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UK's hardware talent is being wasted

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Re: UK's hardware talent is being wasted

#81

Post by James_K »

alephnerd wrote: post #61
HPsquared wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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/Leon…

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.

Re: UK's hardware talent is being wasted

#82

Post by seabass-labrax »

LarsDu88 wrote: post #69
yearolinuxdsktp wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

To be fair, a lot of European countries and localities do not treat their water with fluoride at all. Some have better dental health purely due to better healthcare/dental coverage. The onset of anti-vaccine sentiment will do far more damage and shouldn't be bracketed in that same category.

As a British person, I only discovered that water fluoridation was a thing a few months ago. We usually have chlorine in our water, but almost no fluoride - we get that in our toothpaste.

PS. I've never needed a filling so far :)

Re: UK's hardware talent is being wasted

#83

Post by James_K »

HPsquared wrote: post #35
mapt wrote: post #12

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…

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.

Re: UK's hardware talent is being wasted

#84

Post by wakawaka28 »

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.

Re: UK's hardware talent is being wasted

#85

Post by wakawaka28 »

syntaxing wrote: post #62
refrigerator wrote: post #19

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 terrib…

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 t…

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.

Re: UK's hardware talent is being wasted

#86

Post by bdangubic »

wakawaka28 wrote: post #84

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…

you switch UK and USA in your post and you are right

Re: UK's hardware talent is being wasted

#87

Post by r_thambapillai »

bell-cot wrote: post #74
r_thambapillai wrote: post #51

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!! -- t…

> 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.

Re: UK's hardware talent is being wasted

#88

Post by smartties »

James_K wrote: post #77

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.

Re: UK's hardware talent is being wasted

#89

Post by tidenly »

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.

Re: UK's hardware talent is being wasted

#90

Post by wakawaka28 »

mapt wrote: post #12

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…

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.

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