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UK's hardware talent is being wasted

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Re: UK's hardware talent is being wasted

#621

Post by baud147258 »

dagw wrote: post #272
rgmerk wrote: post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Or maybe he’s just tired of a specific kind of life which might be fun in your early twenties but is less appealing when you’ve got kids and can’t enjoy the nightlife and culture anyway.

you’ve got kids and can’t enjoy the nightlife and culture anyway Having kids while living in the centre of a large city is great, as there is so much culture that is aimed at parents and children. When my kid was small we went to museums and concerts and events all the time that were aimed at kids. There were also several different parks, playgrounds, pools and similar activities to choose from all within easy access…

> Having kids while living in the center of a large city is great

If you can afford a flat that's big enough for you and the kids

Re: UK's hardware talent is being wasted

#622

Post by DragonStrength »

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…

Totally anecdotal but to your point, the engineering jobs in my hometown followed the manufacturing jobs in leaving town in the 1990s after NAFTA.

Engineering seems to be returning as domestic manufacturing increases thanks to foreign auto companies setting up shop across the state, replacing what the US companies left behind.

Re: UK's hardware talent is being wasted

#623

Post by UK-AL »

porker wrote: post #265
timthorn wrote: post #197

Earlier quoted context omitted.

JLR is based in the metro area of Britain's second city. It's not exactly the middle of nowhere. Rolls Royce is in Derby, on the edge of the Peak District with much to offer. Much cheaper housing with more space available. And unlike in London, driving a car isn't hounded by terminal congestion.

JLR Gaydon is not in the metro area of Birmingham. It's in nice countryside and near a motorway which helps, but it's a fair commute out of Birmingham at rush hour to there. The nice surrounding towns/villages are expensive, and even the shitty ones aren't cheap (hello Banbury) as they're on the edge of commuter distance to London. Derby I haven't lived in but know people who have. It's an old manufacturing town and…

There's a huge JLR presence in Solihull right next to Birmingham.

It's also one of the wealthiest areas outside of London. But house prices in the really nice parts of Solihull are also high.

Re: UK's hardware talent is being wasted

#624

Post by IshKebab »

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.

It's not quite that bad - the news obviously makes it seem like it's worse than it is. Also we finally got rid of the Tories, so at least things are heading in the right direction. I made a list of some positive changes Labour have made already:

* Allow onshore wind

* Means tested winter fuel allowance

* Inheritance tax for farms

* Assisted dying bill (controversial but I think generally people are in favour of this)

* Scrapping the public footpath registration deadline

The only stupid thing I think they've done is the porn site age testing thing, but that was also a Tory policy.

IMO the big problem is the right-wing media. Take something like the winter fuel allowance. Very obviously the right thing to do, and even pensioners were generally in favour (check this article: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/c4gegy4r9ndo ), yet it still somehow a huge controversy with disingenuous articles even on the BBC like this one fuelling the faux outrage: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/c80l9lde5yjo

How can we make any improvements if such obviously good changes meet such an irrational reaction?

Re: UK's hardware talent is being wasted

#625

Post by petesergeant »

wakawaka28 wrote: post #85
syntaxing wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Was a MechE for 10 years here in the US and now I’m a SWE. Even here, no one cares about hardware engineers. Don’t get me wrong, you can make enough to be “comfortable”. But anecdotally, maybe 10% of MechE do design. 10% of that are paid handsomely to be in tech and are “Product Designers”. Even then, almost every tech company want to be a predominantly software company. They just happen to need hardware to execute t…

That's what happens when there is not much manufacturing in the country anymore, and everyone is encouraged to go to college. I don't know why the software industry hasn't suffered more along the same lines. Maybe the profit margins for software are higher.

> I don't know why the software industry hasn't suffered more along the same lines

Growth of the software industry isn't constrained by the cost of capital

Re: UK's hardware talent is being wasted

#626

Post by Cumpiler69 »

jajko wrote: post #334
ttoinou wrote: post #242

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What is this spirit we retain that US looses ?

Quality of life, if you define an actual proper life as something happening outside of work hours and sleep. We don't worry whether my insurance will cover the next health issue that will happen to me, be it broken leg or lifelong costly treatment. I don't have to desperately try to save maybe 1.5 million $ to put my kids through decent university, if they desire to do so. I am not brutally tossed on the sidewalk whe…

>thus sporting 50 vacations days per year

Where and how do you get 50 vacation days/year.

Re: UK's hardware talent is being wasted

#627

Post by UK-AL »

robbie-c wrote: post #555
graemep wrote: post #463

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Can you explain how your link supports your argument? The conservatives ran austerity-based policies for the last 14 years. Is your argument that they did not have a choice?

Have you seen the national debt under the conservatives? It's massively increased.

Re: UK's hardware talent is being wasted

#628

Post by pydry »

tome wrote: post #585
pydry wrote: post #578

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

>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

That bottleneck is unrelated to the baumol effect.

Re: UK's hardware talent is being wasted

#629

Post by petesergeant »

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 was also trying to raise recently. It's interesting to me that the UK has an absolutely incredibly generous startup investment scheme (SEIS)[0], and still hasn't managed to make this work. SEIS is ludicrously generous, and should make getting funding a breeze in the UK, and yet ... somehow it isn't.

0: If a few hurdles are jumped through, then an investor who gives you £250k can get £125k relief on their income tax (not what they'd have paid on £125k, literally the whole £125k), and then claim a further 50% back of the remainder from the government if you go bust.

Re: UK's hardware talent is being wasted

#630

Post by zipy124 »

tomhoward wrote: post #572
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…

That’s a big part of it. But mostly it’s that your dev+deploy+evaluate cycle is so much slower. With web software you can write a feature or bug-fix and push to prod in minutes - and repeat that many times a day. With hardware each equivalent cycle is weeks or months (especially in my vertical - farms).

That's what I meant by prototype turnover time, your iteration cycle.
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