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UK's hardware talent is being wasted

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Re: UK's hardware talent is being wasted

#771

Post by mhh__ »

nobodywillobsrv wrote: post #333
mhh__ wrote: post #140

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The good news is that a relatively small amount of aggressive planning reform (namely, firing everyone involved and never calling it "planning" ever again) will fix most of the (fixable...) worst aspects of modern Britain. We banned building stuff in 1947, we can undo it.

The problem is the institutions are unaccountable and can't be easily made controllable by the electorate again. Bank of England, the judiciary etc. These control the country not the MPs. Blair onward

Judicial review at the moment is just completely insane.

If you want to do anything it takes the best part of a decade of planning and environmental review, in large part because there are a small army of charitable organisations (often with their fees capped) waiting to challenge absolutely everything.

A government consultation was recently blocked! A consultation!

We need to completely destroy this system, they can do something useful instead. Angels sing whenever a Quango dies.

Re: UK's hardware talent is being wasted

#772

Post by mhh__ »

Earw0rm wrote: post #705
youngtaff wrote: post #466

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's also the quality of the build… most new build houses are shit because the house building companies are more interested in their profit than the quality of the product If we made cars like we make houses there'd be a long queue outside every car dealer as people returned them to get their money back

That's partly (but not entirely) survivor bias. The Victorians built a lot of absolute garbage. Much of it was destroyed during or immediately after WWII, or extensively - and expensively - renovated at the tail end of the 20th century. Some of it muddles on in not-really-fit-for-purpose condition: terraced houses with lath-and-plaster walls between units, street plans that can't accommodate modern requirements for r…

I think the new builds also highlight the problem in that we're mostly obsessed with building these weird not-quite-a-town clumps of houses rather than actually growing patterns that we know work.

That and people have no taste. I like Poundbury, but I would also accept some modernist Foster-ville if someone actually did it and was prepared to put their foot down to make it consistent.

Re: UK's hardware talent is being wasted

#773

Post by [deleted] »

pjc50 wrote: post #690
hintymad wrote: post #679

Earlier quoted context omitted.

UK ignited the First Industrial Revolution. It's sad to see that UK has slipped to number 16 or lower when it came to the market share of global manufacturing. And the problem is not to just UK, but to pretty much all the developed countries. Many nations and people have benefited greatly from globalization, but I have to ask: is it worth it if the cost is forfeiting my own country's manufacturing know-how and supply…

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.

[deleted]

Re: UK's hardware talent is being wasted

#774

Post by tome »

pydry wrote: post #751
mattnewton wrote: post #731

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

But if we had robotic wait staff then that would be a net benefit for society, and the human former wait staff would go and do something else that's slightly more valuable for an amount of pay that's either slightly less or slightly more depending on the effect of automation on the whole economy, probably slightly more in the long run. This is the story of industrialisation!

Thought experiment: would it be good if we replaced mass transit by individual taxi drivers, because there would be so much demand for those taxi drivers that their boats would be lifted?

Re: UK's hardware talent is being wasted

#775

Post by rbanffy »

nradov wrote: post #757
rbanffy wrote: post #729

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

Nokia enters the chat

Re: UK's hardware talent is being wasted

#776

Post by petra »

llm_trw wrote: post #635
Beretta_Vexee wrote: post #338

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Being an engineer means mastering your production tool. For everything to do with physical production, you need to be close to the means of production to gather essential information on quality, capacity, operator feedback (machine and quality operators are invaluable sources of information.), etc. Most information is not digital or hardly digitizable. I don't completely agree with the article's classification of ARM…

I'd go one further and say you have to be at least a journeyman in whatever tools your process is using. The difference between someone designing a part in cad and someone designing the tool paths for the machine that makes the part in cam is night and day.

What about using simulation(or estimation using software) to understand the manufacturing process well enough to design for it, without being in the factory?

Re: UK's hardware talent is being wasted

#777

Post by tonyarkles »

rbanffy wrote: post #740
llm_trw wrote: post #635

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'd go one further and say you have to be at least a journeyman in whatever tools your process is using. The difference between someone designing a part in cad and someone designing the tool paths for the machine that makes the part in cam is night and day.

> The difference between someone designing a part in cad and someone designing the tool paths for the machine that makes the part in cam is night and day. I remember, in a CNC programming class, the instructor calling out one of the students on a lathe program: "One millimeter increments?! What material do you think you are using? Styrofoam?!". That class is where I feel in love with the ASR-33 teletype and its caden…

> "One millimeter increments?! What material do you think you are using? Styrofoam?!"

I'm an EE not a MechE but I'd be truly curious to know if there are any MechE programs where a fresh graduate would have ever heard the term "feeds & speeds".

In a similar vein, I learned to solder in EE but not because of any of my course work. We were lucky enough to have an aerospace electronics manufacturer situated on the north edge of campus. The IEEE Student Society worked out a deal with them where EE students who wanted to learn could come and do a 3-hour crash course with the techs. I could solder before I did the course, but my ability to solder well improved dramatically as a result of those 3 hours of training. And, even more importantly than learning to solder, I learned a ton of things about solderability: what makes a circuit board easy to solder and what makes it hard to solder under different manual and automated manufacturing techniques (wave soldering, paste + pick & place, etc).

Re: UK's hardware talent is being wasted

#778

Post by charlieyu1 »

incog_nit0 wrote: post #143

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…

Feels the same. Moved to UK a couple of years ago, can’t find a £25k job. Found some outsourced work at American companies and now suddenly I’m going to hit the higher tax bracket

Re: UK's hardware talent is being wasted

#779

Post by flir »

hintymad wrote: post #679
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…

UK ignited the First Industrial Revolution. It's sad to see that UK has slipped to number 16 or lower when it came to the market share of global manufacturing. And the problem is not to just UK, but to pretty much all the developed countries. Many nations and people have benefited greatly from globalization, but I have to ask: is it worth it if the cost is forfeiting my own country's manufacturing know-how and supply…

When I was a kid (80s) I knew old boys with lathes and mills and pillar drills at the bottom of the garden. They were the last generation, I think, of a tradition rooted in the Victorian era which informally transferred a lot of knowledge from one generation to the next.

My pet theory is that their disappearance is tied closely to the cost of land. I see US-based hardware hobbyists' shops on YouTube, and I think "I couldn't even afford to build a shed that big". The tools themselves are often actually pretty cheap second hand at auction, because the demand is so low, but I live on the back of a postage stamp in comparison with those guys.

(Another possibility is simply that software ate the world.)

Re: UK's hardware talent is being wasted

#780

Post by rbanffy »

tonyarkles wrote: post #777
rbanffy wrote: post #740

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The difference between someone designing a part in cad and someone designing the tool paths for the machine that makes the part in cam is night and day. I remember, in a CNC programming class, the instructor calling out one of the students on a lathe program: "One millimeter increments?! What material do you think you are using? Styrofoam?!". That class is where I feel in love with the ASR-33 teletype and its caden…

> "One millimeter increments?! What material do you think you are using? Styrofoam?!" I'm an EE not a MechE but I'd be truly curious to know if there are any MechE programs where a fresh graduate would have ever heard the term "feeds & speeds". In a similar vein, I learned to solder in EE but not because of any of my course work. We were lucky enough to have an aerospace electronics manufacturer situated on the north…

> if there are any MechE programs where a fresh graduate would have ever heard the term "feeds & speeds".

This was an extracurricular activity, and the MechE's were in their fifth year or so. I was in my first year (semester, really) and I was suggested I take the course because I was already a reasonable programmer and there was very little materials in the course, but it was more about programming the machines (simple loops, no real decisions, etc).

I was doing 0.1mm increments in my code because I "felt" steel wouldn't be soft enough for more, but I never got any real training on that before second year.

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