Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

UK's hardware talent is being wasted

josef.cn

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

751–760 of 1001 posts

Re: UK's hardware talent is being wasted

#751

Post by pydry »

mattnewton wrote: post #731
pydry wrote: post #496

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I always found it interesting that a lot of economists thought that a rising tide lifting all boats could be characterized as a "disease".

The Baumol effect is paying more for the same productivity, which can feel like a disease when you have to pay more and more for the same in some area for services relative to goods to the point where you end up pathologically preferring goods over services. The JFK-popularized term defending a special interest project trickling down benefits to a wider community isn’t really what it feels like to someone in a coasta…

The Baumol effect means that as society gets richer and GDP goes up, orchestral musicians or wait staff or any other profession whose productivity which which enjoy but whose productivity largely hasn't changed since the 19th century get paid more.

The "disease" is equivalent to a rising tide raising all boats or the lack of commodification of certain forms of human labor.

The "cure" for baumol's "cost disease" would be an explosion in income inequality.

Re: UK's hardware talent is being wasted

#752

Post by kevin_thibedeau »

Macha wrote: post #701
zipy124 wrote: post #584

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 amou…

> and these are oxford/cambridge/imperial/UCL grads. There are many bad things we can say about software hiring, but one of the good things is that (outside the US at least), it's much more concerned with what you can do than the name recognition of the institution where you studied.

The US isn't that focused on elite schools. It's only in the VC/startup bubble where bias exists. Most tech grads don't go to those schools.

Re: UK's hardware talent is being wasted

#753

Post by idhegeu »

robertlagrant wrote: post #724
idhegeu wrote: post #717

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The fact that ads work doesn't mean that they're beneficial to the economy. I disagree with the premise that non-human entities are entitled to my attention.

> I disagree with the premise that non-human entities are entitled to my attention. I tried that but the cop said it was still speeding even if I refused to acknowledge the speed limit sign.

Fair enough, I'll add some nuance. The government that I am a citizen of is a special case of a non-human entity, they do have entitlement to my property (which includes my attention).

Traffic signs put up by my government are different than billboards put up by a company. The former is to protect me, the latter is to exploit me.

Re: UK's hardware talent is being wasted

#754

Post by gazchop »

secondcoming wrote: post #744
gazchop wrote: post #230

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Quite frankly, it's cultural and the thing I hear a lot is simply: fuck that for a job! I could quite happily get on fine at one of those big American style startups but I don't get excited about hype, I don't have the work culture it demands and I don't have a price on my soul. I'd rather earn a lot less, have extreme stability, have better family time and balance. On top of that there's something tasteless and unet…

The part about that plan that worries me is the ageism in software. I'm mid-forties and it's something I think about a lot for when I have to get a new job. Anyone young should go make as much money as possible, as early as possible, so they can have the same outlook you do in later life.

Not really had any problems with that and I'm older than you are. And quite frankly I didn't have any money really until I hit about 35. I just lived within my means.

Re: UK's hardware talent is being wasted

#755

Post by BobaFloutist »

foobarian wrote: post #725
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…

Would it be fair to say that the "unicorn" effect is a lot harder to achieve as well? If VC rely on 1 out of N startups doing well then that 1 success needs to achieve over N-fold returns just to break even. On the other hand I have no trouble coming up with examples of hardware companies that did well: Apple, Nvidia, Intel... but those time scales are titanic.

It's funny that you didn't mention Dell, Lenovo, Sony, or even Microsoft and Nintendo which both make their money off the software than the hardware, but are also companies that produce and selling hardware.

Re: UK's hardware talent is being wasted

#756

Post by talldayo »

hintymad wrote: post #702
pjc50 wrote: post #690

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Even the Americans can't manage economic isolation. It takes a global civilisation to build a smartphone. We might have been able to get closer to it by being in the EU, but now we're on our own on that one.

Yeah, I do recognize that. I just wish that the US could have a healthy mixture of light and heavy industry, so that the cost building any mission critical systems will not go through the roof, and so that we will be able t build anything domestically if we want. Even though it's likely a pipe dream now, but at least the US can do so for the WW II and after WW II for quite some time.

That ship sailed. It's like the other comment said - China embraces manufacturing to make other countries inept at it. It's not only that American precision engineering is mostly at parity with China, it's that manufacturing anywhere else is a waste of money. When unibody aluminum Macbook cases are machined, they never are machined in America. They're sold to Americans, marketed as an American company, but your device (even at the markup Apple charges) cannot be made economically in America, period.

In a broader sense, I'd say that America is headed down the same road the UK is too. We expect people to pay hand-over-fist for our tech talent that isn't any better than what you can get in Pakistan or China. Our hard markets are getting bearish, our leadership wants to de-globalize, and American tech wants to maintain global control without acquiescing to local governance.

America had the economic lead before WWI and after WWII, but now we've bet the farm on our ability to market bullshit. America's national economy cannot survive if the App Store and ChatGPT are our premier exports.

Re: UK's hardware talent is being wasted

#757

Post by nradov »

rbanffy wrote: post #729
foobarian wrote: post #725

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Would it be fair to say that the "unicorn" effect is a lot harder to achieve as well? If VC rely on 1 out of N startups doing well then that 1 success needs to achieve over N-fold returns just to break even. On the other hand I have no trouble coming up with examples of hardware companies that did well: Apple, Nvidia, Intel... but those time scales are titanic.

> Apple, Nvidia, Intel. Not sure they are great examples. Intel is going through a lot of pain now (but it's been very successful in the past). Apple was in a terrible situation before its reverse acquisition by NeXT (NeXT paid one Steve Jobs for all of Apple and got $400 million in change). Nvidia got insanely lucky with Bitcoin, then with AI. Its original plan was to make 3D accelerators for gamers and, maybe, engi…

Luck and timing obviously play huge roles. But I like to think that as an industry we no longer frequently make mistakes quite as outright stupid as Commodore management did. There are at least some generally understood tech industry best practices which prevent decisions like that when there is serious money at stake.

Re: UK's hardware talent is being wasted

#758

Post by kjkjadksj »

nine_k wrote: post #169
raverbashing wrote: post #167

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Production of software is nearly 100% R&D. Making a million copies of a software product has a trivial cost. > Production of hardware is some R&D, and then actual manufacturing Totally. And if you think deployment errors are bad, wait until you see how many production errors exist and how many items out of your line come out working and within spec

Indeed. You cannot release a patch for a mechanical part or a PCB.

You just release a new version. How many xbox 360s did they actually release? I think its close to a dozen iterations.

Re: UK's hardware talent is being wasted

#759

Post by mike_hearn »

throwaway48476 wrote: post #126
bell-cot wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Unfortunately the UK has not been... 20 years, or 112 years? Consider just how far the UK's place in the world fell between 1911 (George V ascended to the throne of the global superpower; his Royal Navy was launching 2 to 4 new capital ships per year ) and 1948 (3 years after "winning" WWII - and basics such as food, clothing, and gasoline were still strictly rationed).

They spent the wealth of empire fighting a war and achieved what exactly? They would have been better off losing. Crazy when you think about it.

Just so everyone is clear, the Nazi plan for what to do with an occupied Britain was to enslave large parts of population, to completely erase Britain as a country, and they also considered mass deportations of the native population. "Better off losing" is not really supportable under any reading of the historical evidence.

Re: UK's hardware talent is being wasted

#760

Post by kristianc »

rbanffy wrote: post #741
varispeed wrote: post #737

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What safety net? UK does not have a safety net.

That's fair. UC and the NHS are far from ideal, but, compared to the US, they are heaven.

I think that needs to be qualified heavily — salaries in the UK are much lower both in nominal and PPP terms, so there's much less opportunity to build one's own safety net, and the NHS is overwhelmingly focused on providing care for the elderly. To a young(ish) startup founder, the presence of the NHS and UC makes little to no difference.
Post reply on HN