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UK's hardware talent is being wasted

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Re: UK's hardware talent is being wasted

#131

Post by pyuser583 »

bsnnkv wrote: post #115

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…

Half my feed is Americans talking how terrible it is, the other half non-Americans (or immigrants) praising it.

Re: UK's hardware talent is being wasted

#132

Post by eru »

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…

> 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.

Re: UK's hardware talent is being wasted

#133

Post by chii »

eru wrote: post #132
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…

> 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.

Re: UK's hardware talent is being wasted

#134

Post by BuyMyBitcoins »

bsnnkv wrote: post #115

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…

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.

Re: UK's hardware talent is being wasted

#135

Post by BuyMyBitcoins »

kjellsbells wrote: post #127
bsnnkv wrote: post #115

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…

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 cheat…

I wonder how much of this has to do with a more rigid class system compared to the US.

Re: UK's hardware talent is being wasted

#136

Post by throwaway48476 »

WillPostForFood wrote: post #129
throwaway48476 wrote: post #126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Re: UK's hardware talent is being wasted

#137

Post by Animats »

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/

Re: UK's hardware talent is being wasted

#138

Post by robocat »

tjpnz wrote: post #113
tidenly wrote: post #89

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…

>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 i…

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.

Re: UK's hardware talent is being wasted

#140

Post by mhh__ »

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.

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.

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