Earlier quoted context omitted.
Fundholding GPs don't do badly. A lot get 6 figures if they are partners in a surgery. I think most Doctors etc need to wait until they're consultants until they make decent money. But I'm like you - fell into banking due to being a Lotus Notes developer when it was flavour of the month and have never left. I reckon I'm on over double what I would be if I'd ended up working for IBM or Cap Gemini or similar. [And I sh…
Is 6 figures a lot?
UK's hardware talent is being wasted
521–530 of 1001 posts
Re: UK's hardware talent is being wasted
#522Earlier quoted context omitted.
Fundholding GPs don't do badly. A lot get 6 figures if they are partners in a surgery. I think most Doctors etc need to wait until they're consultants until they make decent money. But I'm like you - fell into banking due to being a Lotus Notes developer when it was flavour of the month and have never left. I reckon I'm on over double what I would be if I'd ended up working for IBM or Cap Gemini or similar. [And I sh…
I don't know, the doctor route seems like a lot of work for the money. My FIL told his kids not to do it, and he was a surgeon who ran a department. They messed around with the doctors' pensions, and it made a lot of them quit. Conditions are also awful, he started the department in a temporary building and retired with it still there. A doctor is also a kid who got full A grades as a high school graduate. They'd hav…
Yes, because the number of med school places in the UK is limited by the government (because they have to fund the extra cost of the course over what students pay in tuition fees). You don't really need to be that smart to be a doctor.
Re: UK's hardware talent is being wasted
#523Earlier quoted context omitted.
IMO the UK should look at what Singapore did and maybe learn from that. There's really no excuse for a country like the UK other than ordinary plain and simple mis-management from the top. Singapore did not depend on neighboring countries to climb out of 3rd world poverty. To name an example.
It's a political issue. There are things the UK is good at - finance, culture/media, software and yes hardware innovation, legal services, tourism. But since the GFC especially, none of these things are considered "right" by the electorate. Instead we romanticise unproductive legacy stuff, and an NHS which, while its staff are in many cases heroic, spends most of its vast budget cleaning up the mess of a population w…
The bicycle is the slow death of the planet. General Director of Euro Exim Bank Ltd. got economists thinking when he said: "A cyclist is a disaster for the country's economy: he does not buy cars and does not borrow money to buy. He does not pay for insurance policies. He does not buy fuel, does not pay for the necessary maintenance and repairs. He does not use paid parking. He does not cause serious accidents. He does not require multi-lane highways. He does not get fat. Healthy people are neither needed nor useful for the economy. They don't buy medicine. They do not go to hospitals or doctors. Nothing is added to the country's GDP (gross domestic product). On the contrary, every new McDonald's restaurant creates at least 30 jobs: 10 cardiologists, 10 dentists, 10 dietary experts and nutritionists, and obviously, people who work at the restaurant itself." Choose carefully: cyclist or McDonald's? It is worth considering. P.S. Walking is even worse. Pedestrians don't even buy bicycles.
Re: UK's hardware talent is being wasted
#524Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's called capitalism because we use capital to allocate value creation. So obviously finance extracts wealth, that's their job in a capitalist system.
But in the case of OP the value creation does not happen because they are working in finance instead of in a job creating value. I want to see some decent analysis of the situation, not stories about how the system is supposed to work.
Re: UK's hardware talent is being wasted
#525Here's a story I tell from time to time. When I was at uni, we had an internship as part of the course. The course was a joint course between Engineering and Econ/Management, so you could choose from a very wide variety of industries to satisfy the thesis requirement. The business school would coordinate the internships. So I went interviewing in the engineering firms to the west of the country. Aerospace, materials,…
If you are only doing it for the money, your point is fair - but there are many of us for whom - beyond reasonable necessities - that is at best a secondary consideration. Anybody who moves from engineering to finance doesn't have their heart in engineering - which is fine, but its not like they had no choice. Agree though that London and parts of the South place extra pressures on people looking to build a life and…
Ahhh, the classic no true engineer / scotsman argument ... I couldn't possible be an Engineer because I like hard software projects with smart people, good budgets, and tight deadlines.
Re: UK's hardware talent is being wasted
#526The comparison of salaries doesn't necessarily make sense there. Cost of life in the UK is only high in London, and remains lower than California. I remember working as a software engineer on £32k, and I could still afford a 3-bedroom house with a garden, garage and a car.
Re: UK's hardware talent is being wasted
#527I think a lot of this is exactly right - but one tiny caveat I'd add is that comparing the UK to the USA is sometimes a misnomer. On a size basic, the UK is much more comparible to a US state that the USA as a whole, and a lot of the observations made here are probably equally true of some US states like Colorado where talent is moved out to California.
The UK is almost twice the size of the largest US state--California. And that comparison doesn't fare well for the UK. The UK is below the US' poorest state in terms of GDP per capita.
Re: UK's hardware talent is being wasted
#528Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yes there are ridiculous rules like that are enforced. However tbh she should have checked first. Rules around how the area should look, should be decided by people that live there. There are many better examples where it makes a lot of sense for the locals to be strict about rules about what can be erected. I used to live near the Village of Corfe Castle. Generally the argument is that the place would lose its chara…
But it's _good_ when houses look different. Growing up my family would drive around new developments and say "ugg, these cookie-cutter houses all look the same, I miss when you we built unique and individual houses" and then it's jarring to move somewhere where people value conformity above all else and being different is considered bad. God forbid your house has eaves. Explains a lot, actually. I'm not talking about…
You decide you own level of involvement in the community.
> I note that your example doesn't seem to have a problem putting car parks in, incidentally.
It is very interesting that whenever you bring up an example where it illustrates a particular point well, they will try to find anything they can point to so they can dismiss the general point being made. Guess what, a place in rural England that you can only travel easily to via car or coach will prioritise parking.
BTW I suspect knowing that area, you probably couldn't build anything other than parking in those places.
Re: UK's hardware talent is being wasted
#529Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yes there are ridiculous rules like that are enforced. However tbh she should have checked first. Rules around how the area should look, should be decided by people that live there. There are many better examples where it makes a lot of sense for the locals to be strict about rules about what can be erected. I used to live near the Village of Corfe Castle. Generally the argument is that the place would lose its chara…
That's fair when it comes to villages, but it's mostly the edge of small cities, and within larger ones, that growth needs to happen - because that's where infrastructure exists or can be added on. Let the Cotswolds and Kent Weald be chocolate-box nimbyland, but keep it out of places that are trying to get work done.
Re: UK's hardware talent is being wasted
#530Earlier quoted context omitted.
You've got the wrong end of this one. UK has long pursued a strategy of "social mobility", which is shorthand for: some places will be shit, and if you're hardworking or clever you can and should leave. So the bright, capable people from white working-class towns either joined the middle classes or skipped the country entirely a generation or two ago. Leaving behind a bunch of people for whom no wage will tempt them…
There is a constant narrative that is pushed on everyone that immigration is necessary because people won't do the menial jobs. There is a huge number of problems with this this narrative. * Menial jobs were/are normally done in the past by younger more inexperienced people. These were usually done part time while in education. This allows younger people to build basic competency and money management skills. They are…
Menial routine work for juniors has been eliminated or automated to the margins, that much is true. No office-boys and far fewer supermarket cashiers. For those with people skills, there's plenty of café work, but that's about it.
On the flip side though, the educational/academic landscape for the upper quartile of young adults is hugely more competitive. Nobody is making it to a Russell Group uni on cruise control, and getting top grades AND having a part time job AND hobbies and a social life isn't easy.
Then you have menial work that's actually fairly skilled. Social care, childcare and so on. That's not something a student is going to do for a couple of years on the way to something better.
And a shift, for various reasons, to the contracted-out agency model for cleaning. Mostly done by immigrants, but they work harder than most semi-retired Brits would be willing to. Even if they're less flexible than the old boy who'd fix a bad door or window as well as sweeping the floor, and have none of his loyalty.
UberEats on the other hand is taking the mick. A lot of their workers are undocumented, the self-employed contractor status allows the operator to avoid the normally stringent penalties for immigration law breaches. I don't know if they lobbied for the law to be that way, but it's a massive loophole. So this is illegal work and maybe shouldn't be conflated with legit immigration. How much it's a problem I'm not sure.. the actual numbers are quite small, but like the loudspeakers on the bus thing, it's a very visible breach of the norms and rules, so there's an argument that it's bad for society on that basis. And like I say, the operator is blatantly exploiting it, they can't be blind to what's going on. I'm pretty liberal on immigration, miss the positive contribution the former Eastern Bloc countries made prior to Brexit, but the whole food delivery sector is overdue a clean out.