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The last days of Silicon Roundabout

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Re: The last days of Silicon Roundabout

#121

Post by iso1210 »

fy20 wrote: post #79
nodejs_rulez_1 wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> First of all, working in tech in the UK you can make $130,000 which is 3-4x the median annual salary. That's not a common compensation at all. I think USA gives way more choices, at the very least finance, big tech and start-ups (that actually offer noticeable equity, unlike UK).

I've been outside the UK for a few years, but when I was there £80k for a senior in London was fairly standard, and I had recruiters emailing me for £100k roles. That's the pre-tax salary; getting some extra compensation or perks would be somewhat expected, but not at US levels. Outside London it varies a lot though... I'm from the South West and £50k would be a good salary there. But that's no different from some pl…

> That's the pre-tax salary

For anyone watching, £100k ($136k) pre tax is £67k ($91k) post income related taxes.

That's about the same tax rate as someone in California according to https://us.icalculator.info/tax-calculator/annual.html

Re: The last days of Silicon Roundabout

#122

Post by sprafa »

stillworks wrote: post #103
glenngillen wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Saying this at the risk of being downvoted but don't really care as I feel I have to let it out. The U.K. healthcare system is the lowest level of medical service possible being made available with tax payers' contribution. The highest tax rate contributors as a result are getting the worst possible service. And most of such high rate tax payers either get some kind of medical insurance from their employer OR they en…

The NHS isn’t even close to the best health system in the world. There are multiple other bizarre conceptions in tour rant but I would have to take 15 min that I don’t have.

Re: The last days of Silicon Roundabout

#123

Post by glenjamin »

stillworks wrote: post #103
glenngillen wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Saying this at the risk of being downvoted but don't really care as I feel I have to let it out. The U.K. healthcare system is the lowest level of medical service possible being made available with tax payers' contribution. The highest tax rate contributors as a result are getting the worst possible service. And most of such high rate tax payers either get some kind of medical insurance from their employer OR they en…

The reason for basically all of the problems you have described is over a decade of systematic under funding by the current government.

Continually forcing trusts to make cuts and costs savings result in them running with no slack at all - which leaves no room to make improvements, thus perpetuating the downward spiral.

Re: The last days of Silicon Roundabout

#124

Post by iso1210 »

stillworks wrote: post #103
glenngillen wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Saying this at the risk of being downvoted but don't really care as I feel I have to let it out. The U.K. healthcare system is the lowest level of medical service possible being made available with tax payers' contribution. The highest tax rate contributors as a result are getting the worst possible service. And most of such high rate tax payers either get some kind of medical insurance from their employer OR they en…

> The U.K. healthcare system is the lowest level of medical service possible being made available with tax payers' contribution.

Rubbish. International studies stick the UK health system high up, and typically far higher than the US system. On top of that if you're that bothered you can pay for private health care, which typically costs less than £1k a year.

> People call out the U.S. health services being astronomically expensive. The fact of the matter is that medical services are expensive. Someone has to pay.

The US spends three times as much on healthcare than the UK, over twice as much as western european countries like Germany, Brelgium, France etc.

> I have not heard from anyone in my close circle even being offered prenatal classes maybe it is available as a paid service under some expensive medical insurance plan but not via N.H.S.

For our first child we had prenatal classes, they were free. Didn't bother for the second, but they were available. Plenty of standard hospital checkups.

> why for heavens sake does the Prime Minister has to go on national television and beg to people to "Save the N.H.S"

Because people like the NHS, but don't like the prime minister. I believe it's called "stolen valor" in the US

Re: The last days of Silicon Roundabout

#125

Post by iso1210 »

glenjamin wrote: post #123
stillworks wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Saying this at the risk of being downvoted but don't really care as I feel I have to let it out. The U.K. healthcare system is the lowest level of medical service possible being made available with tax payers' contribution. The highest tax rate contributors as a result are getting the worst possible service. And most of such high rate tax payers either get some kind of medical insurance from their employer OR they en…

The reason for basically all of the problems you have described is over a decade of systematic under funding by the current government. Continually forcing trusts to make cuts and costs savings result in them running with no slack at all - which leaves no room to make improvements, thus perpetuating the downward spiral.

Not just the current government, UK health care funding (regardless of source) has been about £1k a year per capita lower than France, Germany, Netherlands etc for 40 years (and about £8k a year lower than the US).

In 2016, UK governemnt/compulsory funding was $3175 per person. Germany $4781. The US was $8080.

Compare for yourself.

https://data.oecd.org/healthres/health-spending.htm

Re: The last days of Silicon Roundabout

#126

Post by sprafa »

ca01an wrote: post #34
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.…

UK salaries are a lot lower than US salaries but every country has lower salaries than the US and the UK fares better than most. I would guess this means brits have less incentive to emigrate than people from India or somewhere were salaries are even lower than the UK. It’s also quite difficult to move to the US from the UK, a lot easier to move to Canada, Australia, New Zealand or the rest of Europe.

There are also virtually equally exciting opportunities, I think. Deepmind has never moved from london, and google essentially just built their HQ around them in kings cross.

Re: The last days of Silicon Roundabout

#127

Post by twic »

stillworks wrote: post #103
glenngillen wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Saying this at the risk of being downvoted but don't really care as I feel I have to let it out. The U.K. healthcare system is the lowest level of medical service possible being made available with tax payers' contribution. The highest tax rate contributors as a result are getting the worst possible service. And most of such high rate tax payers either get some kind of medical insurance from their employer OR they en…

> In my experience, like I said, someone needs to take a serious look at N.H.S and it's workings and shake it down.

Sounds to me like you've fallen for Tory propaganda about the NHS. The reason the service it provides is worse than in other countries is simply that it has less funding. Annual per capita spending on healthcare, in PPP pounds sterling:

UK £2989 = 1x

France £3737 = 1.3x

Germany £4432 = 1.5x

United States £7736 = 2.6x

https://www.ons.gov.uk/peoplepopulationandcommunity/healthan...

Re: The last days of Silicon Roundabout

#128

Post by tiew9Vii »

eldudebrother wrote: post #114
tiew9Vii wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Don't get me wrong I like paying with technologies, especially keeping up to date. In fact as a consultant that's why I'm brought in, to deliver the new thing the org doesn't yet have experience with. My list and breadth of experience is more than most from the CV's i've seen and the roles I perform going in as a consultant to some very large company's. In most cases up until recently due to job market shift I've bee…

What would be an interesting role for you? There must be some companies in Sydney using Rust/Golang or similar if Python ETL isn't what you like doing.

No Rust, I’ve been looking and would be excited to do some rust professionally.

I have seen a few GoLang jobs, they have mainly been Devops tooling/platform support roles and a 30% paycut, I could be interested for the right company. Devops often comes with the unadvertised salary reduction, on call duties. Not against on call but every time the deal has been worse than not being on call.

Kotlin I’d be interested in, seen a few odd jobs but closer to 35% pay cut. I thought they would be more Kotlin usage than there currently is.

Modern Java I could be interested in with the caveat no Spring boot. I haven’t really seen this, and the Java roles seem to be the lower end of the market outside of specialised roles in banks which isn’t an atmosphere I’d like to work in due to how hard it is to get things done and being a people management game. That’s my current life, multi billion dollar city org where easy things become hard things for no obvious reason.

Scala, I would enjoy but it doesn’t exist. It’s only listed on roles next to Python and Spark as bait. It was reasonably popular here in 2014 being the largest tech meetup held at Atlassian. The people I know writing Scala are now doing it remotely. There is a crm who use it in Melbourne I’m actually following up, then there’s Rupert Murdoch owned orgs REA, Foxtel, etc i’d rather not work for and didn’t get a good impression when I have spoke to.

Haskell I would love but would say I’m beginner.

My specialties are cloud, micro services, devops, devops without Python except for small scripts and definitely no Ansible. I don’t mind devops, I’ve been setting Kafka clusters and writing Kafka apps up for the past few years but all the devops roles I see use ansible and it’s a pore choice in my opinion and from the programming side Spring have their own Kafka library which is a no go for my sanity. Spark / data engineering stuff I’ve just landed in, I get by but not an interest of mine especially as most of it I think has the if all you have is an hammer everything looks like a nail.

My ideal job would be working for a product company, on a product that has value you can invest yourself in and perform many roles. I miss working in a good product company with a valuable service. As long as I’m not writing NodeJs / massive amount of Python I wouldn’t be to fussed.

I did a couple of years at Atlassian, for a period that was really enjoyable until change of manager’s and direction etc.

I might have to refresh my leet code and give Canva a shot although that looks like a 40% paycut as most of the startups here do trading on name.

Salary right now seems a big factor for me, I’m on just under $200k AUD inc super, I’d move no questions asked for 10-15% in that range but 30-40% I have to have job satisfaction to move. I’m well aware my salary is way in to the upper end for AU although some will be on more. At the same time the paycut seems significant. Not complaining, I won’t go without food either way but it’s the predicament I am in. First world problems.

In the next 12 months I’ve been lucky enough to get in to a position to semi retire and then do 3-6 month contracts to tie me by and look at a career outside software.

Re: The last days of Silicon Roundabout

#129

Post by eldudebrother »

tiew9Vii wrote: post #128
eldudebrother wrote: post #114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What would be an interesting role for you? There must be some companies in Sydney using Rust/Golang or similar if Python ETL isn't what you like doing.

No Rust, I’ve been looking and would be excited to do some rust professionally. I have seen a few GoLang jobs, they have mainly been Devops tooling/platform support roles and a 30% paycut, I could be interested for the right company. Devops often comes with the unadvertised salary reduction, on call duties. Not against on call but every time the deal has been worse than not being on call. Kotlin I’d be interested in,…

Sounds like you've got a great range of experience, both broad and in-depth so I imagine you can pretty much pick and choose your job offers/contract gigs. I'm also wondering what a career outside of software might look like in the future - if you have any initial ideas I'd be interested to hear them.

I moved to Sydney at the end of 2018, have been working mostly with Python for the best part of 10 years (previously in the UK) and also have landed in data engineering. I also still do some web dev and act as a tech lead. I don't mind the data side of things and I get to work with (Azure|AWS|GCP) and their various data-realated technologies on a daily basis. I haven't worked with Kafka as nowhere I've worked has had a need for it so far, but having said that I've also done stuff with Kubernetes which was probably overkill too in retrospect.

I know they have slightly different use cases but if you don't like Ansible, have you used Terraform? Hashicorp have started to dominate in some areas of DevOps tooling and as you know it has a lot of traction, although I can't think of many companies using it in anger in Australia off the top of my head.

I don't work here so this isn't an ad for the company, but this is an example Java job description I saw recently https://www.todaysplan.com.au/jobs/ No mention of Spring which is a bonus for you, but I imagine there'd be a pay cut from what you're on now. I've heard some Canberra-based jobs pay relatively well but the average could be skewed by some of the high paying government jobs.

Re: The last days of Silicon Roundabout

#130

Post by lewisflude »

KaiserPro wrote: post #109
45ure wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You are labelling these locations as a 'shithole' without offering any real perspective. The urban regeneration, around the Google site and Kings X has changed the area considerably to shed its gritty image, even if it still lacks some soul. The transport links might be the key factor, but it is also situated in proximity to world leading universities and academic institutions (UCL/Birkbeck/SOAS/UoW/LSE), notwithstan…

Soho is pretty much equidistant to UCL, and is closer to kings. Everything is close in london. My issue is this, Kings Cross is basically what someone thinks a "tech hub" should feel like, rather than what will naturally pop up over time. My company is moving from Soho, which is a nice vibrant (now sadly diminished) cultural center, to kings cross. Everything is private land in kingscross, which means that the local…

I actually went for dinner nears Kings X the other day, and there is a little market section near St. Martins https://canopymarket.co.uk/

Although I actually totally agree with you. Kings X not having as much public land makes the entire place almost feel pre-gentrified if that makes sense. Not much soul.

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