UK's hardware talent is being wasted • Hacker News Board

Re: UK's hardware talent is being wasted

#631

Post by marcinzm » Mon, Jan 20, 2025, 1:05 PM UTC

mrtksn wrote: post #619

marcinzm wrote: post #610

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You've fallen into the classic trap of thinking about the very very very tiny of people who are billionaires. Very few people are billionaires. Very few startup founders will ever be even if they succeed. Life changing money is going from $50k/year to $1m/year. Not from $1b to $2b. The vast majority of tax burden and complexity hits the middle class. > When Apple was founded, the tax rates were %70. It was 35% on cap…

In Europe the capital gain tax ranges from %37 in Norway, %34 in France, %26 in Germany and Italy, %10 in Bulgaria and %0 with conditions in many other places. Tax heavens are a European invention anyway. And no, millionaire or billionaire doesn't matter much. Europe lacks Billionaires not Millionaires. Europe is full of small businesses and by small I mean millions in profits and revenues. In Europe %99 of the compa…

> Europe lacks Billionaires not Millionaires.

It lacks both.

The US has 8.5% millionaires. Germany has 4.1. France has 5.6. Norway has 5.9. The UK has 5.8. Once you include the rest of the EU it goes even lower.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_number_of...

edit: And in the US there's no need to start a business to be a millionaire. You can become one by just working a regular job. Sales, consulting, tech, finance, etc. jobs can even pay you $1m per year.

Re: UK's hardware talent is being wasted

#632

Post by sealeck » Mon, Jan 20, 2025, 1:06 PM UTC

James_K wrote: post #579

DaedPsyker wrote: post #547

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A few here have commented on different aspects, and they have their part to play but I agree with you, market fragmentation is the scale killer. From an outside perspective it might appear like Europe is a true single market like the US but it isn't. Scaling to a European level isn't impossible but it is difficult. Some of that will just be difficult to do anything about, language, different cultures, etc. On the pol…

Market fragmentation is a measurable phenomenon, as far as a language goes. The language barrier is just the cost of a translator. Is that cost prohibitively high in Europe? I hear a lot of explanations of why Europe has fewer tech companies than America, but they are almost never backed by statistics. The most obvious answer continues to be the Bretton Woods system, by which large amounts of money are funnelled into…

> The language barrier is just the cost of a translator.

Is it?

> Market fragmentation is a measurable phenomenon, as far as a language goes.

Market fragmentation isn't about language fragmentation – the EU has no single market for services currently, which means if you want to launch a product EU-wide you are effectively launching a product in 27 different countries. There is some harmonization, but not much. If you launch a product in the US you have a large fully harmonized single market.

Re: UK's hardware talent is being wasted

#633

Post by louthy » Mon, Jan 20, 2025, 1:06 PM UTC

refrigerator wrote: post #19

This is spot on. All the smart and ambitious people I know who studied (non-software) Engineering at university in the UK have ended up going into software engineering via self-teaching or finance/consulting because the only hardware engineering career paths seem to be working for Rolls Royce in the middle of nowhere with terrible pay, or alternatively working at Jaguar Land Rover in the middle of nowhere with terrib…

> Rolls Royce in the middle of nowhere

100 miles north of London. 1 hour on the train.

> Jaguar Land Rover in the middle of nowhere

100 miles north of London. 1 hour on the train.

Re: UK's hardware talent is being wasted

#634

Post by hardlianotion » Mon, Jan 20, 2025, 1:08 PM UTC

graemep wrote: post #488

pjc50 wrote: post #455

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Under-rated comment. This is basically the whole explanation. 2008 did a huge amount of damage, not just immediately but to long-term mindsets. Ironically I think it's even entrenched the meme that the only real way to make money in the UK is property. We're all Georgists now. (this includes property as an export industry! Leaving increasing areas of the UK owned by overseas absentee landlords.)

The problem is that people think property is a risk free way of making money - even if they borrow heavily to invest. Maybe what we need is a property price crash.

In the UK it more or less is a risk free way to make money. The government's hand is always seen when a danger to the property market prices hoves into sight.

Re: UK's hardware talent is being wasted

#635

Post by llm_trw » Mon, Jan 20, 2025, 1:09 PM UTC

Beretta_Vexee wrote: post #338

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…

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.

Re: UK's hardware talent is being wasted

#636

Post by YakBizzarro » Mon, Jan 20, 2025, 1:09 PM UTC

llm_trw wrote: post #611

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…

Parts are pretty much instant, pcb turn around times are 3 to 15 days depending on how complex they are. Even in the bad old days of punch cards and priesthoods the turn around for software was faster. I have a little pcb mill in the garage that I use for prototypes. To this day I've not met another EE that knows what a voronoi mapping is, or why you'd want one. In a previous startup where I was the software engineer…

Only for simple pcb. If you are making multi-layer pcb with complex stacks, pcb manufacturing and soldering (with associated tooling setup, validation and so) are easily 2 months of turnaround

Re: UK's hardware talent is being wasted

#637

Post by Folcon » Mon, Jan 20, 2025, 1:12 PM UTC

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…

Just to chime in and say that bootstrapping does work in this domain, I say that as someone who's had a few friends go down that route, but yes, it's really tough.

There's also people I know who built small scale solutions and then managed to push that into funding and funnily enough a Kickstarter as well though I don't think he'd recommend anyone follow that route.

Re: UK's hardware talent is being wasted

#638

Post by sealeck » Mon, Jan 20, 2025, 1:13 PM UTC

nobodywillobsrv wrote: post #331

alecco wrote: post #285

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The problem is policy is oriented to growing GDP and not GDP per capita. Large corporations benefit from GDP growth and lower wages, so they incentivize the political class to grow the population artificially (wink-wink).

The other problem is the welfare state or just the state. So much graft and just living off printed money. It pushes out success. What percent of the UK is effectively civil servants or people receiving benefits? What percent are net takers? A lot

> The other problem is the welfare state or just the state. So much graft and just living off printed money. It pushes out success.

I see these uninformed comments all the time, and to be they suggest that the person in question has an intense ideological bent, but an aversion to evidence. As another commenter pointed out, a large amount of UK benefits spending (~£100bn) is on the state pension (the single largest benefit).

You are correct that there are a large number of economically inactive people in the UK (something like 20% of working-age people). We have had at least 50 years of government presupposing that the problem here is that these people are lazy, and a little stick will motivate them back to work. The mere fact that this has not worked (and we have tried it repeatedly) might suggest that the problem is a bit more complex than this.

One issue is that the general health of the population is very poor. Unfortunately, improving this is a very hard problem. I think people underestimate just how hard. If you could solve this, you would create hundreds of billions of pounds in value (I am not underestimating). Presumably some starting points would be working out how to lower the costs of fruit and vegetables and increase the cost of ultra-processed fast food. Not sure what else helps here. I would give this a read: https://billmitchell.org/blog/?p=61595

The other problem is that there are no jobs for the people in question, so even if they want to work (or are heavily incentivised to do so) they are not able to. The government can create some employment for these people, but a better vocational training system might help here.

The graft and living off printed money I do see is mostly in housing – people in the UK love to own and rent out houses. This means that (compared to e.g. Germany/Switzerland/Austria) there are very weak protections for renters. Additionally, when house prices are really high it makes it very challenging to build industries on top of this.

Re: UK's hardware talent is being wasted

#639

Post by IshKebab » Mon, Jan 20, 2025, 1:14 PM UTC

tikkabhuna wrote: post #301

The problem I see in the UK is a lack of hubs. I wrote to the Department for Levelling Up when it was a thing. Finance has done well in the UK due to London and having a significant number of firms in a single place. I can get a new job for a different company, doing a similar thing, in the same building. How does that work for any other industry in the UK? Its no wonder that wages haven't risen when moving job also…

> How does that work for any other industry in the UK?

I don't know about other industries but in silicon there are a few hubs - especially Cambridge, Bristol and London.

When I lived in London there was a big start-up scene around Hoxton.

It's not going to happen for consumer product type things (think Dyson) though because none of the manufacturing is in the UK. Who gets injection moulding done in the UK? Nobody. Dyson is a rare exception and even then it's only R&D that happens in the UK - manufacturing is all in Malaysia.

Re: UK's hardware talent is being wasted

#640

Post by cfd456 » Mon, Jan 20, 2025, 1:14 PM UTC

alephnerd wrote: post #6

gjsman-1000 wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Calling it right now: give it five years, and even Raspberry Pi will be relocating. ARM is already somewhat relocating - some of their newest cores, like Cortex A78, were designed in Austin.

I don't think they'd relocate, but that doesn't matter. They most likely will pull an ARM and hire almost entirely in the US and India instead of in the UK, because competitive British engineers would immigrate to the States, and you can get top tier Indian chip design talent across the spectrum for $30-60k.

It is impossible to immigrate to the US unless your employer is willing to go through the time-consuming and expensive process of sponsoring a visa + green card, which they have little reason to do since they can pay you less over here. I've been designing chips for years in the UK at ARM and elsewhere, haven't encountered anyone moving to the States