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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

#121

Post by insane_dreamer »

marbro wrote: post #53
mapt wrote: post #12

A lot of these complaints are not about an industry, but about late stage capitalism. About a failing society that privileges profits over social progress and material productivity because oligarchs and aristocracy own the institutions and are running this thing into the ground on base class instinct. All these cool "save the world" school projects exist because the current people running the world are deciding what…

Socialism isn't the solution, it's the problem. People deserve to be paid for work and the better the work that they do, the more they deserve to be paid, even though that can be much more than the average person earns.

I don't think you understand socialism and capitalism.

Suppression of wages is very much a feature of capitalism (the company's mission is to acquire capital for shareholders; technology that lowers costs by reducing the need for labor, or reducing the payment for labor, is a goal); whereas socialism holds that those who do the work should benefit from their labor (workers should own the means of production).

A "socialist" company in the U.S. would be an employee-owned company or a co-op (like REI) though they would never call themselves that because Americans don't understand what socialism is (and have been taught that it's "evil").

Re: UK's hardware talent is being wasted

#123

Post by Brybry »

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.

The U.S. is still the second largest manufacturer in the world by a large margin [1][2]

Like, yes, manufacturing's % of US GDP is low (and has been decreasing for a long time) and manufacturing employment is flat or slowly increasing but we're still making a lot of stuff.

[1] https://www.nist.gov/el/applied-economics-office/manufacturi...

[2] https://worldpopulationreview.com/country-rankings/manufactu...

Re: UK's hardware talent is being wasted

#124

Post by roenxi »

insane_dreamer wrote: post #112
roenxi wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> there are simply no such successful Empires anywhere in the world anymore There is the US not-an-Empire [0] though, that'll probably count when the history books reflect on the present era. WWI/II can very easily be interpreted as a transition of power away from incompetent British leadership (indeed, European monarchies - the change pre- post- WWI is striking) towards more capable US-based leadership. It isn't cle…

I think it was more about economics than competency. By the end of WW2 the UK was bankrupt and completely ruined economically, while the US had become the industrial powerhouse of the world thanks to abundant resources, manpower, and the fact that the war largely took place far from its borders (a few tiny islands notwithstanding). By the end of WW2 the US owned nearly all the gold that Europe previously owned which…

If the UK wants to pretend that WW2 (or, indeed, WW1) happened like a shock storm, unforseen and unforseeable, with no involvement from them they are welcome to do that. The result of that attitude was that the UK parliament was only allowed to govern a small and increasingly irrelevant island with lousy weather and steadily worsening economic prospects instead of a global empire.

There is a lesson for people governing global empires here - don't allow major wars to blow up on your borders. Or, ideally, anywhere. Maybe spend some time promoting peace and prosperity. Train the diplomats in diplomacy.

You'll notice that the US solution at the end of WWII was completely different to the European settlement at the end of WWI. And the US approach to warring was a lot more staid than the UK's. These are basic matters of competence.

Re: UK's hardware talent is being wasted

#125

Post by wakawaka28 »

Brybry wrote: post #123
wakawaka28 wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

The U.S. is still the second largest manufacturer in the world by a large margin [1][2] Like, yes, manufacturing's % of US GDP is low (and has been decreasing for a long time) and manufacturing employment is flat or slowly increasing but we're still making a lot of stuff. [1] https://www.nist.gov/el/applied-economics-office/manufacturi... [2] https://worldpopulationreview.com/country-rankings/manufactu...

I don't think we make a lot of stuff but we do make some of the most expensive stuff. So a lot of stats really don't reflect how unbalanced our trade is in real terms.

Re: UK's hardware talent is being wasted

#126

Post by throwaway48476 »

bell-cot wrote: post #74
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…

> 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.

Re: UK's hardware talent is being wasted

#127

Post by kjellsbells »

bsnnkv wrote: post #115

I left the UK for the USA in 2020. It was only last week that another HN commenter finally opened my eyes to the fact that since I have left the UK, I have become someone with the ability to take things from 0 to 1.[1] I do not believe I could have achieved what I have in the last half-decade if I had stayed in the UK. There is something deeply rooted in the UK's contemporary culture (which I cannot yet fully explain…

So good to read this and feel...validated, somehow. The UK is culturally a very difficult place to start and run a business. There's a crabs in the bucket mentality that I didnt have words for before I'd left the UK for a few years, but now when I visit or do business there is absolutely everywhere.

One business thing that really strikes me is that people in the UK treat bankruptcy as a moral failing, as if you cheated your investors, and not a strictly financial one, as in, you ran out of cash before achieving product market fit. It seems rooted in an unusually Victorian ethis, which is ironic, because in that era, businesses started and folded all the time.

Re: UK's hardware talent is being wasted

#128

Post by throwaway48476 »

roenxi wrote: post #124
insane_dreamer wrote: post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think it was more about economics than competency. By the end of WW2 the UK was bankrupt and completely ruined economically, while the US had become the industrial powerhouse of the world thanks to abundant resources, manpower, and the fact that the war largely took place far from its borders (a few tiny islands notwithstanding). By the end of WW2 the US owned nearly all the gold that Europe previously owned which…

If the UK wants to pretend that WW2 (or, indeed, WW1) happened like a shock storm, unforseen and unforseeable, with no involvement from them they are welcome to do that. The result of that attitude was that the UK parliament was only allowed to govern a small and increasingly irrelevant island with lousy weather and steadily worsening economic prospects instead of a global empire. There is a lesson for people governi…

Indeed. Choose peace if possible instead of rushing into war. Nothing that happened in the Balkans was important to the UK.

Re: UK's hardware talent is being wasted

#129

Post by WillPostForFood »

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.

They would have been better off losing. Crazy when you think about it.

Better if they had let the Nazis won and ruled the UK? WTF?

Re: UK's hardware talent is being wasted

#130

Post by [deleted] »

monero-xmr wrote: post #110
smartties wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This seems to be the case for most European countries, particularly here in France. We’re experiencing stagnation, or perhaps even a decline. Launching a product in Europe is significantly more challenging due to the market’s high fragmentation. I don’t have much hope for the future of tech companies in Europe.

It’s exhausting trying to explain this to American leftists. They believe the UK / EU is rich, their healthcare is amazing and “free”, and no one has to work more than 35 hours a week. They visit London and Paris once in 10 years for vacation and think they understand the economic order.

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