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UK's hardware talent is being wasted

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Re: UK's hardware talent is being wasted

#581

Post by heraldgeezer »

freddie_mercury wrote: post #552
nine_k wrote: post #151

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> spend their lives inside a big factory in a low-wage country Some gladly would if paid handsomely by the local standards, that is, adequately by the US standards. The bigger problem is raising children away from your native culture.

I spent a decade in a low-wage country and the number of people who were "glad" to spend even half that much time there -- paid handsomely! -- could probably be counted on one hand. Virtually the only people who stay longer than 3-5 years are ones who end up founding their own businesses there. Raising children away from your native culture isn't the deal breaker you imply. There are international schools (though, wi…

So everyone fully admits that these countries are in fact "worse" in every way?

Re: UK's hardware talent is being wasted

#582

Post by pinoy420 »

DoingIsLearning wrote: post #32
pinoy420 wrote: post #2

[flagged]

> on an unjustified 125k. Irrespective of your self perception of value, I am not sure you are fully grasping the disconnect between the growth in cost of living and the (lack of) growth in wages of the past 50 years for the average human in western economies. By many standards we actually need that 125k just to live what we would consider a middle class life in the 1980's.

[dead]

Re: UK's hardware talent is being wasted

#583

Post by eunos »

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.

Well specifically for engineering-related products (both software and hardware).

How can you thrive and be competitive when your competitors in the far-east work for >60 hours per week with a solid ecosystem and generous support from the government?

I am specifically worried about the future of European engineering, unlike US you have much smaller capitals and moats. Many of the products are sustained mainly by legacy built by your predecessors.

If nothing changes then by next-generation most if not all would be devoured by chaebols, Asian Sovereign Wealth Funds, or American PEs. You'll have to work for >60 hours but they not you will enjoy the surplus. Take your poison.

Quantity has a quality of its own.

Re: UK's hardware talent is being wasted

#584

Post by zipy124 »

retrac98 wrote: post #373
nextos wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To some extent, this also applies to software. Except for DeepMind and a few other select places like Altos Labs, getting past £100k is hard , especially outside London. Unless you go into finance, of course. But then, you have to stick to London. Finance is like a black hole that sucks a big chunk of the mathematical, CS and statistical UK talent. They have very proactive recruiters trying to e.g. connect with Oxbri…

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!

That is indeed very rare. A simple sanity check you can look at how many people earn about 100k in the UK, we know the figure for above 125k is 500,000 [1]. We can subtract the number of other jobs that we know for sure pay above this for example lawyers at magic circle firms which start on >150k for newly qualified lawyers, consultants in the NHS, directors of large corportaions, and we end up with a very small amount of people in other industries that earn these figures. Even before that we know the median is about £50k, and I can tell you from experience you can hire very very good software people on those wages, even in London.

From personal experience, I also know of software guys making that, but I also know far far more people earning below that, and these are oxford/cambridge/imperial/UCL grads....

[1]: https://www.gov.uk/government/statistics/personal-incomes-st...

Re: UK's hardware talent is being wasted

#585

Post by tome »

pydry wrote: post #578
tome wrote: post #551

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Personally I'd prefer it if good quality healthcare were cheaply available to all without having to be bottleneck on expensive-and-time-consuming-to-train human labour, even if it did mean that the 0.5% of the population that are doctors might end up working differently (and not necessarily for less -- it's not as though the industrial revolution has impoverished society).

That's not the same issue at all though. A waiter from the early 19th century will have much the same productivity as now. Doctors (we would hope) could be more productive by, say, not using bloodletting and leeches to heal people.

It is the same issue. The reason that medical care is so expensive is that it's bottlenecked on a small number of people who are qualified and licensed to provide it. If it weren't bottlenecked on them then it would be a massive boon to society overall, and it's not clear that it would be particularly detrimental to those people.

Re: UK's hardware talent is being wasted

#586

Post by progbits »

whiplash451 wrote: post #577
zipy124 wrote: post #558

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The largest problem I see is shipping times. If I need to download a new software "part" (library or other), the shipping time is the download time, nearly instant. If I need new hardware pieces, its either next day shipping, a few days by air-freight or three weeks on a boat from china. This limits prototype turnover time, and means iterating quick is much harder. Finally you have the problem that hardware is expens…

True but that reality applies to all your competitors. Your investors should care about your performance relative to the market.

Not to your competitors in Shenzhen, they can get basically any part within one day or can get any prototype made easily.

Re: UK's hardware talent is being wasted

#587

Post by varjag »

zipy124 wrote: post #558
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…

The largest problem I see is shipping times. If I need to download a new software "part" (library or other), the shipping time is the download time, nearly instant. If I need new hardware pieces, its either next day shipping, a few days by air-freight or three weeks on a boat from china. This limits prototype turnover time, and means iterating quick is much harder. Finally you have the problem that hardware is expens…

The pace is not really parts supply constrained in my experience. It just takes much longer to build and validate even relatively modest design changes.

Re: UK's hardware talent is being wasted

#588

Post by Symbiote »

dzhiurgis wrote: post #266
lmm wrote: post #119

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Absolutely. No public transport, almost no culture, and housing anywhere nice is even less available than in London. For a young person working at one of these firms, where can you live? Where could you meet someone to date? What can you even do at the weekend?

> No public transport When I live in London I didn't drive, which was kinda nice but also meant I've only been out of city like once a year. Sitting in traffic sucks of course, but driving rurally opens so much. As for weekends - driving and hiking I guess?

Wherever you live in London, there are commuter (and intercity) railway lines that can take you out of it.

For example I lived not far from Putney. Putney to Windsor & Eton Riverside takes 39 minutes and costs £6.90.

https://www.openstreetmap.org/#map=11/51.5330/-0.1146&layers...

Re: UK's hardware talent is being wasted

#589

Post by huijzer »

petra wrote: post #443
Animats wrote: post #137

If engineering isn't near the factory, it's not as effective. Here's one of the most generic electronic components - a 1K resistor.[1] These sell for about US$0.0015 each. DigiKey has a list of many suppliers. There are a few old-line US resistor makers in there, including Bourns and Ohmite. They're price competitive with Chinese companies. But when you look up their engineering job locations, none are in the US or U…

There are plenty of industries where product engineering is done at a different company or place than product manufacturing. For example, consumer electronics, industrial machines and robotics, telecom and medical devices.

The fact that it exists doesn’t mean it’s the best. You see it all the time that businesses do something just because everyone does it too. For example, the current AI investments, collatoral debt obligations in the 2000s, and conglomerates in the 1960s.

Re: UK's hardware talent is being wasted

#590

Post by eru »

porker wrote: post #246
eru wrote: post #191

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, but what does it matter? Google has equity owners all over the world, but we still treat them as an American company, too.

Profit goes out of the country, reducing investment and rich UK people to invest in new UK companies. It's the same problem with many of our companies being sold to foreign investors: profits are taken outside the country (as we did to other countries in the 19th century and earlier) so our labour enriches other countries while our country gets poorer.

> Profit goes out of the country, reducing investment and rich UK people to invest in new UK companies.

Rich foreigners are happy to invest in the UK. See eg Deepmind itself, which was bought by Google.

> [...] so our labour enriches other countries while our country gets poorer.

Foreign investment is usually seen as a good thing. Especially foreign direct investment.

And: why do you care so much what passports these rich people hold?

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