strike a balance between keeping large companies happy (that want monopolies and have cash today) and true markets (which are efficient on the long run).
The finance industry is probably just a side effect of everybody focusing on short term (both public traded companies and politicians/states)
I've heard this many times, but where is the proof? How would you apply it to the story of OP?
> The system functions very well to take unproductive surplus and allocate it effectively.
What did you measure to come to this conclusion?
In much of the developed world, economic productivity seems to correlate strongly with availability of free capital (I don't have a source but I imagine it's fairly straightforward to cook one up). Even US vs Europe, kind of similar economies, but with capital so much easier to come by in the US, and US productivity per capita is flying compared to Europe.
Availability of free capital is a function of both just general wealth of a society, and how well lubricated the wheels of finance are.
I don't think this is a controversial theory, even if it comes with unpleasant side effects (white collar crime, inequality etc). Just as having a buoyant defence industry that can churn out a lot of boom is great for a country's war fighting potential.
It's essentially the willingness of a society to fund what looks like and could actually be a complete waste of time and money.
In the US there's plenty of money to throw on seemingly frivolous pursuits, because stagnant money is generally considered wasted money. It's considered better to have that money "working for you" invested in something, anything. You could lose out, you could also win big, at least you tried. Can't have omelets without cracking eggs, as the saying goes.
Another Europe-like example is Japan: A rich society with lots of money, but society doesn't want to waste it. So most of the money is stagnant, stored in deposit accounts or in a bedroom drawer (literally, see: Tansu Yokin[1]) instead of being invested in something consequently leading to a stagnant economy.
[1]: https://www.seattletimes.com/opinion/a-nations-character-rev...
This...but a twisted, bloated, incompetent, and malevolently self-serving version of it.
Actual efficiency would dictate that there be only a relative handful of finance jobs, let alone very well-paid finance jobs. And that the vast majority of the money go to actually productive industries. And that the financial markets understand the principles and timescales of other industries, so they don't screw everything up with decisions equivalent to "Fiscal quarter ends in June, and Farmer Jones says he can harvest zero corn by then. Shut him down."
The modern monetary system is a big pyramid scheme so...
if money come from printer and not from factory you need a "printer operator", not a worker or engineer
It's actually Pretty Bloody Hard(tm) to store or move money/wealth safely and properly, not the least because most of us are all highwaymen when given the opportunity. Banks exist to try and bring some civility to that madness, with the cost being (ideally) a pittance skimmed from the top to keep their highwaymen tendencies at bay.
If you want to call them a protection racket akin to the mafia... you're probably right.
Of course, banks these days are much more than that and there's plenty to rightfully crucify them for. But even still, there's a reason being called a third-rate bank clerk is an insult among the highest order.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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]
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.
>>A doctor is also a kid who got full A grades as a high school graduate.
Yes, because the number of med school places in the UK is limited by the government (because they have to fund the extra cost of the course over what students pay in tuition fees). You don't really need to be that smart to be a doctor.
>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.
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.
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.
Yup - I'm not saying it's good or fair, or bad and unfair. I'm just saying this is what it is.
Is 6 figures a lot?
The pound is slightly heavier than the dollar and overall UK wages are lower. But truth is in most of the world being a doctor is a good career but not something you can build outstanding wealth on. Hence Europeans are often puzzled with "I want my kid become a doctor" cliche from American media.
top 5% nationally is £81k
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-d...
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
I always found it interesting that a lot of economists thought that a rising tide lifting all boats could be characterized as a "disease".
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).
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.
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.
>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
That bottleneck is unrelated to the baumol effect.
The bottleneck is the cause of the Baumol effect. If medicine didn't require qualified and licensed human labour to provide then we wouldn't have such high healthcare costs.
Now admittedly, there is a gap between the increase in labour productivity of wait-staff and the labour productivity of healthcare providers over the period since, say, the industrial revolution, but both are outstripped by orders of magnitude by the increase in productivity in the manufacturing and IT sectors. Manufacturing is no longer bottlenecked, because we offshore it, and IT is not bottlenecked because new technology is continuing to rapidly increase labour productivity.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
Passion does not pay the bills; or later on, a comfy lifestyle.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.)
US is an outlier. You can look at self-described data for front-end engineers from the annual State of JS survey for an indication (try clicking on USA vs World): https://2024.stateofjs.com/en-US/demographics/#yearly_salary
> 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.
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.
It feels like it's got more expensive though, and worse quality. A lot of the garlic I've had this year has been in a sorry state to use a random example, and as well as food you buy to cook things like fish and chips which used to be a cheap takeaway meal cost a fortune now.
The depressing thing is that it'd rise a lot more if supermarkets weren't using their weight to squeeze farmers.
UK's food, not eating out mind you, is on par with even eastern europe in some cases.
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.
I literally just came back from a month in Poland, and UK food prices in supermarkets are just as low if not lower. Certainly Aldi prices easily beat Polish supermarket prices on nearly everything, maybe with the exception of baked goods.
Don't get me wrong - M&S and Sainsburys are very expensive places to shop. But I don't see the quality at Morrisons or Asda or yes, even Aldi as being any worse and the prices are very low. Go to France or Germany and try to compare, I can bet that for your average buyer groceries will be cheaper.
I was there twice last year.
Food was cheaper. It's not that UK is cheap, it's more that eastern europe has gotten more expensive.
I think they are referring to the price, not the quality or selection.
From a very quick search, a litre of milk is 20% cheaper in the UK compared to France, Germany and even Poland.
But no, food is incredibly cheap.
Its true i can't eat steak 4 nights a week as god intended but we manage to scratch cook 3 meals a day for 2 people for £70 a week, £85 with a wine pairing.
If you want to forgo eight different vegetables and four different proteins im sure you can do it for less.
I know too many people complaining "food is expensive" when all they live off is gas mark 6 / 25 mins beige rubbish.
>Unfortunately, UK property prices, food prices, utilities etc make Silicon Valley look cheep.
That's not true - UK food is _very_ cheap, and overall living costs are quite a lot less than the UK. Property is the real killer in the UK (and eating out I suppose).
Did you at least get to play with the demo computers? Some of the most fun times before everyone had a super powerful machine were when we got to borrow the top-of-the-line demo machines to play on all weekend. Set up in one of those conference rooms, pizza for everyone.
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).
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.
IMO the UK should look at what Singapore did and maybe learn from that.
There's really no excuse for a country like the UK other than ordinary plain and simple mis-management from the top.
Singapore did not depend on neighboring countries to climb out of 3rd world poverty. To name an example.
The UK cannot just "be Singapore". What happened in Singapore was a specific, unrepeatable combination of its geography, the needs of the region, the size of the country, and the culture.
To maintain its wealth today, Singapore relies on a large underclass of underpaid non-citizens. Around 40% of the country are non-citizens.
In addition, London sort of has its own Singapore(s) in the form of the City and Canary Wharf. That's great for those who work there, but it's not feasible for a country of nearly 70 million for everyone to just work in finance.
Final comment:
> Singapore did not depend on neighboring countries to climb out of 3rd world poverty
Singapore's wealth is built on trade and foreign investment. To assume that without other countries it would be equally successful is absurd.
This is true but there are many policies that the UK could copy from other countries like Singapore that would work much better than what they are currently doing
Can you give a couple of examples, for those unfamiliar with Singapore and/or the UK?
It's a political issue. There are things the UK is good at - finance, culture/media, software and yes hardware innovation, legal services, tourism. But since the GFC especially, none of these things are considered "right" by the electorate.
Instead we romanticise unproductive legacy stuff, and an NHS which, while its staff are in many cases heroic, spends most of its vast budget cleaning up the mess of a population who thinks eating a sensible diet and enacting basic public health policy is "woke".
It's a good thing we banned indoor smoking in public buildings in the early aughts, there's no way you'd get that through in today's political climate.
You're not thinking like an economist :) Here's something I saw on Twitter (no source):
The bicycle is the slow death of the planet. General Director of Euro Exim Bank Ltd. got economists thinking when he said: "A cyclist is a disaster for the country's economy: he does not buy cars and does not borrow money to buy. He does not pay for insurance policies. He does not buy fuel, does not pay for the necessary maintenance and repairs. He does not use paid parking. He does not cause serious accidents. He does not require multi-lane highways. He does not get fat. Healthy people are neither needed nor useful for the economy. They don't buy medicine. They do not go to hospitals or doctors. Nothing is added to the country's GDP (gross domestic product). On the contrary, every new McDonald's restaurant creates at least 30 jobs: 10 cardiologists, 10 dentists, 10 dietary experts and nutritionists, and obviously, people who work at the restaurant itself." Choose carefully: cyclist or McDonald's? It is worth considering. P.S. Walking is even worse. Pedestrians don't even buy bicycles.
Author hasn't been to SW London on a sunny weekend then. £5K bikes strapped to the top of £70K cars as far as the eye can see.
Exact same story for Korea. Dollar-term salaries similar to the EU, but when you compare to CoL it's a much better deal.
>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.
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.
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?
or, alternatively the limitation of Pākehā rights.
It goes to the foundational treaty between the two peoples and the land grants and land uses agreed to.
There are sticking points lost in translation, to say the least.
Not worth it. Maori rights are an intractable problem - the only way to win is to avoid the topic and punt it to a future government. I'm sure you've worked on projects sunk by a non-technical distraction so you surely understand the mechanics.
National says they (and ACT) are the business party but they seem to be mostly windbags. The NZ government traditionally screws over businesses and founders - they certainly fail to encourage businesses while producing a lot of ineffectual programmes.
I don't recommend anyone try and start a business here. Plus NZ society generally cuts down tall poppies - especially capitalists (sportspeople is the main way to achieve without approbation). Be an employee or leech on the welfare state are the usual alternatives.
> Australia pay wayyyy better
well having a relatively small population and bountiful natural resources do great wonder.
We should form a club - even though I came here from Germany...
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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).
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
> The other problem is the welfare state or just the state. So much graft and just living off printed money. It pushes out success.
I see these uninformed comments all the time, and to be they suggest that the person in question has an intense ideological bent, but an aversion to evidence. As another commenter pointed out, a large amount of UK benefits spending (~£100bn) is on the state pension (the single largest benefit).
You are correct that there are a large number of economically inactive people in the UK (something like 20% of working-age people). We have had at least 50 years of government presupposing that the problem here is that these people are lazy, and a little stick will motivate them back to work. The mere fact that this has not worked (and we have tried it repeatedly) might suggest that the problem is a bit more complex than this.
One issue is that the general health of the population is very poor. Unfortunately, improving this is a very hard problem. I think people underestimate just how hard. If you could solve this, you would create hundreds of billions of pounds in value (I am not underestimating). Presumably some starting points would be working out how to lower the costs of fruit and vegetables and increase the cost of ultra-processed fast food. Not sure what else helps here. I would give this a read: https://billmitchell.org/blog/?p=61595
The other problem is that there are no jobs for the people in question, so even if they want to work (or are heavily incentivised to do so) they are not able to. The government can create some employment for these people, but a better vocational training system might help here.
The graft and living off printed money I do see is mostly in housing – people in the UK love to own and rent out houses. This means that (compared to e.g. Germany/Switzerland/Austria) there are very weak protections for renters. Additionally, when house prices are really high it makes it very challenging to build industries on top of this.
it’s more about wealth. You need a functioning welfare state to allow people to take risks
Why do you equate civil servants with people receiving benefits? What a load of nonsense.
Most of the benefits bill in the UK is paid to people who receive the the state pension
Of the others it's split between those who don't earn enough from work i.e. their employers don't pay them enough to live on so those benefits are essentially subsidising companies
And the other large chunk is people who aren't fit to work, this increased as a result of Covid but also the underfunding of health / social care by the previous government
The civil service isn't that big but the largest influx of people was caused by Brexit and the need to duplicate many of the things that didn't need to be separate when part of the EU
The people who've been living off printed money as those with assets, almost all the gains from the cheap money supply over the last 15 or so years has gone to the well off
A few here have commented on different aspects, and they have their part to play but I agree with you, market fragmentation is the scale killer.
From an outside perspective it might appear like Europe is a true single market like the US but it isn't. Scaling to a European level isn't impossible but it is difficult. Some of that will just be difficult to do anything about, language, different cultures, etc. On the political side I'm sure there is plenty more the EU can do but I don't see the will.
Market fragmentation is a measurable phenomenon, as far as a language goes. The language barrier is just the cost of a translator. Is that cost prohibitively high in Europe? I hear a lot of explanations of why Europe has fewer tech companies than America, but they are almost never backed by statistics. The most obvious answer continues to be the Bretton Woods system, by which large amounts of money are funnelled into America, seemingly without reason. China inverts this flow by debasing its currency, and Europe does not.
> The language barrier is just the cost of a translator.
Is it?
> Market fragmentation is a measurable phenomenon, as far as a language goes.
Market fragmentation isn't about language fragmentation – the EU has no single market for services currently, which means if you want to launch a product EU-wide you are effectively launching a product in 27 different countries. There is some harmonization, but not much. If you launch a product in the US you have a large fully harmonized single market.
Well specifically for engineering-related products (both software and hardware).
How can you thrive and be competitive when your competitors in the far-east work for >60 hours per week with a solid ecosystem and generous support from the government?
I am specifically worried about the future of European engineering, unlike US you have much smaller capitals and moats. Many of the products are sustained mainly by legacy built by your predecessors.
If nothing changes then by next-generation most if not all would be devoured by chaebols, Asian Sovereign Wealth Funds, or American PEs. You'll have to work for >60 hours but they not you will enjoy the surplus. Take your poison.
Quantity has a quality of its own.
It’s exhausting trying to explain this to American leftists. They believe the UK / EU is rich, their healthcare is amazing and “free”, and no one has to work more than 35 hours a week. They visit London and Paris once in 10 years for vacation and think they understand the economic order.
Both things can be true: I am happy with the European welfare state and still think there are structural problems.
UK and EU are rich, even if their economy is not doing great.
European corporations and political class are rich and benefit from high GDP stimulated by mass migration and foreign funds cornering the housing market.
But European salaries are stagnating and job security is dropping like a stone, while the cost of living is steadily rising. And public healthcare is getting terrible with months of wait for an appointment.
Spain is now used as example of a growing economy in EU but youth unemployment is high and rising and wages are peanuts compared to housing. A lot of native Spanish kids are just checking out. I guess the Spanish corporations and foreign investors are having a blast. And the boomers with their fat pensions and renting their real estate portfolio.
Of note, the same is happening even in China. I feel really bad for Gen Z.
You should understand that the American situation is, in fact, much worse than ours in many ways. For instance, the average American pays a 40% tax rate compared to our 25% once you account for healthcare.
Ah yes, my fabulous Dutch healthcare basically consisting of being told "you're fine" and overpriced acetaminophen.
Please don't tell me the grass isn't really greener in the Netherlands. Moving over there (from SE England) is one of my dreams.
It’s nice here! My kids can bike to school and not be killed. But the health care is… meh.
Sounds like the non-existent British NHS where getting an appointment to see a doctor is about as likely as meeting the Loch Ness Monster for a spot of tea and crumpets.
Ironically when we were living in Ireland and my daughter was going to have to wait 16 months to get a suspicious growth checked for cancer it was the UK that made it possible for us to go to a private clinic near Belfast and have her checked in a week. And it still wasn't even expensive. Free healthcare isn't actually free if you die waiting.
I'm currently being treated by the NHS and they've been excellent, and I got a same day appointment with a doctor last week.
Admittedly I did phone the surgery at 0800 to get it. But this is awful hyperbole.
It used to be the jewel in the crown of empire though.
Thatcher and the more recent 14 years of UK Conservative government seemed to have kicked it bloody and senseless like Alex and his droogs from the Korova Milkbar.
Only the Conservatives? You think Blair, Brown, and now Starmer did great things for the country? Give me a break. The whole political class is rotten. And the upcoming "Reform UK" is a joke, to say the least.
> You think Blair, Brown, and now Starmer did great things for the country?
No, but apparently you think that I think that. Perhaps you might like to work through that again ...
Leaving the state of the UK as a whole to one side, the NHS was actively kicked like a dog prior to Blair who did at least stop kicking it and attempt to reverse the decline with some, albeit limited, success.
eg: https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC1871752/
The comment I replied to only places blame on Conservatives. There is a name for this: "lying by omission".
I lived and worked in both countries and I feel like the UK is in a worse situation than France nowadays.
It's hard to admit for French citizens but the EU significantly props up the French economy and reduces the structural issues of the country.
Arguing about which sinking ship is going down faster.
I have also lived in both and I agree with you. The UK is a lot worse.
At least France has some things going for it, healthcare is still good, unemployment benefits are good, etc.
The UK has literally nothing to show for.
EU meaning… Germany?
EU meaning the rest of the EU, Germany included but everybody else is contributing to the common market
The good news is that a relatively small amount of aggressive planning reform (namely, firing everyone involved and never calling it "planning" ever again) will fix most of the (fixable...) worst aspects of modern Britain.
We banned building stuff in 1947, we can undo it.
The problem isn't building stuff, it's building stuff where stuff needs to be.
We built plenty of out-of-town shopping centres, business parks and industrial estates in the 70s, 80s, 90s. We stopped because it turns out they're, for the most part, shit. Given the choice, people will WFH and order off Amazon rather than go within a mile of these places.
What we need is to tackle the vested interests in the towns and cities themselves, as an example you can't grow most of our university cities at the edges without much better transit through the centres (trams at least, maybe metro rail). But the very suggestion and the preservation crowd as well as the existing suburbanites lose their shit.
And this is against a backdrop of rural and less educated people mistrusting anything going on in the growth cities, and I don't just mean London.
BUUUT MuHHH PAAARRRKiiiiNNNGGGG!! (And house values). And we can't _possibly_ make the town look different than it did in 1972 because "heritage".
We're talking about a bunch of crusty old church biddies who will literally force you to put the most godawful, hideous house covering in the history of man BACK on your house because they're terrified of being reminded it's not the 70's.
(Sorry for the mail link) https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2592033/Put-pebble-...
Accurate.
In fact, the only post 1972 thing you ARE allowed to do is pave over your front garden and park two Jeep Cherokees (neither of which actually fit in the available space) on it.
Ah yes, it's a delight that the pavements are now covered in SUV's too because they're too big to park legally. Very in keeping with the distinct cultural heritage of the area.
But build a bike lane or even a bike shed, and they'll drag the city council all the way to the EU Supreme Court, even though half of that demographic voted Brexit.
And the neighbours don't have any of that awful looking pebble dash.
Yes there are ridiculous rules like that are enforced. However tbh she should have checked first.
Rules around how the area should look, should be decided by people that live there. There are many better examples where it makes a lot of sense for the locals to be strict about rules about what can be erected.
I used to live near the Village of Corfe Castle. Generally the argument is that the place would lose its character and it won't be the same place anymore if it didn't keep its distinctive look.
https://corfecastle.co.uk/the-village/
If you would just start building places that don't fit in with the rest of the village. The village wouldn't have it character and thus it wouldn't have its tourism in the Summer as a result.
There countless towns and village with a bunch of heritage that literally goes back maybe a millennia and the argument that we should throw this away to build a load of crap houses (new houses BTW are awful, I've looked at many in the last few years) is completely asinine.
That's fair when it comes to villages, but it's mostly the edge of small cities, and within larger ones, that growth needs to happen - because that's where infrastructure exists or can be added on.
Let the Cotswolds and Kent Weald be chocolate-box nimbyland, but keep it out of places that are trying to get work done.
The issue is that those cities end up growing into the countryside. I like there is a big green barrier between Greater Manchester and Macclesfield.
It would help if the cities and larger towns built higher and denser.
Yes lets cram everyone in like sardines in massive sky-scrapers that blots out the sky.
The other alternative is that the UK doesn't allow 600,000 people (net) in every year.
But it's _good_ when houses look different. Growing up my family would drive around new developments and say "ugg, these cookie-cutter houses all look the same, I miss when you we built unique and individual houses" and then it's jarring to move somewhere where people value conformity above all else and being different is considered bad. God forbid your house has eaves.
Explains a lot, actually.
I'm not talking about knocking down thousand-year old houses. I note that your example doesn't seem to have a problem putting car parks in, incidentally. But "locals" (aka old people with enormous amounts of time on their hands who bizarrely feel the right to tell other people what their home should look like) insisting that everything stay mediocre forever because they grew up with it this way is a bit much.
I think it is perfectly fine that people that actually live in an area get to decide what it looks like. If people don't involve themselves in that process and it is monopolized by people "with too much time on their hands" that is their fault. If they don't like the busy bodies then they should make time and actually go to the meetings.
You decide you own level of involvement in the community.
> I note that your example doesn't seem to have a problem putting car parks in, incidentally.
It is very interesting that whenever you bring up an example where it illustrates a particular point well, they will try to find anything they can point to so they can dismiss the general point being made. Guess what, a place in rural England that you can only travel easily to via car or coach will prioritise parking.
BTW I suspect knowing that area, you probably couldn't build anything other than parking in those places.
The challenge is that the people who live in an area use the rules in such a way as to make building new homes very expensive or outright impossible. The people who would like to live in that area have no say, and lack representation.
The bigger picture here is that it means even two rational people can inadvertently make the situation worse for themselves.
Person A lives in City A, but wants to move to City B
Person B lives in City B, but wants to move to City A
Person A votes to make it hard to build new homes in city A, because it makes their own home worth more.
Person B votes to make it hard to build new homes in City B, because it makes their own home worth more.
It makes sense in a self-interested way but both wind up worse off.
And I just meant that the car park is butt-ugly and shows the council's true priorities. They could at least put it on the edge of the village.
> The challenge is that the people who live in an area use the rules in such a way as to make building new homes very expensive or outright impossible. The people who would like to live in that area have no say, and lack representation.
Okay so what? I think that is perfectly fine. It isn't necessary for everyplace to cater for everyone.
> The bigger picture here is that it means even two rational people can inadvertently make the situation worse for themselves. > > Person A lives in City A, but wants to move to City B > > Person B lives in City B, but wants to move to City A > > Person A votes to make it hard to build new homes in city A, because it makes their own home worth more. > > Person B votes to make it hard to build new homes in City B, because it makes their own home worth more. > > It makes sense in a self-interested way but both wind up worse off.
These seems like a fantasy scenario to me. Typically people are either moving to a particular area, or out of a particular area, not swapping one nice affluent area for another equally affluent area (which is somewhat assumed in your scenario).
The reason btw housing is expensive is because housing became an investment vehicle isn't because of nimby's and we have about 600,000 (net) people entering the UK every year.
So… if I move to a county I can decide nobody else gets to build a house there? Even on land I don’t own?
It's also the quality of the build… most new build houses are shit because the house building companies are more interested in their profit than the quality of the product
If we made cars like we make houses there'd be a long queue outside every car dealer as people returned them to get their money back
The problem is the institutions are unaccountable and can't be easily made controllable by the electorate again. Bank of England, the judiciary etc. These control the country not the MPs. Blair onward
I heard the joke that the man who contributed the most to modern London's urban planning was called Adolf Hitler.
Hopefully we'll at least get something new out of it, like punk rock the last time.
It's not quite that bad - the news obviously makes it seem like it's worse than it is. Also we finally got rid of the Tories, so at least things are heading in the right direction. I made a list of some positive changes Labour have made already:
* Allow onshore wind
* Means tested winter fuel allowance
* Inheritance tax for farms
* Assisted dying bill (controversial but I think generally people are in favour of this)
* Scrapping the public footpath registration deadline
The only stupid thing I think they've done is the porn site age testing thing, but that was also a Tory policy.
IMO the big problem is the right-wing media. Take something like the winter fuel allowance. Very obviously the right thing to do, and even pensioners were generally in favour (check this article: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/c4gegy4r9ndo ), yet it still somehow a huge controversy with disingenuous articles even on the BBC like this one fuelling the faux outrage: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/c80l9lde5yjo
How can we make any improvements if such obviously good changes meet such an irrational reaction?
Well - care to be joined by the Germans? It's the reason I am now living in Japan...
How did you get a job in Japan? What were the requirements?
Speaking the language helps. Also working in a highly specialized field.
What made you move from Germany to Japan?
It's not, its just that you are swept into the news cycle of doomerism where engagement is established with FUD. The UK is fine compared to many of its peer nations in many areas.
Exactly. It's not merely the Fabian state, being ruled by lawyers, by socialist agitators, it is the vast swathes of proles who cheer every time they crush success or do wealth appropriations. It feels like you are always just two steps away from being rounded up in a pogrom for merely having savings.
The PM himself defines working class as people with no savings. It's horrid.
How much savings do you have? Is it used for rent-seeking behaviour? I think that's the key issue the country is facing.
If you have a little padding no-one will be coming for you.
Everyone in power is desparately trying dance around tax reform. When you tax productive work much more heavily than unproductive work (looking at our etf holdings grow and crowding out home/business owners with buy-to-lets), you are going to get stagnation.
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.
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.
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/British_Aerospace_HOTOL further development of Concorde)
to transport (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Advanced_Passenger_Train https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tracked_Hovercraft https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hovertravel https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sinclair_C5 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maglev#Birmingham,_United_King...)
to chip design (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
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.
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.
Well my East European perspective is this:
When management decides to launch a new product, they bring in an UK-based 'analyst' who usually does a piss poor job of gathering requirements/docs/building up the project, so you have to step in and 'shadow manage' the whole thing, from producing architecture diagrams to talking to customers, writing specs, writing Jira tickets, besides actually doing the job you're supposed to do.
The only thing they do do is act as an interface layer to upper management and giving each other reacharounds.
But when it comes to handshakes and glitzy product announcement galas, they're all over the place and you are not even invited, the best you can get is having your (usually misspelled) name show up in context of 5 other high-ranking ne-er-do-wells, who they want to suck up to.
Then they leave for a higher paying position to another UK company, and post on linkedin about leadership and inspiring teams.
You are forgotten, but not for long, since people actually start using the stuff you wrote and support tickets start rolling in.
Poor poor UK people having to sit in all those executive positions while contributing nothing.
It also doesn't help that for most West Europeans, places like Romania is synonimous with the Shadow Realm.
The funny thing is, having them spit in your face like this is actually a privileged position, since that means you're usually out of the trenches, where you only see the Jira tickets that you need to solve.
> For all intents and purposes, Venture Capital is dead in the UK.
The UK has the 3rd largest tech VC sector worldwide - only after the US and China
> in action most of their Engineering and Product teams are located in Eastern Europe or India
London also has the largest software sector outside the US, after the Bay Area, Boston, and NYC.
> The UK has the 3rd largest tech VC sector worldwide - only after the US and China
And as I mentioned before, most startups tend to only be UK domiciled for funding reasons, but majority of their operations and leadership are located outside the UK.
Foreign (read: American) VCs tend to conduct transactions in a handful of very well regulated markets, so a Chinese, Indian, or Romanian startup will often have to make a domiciled corporation in a financial hub like the UK or Singapore in order to raise.
For example, Revolut has around 16,000 employees, but barely 2k in the UK and around 7k in Poland+India - and most of these roles are engineering AND strategy roles.
> London also has the largest software sector outside the US, after the Bay Area, Boston, and NYC
Source? Boston is nowhere near a top software hub - both Seattle and Austin are much larger in the software space than Boston.
And I would be shocked if the net amount of SWE roles in London is higher than Tel Aviv or Bangalore.
I think the large software sector here might actually be part of the problem. If you're smart, want to stay in London (expensive), but don't want to work in finance then it's going to be software. There's no interesting hardware jobs here (FPGA trading platforms do not qualify). These jobs do exist in other European countries so I think the parent was correct.
I don't understand why it's so bad in a country that's supposedly amazing at financial services.
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.
I think "capital" is the wrong word for it. We've got a lot of money lying around, but capital implies something productive can be done with it. We can't eat money, and we can't tax it or else they'll screw off. Perhaps if we stopped acting as the worlds fixer for tax dodging we would end up being better off. I can't help but view the City as a kind of tumour, sucking the life out of the rest of the country to enlarge itself.
I think most folks when say Capital they mean “Finance Capital” which UK is really good at. Even historically speaking UK was at the forefront of financial engineering which complimented their physical engineering and enabled to spread their empire and colonize so much.
But UK post WW-2 and specifically post Thatcher stopped investing in physical engineering and overindexed on financial services the results are for all to see now.
But you are right. I think the financial engineering has reached its limits and we see China’s investment in physical engineering over last couple of decades beginning to pay off.
The Chinese strategy of forcibly keeping their financial sector depressed seems pretty sensible as a long term strategy.
On the other hand, the UK has all these cheap engineers. Is it just that they're not actually cheap, on the international market?
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.
Cheap compared to the US. On-par for most of the Western world. Expensive on the international market.
It was always going to be a trap, but it’s been so long in the making that those who started the UK on that path have long since retired wealthy.
> I don't understand why it's so bad in a country that's supposedly amazing at financial services.
Because it's focused on predatory finance: funds cornering housing markets, money laundering, debt markets (think public debt and CDS), currency/rates speculation, etc.
It's not about predatory or non-predatory finance.
In order to become a major financial hub, UK has very favorable foreign transaction laws.
A significant amount of British-domiciled capital is foreign originated but only parked in the UK because of strong contracts law and linkages to just about every major investable market.
This is both a boon and a curse, because why would you finance a $1M seed in London when you can deploy that same capital for a similar sized seed in Tel Aviv or New York and get a better return on investment by exiting or funding additional rounds.
There is no innovation ecosystem in the UK, and it's too late to build one because other markets are just too competitive at this point - India, Israel, Czechia, Poland, etc provide very competitive tax incentives and subsidizes for foreign R&D investment and have done so for decades now.
You might assume the answer is to add additional roadblocks, but that makes British financial services extremely non-competitive, and puts 2.5 million jobs (and voters) at risk.
This is the exact same trap that Singapore and Hong Kong has fallen into, and both are trying to minimize it by becoming the goto financial hubs for target startup scenes (China for Hong Kong, India+ASEAN for Singapore) and investing in foreign startups (eg. Temasek Holdings in Singapore).
The UK needs to do something similar - it needs to give up ambitions of being a peer of the "big boys" in innovation, and concentrate on becoming competitive in international dealmaking, maybe by making a public-private international VC fund like Temasek.
Baillie Gifford (HQed in Edinburgh) and Index Ventures (HQed in London) are competitive in Tech Growth Equity globally (and especially in the Bay). There's no reason there can't be more Baillie Giffords or Index Ventures in the UK.
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.
> 100k jobs aren't that common in software in the UK
They really are, if you're prepared to work for $BIGCO
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.
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.
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?
> especially if AI predictions play out
Thats a big if. Big tech has enshittified everything its touched for a long time now.
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.
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.
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.
> 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/unit...
He meant population.
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)
Similar in France / Paris where some American players can easily pay 100K+ euros for SWE. Rest of France salaries are half or even less.
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.
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.
> 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.
> French engineering peers were not even aware that companies in France (Big Tech or Fortune 500) could offer six-figure salaries.
I know senior engineer at Airbus who don't earn six-figure salaries.
French human resources are cowards and hide behind diplomas to justify pay scales and recruitment. “Nobody gets fired for buying IBM“/”Nobody gets fired for recruiting a polytechnicien”.
I trained as a mechanical/nuclear engineer. It took destroying all the other competitors at my company's internal hackathon, Master Dev France and a project involving several thousand lines of python, for HR at my company to admit that I knew how to code without a software dev diploma.
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?
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.
The green card lottery?
> 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.
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.
> 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.
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
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.
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.
In the US, most of those suppliers understand the nature of startups and are accustomed to working with them, fully aware they are likely to fail. The deals are structured appropriate for those realities and some suppliers specialize in or have a preference for startups.
In the UK, many suppliers still treat startups like an exotic beast, or worse, a corner shop. US business has a familiarity and comfort with startups, due in no small part from being an increasingly prominent part of the American business landscape since the Second World War. It is the water they swim in.
That's interesting!
Here, failing to pay your bills is both a breach of fair play, and what "dodgy" people i.e. criminals and con-artists do.
But equally it means we can operate a bit more of an honour system in terms of lines of credit. Small businesses typically allow one another at least some amount of credit terms, which they would not offer a private individual.
I wonder how much of this has to do with a more rigid class system compared to the US.
Anecdotally, the British people I have interacted with in a business setting seem to have a dearth of ambition. These people weren’t depressed, but I sensed a kind of defeatist cynicism.
As an American I realize our culture encourages taking risks and we are remarkably forgiving of failure. In fact, we seem to congratulate people for the fact that they tried in addition to overlooking the failure. I’m not sure if this comes from “the frontier spirit” or if this mindset used to exist throughout the Anglosphere. In any event, I do feel bad for the UK as a whole. It just seems like things keep getting worse and at some point the national mood becomes a self fulfilling cycle.
American parents: "You can do anything you set your mind to! Anyone can be president! If you fail, pick yourself back up and try again! Your cousin with the big house started out washing cars and built an amazing success from nothing!"
British (and Irish) parents: "The whole system is rigged so don't even try, the guy in the big house up the road got it through shady government contracts, my uncle can get you a job at the council so you'll never, ever get fired, the only reason to ever save money is for retirement or a house, your cousin who tried to start a company thinks he's better than us...."
It really starts at a young age.
I remember playing (my) football (your soccer) in school and my neighbourhood as a kid.
If you were going to strike you needed to be pretty sure that you can score or that you can take the heat from your team mates if you fail.
In contrast watching kids play sports in the US, everyone is constantly trying to lift each other up after failure.
These small cultural differences easily add up in how you carry yourself in business.
Negativity seems to be culturally frowned upon in the US (what a downer). Positivity seems to be culturity frowned in Europe (naive 'happy go lucky' kind of guy).
Spot on. I’ve met several foreign exchange students during my time at university. A simple observation from one of them really stuck with me: “You Americans really like to help strangers.”
The “happy go lucky” observation squares with what I have been told by my Eastern European friend. Any stranger, or mere acquaintance, who is friendly and offering help is likely trying to obligate you into repaying the favor later on. People who for fall for this are naïve or simpletons. There’s definitely a level of trust that needs to be earned before you experience the same kind of positivity and goodwill that Americans seem to dole out to “randos” they just met.
Right after that “like to help” comment he followed it up with: “It is like you are all Golden Retrievers”. Which I found both hilarious and fitting.
Half my feed is Americans talking how terrible it is, the other half non-Americans (or immigrants) praising it.
It's the UK's aristocracy, most likely. They own nearly everything in the UK, haven't earned any of it, and the last thing they need is the invasion of rich self-made entrepreneurs.
> 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.
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)
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.
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…
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
you can do worse than creating credit reports
they could be figuring out how to get people to click on ads
Ads only work because there are useful products to buy. They're a sadly necessary indicator of a productive economy.
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.
> 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.
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.
That must have been a very long time ago!
10 years 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.
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?
>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.
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
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.
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...) 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-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-...) means concerns about periods of low wind will likely become less of an issue over time.
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
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?"
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.
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.
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.
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?
Btw: remaining examples are just as stupid as the first one.
Ideas are worth nothing. Even if they shine
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.
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.
Very true, the Australian scene is so dismal, it makes the UK look great.
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...
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.
Why don't all British hardware engineers move to the United States? What keeps them in Britain?
I'm a British-American hardware engineer, I've lived in the UK nearly all my life. I've a home, and a family with kids here, I'm very settled. I've had plenty opportunity to move to the US, even before I had a family (with my current employer or under my own steam as a citizen) and I've no interest. I visit the US every few years and by the end of the trip I'm very much done with it all. Other than the much larger job market, I don't think there's a single US thing I want. Everything we have here is either better, or I'm sufficiently used to it. American is an unappealing place to live for many social reasons, I'd much rather move to France or Germany if I had to leave (and wasn't worried about the language barriers).
Ironically, other countries (former British colonies) have more access to US "specialty occupation" working visas than the UK does -- none of these are H1-B.
Canadians and Mexicans have TN, Australians have E3, Singapore and Chile have H-1B1 (a subcategory of H1-B but with its own quotas).
https://www.uscis.gov/working-in-the-united-states/temporary...
Most foreign engineers in the US (outside of H-1Bs) are actually Canadians.
But there are no easy visas for the UK.
It's not surprising in the light what the US celebrates on the 4th of July.
I'm under the impression that tech people working in the US on visas are exploited. The end of year review / firing round which is so popular in the US means you can lose your job, which means you lose your visa, and you get something like 4 weeks to land a replacement or have to move out of the country.
At 20? Sure, who cares. If you've got a house, kids in a local school? The level of stress about being abruptly thrown out of the country seems untenable.
I would expect that dynamic to suppress wages for immigrants (as you have fear to keep them in line instead). Healthcare seems to be similarly set up to frighten people into staying in their current employment.
This perspective might not be accurate, but it's why this British engineer is unwilling to move to the US.
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.
> partner, house, possessions, etc) - then you’ve got multiple other problems to solve
I get the intent, but this made me laugh
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.
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.
It's not obvious that the US is necessarily a better place to 'do hardware' than the UK for them anyway.
Plus if you're a UK-based person with a STEM background, the fintech industry will pay you a lot of money if you're willing to do their dirty work.
Not wanting to live in the United States, I would venture.
It's not that easy to get a work permit in the US unless you're truly exceptional or marry an American.
My cousin (an American living and working in France) married a guy originally from Morocco. After eventually realizing that they might want to move to the US, they couldn't, because he couldn't get a visa.
It would have taken quite a bit of time- my cousin would have had to move back to the US first, established residence, and gotten a job and some other requirements. Only then could they have qualified to apply, and the wait time for the application to be approved would be in the 9-14 months range.
Once they applied, he could have moved here with her, but not gotten a job, I think, until the application for the visa was approved.
Ultimately, they opted to go a different route.
> It would have taken quite a bit of time- my cousin would have had to move back to the US first, established residence, and gotten a job and some other requirements.
That's strange. A spouse green card doesn't require the residence and there is no wait time for the spouses of US Citizens. However, the processing time (especially via consular processing) is ridiculous, around 2 years now.
Some people don’t focus primarily on the money. When that’s the case, many things (love, pride, comfort, dreams, fears, etc) might keep someone from moving.
Hardware engineer here, from a qualification perspective. I worked for a large American defence company and was invited to work in the US. I declined.
The work culture, social and economic stability are terrible. Education is expensive or poor. Regulation and standards are poor. Not a good place to bring up a family.
Family and friends.
Visas are not a pleasant thing to deal with.
Don't they suffer from the same H1B restrictions?
>>"Engineers: Your brain's worth billions. Build empires, not apps."
Pay engineers billions, then, not CEOs, VCs and shareholders.
> Meanwhile computer science graduates land lucrative jobs in big tech or quant trading, often starting at £100,000+
I mean, not really
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.
Software is eating the world
Aren't hardware salaries outside California basically shit even in the US?
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).
>Engineers in "flyover country" where I am seem to easily exceed six figures.
So do brand new software grads
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)
You seem to overestimate the engineering supply in Des Moines.
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)
What ever happened to GraphCore?
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.
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.
I think d-matrix might succeed.
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
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.
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.
Taxes and a hatred of success by over half the population
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.
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.
Probably because 85%+ of the population would reject it.
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.
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.
We already offer those, just look at diego garcia currently, or RAF Menwith Hill in yorkshire which is an NSA base.
Nope
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.
Government spending is 45% of GDP.
Putting more layers of privatisation between the government and the service it provides will decrease the quality and increase the costs. Sewage is now in our rivers and we pay more for water. Trains are obscenely expensive compared to Europe. Energy is expensive. All of these things cost boatloads because we sold them off and drag the rest of the economy down with them. We wouldn't be spending so much today if we'd invested more in the past.
And private spending is something like 200%. GDP is a measure of added value, not total spending/revenue.
Capitalism is not the problem so much as policies that promote trade imbalances and outsourcing of jobs. If there are people somewhere willing to work for much less than you are, there are far fewer opportunities to do anything. It is not normal to get a ton of cheap imports forever, and a reversion to the mean is not a sign that capitalism is failing.
Unless the whole world was to demand the same standard of living (which is impossible), or global trade is limited, there will be nations where the wealth of the average person is on the decline.
What we are seeing is a great levelling out of living standards across the world. Poor countries are unquestionably getting richer, while rich countries are stagnating and decaying. It's a period of readjustment, but self-limiting.
There's no need for the West to stagnate like this. We could let the rest of the world develop itself while we continue to be self-sufficient. That requires tough decisions like choosing to limit imports of foreign goods and labor. But that is unfortunately not how it's going. Some people have been selling out their own countries for decades to make a quick buck, or perhaps to defend some economic theory that the plan with the highest cost efficiency is always the best.
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.)
The NHS is not dying an entirely natural death. Murder most foul.
Your question is coupling a matter of our policy preference, our tactical planning to arrive at that preference, and a hypothetical predictive model. If like some supervillain I had come up with a satisfactory answer to all those questions I would have enacted it twenty minutes 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.
Well everytime somebody wants to build high density housing or really anything to alleviate the housing crisis we get the usual NIMBY screaming similar to OP about evil corporations coming to destroy the character of their local neighborhood.
OP is a YIMBY for the record.
Returning by right development to the UK is very possibly the single largest policy measure that might enable a way forward, not because it's so intimately tied to the financialization of the economy, but because it's such an enormous capital concentration that its limitations overshadow a lot of other issues.
It may be hard to see it from where we're standing, but the current housing situation is one extreme of a catastrophic ongoing crisis.
If we're talking about the UK, then London is already as dense as it can reasonably be. It went all-in on public transit almost 200 years ago.
And of course, it made it all worse. Now you HAVE to work in London if you want a high salary.
The only real way to fix the housing is to promote remote work and decentralized companies.
"Reasonably" is doing a lot of work there. It sounds an awful like you're defining the boundaries of reasonability at "Exactly what is built right now and using the exact borders of current municipalities", which is a tautology. Even if we limit ourselves to the current municipal boundaries of London, population density is ~6000 people per square kilometer. Kowloon Walled City survived with 3,000,000 people per square kilometer, Manhattan has 75,000, Dhaka 23,000, San Francisco 19,000.
Their system is a much better one than we tend to have in the US, but "All-in on public transit" looks more like Trantor than London. A majority of the TFL system was constructed more than a century ago.
Yeah.. no. Have you been to Asian cities? It's rows and rows of 100 floor apartments, it's urban centers consolidated into high density malls and commercial centers. We're talking about dozens of high rises where every floor contains restaurants and shops. I daresay there is more to eat and shop in the 1km Radius around Ikebukuro Station then entire borough of Westminster!
Nobody wants to work in some backwater in the middle of nowhere either, especially if you are young and want to meet new people.
Affordable high density housing used to comprise about half of all housing built in the UK. Then almost all constuction of it was halted.
The private sector never built any of it. NIMBYs didnt stop this construction. Ideologues whinging about the % of GDP spent by the public sector did.
NIMBYs are just a side effect of the world neoliberals created.
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.
The government is the biggest rentier and monopolist of all. It's the elephant in the room.
> but what’s the solution?
I strongly suspect it's a variant on capitalism that:
1. Recognises that some industries (utilities, healthcare, etc) are not well suited to market provision and are state funded. i.e. the sort social provisions that many of the nordic countries have.
2. Recognises that extreme wealth inequalities invalidate the key principle that capitalist economics is premised on (that the market value of a good or service closely approximates it's societal value) and therefore imposes much stronger progressive taxes on very high earners to effective cap how much wealth a single individual can control.
> early stage capitalism (lack of regulation and all)
High tax rates (90% in some cases) and all
The 'Laffer Curve' concept is treated at first glance as some kind of complex model created by experts that Explains A Lot, at second glance as something a bunch of drunk political operatives scrawled on a cocktail napkin in 1974 that doesn't necessarily have any relation to reality, and at third glance as a tautology whose dishonest core is the labelling of the x axis.
Academic attempts to identify the optimal maxima of tax receipts, which conservative political operatives will always implicitly assume is "half whatever the current rate is", suggest something on the order of 60%.
> In economics, the Laffer curve illustrates a theoretical relationship between rates of taxation and the resulting levels of the government's tax revenue.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laffer_curve
I would dispute the premise of the Laffer Curve: that the goal of setting a (high) taxation rate is to maximise government revenue. I think that reducing wealth inequality is a good in and of itself. And especially under a capitalist system that depends on it's citizens having vaguely equal purchasing power to function efficiently.
Assuming that our starting point is our current situation where wealth is very unequally distributed, that is. I would agree with the suggestion that things being too equal, and there being no reward for hard work and/or ingenuity also leads to problems.
Optimisation that tries to balance that trade-off would interest me greatly.
Point 1 tends to fall apart when the government can't control its own coffers and after a few decades of mismanagement decides that privatisation is the main way to reduce their debt burden. So I think this one ebbs and flows over time generally.
See South Africa for an example. Power production is slowly opening up to market forces as an alleviation to the extreme mismanagement and corruption of the last 2-3 decades.
On the other hand, there are also some alternatives, like "devolution" of state services to the provincial or municipal level. The local Cape Town government is busy trying to gain control over the city's train lines from the government org that owns them, to provide better service.
There's no substitute for competence and integrity, but private entities are just as capable of being inept and corrupt. Look at companies like Enron or Comcast.
>Reset into early stage capitalism (lack of regulation and all)?
I think this wouldn't be bad.
In the case of the UK the solution in effect since the mid 2010s is increase taxation, replace the natives completely with someone more desperate, and suppress wages.
Socialism isn't the solution, it's the problem. People deserve to be paid for work and the better the work that they do, the more they deserve to be paid, even though that can be much more than the average person earns.
You've essentially summarised a key Marxist critique of Capitalism.
What you've described - the need for people to have autonomy, value, and ownership over the work they do - is the core tenet of Marxism.
That's a very marxist view on wages, actually...
Capitalism seeks rent from having capital, so the obvious optimization is to squash the ability to demand higher wages (original Marxist argument about "ownership of means of production" was how big capitalist controlled access to machines you needed to the work, thus being able to depress the wages)
I don't think you understand socialism and capitalism.
Suppression of wages is very much a feature of capitalism (the company's mission is to acquire capital for shareholders; technology that lowers costs by reducing the need for labor, or reducing the payment for labor, is a goal); whereas socialism holds that those who do the work should benefit from their labor (workers should own the means of production).
A "socialist" company in the U.S. would be an employee-owned company or a co-op (like REI) though they would never call themselves that because Americans don't understand what socialism is (and have been taught that it's "evil").
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.
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…
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
You've got the wrong end of this one.
UK has long pursued a strategy of "social mobility", which is shorthand for: some places will be shit, and if you're hardworking or clever you can and should leave.
So the bright, capable people from white working-class towns either joined the middle classes or skipped the country entirely a generation or two ago.
Leaving behind a bunch of people for whom no wage will tempt them to London to do the hard, menial work needed to keep the city running. So on that front we have no choice but to import.
The people left behind either have caring responsibilities that means they can't move, long term health problems and disabilities, or just lack the basic work ethic, motivation and so on to get on in life.
Ultimately who's going to mop the floors at City banks and so on? It won't be the bright, ambitious kids of second and third generation immigrant families, not if they can at all help it, nor the sons and daughters of white middle classes, whether that's metropolitan elites or the trades and services people.
(This, btw, is why immigrants are generally hard working: "people willing to relocate their lives halfway around the world to an often hostile culture where they'll never truly be at home" is a strong filter for people with drive and motivation. Those lacking it stay home, regardless of which host and guest culture we're talking about).
There is a constant narrative that is pushed on everyone that immigration is necessary because people won't do the menial jobs. There is a huge number of problems with this this narrative.
* Menial jobs were/are normally done in the past by younger more inexperienced people. These were usually done part time while in education. This allows younger people to build basic competency and money management skills. They aren't supposed to be jobs for life and everyone knew this in the past. By constantly importing people from to do these jobs, you stop younger people from building up this basic competency. This stuff is important btw, as I know many people who never had these jobs and had the bank of Mum and Dad pay for them for far too long, they don't know how to manage money.
* A lot of more menial jobs are done by people that are part retired. When I was younger I worked with many part retired people that had a stressful job and moved away and part retired and were on the checkouts out the supermarket, cleaning, pushing trolleys or delivering things.
* A lot of immigrants seem to do jobs like Uber Eats, Deliveroo and other zero hour contract food delivery jobs. If you don't believe me, go to your local McDonalds at 8am on a Saturday morning and every driver picking up food will be a immigrant of one sort or another. These are jobs where people are literally too lazy to drive 5 minutes to the McDonalds drive through on a Saturday morning. I am normally very pro-free market however do we really need to immigrants to do these jobs? I don't use Uber Eats and I have no idea how much it costs, but I think the guy up the road that has a small mansion a Jag and Two Teslas can probably afford to pay a bit more for delivery.
* I am from the South of the UK. If you aren't from London or another big city, London is one of the most horrid places to visit, work. I spent maybe a 4 months working as a freelancer in London (travelling in). People are downright rude, everything is a ripoff. I'd rather be slightly worse off and live here than be "better" off an live in London.
It's conflating a bunch of things.
Menial routine work for juniors has been eliminated or automated to the margins, that much is true. No office-boys and far fewer supermarket cashiers. For those with people skills, there's plenty of café work, but that's about it.
On the flip side though, the educational/academic landscape for the upper quartile of young adults is hugely more competitive. Nobody is making it to a Russell Group uni on cruise control, and getting top grades AND having a part time job AND hobbies and a social life isn't easy.
Then you have menial work that's actually fairly skilled. Social care, childcare and so on. That's not something a student is going to do for a couple of years on the way to something better.
And a shift, for various reasons, to the contracted-out agency model for cleaning. Mostly done by immigrants, but they work harder than most semi-retired Brits would be willing to. Even if they're less flexible than the old boy who'd fix a bad door or window as well as sweeping the floor, and have none of his loyalty.
UberEats on the other hand is taking the mick. A lot of their workers are undocumented, the self-employed contractor status allows the operator to avoid the normally stringent penalties for immigration law breaches. I don't know if they lobbied for the law to be that way, but it's a massive loophole. So this is illegal work and maybe shouldn't be conflated with legit immigration. How much it's a problem I'm not sure.. the actual numbers are quite small, but like the loudspeakers on the bus thing, it's a very visible breach of the norms and rules, so there's an argument that it's bad for society on that basis. And like I say, the operator is blatantly exploiting it, they can't be blind to what's going on. I'm pretty liberal on immigration, miss the positive contribution the former Eastern Bloc countries made prior to Brexit, but the whole food delivery sector is overdue a clean out.
> It's conflating a bunch of things.
Not really. I am talking generally about this notion that we need to keep importing people.
> Menial routine work for juniors has been eliminated or automated to the margins, that much is true. No office-boys and far fewer supermarket cashiers. For those with people skills, there's plenty of café work, but that's about it.
That is often repeated but I don't think that is quite as true as people make out. There aren't robots yet (or likely to be) stacking the supermarket shelves. Yes self service has taken most of the cashier jobs (not all btw).
> And a shift, for various reasons, to the contracted-out agency model for cleaning. Mostly done by immigrants, but they work harder than most semi-retired Brits would be willing to. Even if they're less flexible than the old boy who'd fix a bad door or window as well as sweeping the floor, and have none of his loyalty.
In other countries to emigrate there you need to have skills they need. When I moved abroad previously the company had to justify looking outside of the country to employ me. I don't understand how it can be justified that they can't find cleaning staff. BTW I employ a cleaner so I know roughly how much they cost.
> UberEats on the other hand is taking the mick. A lot of their workers are undocumented, the self-employed contractor status allows the operator to avoid the normally stringent penalties for immigration law breaches. I don't know if they lobbied for the law to be that way, but it's a massive loophole. So this is illegal work and maybe shouldn't be conflated with legit immigration. How much it's a problem I'm not sure.. the actual numbers are quite small, but like the loudspeakers on the bus thing, it's a very visible breach of the norms and rules, so there's an argument that it's bad for society on that basis. And like I say, the operator is blatantly exploiting it, they can't be blind to what's going on. I'm pretty liberal on immigration, miss the positive contribution the former Eastern Bloc countries made prior to Brexit, but the whole food delivery sector is overdue a clean out.
It doesn't matter whether it is small or not (I don't think it as small as you are making out). It shouldn't be happening. Also just because you don't like the people that are highlighting this issue, doesn't mean that the issue isn't important.
The reason why things are a mess is that nothing gets sorted out properly in the UK. We have had leadership failures now for years.
Could you elaborate further? I am a skilled immigrant in the UK. I pay my taxes and have not used any benefits. I even pay for my medication; the only free service I have used is a GP appointment or a hospital scan, which was likely covered by the IHS (Immigration Health Surcharge).
What have I done to make the country worse off?
It's nothing against you personally. I'm sure many immigrants are good people and some scarce skilled workers must be imported. But there seems to be a desire from the top to import too many foreign workers across the West. This contributes to the low wages and lack of opportunities described in the article.
The UK also has outsourced a lot of manufacturing, which further worsens the job market. I don't know how many hardware engineers are imported unnecessarily or else part of "offshoring," but by all indications I've seen personally the number may be significant. This is from an outside US perspective, so take it with a grain of salt.
> Talk too much about these things and you're probably getting sent to prison.
This trope is getting a bit ridiculous. For the record, the event that inspired the notion that complaining online could get you sent to person involved individuals encouraging the public to burn down council offices[1] and a hotel[2].
Conspiracy to commit arson has been one of the most serious offences in English law for centuries, and that's even before you add the murder part to it.
[1]: https://www.reuters.com/fact-check/man-jailed-7-half-years-e...
[2]: https://www.nottinghamshire.police.uk/news/nottinghamshire/n...
PS. I am nonetheless aware that we burnt down the White House. On behalf of Britain, sorry about that.
Google’s not pulling it up but I swear I read about police visitations for immigration criticism that didn’t involve calls for murder or arson.
The UK arrests people for writing the n-word on Twitter https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/crime/black-twitter-ra... or praying silently near abortion clinics. https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c4g9kp7r00vo so it’s not exactly a stretch.
Here's one:
As relayed by Russian propaganda outlets: https://x.com/VigilantFox/status/1820724008637063664
Reuters fact check: https://www.reuters.com/fact-check/video-arrest-over-faceboo...
>VERDICT Missing context. The clip shows a June 2024 arrest, according to Devon and Cornwall Police, and predates the Southport knife attack by around a month.
Hence not debunked (a strategy we're used too).
Times article on the subject: https://archive.ph/3OkeG Police arresting nine people a day in fight against web trolls
>More than 3,300 people were detained and questioned last year over so-called trolling on social media and other online forums, a rise of nearly 50 per cent in two years, according to figures obtained by The Times.
>About half of the investigations were dropped before prosecutions were brought, however, leading to criticism from civil liberties campaigners that the authorities are over-policing the internet and threatening free speech.
>Jim Killock, executive director of the Open Rights Group, said the Crown Prosecution Service emphasised section 127 was to be used only in “extreme circumstances”. “But the problem is ‘grossly offensive’ is not something you should normally be prosecuted for. It’s not showing harm to other people. It’s not showing that somebody is being harassed ... attacked or threatened.”
This gaslighting is getting a bit ridiculous. The oppression did not start in the wake of Southport, it has been in place for years. But I'm going to talk about Southport first. People were arrested for pointing out that the Southport murderer was a Muslim terrorist. Well guess what, he was: https://news.sky.com/story/southport-stabbings-suspect-faces... The media said it was all disinformation and put forth many straw man claims to smear people who are fed up with their government covering for the crimes for immigrants.
>Conspiracy to commit arson has been one of the most serious offences in English law for centuries, and that's even before you add the murder part to it.
I'm not defending conspiracy to commit arson. It is a fact that people have been jailed for far less serious things. I heard some reports that people were jailed for recording the riots or even posting about the existence of the riots.
Nevermind arson, Britain jails people for flame wars online: https://www.breitbart.com/europe/2017/10/14/british-police-a... And that is OLD, and nothing has changed. I hear regular reports of absurd arrests coming out of the UK.
As the article says, "section 127 of the Communications Act 2003, [...] makes it illegal to intentionally “cause annoyance, inconvenience or needless anxiety to another”" and that can be and regularly is used to punch down on people expressing simple grievances. It is entirely subjective what causes "annoyance, inconvenience or needless anxiety" or is intended to do so. Our mere existence probably causes annoyance and inconvenience to some people. Got a problem with immigrants who don't respect your culture and disproportionately commit all the crimes? Well, it is going to cause some brown people to be anxious if you talk about it, so off to the slammer you go. That is truly how it goes, unless you're in a good position to fend off political attacks.
> This gaslighting is getting a bit ridiculous
Totally agree
They always take the extreme part of your posts, find a minor counter claim, then imply we have total free speech
He wasn't a Muslim he was brought up a Christian!
The rumours were he was an asylum seeker who came over on a boat
But as you end up quoting Breitbart what hope is there
Just because someone was "brought up as a Christian" doesn't mean they are one. And he WAS a terrorist or wannabe terrorist, as evidenced by everything said in that article. You're over here whining about Breitbart as your neighbors are being jailed for merely talking about these issues in a way that displeases your overlords.
you switch UK and USA in your post and you are right
Lol the US is not without its problems but the UK is worse, hands down.
Try unfollowing Musk for a bit. It'll do you good.
Try unfollowing CNN, MSNBC, and BBC for a bit. It'll do you good.
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 :)
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.
> 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).