531–540 of 1001 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Not disagreeing with your general point, but UK food is very cheap, compared to almost anywhere in western europe and nowadays with the states too.
UK's food, not eating out mind you, is on par with even eastern europe in some cases.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Contracting rates in Paris seem to be much higher - €700-€1000 a day seems common from what I’ve seen. I suspect a big part of it is labour laws. The UK is similar. Companies don’t want to take on the legal commitment of a high salary person, so they take on contractors instead.
This will depend enormously on the company: a consulting and IT services company like Capgemini will employ Moroccan university graduates at 32K€/year. Apple will recruit the best engineers from telecoms companies, arms manufacturers, research institutes and intelligence services for 120K€/year and the same in share, equity. France knows how to train excellent engineers and give them responsibilities in major governm…
Your comment is on point, though I’d slightly adjust the part about French engineers career goal. From my experience, many French engineering peers were not even aware that companies in France (Big Tech or Fortune 500) could offer six-figure salaries. They also often have never heard of leetcode/system design/behavioral interviews. They assume their career trajectory depends almost entirely on the ranking/prestige of their engineering school (which is true for french companies), but in practice, most U.S. recruiters/companies don’t even know what a French engineering school is. A bachelor/master degree and a good grind on leetcode is enough for them.
For most students I studied with, the dream is to secure a 45K~50k salary right after graduation, and target 80k as an end-of-career goal, by following this path:
-Attend a top engineering school.
-Join a CAC40 company as a software engineer.
-Transition into management after 10–15 years.
The difference between Germany and Britain is that Germany still has large, successful and innovative hardware companies and it still has decent engineering jobs. Britain has lost them, together with the companies which once offered them.
But these jobs didn't vanish into thin air, they vanished to India and China, which now control the companies making "British" cars (MG, Lotus, Jaguar, Landrover, etc.).
There is the delusion in many Western people that e.g. China just can not do proper engineering and that outsourcing jobs there will not work. This is false. Most engineering jobs people do can be done just as well by people on the other side of the world for half the pay. The only reason you get paid twice the money for the same thing is institutional inertia, a company can not move it's development all at once to there other side of the world, so there need to be people locally to do engineering, even if it is more expensive. This is not something which will remain true forever.
These Hardware jobs are paid terribly because they well paid for the global market rate.
It is not geography, or lack of innovation or VCs. It is outsourcing.
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,…
Now, sure, that salary might be too low, and working for the NHS seems like hell but it would seem the money isn't the main obstacle. Maybe not right now for 2 years ago that was a very good pay.
There are other pay-related issues. Marginal tax between 100 and 150 or so is incredibly high, around 60-70%. This is because many nasty things kick in there. Tax free allowance shrinking for example. Doctors are double screwed in some cases, as by law they have to contribute a lot of their salary to pension, and in this threshold often exceed their allowance - which is a real kick in the nuts, seeing how they can't reduce it, and anyway, pension saving should always be seen favourably in a place like UK. These are by the way some of the reasons for doctor shortages in the UK, senior doctors have little incentive to work harder, many cut their hours with little difference to their net pay.
But these aren't strictly linked to their headline salary.
[1] https://www.healthcareers.nhs.uk/explore-roles/doctors/pay-d...
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 w…
You're not thinking like an economist :) Here's something I saw on Twitter (no source): The bicycle is the slow death of the planet. General Director of Euro Exim Bank Ltd. got economists thinking when he said: "A cyclist is a disaster for the country's economy: he does not buy cars and does not borrow money to buy. He does not pay for insurance policies. He does not buy fuel, does not pay for the necessary maintenan…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
For the last 20 or 25 years the UK has been coasting on the North Sea oil&gas money, I'd say that worked up until the early 2010s, and then on the almost complete financialization of its economy and on selling out whatever pieces of the economy could still be sold out (that includes part of their beloved NHS). But that can only work for so long and is beneficial in the medium to long-term for a very limited number of…
I agree, but my point is that the France, Germany, and other comparable European economies have the same or similar problems. The UK is not some exception, it is a typical western economy. The US is an outlier (doing better). > that includes part of their beloved NHS A more severe problem is that the NHS was debt funded (mostly through off balance sheet debt) in the 2000s. The government kept their promise not to inc…
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…
Not only is the bureaucracy difficult, the labor laws make it very difficult to hire and compensate talent.
Germany wants innovation to be done by large corporations, not by start ups.
you can do worse than creating credit reports they could be figuring out how to get people to click on ads
Completely wrong on the root causes. Britain used to have a large hardware industry, where these people would actually get to do proper engineering. The difference between Germany and Britain is that Germany still has large, successful and innovative hardware companies and it still has decent engineering jobs. Britain has lost them, together with the companies which once offered them. But these jobs didn't vanish int…
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.
Regulations often stem from a particular mindset. However, they also serve to perpetuate that mindset. As a member of the working class, I find there’s little incentive to build something new or innovate because the effort required to navigate through all the burdensome regulations is overwhelming. On top of that, any additional income I might generate from bringing my ideas or initiatives to market would be taxed at…
I find it ironic you mention "classes" (regarding "as a member of the working class"). There are problems everywhere (either as an employee or as an entrepreneur). Feeling overwhelmed is just a feeling, does not say anything about how much you can do or if you get a reasonable workload.
I think what is holding Europe back is the people not trying and understanding various things without having lots of fears (of being overwhelmed, of large tax, of what people will say, etc.).
A balance must be stricken also between what you can do (leisure, family) and how many resource you produce/consume. The purpose should be for more of leisure/family but that is ONLY IF we (I am also European) produce/consume enough. Too many smart and capable people want to "just be an employee", which results in gaps in other places (entrepreneurs, politicians, etc.).