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UK's hardware talent is being wasted

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Re: UK's hardware talent is being wasted

#561

Post by dukeyukey »

HPsquared wrote: post #64
alephnerd wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's because the UK is so good at financial services. It's fairly easy to deploy capital in the UK in mainland Europe, the US, India, China, ASEAN, and Middle East, which means there isn't much of an incentive to deploy it within the UK in industries that the UK cannot compete directly in. For example, Dyson has almost entirely shifted operations to ASEAN (Phillipines and Malaysia primarily). And AugustaWestland/Leon…

On the other hand, the UK has all these cheap engineers. Is it just that they're not actually cheap, on the international market?

Cheap compared to the US. On-par for most of the Western world. Expensive on the international market.

Re: UK's hardware talent is being wasted

#562

Post by aiisahik »

The answer here can be found if you just "follow the money" and realize that while some investments follow international boundaries, other types of investments are highly mobile.

The lack of UK hardware startups is due to the lack of local VC appetite and the unwillingness of US VCs to fund a non-Delaware incorporated company. Therefore the investment from a VC to a startup is generally "bounded" by geography.

The lack of UK VC appetite is due to the fact that there are just not that many LPs that want to give their money to a UK VC given their choice internationally. The LP investment to VC is "unbounded" - meaning it just follows exactly where the returns are highest.

What we really need is for UK startups to break the international border between silicon valley and the UK (or anywhere else for that matter). This means setting up a Delaware C corp, selling to the US, but keeping most of the talent in the UK.

Re: UK's hardware talent is being wasted

#563

Post by Simon_O_Rourke »

> 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.

I hear ya on this, and it's not just the setup costs, or the testing or the certification... It's a non trivial task to run a hardware company. Even the stuff you don't expect. For instance, a good friend of mine founded a health startup that makes wearables, and they were almost torpedoed in the first year of operation by some mouthy influencer who went about publicly calling their beta release product a fraud. This is despite the fact it worked and did what it should.

Re: UK's hardware talent is being wasted

#564

Post by CraigJPerry »

concerndc1tizen wrote: post #476
CraigJPerry wrote: post #284

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Interesting that you say that, my understand of the data is that manufacturing output has never been higher - ignoring lingering Covid shocks - https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/IPMANSICS But because productivity is higher https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/M0100CUSM070NNBR - which doesn’t mean the workers are working harder: a man with a shovel can work as hard as he likes, but he’s never going to compete with the…

Nice charts, but M0100CUSM070NNBR is from 1948 to 1963 :)

Eh, well, this is a bit embarrassing! On mobile, I can’t local a chart that covers the post war until now, best I can find is https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/OUTMS which shows late 80s onwards BUT shows a drop at 2008 onwards which goes against my argument (notwithstanding the big gap between both charts)

Re: UK's hardware talent is being wasted

#565

Post by agwp »

bArray wrote: post #553

I'm somewhat bucking this trend as a hardware engineer in London, a few comments: > Geographical Constraints: Unlike lucrative software jobs, hardware engineering demands physical presence. Not completely true. Our engineers take hardware home, and I have a mini-lab at home for developing hardware. If COVID2.0 kicked off tomorrow, we would be robust against this. > Venture Capital: European VCs, mostly bullish on fin…

Aside from computer hardware, another industry that the UK is nowhere near ambitious on (despite its fortunate geography) is offshore wind power.

This is an area with ridiculous potential in the UK if the will and the financing was there to build it.

[Conservative analysis shows](https://www.sustainabilitybynumbers.com/p/can-solar-and-wind...) that if only 10% of the UK's EEZ was used for offshore wind, it would produce >2000 TWh annually (over 2 trillion kWh).

That is equivalent to half of [all the electricity consumed by the United States](https://www.eia.gov/energyexplained/electricity/use-of-elect....) - from a country with five times fewer people, a GDP one-eighth the size and a total land area 39 times smaller.

Not only would developing this sector be an industrial driver in itself, but the sheer excess of carbon-free power could be used to power the growth of other sectors - from energy-intensive data centers to heavy industry. Needless to say it would also act as some protection given geopolitical risks with fossil fuel supplies.

And also the [development of novel energy storage solutions](https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2024/apr/01/thermal-...) means concerns about periods of low wind will likely become less of an issue over time.

Re: UK's hardware talent is being wasted

#566

Post by jahnu »

graemep wrote: post #463
Marazan wrote: post #427

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's because post GFC the USA stimulated and the EU went all in on austerity. It is fairly clear what was the best option.

The UK did not choose austerity: https://commonslibrary.parliament.uk/research-briefings/sn06... but still has worse growth than the US.

They most certainly did

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_Kingdom_government_aust...

What they didn't do, unlike PIGS, was also tough reforms which are paying back now

https://www.reuters.com/breakingviews/flying-piigs-nations-s...

Re: UK's hardware talent is being wasted

#567

Post by zipy124 »

refrigerator wrote: post #19

This is spot on. All the smart and ambitious people I know who studied (non-software) Engineering at university in the UK have ended up going into software engineering via self-teaching or finance/consulting because the only hardware engineering career paths seem to be working for Rolls Royce in the middle of nowhere with terrible pay, or alternatively working at Jaguar Land Rover in the middle of nowhere with terrib…

I even know a decent amount of people who did engineering at the top unis in the UK, only to go into audit at the big 4....

Re: UK's hardware talent is being wasted

#568

Post by amelius »

mewpmewp2 wrote: post #524
amelius wrote: post #494

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Decision of where to allocate money creates value. Imagine you have 500k to allocate. You can choose to invest in A or B, after analysis you realize A is a failing business, but B with 500k invested will create enormous value by producing product C. If you didn't allocate in B this company wouldn't have had enough money to produce C and succeed.

Yes, but this can still be true if the system works in a perverted way.

In your example, you should include how many $ go to the entity doing the allocation. If this is an insane amount of money, then maybe we are better off without finance and just figure out the optimal allocation in some other way.

Re: UK's hardware talent is being wasted

#569

Post by zipy124 »

ctz wrote: post #240
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…

My impression is that top aerospace people do not now work in aerospace, but in Motorsport.

motorsport is similarly low salary, at least specifically F1. It is like game-dev in software in that there are far more people who want to do it than the number of jobs available so they can afford to pay you in the cool experience of working on F1 rather than in cash terms.

Re: UK's hardware talent is being wasted

#570

Post by Symbiote »

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,…

In ~2006 I had a similar experience arranging my work placement during university, although I was earning a bit more — £16k for software development in the South East, just outside London. The banks were certainly offering a lot more, £30-something-k.

The university careers person said five banks would each take all fifty of us, just on the basis of us being Imperial College students, so we should apply them and forget anything else we were interested in as it wouldn't pay well. She couldn't understand the person who wanted to work at a computer game company.

We complained to the head of department, who was furious. A short time later there was a new careers person.

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