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UK's hardware talent is being wasted

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Re: UK's hardware talent is being wasted

#401

Post by imtringued »

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…

I disagree very slightly. Mostly with this part:

>So, with hardware, the cost of the workforce plays a major role, while with software it does much less. To produce physical things, you need a lot of people who are not well-off, and for whom factory work is an upgrade of their financial and social standing. A "developing country", with huge swaths of population leaving rural life for a better city life and factory work, is best in this regard. Ideally you sell your product to richer folks, maybe outside the country of production.

You don't need a lot of people who are not well-off. You can automate the entire process. The problem with automation and labor saving technology is that it is capital intensive. The higher the capital investment per job (higher capital intensity), the bigger the chunk of money that flows to capital rather than labor.

This means that the cost of the workforce in a software company plays a bigger role than in a hardware company, where financing costs to pay for labor saving technology play a bigger role.

There are mining companies in Africa, who have nothing but an army of people equipped with shovels digging a small scale open pit mine. There is no way the labor cost here is the biggest constraint. An excavator and wheel loader could accomplish more with less people, but it would mean getting a USD loan to import foreign equipment and then selling for export to pay the foreign debts, rather than local production.

Re: UK's hardware talent is being wasted

#402

Post by vladvasiliu »

zimpenfish wrote: post #352
vladvasiliu wrote: post #330

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The way I see it, at least in France, it's not really a question of religion. "The rich" are thought to have acquired their wealth doing dubious things, mostly by "exploiting the poor". There's also a very strongly egalitarian way of thinking, as in pretty much everybody is interchangeable. So, if someone does better than somebody else, it's likely because of something "unfair" (or luck) and not thanks to being more…

> "The rich" are thought to have acquired their wealth doing dubious things, mostly by "exploiting the poor". To be fair, that's probably true in the vast majority of cases.

I've never personally known any "very rich" people so I can't comment on them.

But the perception I'm talking about applies even to "reasonably confortable" people. Think your random engineer making 100k a year (which is a "good" salary in these parts). Basically, someone with some form of STEM degree.

I doubt most of these people are doing anything shady. Plus, this kind of income doesn't really give them any kind of financial independence: they wouldn't be able to afford not having a job.

Re: UK's hardware talent is being wasted

#403

Post by varispeed »

varispeed wrote: post #325
bboygravity wrote: post #170

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Isn't it also an income issue? I'm from EU and would be totally open to move to UK if there was an opportunity to make more there while working on something cool. But there simply isn't? Then there are US startups where I could likely make 2 or 3x what I make in EU or UK. So why would talent every consider moving to the UK to build a startup in 2025 anyway?

Something not talked about - you probably won't be able to lease suitable property if you are doing anything other than apps. Doing soldering of prototypes? Good luck finding a landlord that would let you do it. The moment they hear "fumes" is a nope, fire hazard, safety risk and won't let you...

Why downvotes? This is my real world experience.

Re: UK's hardware talent is being wasted

#404

Post by robertlagrant »

nonrandomstring wrote: post #303
mrtksn wrote: post #196

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, there are advantages of a stable and well functioning systems that don't have disruptors and we indeed benefit of it as having good lives but unfortunately this can't last as those who go hard on progress and tear down everything and rebuilding again will eventually get ahead on everything and won't let us just be as we now see with US billionaires having impact over Europe. Americans feel more pain but are also…

> unfortunately this can't last as those who go hard on progress and tear down everything and rebuilding again A notion of "bare progress" is the elephant in the room. Progress is a vector. It has magnitude and direction. People talk of moving "forward or back", but science also has a steering wheel. > and the Americans and Chinese will make us adopt their ways. This very notion of "progress" as a totalitarian force…

> When Europe was starting a 1000 year technological master-race, more measured minds had to extinguish that fire

A lot of the measured minds were saying eugenics was a good idea. It took the horror of seeing experiments and concentration camps to make it so deeply unfashionable the idea couldn't even survive in academia.

Re: UK's hardware talent is being wasted

#405

Post by blitzar »

ktallett wrote: post #385
swarnie wrote: post #371

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wonder if we ever crossed over, i also worked for Intel in the west country (Swindon) and now whore myself out to aerospace/defence in the same area. I see what our engineers are paid and its genuinely concerning.

Is the UK more in line with the norm though and the US is the outlier? I would say the UK, Europe, and Japan all have similar wages (although Japan has worse benefits and on the whole a larger expectation of workers so it's not like for like.)

> Is the UK more in line with the norm though and the US is the outlier

Mostly the US is an outlier. Unfortunately, UK property prices, food prices, utilities etc make Silicon Valley look cheep.

Re: UK's hardware talent is being wasted

#406

Post by tonyedgecombe »

CalRobert wrote: post #210
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" an…

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

There is an element of truth to that, self build projects seem to go about was well as the typical software project.

Re: UK's hardware talent is being wasted

#407

Post by shawabawa3 »

zipy124 wrote: post #317
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 safe job earns much much more unless you are the founder. Equity pay for start-ups in the UK for devs is very poor, or non-existent, and the base salary also very poor (and not even guaranteed to be paid if they go under). You can instead work for a company like nvidia, google or meta and get a huge base, and nice equity on top. If UK startups paid equity to their devs, I would work a lot harder when I've worked…

I've been shocked in my career in the UK by just how much founders will rip people off on equity

In basically every UK startup I've worked at they've done 1 or all of the below:

1. Offered options in numbers with no valuation/percentage of ownership. "We offer you 40000 stock options!". When asked to clarify numbers, they delay and never tell you. Inevitably they have a value of a few pence each

2. Withdraw options unilaterally when you leave the company with no option to exercise

3. Never get round to filling in the paperwork so you never actually receive them

I was _shocked_ when i worked for my first US startup and they just...gave me the options. And I could exercise them whenever I wanted. And they expired 10 years after I left the company

Re: UK's hardware talent is being wasted

#408

Post by troupo »

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.

You're focusing on one success story out of thousands.

90%, or more, of US startups only exist to be sold to the highest bidder or to coast indefinitely long in infinite investor money, and never turn a profit.

There's still expectation in Europe at large that your company should have an actual business plan and a path to profitability.

Re: UK's hardware talent is being wasted

#409

Post by piker »

benrutter wrote: post #387

I think a lot of this is exactly right - but one tiny caveat I'd add is that comparing the UK to the USA is sometimes a misnomer. On a size basic, the UK is much more comparible to a US state that the USA as a whole, and a lot of the observations made here are probably equally true of some US states like Colorado where talent is moved out to California.

The UK is almost twice the size of the largest US state--California. And that comparison doesn't fare well for the UK. The UK is below the US' poorest state in terms of GDP per capita.

Re: UK's hardware talent is being wasted

#410

Post by JonChesterfield »

brcmthrowaway wrote: post #8

What ever happened to GraphCore?

Volta.

The hardware is good. It's fairly horrendous to program but comparable to other specialised chips and the lowering from XLA / onnx etc worked well enough.

The 20x performance lead over Nvidia's Pascal looked great. Volta beating Pascal by 10x did unrecoverable damage to Graphcore's marketing slides. I think they got the later generations running a bit faster but it was never the order of magnitude over nvidia they started from.

I'm not sure what they're doing these days. The exit to softbank valued the employee shares at $0 so the engineers that had already left got burned. Most of the engineers I knew there have left but there still seems to be a large headcount.

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