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UK's hardware talent is being wasted

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Re: UK's hardware talent is being wasted

#181

Post by zmgsabst »

nine_k wrote: post #169
raverbashing wrote: post #167

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Production of software is nearly 100% R&D. Making a million copies of a software product has a trivial cost. > Production of hardware is some R&D, and then actual manufacturing Totally. And if you think deployment errors are bad, wait until you see how many production errors exist and how many items out of your line come out working and within spec

Indeed. You cannot release a patch for a mechanical part or a PCB.

You can and people do.

It’s just a lot more expensive and labor intensive to apply.

Re: UK's hardware talent is being wasted

#182

Post by akomtu »

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…

It's the UK's aristocracy, most likely. They own nearly everything in the UK, haven't earned any of it, and the last thing they need is the invasion of rich self-made entrepreneurs.

Re: UK's hardware talent is being wasted

#183

Post by MichaelZuo »

nine_k wrote: post #151
Animats wrote: post #137

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 U…

> spend their lives inside a big factory in a low-wage country Some gladly would if paid handsomely by the local standards, that is, adequately by the US standards. The bigger problem is raising children away from your native culture.

You should probably recommend them to Apple recruiters, since they regularly have shortages of bilingual top tier talent willing to work full time at major factories.

Even with extremely generous FAANG salaries in areas with cost of living less than a quarter of Cupertino.

Re: UK's hardware talent is being wasted

#184

Post by Earw0rm »

mhh__ wrote: post #140
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.

The problem isn't building stuff, it's building stuff where stuff needs to be.

We built plenty of out-of-town shopping centres, business parks and industrial estates in the 70s, 80s, 90s. We stopped because it turns out they're, for the most part, shit. Given the choice, people will WFH and order off Amazon rather than go within a mile of these places.

What we need is to tackle the vested interests in the towns and cities themselves, as an example you can't grow most of our university cities at the edges without much better transit through the centres (trams at least, maybe metro rail). But the very suggestion and the preservation crowd as well as the existing suburbanites lose their shit.

And this is against a backdrop of rural and less educated people mistrusting anything going on in the growth cities, and I don't just mean London.

Re: UK's hardware talent is being wasted

#185

Post by akomtu »

wenc wrote: post #65
marbro wrote: post #27

Why don't all British hardware engineers move to the United States? What keeps them in Britain?

Ironically, other countries (former British colonies) have more access to US "specialty occupation" working visas than the UK does -- none of these are H1-B. Canadians and Mexicans have TN, Australians have E3, Singapore and Chile have H-1B1 (a subcategory of H1-B but with its own quotas). https://www.uscis.gov/working-in-the-united-states/temporary... Most foreign engineers in the US (outside of H-1Bs) are actually…

It's not surprising in the light what the US celebrates on the 4th of July.

Re: UK's hardware talent is being wasted

#186

Post by titanomachy »

incog_nit0 wrote: post #143

It's not just in the hardware sector, it's across the board. My (American) wife moved to London years ago and was a manager in a prestigious London museum overseeing 60 people. She has over 20 years experience in some of our top museums and her salary in 2023 was a paltry £30k. We just moved to the US and within a couple of months she has a job in museums here but now paying 2.3x the salary (converted back to £) and…

I'm pretty sure engineers are also 230% increase or more.

Re: UK's hardware talent is being wasted

#187

Post by Earw0rm »

bboygravity wrote: post #176
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…

IMO the UK should look at what Singapore did and maybe learn from that. There's really no excuse for a country like the UK other than ordinary plain and simple mis-management from the top. Singapore did not depend on neighboring countries to climb out of 3rd world poverty. To name an example.

It's a political issue. There are things the UK is good at - finance, culture/media, software and yes hardware innovation, legal services, tourism. But since the GFC especially, none of these things are considered "right" by the electorate.

Instead we romanticise unproductive legacy stuff, and an NHS which, while its staff are in many cases heroic, spends most of its vast budget cleaning up the mess of a population who thinks eating a sensible diet and enacting basic public health policy is "woke".

It's a good thing we banned indoor smoking in public buildings in the early aughts, there's no way you'd get that through in today's political climate.

Re: UK's hardware talent is being wasted

#188

Post by realusername »

sebmellen wrote: post #160
realusername wrote: post #118

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I lived and worked in both countries and I feel like the UK is in a worse situation than France nowadays. It's hard to admit for French citizens but the EU significantly props up the French economy and reduces the structural issues of the country.

EU meaning… Germany?

EU meaning the rest of the EU, Germany included but everybody else is contributing to the common market

Re: UK's hardware talent is being wasted

#189

Post by timthorn »

roenxi wrote: post #124
insane_dreamer wrote: post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think it was more about economics than competency. By the end of WW2 the UK was bankrupt and completely ruined economically, while the US had become the industrial powerhouse of the world thanks to abundant resources, manpower, and the fact that the war largely took place far from its borders (a few tiny islands notwithstanding). By the end of WW2 the US owned nearly all the gold that Europe previously owned which…

If the UK wants to pretend that WW2 (or, indeed, WW1) happened like a shock storm, unforseen and unforseeable, with no involvement from them they are welcome to do that. The result of that attitude was that the UK parliament was only allowed to govern a small and increasingly irrelevant island with lousy weather and steadily worsening economic prospects instead of a global empire. There is a lesson for people governi…

British weather is great. Enough rain to keep the land green and pleasant, temperatures that don't get too hot nor too cold - the very definition of temperate.

Re: UK's hardware talent is being wasted

#190

Post by Earw0rm »

incog_nit0 wrote: post #143

It's not just in the hardware sector, it's across the board. My (American) wife moved to London years ago and was a manager in a prestigious London museum overseeing 60 people. She has over 20 years experience in some of our top museums and her salary in 2023 was a paltry £30k. We just moved to the US and within a couple of months she has a job in museums here but now paying 2.3x the salary (converted back to £) and…

The culture sector in London is notoriously badly paid. Mostly staffed by the intellectual trophy husbands and wives of the financial sector.

Even similar sized public sector organisations (thinking education) pay far better. A senior headteacher with 50 or 100 staff will do a lot better than a cultural manager.

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