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UK's hardware talent is being wasted

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Re: UK's hardware talent is being wasted

#681

Post by HPsquared »

jahnu wrote: post #566
graemep wrote: post #463

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The UK did not choose austerity: https://commonslibrary.parliament.uk/research-briefings/sn06... but still has worse growth than the US.

They most certainly did https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_Kingdom_government_aust... What they didn't do, unlike PIGS, was also tough reforms which are paying back now https://www.reuters.com/breakingviews/flying-piigs-nations-s...

The Conservative party used austerity rhetoric as a way to win votes, but they did not cut spending other than reversion to the mean after the high spending around 2008.

See here for international comparison of government spending as % of GDP (the second figure showing trends over time), UK is not an outlier:

https://www.imf.org/external/datamapper/exp@FPP/USA/GBR/CZE/...

Re: UK's hardware talent is being wasted

#682

Post by SJC_Hacker »

lmm wrote: post #320
dzhiurgis wrote: post #266

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> No public transport When I live in London I didn't drive, which was kinda nice but also meant I've only been out of city like once a year. Sitting in traffic sucks of course, but driving rurally opens so much. As for weekends - driving and hiking I guess?

Sure, but at that point you're having to buy a car (which is much harder as a young person - car prices have gone up, insurance has gone up faster, the driving test is harder than it was and lessons cost more...), you'll need somewhere to park it which adds to your housing costs, you still can't go drinking, and in general you're cut off from a lot of what young people are doing.

No Uber/Lyft in the UK?

Re: UK's hardware talent is being wasted

#683

Post by constantcrying »

pjc50 wrote: post #678
constantcrying wrote: post #675

>Unlike lucrative software jobs, hardware engineering demands physical presence. Genuinely baffling. What is talking about? Most hardware jobs involve sitting in front of Design and simulation software.

Eventually the hardware comes back from the factory and somebody has to do bringup. It doesn't need constant in office presence, but it does need to happen some days. Sometimes you even need to go to the factory itself.

If you are doing CAE why would you ever need to look at the physical object?

Re: UK's hardware talent is being wasted

#684

Post by pjc50 »

hbrav wrote: post #647

I'm a Brit who has worked in finance and AI. I honestly want to move into building hardware. My background is physics, I want to build things that make the world better. But the businesses just seem absent. One of the UK's most exciting hardware projects was Reaction Engines, and they went bankrupt recently. I really want to know what we can do to fix this. As a country, we aren't building things that people want. Wh…

> As a country, we aren't building things that people want.

The key distinction is between "what people want", "what people are prepared to pay for", and "what the people with all the money really want to buy".

The huge success of gatcha games which understand the economic inequality among their audience is important. Most of the free users are effectively there as an audience for the few whales who pay for the whole thing.

Similarly, startups are not so much about serving unmet needs as about fishing for whale VCs, of which there are very few and all searching in the same pond of Silicon Valley. They in turn want whale companies: a mere profitable business isn't enough, it has to be world-dominating.

The financial sector makes a lot of money because it serves the customers who have the money.

Re: UK's hardware talent is being wasted

#685

Post by constantcrying »

rfool wrote: post #648

Oh no! What you describe is generally known as a 100% german trait. You cannot steal it from us and relabel as british! No, Sir! BTW: your examples stink. From first to last one: > Sarah: Built a fusion reactor at 16. Now? Debugging fintech payment systems. Nice, but that fusion reactor? Where is it? Did she really accomplish something?

Germany has multiple successful and innovative engineering companies, where engineers work for good wages.

>Where is it? Did she really accomplish something?

Building a fusion reactor is not that hard, although that example is probably hyperbole. Note that a fusion reactor is something totally different than a fusion reactor which outputs net energy.

Re: UK's hardware talent is being wasted

#686

Post by pjc50 »

ashergill wrote: post #663

> The reality for most graduates is even grimmer: > • £25,000 starting salaries at traditional engineering firms > • Exodus to consulting or finance just because it's compensated better This is _exactly_ my career so far. The key thing about the British economy is that while most things operate in a free market, construction is centrally planned by councillors who are incentivised to block most development. So the wh…

I used to live and work in Cambridge. In many ways it's a victim of its own success; people will, not unreasonably, argue that it's a beautiful little town of historic buildings, embedded in a primarily agricultural county of either prime agricultural land or protected wetland. They're not going to let you build Shenzen in Shelford no matter what the economic benefit might be. Meanwhile it's close enough to London that the property prices tick upwards to London commuter weighting.

(This is also why we have expensive electricity, because people oppose building any infrastructure. I'm coming round to the idea that there should just be county-by-county referendums where people have to pick either blanket allowing energy development or having a bill surcharge.)

Re: UK's hardware talent is being wasted

#687

Post by alephnerd »

dukeyukey wrote: post #561
HPsquared wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

On the other hand, the UK has all these cheap engineers. Is it just that they're not actually cheap, on the international market?

Cheap compared to the US. On-par for most of the Western world. Expensive on the international market.

Not really. UK salaries are largely comparable to those for a similar caliber of talent in China or India ($30-50k mid-career is doable in both markets).

The difference is countries like India, Czechia, Poland, Israel, Romania, etc all provide competitive tax incentives or subsidizes for R&D work, so you can hire competitive talent AND get preferential tax treatment.

Re: UK's hardware talent is being wasted

#688

Post by pjc50 »

louthy wrote: post #633
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.

Bit of a distance to go for a pint in the evening.

Isn't JLR in Solihull? That's two hours from London.

Re: UK's hardware talent is being wasted

#689

Post by youngtaff »

wakawaka28 wrote: post #659
youngtaff wrote: post #495

Earlier quoted context omitted.

He wasn't a Muslim he was brought up a Christian! The rumours were he was an asylum seeker who came over on a boat But as you end up quoting Breitbart what hope is there

Just because someone was "brought up as a Christian" doesn't mean they are one. And he WAS a terrorist or wannabe terrorist, as evidenced by everything said in that article. You're over here whining about Breitbart as your neighbors are being jailed for merely talking about these issues in a way that displeases your overlords.

Just because he was a wannabe terrorist doesn't make him a Muslim which what you claimed

The people who were jailed were generally jailed for rioting and incitement to riot

Re: UK's hardware talent is being wasted

#690

Post by pjc50 »

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…

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.
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