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The last days of Silicon Roundabout

newstatesman.com

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Re: The last days of Silicon Roundabout

#81

Post by erdo »

dukeyukey wrote: post #44
lostdog wrote: post #17

Everything I read on the internet suggests that UK tech salaries are extremely low, and that the profession has a low level of respect overall. I have many many foreign or first generation immigrant coworkers, but almost no one British. I'm surprised, because there's no language barrier and a minimal cultural barrier, but still the vast majority of my coworkers are from places that are much harder to immigrate from.…

> Everything I read on the internet suggests that UK tech salaries are extremely low, and that the profession has a low level of respect overall. For salaries, we're better paid than the vast majority of white-collar workers to the point it becomes a running joke. I once got asked by a standup comedian doing a set what my job is, I said software dev, and he answered "blimey you must be fuckin loaded". We're not at th…

I think I might know what the OP means by respect. You see it in Thai dev recruitment ads, they sometimes mandate developers to be 27 years old or younger, the implication seems to be that if you are still a developer by the time you're 28, then there must be something wrong with you. It can be seen as something akin to an admin role, for which more than two years experience would be pointless.

I never experienced that in London, quite the opposite, devs have a mystic status as the person who probably earns more than anyone else, doing something no one understands and still wears a t-shirt to work.

I do see the low respect attitude in Paris a little though (or perhaps it's simply budget constraints). The best development is the cheapest, for instance there are a lot more react native gigs here where they want one person to do both an iOS and an Android app, and the contract is for 3 months. I don't touch those with a barge pole because they'll end up with junk that barely works of course

Re: The last days of Silicon Roundabout

#82

Post by hogFeast »

erdo wrote: post #2

Is this article down playing the effects of Brexit a little? I used to work in Silicon Roundabout and now I live in Paris, I know plenty of developers who've moved out of the UK because of Brexit, but none who have moved to the UK since Brexit was finalised. It must be getting harder and harder for London based startups to find a dev team

It isn't. Funding in first half of 2021 was larger than the whole of 2020...and London in 2020 was already many multiples than Paris. Additionally, the UK has a large startup scene outside London. Manchester was roughly equal to Amsterdam in 2020, it grew significantly in 2021 and is likely going to approach top-tier mainland cities soon. Edinburgh and Belfast are growing fast.

It isn't even close (tbh, the UK isn't really competing with the EU anymore...the EU is just so far behind).

Btw, the reason why people have moved out of Silicon Roundabout is the same reason banks moved out of Canary Wharf. Rents too high, office space not growing fast enough (Google moved into Holborn, outgrew that, moved to Victoria, outgrew that, and is now building a huge new office in King's Cross). VC funding is up something like 15x since the Roundabout was created, the growth was just too rapid for such a small area.

Re: The last days of Silicon Roundabout

#83

Post by grumpyprole »

refurb wrote: post #78
erdo wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Personally speaking (and I say this as a Brit who really likes the US, and Americans in general whenever I meet them). I haven't tried to move to the US because of the slightly distasteful situation in terms of education, healthcare and social security, car dependence, weirdly low holiday allowance, Foxnews, QAnon, an alarming gun lobby, and the current republican party in general is quite quite shocking to me in it'…

Methinks your view of the US is way too based on what you read/watch on the internet. It’s no different than the UK. I could say I don’t want to live there because of rampant alcohol abuse, random crime in London, racial strife from refugees, crazy politicians, insane media who focus too much on some old family with crowns. But I know that’s not an accurate representation of the UK.

> I know that’s not an accurate representation of the UK.

Actually that's pretty accurate, from someone that lives here. There are some good points though, like basic human rights (e.g. abortion), which one cannot take for granted.

Re: The last days of Silicon Roundabout

#84

Post by erdo »

refurb wrote: post #78
erdo wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Personally speaking (and I say this as a Brit who really likes the US, and Americans in general whenever I meet them). I haven't tried to move to the US because of the slightly distasteful situation in terms of education, healthcare and social security, car dependence, weirdly low holiday allowance, Foxnews, QAnon, an alarming gun lobby, and the current republican party in general is quite quite shocking to me in it'…

Methinks your view of the US is way too based on what you read/watch on the internet. It’s no different than the UK. I could say I don’t want to live there because of rampant alcohol abuse, random crime in London, racial strife from refugees, crazy politicians, insane media who focus too much on some old family with crowns. But I know that’s not an accurate representation of the UK.

Or maybe you're not paying close enough attention.

A few tiny examples: Texas, a state larger than the UK, just became a state where any resident can sue anyone else that helps someone access an abortion after about 6 weeks of pregnancy (before a lot of people know they are pregnant) regardless of rape or incest and win up to $10,000 for doing so.

States all over the country are busy banning voting on a Sunday because after church is when a lot of black people vote.

The looser of the last election, is still claiming to have won it, and millions of people genuinely believe him.

No different to the UK? Maybe try Bolsanaro's Brazil but with a larger GDP

Edit: that Brazil comparison is hyperbole, I don't know enough about Brazil to say that anyway

Re: The last days of Silicon Roundabout

#85

Post by alecco »

> “We increased funding, we increased the number of jobs, but as such, we increased the retail estate value. And the problem which we solved was the financing piece, but then unfortunately, financing still requires you to have an office. But that’s kind of just how the market works.

Same mistake as California. The landlords get a huge cut of cash inflows.

Tech should take a lesson from Macdonalds and buy land before placing a tech hub on it. And land price increases can help get seed money.

Re: The last days of Silicon Roundabout

#86

Post by tiew9Vii »

GlennS wrote: post #69
tiew9Vii wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Unless you are a Data engineer, or React Developer a career move to Australia is career suicide. Just go to LinkedIn and search the variety of jobs and salaries across all of Australia compared to the UK, it doesn't even come close. Salaries are one thing but it's also the variety off work that depresses me more. NZ would be even worse. I came to Australia and had a good four years but now want to leave after the hon…

I had a really different experience. Sydney is full of jobs, and they're much higher paying than any I had in the UK. I never lived in London though.

What are you doing out of curiosity?

I see lots of frontend React jobs, bunch of NodeJS jobs then lots of Python/Spark jobs. Full-time probably around $150-160k average or contracting $1k a day.

Outside of that I see C# or Java using Spring Boot for I don't mind Java but the stuff out here I have done and used is so meh, Spring for everything when there's so much more than Spring. Java 17 was released last week and half the places have only just started using 11.

Even a lot of the cloud/devops stuff here it seems way behind what I was doing a decade ago in the UK.

Recently I've been asking myself maybe I just got lucky and had some good jobs in the UK for forward thinking companies using cloud from the early days at large scale, and my first 4 years in AU I also got lucky before the work changed, so maybe that's poisoned my views. But then I speak to other friends/collages in AU who are not from AU and they express the same problems as me, the choice of jobs isn't great and they feel bit of a step back from what they have done before. I also know people who have left AU completely because of feeling the same.

When i do speak to friends in the UK who careers where lagging behind mine and I was moving way ahead off it seems they're jobs gone from strength to strength where as I get paid a fairly good salary, 30% more than average speaking to recruiters but doing the least interesting, least rewarding work of my life and feeling like the career has gone backwards as now my options are Python/Javascript or take a significant paycut to use some tech I enjoy for a company culture I enjoy.

The more interesting work I have seen has always been overseas companies opening up in AU.

Re: The last days of Silicon Roundabout

#87

Post by refurb »

erdo wrote: post #84
refurb wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Methinks your view of the US is way too based on what you read/watch on the internet. It’s no different than the UK. I could say I don’t want to live there because of rampant alcohol abuse, random crime in London, racial strife from refugees, crazy politicians, insane media who focus too much on some old family with crowns. But I know that’s not an accurate representation of the UK.

Or maybe you're not paying close enough attention. A few tiny examples: Texas, a state larger than the UK, just became a state where any resident can sue anyone else that helps someone access an abortion after about 6 weeks of pregnancy (before a lot of people know they are pregnant) regardless of rape or incest and win up to $10,000 for doing so. States all over the country are busy banning voting on a Sunday becaus…

If you think what you read online or see in the media isn't filtered to get the exact response you're demonstrating now, you're being fooled.

I'd invite you to turn off the computer, put down your phone and go out and enjoy life.

Re: The last days of Silicon Roundabout

#88

Post by mattmanser »

GlennS wrote: post #68
lostdog wrote: post #17

Everything I read on the internet suggests that UK tech salaries are extremely low, and that the profession has a low level of respect overall. I have many many foreign or first generation immigrant coworkers, but almost no one British. I'm surprised, because there's no language barrier and a minimal cultural barrier, but still the vast majority of my coworkers are from places that are much harder to immigrate from.…

The fraction of a given population that will voluntarily migrate is pretty low I think. The gap between London and UK-but-not-London salaries is probably pretty comparable to the one between London and San Francisco, but most people won't move a few hundred kilometers to London to get the extra money. The proportion of people willing to move across the ocean, leave behind friends and family, and embrace a new culture…

There's a huge number of UK expats in the north of France btw, no need to get snobby about the latitude!

Re: The last days of Silicon Roundabout

#89

Post by glenngillen »

xxpor wrote: post #55
Nextgrid wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can you supplement your post with some evidence? Because what I see on the market is all at the ~80k mark - 100k+ is an edge-case outside of FAANG. In comparison, in the US 150k+ seems common, and while you could argue costs of living and healthcare offset that, if you're purely betting on the short-term and are relatively young (so unlikely to need much healthcare) you can save up a ton of cash with that compared to…

How much do people think folks who work for FAANGs are paying for health care? My out of pocket max for a year is $3000. And I pay $25 a month. If I had a family it'd be something like $60 a month and an out of packet max of $7500. And that's the expensive plan, out of pocket max wise (for a lower monthly payment). I haven't come across anyone who was out of network my entire time here. Granted that's more than 0, bu…

The biggest issue I had with the US healthcare system was how confusing it is. And how much you seem to have to know upfront what you’ll need, where to go, etc vs trusting experts in the system to guide you. Even with top tier insurance from my employer. A lasting memory of that was in our prenatal class when they wanted the expecting mother’s to do a blood test to check for various risks. Queue much frantic checking by all of the other white collar employees of Bay Area companies to see if the pathology in this hospital was in network or not.

I don’t live in either country any more, but if I had to choose I’d take the UK system.

Re: The last days of Silicon Roundabout

#90

Post by glenngillen »

tiew9Vii wrote: post #86
GlennS wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I had a really different experience. Sydney is full of jobs, and they're much higher paying than any I had in the UK. I never lived in London though.

What are you doing out of curiosity? I see lots of frontend React jobs, bunch of NodeJS jobs then lots of Python/Spark jobs. Full-time probably around $150-160k average or contracting $1k a day. Outside of that I see C# or Java using Spring Boot for I don't mind Java but the stuff out here I have done and used is so meh, Spring for everything when there's so much more than Spring. Java 17 was released last week and h…

I might be reading more into you brief analysis than I should, but one interpretation I could make from what you just said is:

- there’s a bunch of companies that are using technologies that are a decade or more old, doing work that seems like it was maybe relevant and exciting a decade ago, and they are paying toward the lower end of the market - there are companies using newer technologies/more modern problems, paying more

Maybe the solution here is to reskill/reposition yourself to be able to work for the companies that interest you? There’s quite a few companies doing very interesting things in AU these days. Admittedly the salaries aren’t close to the Bay Area, especially if you want a very early stage startup, but IMO there’s no shortage of exciting opportunities. If you want to optimise for income though you’re probably going to have to make a compromise somewhere.

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