UK's hardware talent is being wasted • Hacker News Board

Re: UK's hardware talent is being wasted

#491

Post by menaerus » Mon, Jan 20, 2025, 10:37 AM UTC

fxtentacle wrote: post #208

mrtksn wrote: post #159

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

"The grant covers personal living, material, and coaching expenses over 12 months, allowing founders to focus on developing their founding idea. While graduates receive personal funding of 2.500€, students can receive 1.000€ a month, additionally up to 30.000€ material and 5.000€ coaching budget that can be used to develop the founding project further."

So, 30k EUR (gross) with a maximum funding period of one year? Laughable. Also probably a little bit tragicomic.

Early seed rounds are usually measured in couple of USD millions. I wonder how these brilliant minds in the EU think they will attract the industry talent to leave their ~5x salary (outside FAANG) for such a pocket money.

Re: UK's hardware talent is being wasted

#492

Post by [deleted] » Mon, Jan 20, 2025, 10:37 AM UTC

GasVeteran wrote: post #448

retrac98 wrote: post #373

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I know plenty of engineers (web application developers) making over £100-£150k outside of London, usually in fairly low-stress remote jobs. The pay is clearly nothing compared to the US, but I wouldn’t say it was massively hard for them to get where they are. They all have 5+ years experience at a senior level, and are otherwise just reliable, capable, low-maintenance employees, but maybe that’s rare!

They are almost always contractors. If you work permanent it tops out max at about £75,000-90,000.

[deleted]

Re: UK's hardware talent is being wasted

#493

Post by wazoox » Mon, Jan 20, 2025, 10:37 AM UTC

This problem isn't limited to hardware engineers, nor to UK. All across Europe, a massive brain drain is occurring, and the way it's going we'll become developing countries in a couple of decades at most.

Re: UK's hardware talent is being wasted

#494

Post by amelius » Mon, Jan 20, 2025, 10:38 AM UTC

fxtentacle wrote: post #435

amelius wrote: post #395

Earlier quoted context omitted.

At this point someone please explain to me how finance doesn't exist to extract wealth from the rest of us.

It's called capitalism because we use capital to allocate value creation. So obviously finance extracts wealth, that's their job in a capitalist system.

But in the case of OP the value creation does not happen because they are working in finance instead of in a job creating value.

I want to see some decent analysis of the situation, not stories about how the system is supposed to work.

Re: UK's hardware talent is being wasted

#495

Post by youngtaff » Mon, Jan 20, 2025, 10:39 AM UTC

wakawaka28 wrote: post #194

seabass-labrax wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Talk too much about these things and you're probably getting sent to prison. This trope is getting a bit ridiculous. For the record, the event that inspired the notion that complaining online could get you sent to person involved individuals encouraging the public to burn down council offices[1] and a hotel[2]. Conspiracy to commit arson has been one of the most serious offences in English law for centuries, and th…

This gaslighting is getting a bit ridiculous. The oppression did not start in the wake of Southport, it has been in place for years. But I'm going to talk about Southport first. People were arrested for pointing out that the Southport murderer was a Muslim terrorist. Well guess what, he was: https://news.sky.com/story/southport-stabbings-suspect-faces... The media said it was all disinformation and put forth many str…

He wasn't a Muslim he was brought up a Christian!

The rumours were he was an asylum seeker who came over on a boat

But as you end up quoting Breitbart what hope is there

Re: UK's hardware talent is being wasted

#496

Post by pydry » Mon, Jan 20, 2025, 10:39 AM UTC

mattnewton wrote: post #359

lordnacho wrote: post #344

Here's a story I tell from time to time. When I was at uni, we had an internship as part of the course. The course was a joint course between Engineering and Econ/Management, so you could choose from a very wide variety of industries to satisfy the thesis requirement. The business school would coordinate the internships. So I went interviewing in the engineering firms to the west of the country. Aerospace, materials,…

I have noticed this anecdotally as well in costal areas of the United States. It’s like textbook Baumol’s cost disease[0], except housing is rising fastest while the cost of labor nearly not at all, because buyers (hiring firms) just don’t buy [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baumol_effect

I always found it interesting that a lot of economists thought that a rising tide lifting all boats could be characterized as a "disease".

Re: UK's hardware talent is being wasted

#497

Post by dukeyukey » Mon, Jan 20, 2025, 10:40 AM UTC

dzhiurgis wrote: post #95

GamerAlias wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Preach. My friend is a gifted passionate Aerospace engineer (top in his specific stream at Cambridge) and basically is withering away working for the above 2 firms. The location is grim being far from others and generally far from other young exciting people. Additionally in his org, there just isn't a sense of excitement/ urgency which leaves him with little to do. Prioritising career for a career that's not there W…

Wait what. Quality of life in rural UK is worse than rat race of London?

What makes you think QoL in London is bad? I grew up in a rural farming town and much prefer London. Housing is expensive but that's about it.

Re: UK's hardware talent is being wasted

#498

Post by 946789987649 » Mon, Jan 20, 2025, 10:41 AM UTC

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…

Going through our pre-seed round atm and it is incredibly frustrating. I haven't raised in the US so it may be similar there, but the amount of time wasted for a relatively small amount of money is painful.

I'm also not sure what the government can do. SEIS/EIS is a great scheme, but the SEIS limit of £250k feels almost too small to do anything meaningful, and EIS funds are generally later stage or re-investment from SEIS.

Re: UK's hardware talent is being wasted

#499

Post by piltdownman » Mon, Jan 20, 2025, 10:41 AM UTC

dukeyukey wrote: post #474

maeil wrote: post #381

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Correct, but the tail of VC being fat is unique to the US. Pretty much the rest of the world is like the UK in all but a miniscule percentage preferring stability rather than moonshots.

WOrth ponting out the UK is 3rd worldwide in VC tech investment. The US is the outlier, but if you think the UK is bad you haven't seen shit.

Yeah but if it's not a moonshot SaaS factory they don't want to hear the reality.

For example, Ireland's state VC - Enterprise Ireland - ranked first in the world of venture capital investors by deal count in 2020 by Pitchbook. The average size of the deal compared to a Series A was laughable in context, but the ethos is there.

Re: UK's hardware talent is being wasted

#500

Post by gadders » Mon, Jan 20, 2025, 10:42 AM UTC

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…

>> Only London's financial sector pay was globally competitive - but now with Brexit's rules fully locked in even that sector is slowly losing its talent and customers to Europe and beyond.

Citation needed. No-one wants to live in Frankfurt.