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UK's hardware talent is being wasted

josef.cn

601–610 of 1001 posts

Re: UK's hardware talent is being wasted

#601

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…

I'm pretty sure engineers are also 230% increase or more.

If you take advantage of the larger number of tech company jobs in the US and were in a non-tech company in the UK then you can make 500% more.

Re: UK's hardware talent is being wasted

#602
post #319

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't understand why it's so bad in a country that's supposedly amazing at financial services.

> I don't understand why it's so bad in a country that's supposedly amazing at financial services. Because it's focused on predatory finance: funds cornering housing markets, money laundering, debt markets (think public debt and CDS), currency/rates speculation, etc.

It's not about predatory or non-predatory finance.

In order to become a major financial hub, UK has very favorable foreign transaction laws.

A significant amount of British-domiciled capital is foreign originated but only parked in the UK because of strong contracts law and linkages to just about every major investable market.

This is both a boon and a curse, because why would you finance a $1M seed in London when you can deploy that same capital for a similar sized seed in Tel Aviv or New York and get a better return on investment by exiting or funding additional rounds.

There is no innovation ecosystem in the UK, and it's too late to build one because other markets are just too competitive at this point - India, Israel, Czechia, Poland, etc provide very competitive tax incentives and subsidizes for foreign R&D investment and have done so for decades now.

You might assume the answer is to add additional roadblocks, but that makes British financial services extremely non-competitive, and puts 2.5 million jobs (and voters) at risk.

This is the exact same trap that Singapore and Hong Kong has fallen into, and both are trying to minimize it by becoming the goto financial hubs for target startup scenes (China for Hong Kong, India+ASEAN for Singapore) and investing in foreign startups (eg. Temasek Holdings in Singapore).

The UK needs to do something similar - it needs to give up ambitions of being a peer of the "big boys" in innovation, and concentrate on becoming competitive in international dealmaking, maybe by making a public-private international VC fund like Temasek.

Baillie Gifford (HQed in Edinburgh) and Index Ventures (HQed in London) are competitive in Tech Growth Equity globally (and especially in the Bay). There's no reason there can't be more Baillie Giffords or Index Ventures in the UK.

Re: UK's hardware talent is being wasted

#603
post #541

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 gener…

It's essentially the willingness of a society to fund what looks like and could actually be a complete waste of time and money.

In the US there's plenty of money to throw on seemingly frivolous pursuits, because stagnant money is generally considered wasted money. It's considered better to have that money "working for you" invested in something, anything. You could lose out, you could also win big, at least you tried. Can't have omelets without cracking eggs, as the saying goes.

Another Europe-like example is Japan: A rich society with lots of money, but society doesn't want to waste it. So most of the money is stagnant, stored in deposit accounts or in a bedroom drawer (literally, see: Tansu Yokin[1]) instead of being invested in something consequently leading to a stagnant economy.

[1]: https://www.seattletimes.com/opinion/a-nations-character-rev...

Re: UK's hardware talent is being wasted

#604

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…

Software engineers can usually expect to at least 2x their earnings, the median in the uk is £50k and in the US it is £100k, and that is not acounting for the significantly lower tax burden. (That pay excludes medical benefits, if you include the dollar value of that and bonuses and equity the difference rises).

Re: UK's hardware talent is being wasted

#605
post #367

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>I think most Doctors etc need to wait until they're consultants until they make decent money. A consultant gets £100k -> £140K ish from the NHS. However, many supplement that with private work and therefore make significantly more.

Yeah, 100k is starting pay band for Consultants, 140k is after 14 years of service _as a consultant_. To get to the starting line of Consultant they have to go through the Residency gauntlet which start you off at 36k and hideous hours.

Yup - I'm not saying it's good or fair, or bad and unfair. I'm just saying this is what it is.

Re: UK's hardware talent is being wasted

#606

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>> 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.

A quick Google search will return many: https://www.reuters.com/world/uk/city-london-chief-says-brex... TLDR: They're not moving to Frankfurt but they are moving out of the UK.

What do you expect the Lord Mayor to say? "Yes we think Brexit was great and that the government is going a good job." They're a lobby, they want to lobby for more concessions.

Re: UK's hardware talent is being wasted

#607

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> The speed run of the French engineer is to be admitted to a good engineering school, to be recruited on diploma in a large state body, to spend 3-5 years there with a low salary but great responsibility, to be recruited by a Swiss or American company, profit. 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 e…

> French engineering peers were not even aware that companies in France (Big Tech or Fortune 500) could offer six-figure salaries.

I know senior engineer at Airbus who don't earn six-figure salaries.

French human resources are cowards and hide behind diplomas to justify pay scales and recruitment. “Nobody gets fired for buying IBM“/”Nobody gets fired for recruiting a polytechnicien”.

I trained as a mechanical/nuclear engineer. It took destroying all the other competitors at my company's internal hackathon, Master Dev France and a project involving several thousand lines of python, for HR at my company to admit that I knew how to code without a software dev diploma.

Re: UK's hardware talent is being wasted

#609
post #455

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Under-rated comment. This is basically the whole explanation. 2008 did a huge amount of damage, not just immediately but to long-term mindsets. Ironically I think it's even entrenched the meme that the only real way to make money in the UK is property. We're all Georgists now. (this includes property as an export industry! Leaving increasing areas of the UK owned by overseas absentee landlords.)

The problem is that people think property is a risk free way of making money - even if they borrow heavily to invest. Maybe what we need is a property price crash.

I'm not sure a property price crash would achieve this goal.

You will have to decide for yourself if I'm speaking from experience or have motivated reasoning, as I'm saying this as an overseas absentee landlord who bought a UK apartment around the tail end of the previous price crash, initially as a place to live in until I decided the UK wasn't for me any more, and was rich enough to do so without a mortgage.

(I left the UK in 2018 due to a mix of Brexit and technological incompetence in the form of the Investigatory Powers Act. Would have left UK sooner but for parent with Alzheimer's).

Reason being: the income from housing doesn't have to come from reselling houses (which a price crash would impact) — I'm collecting rent, not flipping property. Forecasts future increases to rental rates suggests it won't keep getting worse (relative to general inflation) than it already is for renters, but it's already obviously quite bad.

Re: UK's hardware talent is being wasted

#610
post #299
post #288

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Which regulations exactly you find burdensome or overwhelming and stopping you from attempting the become wealthy, change your life and the world maybe? Why would you skip having 1 billion Euros just because you could have had 2 Billion but the government took the rest? Up until 1960's rich Americans payed %91 tax, and yet they kept their entrepreneurial spirit - why you can't do the same at the stated %50? When Appl…

You've fallen into the classic trap of thinking about the very very very tiny of people who are billionaires. Very few people are billionaires. Very few startup founders will ever be even if they succeed.

Life changing money is going from $50k/year to $1m/year. Not from $1b to $2b.

The vast majority of tax burden and complexity hits the middle class.

> When Apple was founded, the tax rates were %70.

It was 35% on capital gains.

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