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UK's hardware talent is being wasted

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Re: UK's hardware talent is being wasted

#541

Post by yobbo »

mjburgess wrote: post #468
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.

The job of secondary financial markets is to redirect areas of surplus unproductive wealth (that makes no return), to productive areas. By the magic of markets, sustained profitability = productive use of resources. The problem with labourers who work in these secondary markets however, is the same as the guards who watch the gate: they can extract large tolls for being in the right place at the right time. People in…

> The system functions very well to take unproductive surplus and allocate it effectively.

What did you measure to come to this conclusion?

Re: UK's hardware talent is being wasted

#542

Post by dmwilcox »

I moved from Silicon Valley to London -- a funny thing I haven't seen mentioned is that the tax rates on RSUs are absolutely awful (extra NI can push rates to nearly 60%).

That is a large disincentive for working in a tech company versus finance. Tech companies especially start-ups largely pay in stock which could be mispriced and you make more (or less) money than could be predicted. But versus finance paying pure cash, less (equity) risk, and a lower tax rate the incentives are clear.

HMRC I don't think should be underrated in their effects on answering the question -- "should I start my start-up in the US or the UK?"

Re: UK's hardware talent is being wasted

#543

Post by StefanBatory »

mellosouls wrote: post #483
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,…

If you are only doing it for the money, your point is fair - but there are many of us for whom - beyond reasonable necessities - that is at best a secondary consideration. Anybody who moves from engineering to finance doesn't have their heart in engineering - which is fine, but its not like they had no choice. Agree though that London and parts of the South place extra pressures on people looking to build a life and…

Passion does not pay the bills; or later on, a comfy lifestyle.

Re: UK's hardware talent is being wasted

#544

Post by rich_sasha »

yobbo wrote: post #541
mjburgess wrote: post #468

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The job of secondary financial markets is to redirect areas of surplus unproductive wealth (that makes no return), to productive areas. By the magic of markets, sustained profitability = productive use of resources. The problem with labourers who work in these secondary markets however, is the same as the guards who watch the gate: they can extract large tolls for being in the right place at the right time. People in…

> The system functions very well to take unproductive surplus and allocate it effectively. What did you measure to come to this conclusion?

In much of the developed world, economic productivity seems to correlate strongly with availability of free capital (I don't have a source but I imagine it's fairly straightforward to cook one up). Even US vs Europe, kind of similar economies, but with capital so much easier to come by in the US, and US productivity per capita is flying compared to Europe.

Availability of free capital is a function of both just general wealth of a society, and how well lubricated the wheels of finance are.

I don't think this is a controversial theory, even if it comes with unpleasant side effects (white collar crime, inequality etc). Just as having a buoyant defence industry that can churn out a lot of boom is great for a country's war fighting potential.

Re: UK's hardware talent is being wasted

#545

Post by nsteel »

dukeyukey wrote: post #509
alephnerd wrote: post #10

I agree with this call to action. Sadly, I think there are more fundamental issues in the UK economy. For all intents and purposes, Venture Capital is dead in the UK. While companies do get funded in the UK and are technically "UK domiciled" - in action most of their Engineering and Product teams are located in Eastern Europe or India, or are startups from those markets (and China) who domiciled in the UK to raise fr…

> For all intents and purposes, Venture Capital is dead in the UK. The UK has the 3rd largest tech VC sector worldwide - only after the US and China > in action most of their Engineering and Product teams are located in Eastern Europe or India London also has the largest software sector outside the US, after the Bay Area, Boston, and NYC.

I think the large software sector here might actually be part of the problem. If you're smart, want to stay in London (expensive), but don't want to work in finance then it's going to be software. There's no interesting hardware jobs here (FPGA trading platforms do not qualify). These jobs do exist in other European countries so I think the parent was correct.

Re: UK's hardware talent is being wasted

#546

Post by [deleted] »

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.)

[deleted]

Re: UK's hardware talent is being wasted

#547

Post by DaedPsyker »

smartties wrote: post #88
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.

This seems to be the case for most European countries, particularly here in France. We’re experiencing stagnation, or perhaps even a decline. Launching a product in Europe is significantly more challenging due to the market’s high fragmentation. I don’t have much hope for the future of tech companies in Europe.

A few here have commented on different aspects, and they have their part to play but I agree with you, market fragmentation is the scale killer.

From an outside perspective it might appear like Europe is a true single market like the US but it isn't. Scaling to a European level isn't impossible but it is difficult. Some of that will just be difficult to do anything about, language, different cultures, etc. On the political side I'm sure there is plenty more the EU can do but I don't see the will.

Re: UK's hardware talent is being wasted

#548

Post by constantcrying »

nsteel wrote: post #539
constantcrying wrote: post #533

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…

I don't disagree with anything in particular here but I'm not sure your latter paragraphs do anything to explain why Germany is different. Or are you saying it's also institutional inertia and it's just a matter of time for them to end up the same?

>Or are you saying it's also institutional inertia and it's just a matter of time for them to end up the same?

Exactly. Britain has lost its industry long ago, while Germany did not. The situation right now is different, but I do not believe the trajectory is.

Especially when it comes to software, even the largest corporations in Germany just outsource to India. And justifying hiring people for 2x/3x//4x the cost at "home" becomes increasingly hard.

Re: UK's hardware talent is being wasted

#549

Post by sylware »

tomhoward wrote: post #519

I don’t think it’s just a UK thing, or that it’s much easier to start a hardware startup in the USA. I think it’s more that the bar for getting a hardware startup off the ground is much higher than a software startup - everywhere in the world. Personally I’ve been trying to self-fund and bootstrap a hardware startup (based in Australia but I’m reasonably well connected in Silicon Valley as I’m a YC alum). I’ve had pl…

Yep, look at RISC-V, the most promising hardware is from the USA. It is not yet on the latest silicon process, but with the latest GPU, I guess we could run the latest games, until the game devs recompile and QA a bit their games (obviously on elf/linux)

Re: UK's hardware talent is being wasted

#550

Post by turbojerry »

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.

EU drone regulations ban autonomous drones from being flown. This made me stop work on them, this is not a mindset problem. It's actually a corruption problem as Google wanted to sell their software to coordinate drone flights and the EU people were "persuaded" to enact regulations to make this happen.
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