191–200 of 261 posts
Sounds like the author is upset that Brexit has closed the valve on the pipeline of cheap labour from EU workers. There's no shortage of talent in London trust me, it's just that you're going to have to start paying more than a pittance to get it. Brexit so far has been a positive thing for tech workers' salaries.
"cheap EU labour" tends to apply more to fruit pickers than AI PhDs I suspect
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Well precisely Moving to NYC/silicon valley is going to mean fishing in a very over fished pool. There is a reason why "meta", Google and amazon are expanding engineering over here and the wider EU: lots of (comparably) cheap talented labour. Even if you don't loose staff, operating an engineering team over large distances is a challenge unless you know what your doing. Given that he's blaming the engineers for conce…
> There is a reason why "meta", Google and amazon are expanding engineering over here and the wider EU: lots of (comparably) cheap talented labour. Yeah, I moved from London back to NYC after Brexit and literally got a 100% raise. And London is well above the European average.
Sounds like the author is upset that Brexit has closed the valve on the pipeline of cheap labour from EU workers. There's no shortage of talent in London trust me, it's just that you're going to have to start paying more than a pittance to get it. Brexit so far has been a positive thing for tech workers' salaries.
The labor pool isn't any cheaper in NYC. Salaries are significantly higher than London. He's in for a harsh reality.
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>Despite the article author's claim, most of the startups in the generation that I joined (2018+) have focused on getting a decent business model, rather than hyper growth above all else. > They also had to do much more with significantly less. There was less VC money sloshing about compared to the west coast, so we had to be very careful in how we optimised. With supporters like this the UK is in no need of enemies.…
I mean how stupid, trying to make some money. What kind of n00b tries to pay their own way? How terribly blinkered we were to not waste runway on hyper growth knowing that there wasn't money to support it? We are all so terribly stupid.
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"cheap EU labour" tends to apply more to fruit pickers than AI PhDs I suspect
Tech salaries in continental Europe are significantly lower than in the US or UK. Even the most highly developed economies like Germany and Denmark often provide 50% of what you might make in CA or NY for a similar role.
With the exception of Switzerland.
Beyond that, I believe that Europe’s (particularly Britain’s) negative cultural attitude towards sales is a major inhibitor to building tech champions on the same scale as the US or China. In my thirteen years of working in the UK, I’ve learnt that in British culture sales and selling is viewed negatively. The linked HBR article talks about self-promotion not sales. That seems quite different to me. And speaking from…
I'll take the British way over that any day of the week.
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Well precisely Moving to NYC/silicon valley is going to mean fishing in a very over fished pool. There is a reason why "meta", Google and amazon are expanding engineering over here and the wider EU: lots of (comparably) cheap talented labour. Even if you don't loose staff, operating an engineering team over large distances is a challenge unless you know what your doing. Given that he's blaming the engineers for conce…
Facebook recruiting in London feel about as desperate to fill their pipeline as Google did ten years ago these days. London has many great qualities, but tech hiring here is also really challenging.
I'd say it's more size than desperation. Yeah, recruiting in London probably gives you lower bang for the buck than tapping other labor markets. But once you reach a certain size, you're going to be recruiting in basically every market, since good people are a small proportion of the population and you have a huge need for good people.
For example, Google has had great success in hiring Serbian developers. They also hire developers in Brazil, Poland, Taiwan, Japan, Germany, France, etc - 40 different countries. To exclude England would be kinda weird. Facebook being a few years behind Google makes sense, and they'll end up in a similar position, basically hiring everywhere.
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No, the UK government requires you to have no clue (but be chums with a minister or Tory MP) before it spaffs torrents of money your way.
But once you have that, anything is possible e.g a lucrative ferry contract despite owning not a single boat.
As far as I can tell, the British media destroyed a potentially viable new company by seeding the belief it was a scam just out of sheer anti-Brexit spite. That seems like a pretty good reason not to set up business in the UK actually.
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The point is that there was both scales of economy due to the Erasmus program and a lot of pan European research grants.. Being able to pull from a Europe wide talant pool was a huge benefit to the UK and her universities. So there was massive, irreplaceable benefits just for universities lost due to the Brexit project. Along with that Brexit has cost the UK a ton of money.. this net contributer stuff was literal pro…
> Along with that Brexit has cost the UK a ton of money.. this net contributer stuff was literal propaganda. The fact that the UK was a net contributor to the EU is uncontroversial [1]. Please cite sources if you're making a drastic claim otherwise. [1] https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-politics-48256318
Indeed, the UK can now spend what they net contributed to the EU before. But I think it's doubtful that this makes up for everything else the UK lost in the process that isn't just some monetary number (in some government budget).
Things like the already mentioned access to the European research and university space - which hugely profited the UK because they used to be really good at "brain draining" the rest of the EU. Access to the European markets is now harder as well, translating directly to (at least in the short term) lost revenue and profit for UK companies, and lost tax revenue for the government, as well as some additional supply chain problems on top of the supply chain problems everybody else faces already.
The UK says their net contribution was "an average net contribution of £7.7 billion between 2014 and 2018". Of course this is only partially true. They got a lot more money back indirectly because they directly profited from some of the work various EU agencies did (and now they have to pay people to do the same work a lot of times). Some of these agencies were based in the UK, paid from the EU budget with individual employees paying taxes to the UK government. A lot of the university stuff (funding PhDs, Erasmus) is also not covered by their estimates (tho general research grants were). They lost access to EU funded research programs (like CERN or ITER), too, and now have to foot the bill to participate in those themselves, if they want and are allowed to still participate (e.g. ITER is not EU, and the UK will still participate, but where the EU previously paid a lot of the UK scientists and engineers out of their funds, now the UK government will have to pay them directly).
So I think their actual net contribution was more like 4-6 billion, and that doesn't still factor in lost opportunity costs due to now limited access to the European economic and labor markets, and the collective bargaining powers of the EU in things like trade deals, etc.
Given all that, I'd argue that there is ample reason to theorize Brexit was monetarily a net negative for the UK. It's hard to say yet, because the long and slow Brexit process took ages, everybody is still adopting, and it's therefore too early to have any reliable mid to long term numbers. And of course, the impact of COVID-19 makes it even harder to analyze just the Brexit outcomes.
So, back to topic, I would agree that at least the Brexit supporters who focused mainly on the net contributor thing (not all Brexit supporters operated that way) used it as propaganda - like the infamous red NHS bus - and not in a sound argument for their cause. They willfully ignored all the other things that would or could happen as a result of a Brexit.
Beyond that, I believe that Europe’s (particularly Britain’s) negative cultural attitude towards sales is a major inhibitor to building tech champions on the same scale as the US or China. In my thirteen years of working in the UK, I’ve learnt that in British culture sales and selling is viewed negatively. The linked HBR article talks about self-promotion not sales. That seems quite different to me. And speaking from…
The commercial culture in the UK is, generally, nothing like the US. You have companies with great products that refuse on principle to hire lots of salespeople. I actually can't think of a SaaS company that is as aggressive in investing in sales and marketing as you see on average in the US. And this is rational because the return on investment is usually very poor (fintech in the UK is probably the best example, su…
Barclays, Lloyds, Rothschild, NatWest Markets (+HSBC which maybe isn't "home grown").