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UK's hardware talent is being wasted

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Re: UK's hardware talent is being wasted

#201

Post by itake »

maeil wrote: post #144
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…

> Instead, a lot of extremely smart people in the UK would rather get the 'safe' job at Google, or McKinsey than the 'this will never work but can you imagine how cool it would be if it did' job at a startup. This isn't just an EU thing, for what it's worth. The US is the outlier.

Even internally in the USA, you will see the full spectrum of EU-like VCs to Sand Hill-like VCs.

Re: UK's hardware talent is being wasted

#202

Post by klooney »

vishnugupta wrote: post #152
James_K wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 enlarg…

I think most folks when say Capital they mean “Finance Capital” which UK is really good at. Even historically speaking UK was at the forefront of financial engineering which complimented their physical engineering and enabled to spread their empire and colonize so much. But UK post WW-2 and specifically post Thatcher stopped investing in physical engineering and overindexed on financial services the results are for a…

The Chinese strategy of forcibly keeping their financial sector depressed seems pretty sensible as a long term strategy.

Re: UK's hardware talent is being wasted

#203

Post by quacksilver »

lotsofpulp wrote: post #117
pfdietz wrote: post #111

Reading all this negativity about the UK made me wonder: is it possible that the UK throwing in the towel and asking to become part of the US could actually become reality? It's an admittedly outlandish idea, but suddenly it didn't seem entirely preposterous.

Why would the US want the UK? The UK does not seem to have natural resources that the US would want. The main resource is intellectual talent, which is already free for the US to obtain via immigration and a common language.

Possibly the UK's worldwide military bases / islands to build bases on or mine the oil and some restricted technology. Maybe a 'Hong Kong' style outpost in Europe.

May be a bit of a stretch though.

Re: UK's hardware talent is being wasted

#204

Post by torginus »

nine_k wrote: post #155
wakawaka28 wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Production of software is nearly 100% R&D. Making a million copies of a software product has a trivial cost. There are no assembly line workers in software (and the very word "assembly" means a different thing). A software engineer very often brings in revenue many times their salary. Production of hardware is some R&D, and then actual manufacturing. Production of each physical item costs you. Production of every phy…

Yeah I remember one of my friends working for a German auto company during the 2008 financial crisis and having insane stuff routinely happen like an auto manufacturer having to buy truckloads of sensors from a subcontractor that had nowhere to go as car manufacturing lines were stopped.

Failing to do so would have meant these manufacturers would go under, (along with their own subcontractors) and once demand shot back up, cars would be literally impossible to manufacture as key suppliers went out of business.

Re: UK's hardware talent is being wasted

#205

Post by rcbdev »

justin66 wrote: post #116
xxpor wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Engineers in "flyover country" where I am seem to easily exceed six figures. So do brand new software grads

New "software" grads? Easily? Today? In flyover country? I'm not seeing it. Salaries got a nice bump over the last few years, but hiring has slowed down and new grads are the first to suffer. (and some of what you see when people on forums like this one talk about what they're paid is bullshit, for some reason)

You seem to overestimate the engineering supply in Des Moines.

Re: UK's hardware talent is being wasted

#206

Post by Earw0rm »

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…

Depends on the bankruptcy. Nobody is going to shed tears over investors losing out. Speculate to accumulate, risk and reward.

But IDK how it works in other countries, UK bankruptcies also means customers, unsecured creditors (often other small businesses), and the State (payroll taxes) also lose out.

And it leaves a bad taste when a company run at high risk of bankruptcy ("oh but we're a Start Up") screws over their suppliers which are often more traditional businesses (whether that's print designers, lawyers or tradespeople) by carrying on trading far into insolvency.

That implies a kind of arrogance ("You just have a business which pays it's bills, I have a vision) which UK culture is allergic to.

Re: UK's hardware talent is being wasted

#207

Post by foobazgt »

nine_k wrote: post #155
wakawaka28 wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Production of software is nearly 100% R&D. Making a million copies of a software product has a trivial cost. There are no assembly line workers in software (and the very word "assembly" means a different thing). A software engineer very often brings in revenue many times their salary. Production of hardware is some R&D, and then actual manufacturing. Production of each physical item costs you. Production of every phy…

This all resonates very strongly with me. We have tons of automation - the proverbial "economies of scale", but we haven't managed to solve the last mile.

Auto assembly seems like a poster child. There's wild automation going on, but the typical plant still requires thousands of employees doing things by hand. Musk tried to automate a lot more of this away with newer/better robotics, but failed. (Tesla has still achieved a lot here, but it's been more towards creating designs that are more amenable to the current state of robotics).

IMO, this problem should be solvable now. I.E. we don't need "new physics" to reach another step-function in automation. We need more investment. We're still largely in the mindset of "special-purpose" automation.

Re: UK's hardware talent is being wasted

#208

Post by fxtentacle »

mrtksn wrote: post #159
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…

Completely agree, the problem in Europe is not regulations or anything like that - it is a mindset issue. It is one of things that europeans can learn from Americans. My hypothesis is that this is a combination of old money and class consciousness. In other words, the rich are risk averse because all they care is preserving their wealth and the working class don’t believe and can’t even imagine that more is possible.

In Germany, you can typically finance the first 1-3 years of your start-up through government gifts like "EXIST". That's why you don't need early seed investors.

Re: UK's hardware talent is being wasted

#209

Post by nicoburns »

TheCapeGreek wrote: post #154
nicoburns wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> but what’s the solution? I strongly suspect it's a variant on capitalism that: 1. Recognises that some industries (utilities, healthcare, etc) are not well suited to market provision and are state funded. i.e. the sort social provisions that many of the nordic countries have. 2. Recognises that extreme wealth inequalities invalidate the key principle that capitalist economics is premised on (that the market value o…

Point 1 tends to fall apart when the government can't control its own coffers and after a few decades of mismanagement decides that privatisation is the main way to reduce their debt burden. So I think this one ebbs and flows over time generally. See South Africa for an example. Power production is slowly opening up to market forces as an alleviation to the extreme mismanagement and corruption of the last 2-3 decades…

There's no substitute for competence and integrity, but private entities are just as capable of being inept and corrupt. Look at companies like Enron or Comcast.

Re: UK's hardware talent is being wasted

#210

Post by CalRobert »

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…

I lived in Ireland for 10 years. It's not the same as the UK but there _is_ cultural overlap. Every time you shared a new idea with _anyone_, even things as simple as "I want to buy a site and build a house on it", the first thing you hear is how that's a bad idea, you will fail, it will never work, and you need to leave it to "professionals".

Not to mention the whole idea that trying to be successful is "notions" and should be sneered at.

Edit: To compare -

Me: "I want to build a house"

Irish friends: "That's a bad idea, you'll never make it work, you'll go bankrupt and it will kill you..."

California/Oregon friends: "Fuck yeah I'll bring a nailgun"

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