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UK's hardware talent is being wasted

josef.cn

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Re: UK's hardware talent is being wasted

#611

Post by llm_trw »

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…

Parts are pretty much instant, pcb turn around times are 3 to 15 days depending on how complex they are.

Even in the bad old days of punch cards and priesthoods the turn around for software was faster.

I have a little pcb mill in the garage that I use for prototypes.

To this day I've not met another EE that knows what a voronoi mapping is, or why you'd want one. In a previous startup where I was the software engineer I got through more prototypes for the analogue signal paths in an afternoon than the two other EEs had in the previous week.

Re: UK's hardware talent is being wasted

#612

Post by Kallocain »

CalRobert wrote: post #210
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…

I lived in Ireland for 10 years. It's not the same as the UK but there _is_ cultural overlap. Every time you shared a new idea with _anyone_, even things as simple as "I want to buy a site and build a house on it", the first thing you hear is how that's a bad idea, you will fail, it will never work, and you need to leave it to "professionals". Not to mention the whole idea that trying to be successful is "notions" an…

I don't know what the regulations are in the UK, but in many European countries, building a house isn't just about knowing how to build a house, it's also about knowing all the DIN requirements. These are necessary for insurance to pay out if something happens to your house. Let's take a simple example: You're wiring your house. Because of a mistake, the house burns down.

Insurance: “Okay sir, who did the electrical wiring? you: “Me”. Insurance: “Are you a professional? you: “No" Insurance: “Have you had your work certified by a third party?" you: “Do my buddies count?” insurance: "Have a good day sir"

There may never be a problem and you may have figured out everything that's required to get your butt covered (good for you in this case), but the fact is that a lot of people don't know about these things, do their own thing and get royally screwed if there's a problem and, God forbid, someone gets hurt.

Re: UK's hardware talent is being wasted

#613

Post by llm_trw »

progbits wrote: post #586
whiplash451 wrote: post #577

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

They also get it stolen even faster.

Re: UK's hardware talent is being wasted

#614

Post by JaDogg »

wakawaka28 wrote: post #84

Keep importing skilled workers. I'm sure it will work out for you eventually. /s Seriously, I feel bad for our British bretheren. The UK government is seemingly out of control and actively working against the people. There are also long-running geopolitical trends like outsourcing to contend with. Talk too much about these things and you're probably getting sent to prison. It's time for the US to bring some democracy…

Could you elaborate further? I am a skilled immigrant in the UK. I pay my taxes and have not used any benefits. I even pay for my medication; the only free service I have used is a GP appointment or a hospital scan, which was likely covered by the IHS (Immigration Health Surcharge).

What have I done to make the country worse off?

Re: UK's hardware talent is being wasted

#615

Post by marcinzm »

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…

My view is that the US startup culture exists because of wealth inequality at the $1-$20m net worth level. Wealth inequality is socially incentivized at that level because of the lack of a decent social safety net. If you don't save money then at 50 you may end up homeless on the street due to bad luck. But if you don't get bad luck then you end up at 50 with a large amount of money that you don't have much to do with. So you start investing some in riskier things because who cares.

US founders not from wealthy backgrounds can often get $500k from friends and family. I doubt those in the UK can do so.

There's massive massive social costs due to this in the US so be careful what you wish for.

Re: UK's hardware talent is being wasted

#616

Post by llm_trw »

huijzer wrote: post #589
petra wrote: post #443

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

>the current AI investments

As someone whose done both hardware and AI, the current AI investments are at worst a repeat of the 2000 dot com boom.

They aren't wrong, but they may be premature with how terrible our compute substrate is.

Re: UK's hardware talent is being wasted

#617

Post by esskay »

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…

Hey now you could also go and work for Airbus...but it does mean having to go to Stevenage, as well as getting terrible pay.

Re: UK's hardware talent is being wasted

#618

Post by esskay »

retrac98 wrote: post #454
GasVeteran wrote: post #448

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They are almost always contractors. If you work permanent it tops out max at about £75,000-90,000.

They’re not, they’re full time employees.

They're in the extreme minority. Most software dev roles in the UK top out between £40 and £50k, £60k if you're lucky.

Re: UK's hardware talent is being wasted

#619

Post by mrtksn »

marcinzm wrote: post #610
mrtksn wrote: post #299

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 cap…

In Europe the capital gain tax ranges from %37 in Norway, %34 in France, %26 in Germany and Italy, %10 in Bulgaria and %0 with conditions in many other places. Tax heavens are a European invention anyway.

And no, millionaire or billionaire doesn't matter much. Europe lacks Billionaires not Millionaires. Europe is full of small businesses and by small I mean millions in profits and revenues.

In Europe %99 of the companies are small or medium sized enterprises, which is not different than the USA. In USA however, large companies have slightly higher number of employees which is an indicative of concentration of power and that's how you get your "USA has 5 unicorns in top 10 but EU has only 1" lists.

Contrary to the narrative, Europe has much more small and medium sized enterprises per capita: https://www.nationmaster.com/country-info/stats/Economy/Micr...

Re: UK's hardware talent is being wasted

#620

Post by n144q »

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…

Very weird comment. Article talks about hardware talent in UK. Your comment tries to prove "engineering jobs" are not in the US by providing the job listing of a single supplier, when everybody knows that there are a huge amount of hardware talent in the US working at great companies that deliver amazing products. Your comment seems to equate "manufacturing jobs" to "hardware engineering jobs" which apparently isn't correct.
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