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

Re: UK's hardware talent is being wasted

#941

Post by yurishimo » Tue, Jan 21, 2025, 9:54 AM UTC

dash2 wrote: post #934

pjc50 wrote: post #686

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 th…

Surely even prime agricultural land is vastly (thousands of times?) less valuable than lab space for engineering companies.

Only if you place no value on the land simply existing as it does now and providing aesthetic value. Most people privileged enough to sit on a planning council coincidentally also trend towards valuing peace and quiet and are hesitant to approve projects that may disrupt their assumed way of life.

From the outside looking in, rural UK council politics seems like the epitome of “I got mine so bug off”. I think this is one reason why London is becoming a super hub (among other reasons). London broke the ice and now they are trying to keep progressing but physical distance is becoming a limiting factor. Other municipalities will need to embrace change if they want to keep developing into a place where people want to live and work.

Re: UK's hardware talent is being wasted

#942

Post by dukeyukey » Tue, Jan 21, 2025, 10:09 AM UTC

shermantanktop wrote: post #923

dukeyukey wrote: post #798

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This isn't my experience at all, and I've been in London tech for 8 years now. I'm not entirely sure what "low respect" means here, but anywhere I've worked the company is pretty wary of knarking of their developers because we can just up and find another job basically immediately. We get paid a fair bit too - not sure compared to finance, but not hard to hit the 95th percentile or so.

Glad to hear it’s working out for you. I’ve talked to too many UK devs who feel handcuffed when they get even 50% of the US equivalent, because it’s a pay cut to go elsewhere. But, as you say, it’s all relative.

Can't beat yourself up for not getting a salary commensurate with an entirely different economy and strict visa rules. That's just torturing yourself.

Re: UK's hardware talent is being wasted

#943

Post by Earw0rm » Tue, Jan 21, 2025, 10:25 AM UTC

ta1243 wrote: post #728

Earw0rm wrote: post #698

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How do poorer countries manage to avoid getting outright bankrupted by social care? Why is it such a black hole money-pit in the UK particularly?

More workers to older people ratio More social care from family (which is unpaid and thus is hidden in GDP figures) Less social care Expectation in the UK that wealthy old people should not pay for their own care and instead poorer working people should

Are we miscounting GDP?

That is, if someone goes out for work instead of caring for relatives, not only do we count their work as GDP, we also count the person who has to stand in for them.

So that's a large increase in paid work done, but a minimal amount of extra wellbeing generated. Especially if, say, each of them now has to drive 45 minutes each way.

If, as you say, care is paid for by other people working, are there interventions - either state or individual - to reduce the need to consume it? Obviously some people are just unlucky, and live a long time in a state of total incapacity (hence the "dementia tax" rhetoric), is it possible to incentivise people to do things that mean they need less of it - by spending a greater proportion of their lifespan in good health, say?

Re: UK's hardware talent is being wasted

#944

Post by Earw0rm » Tue, Jan 21, 2025, 10:29 AM UTC

lotsofpulp wrote: post #721

Earw0rm wrote: post #698

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How do poorer countries manage to avoid getting outright bankrupted by social care? Why is it such a black hole money-pit in the UK particularly?

It’s a black hole money-pit everywhere. There is no return on spending money for people who will never be productive again. The only way that kind of wealth transfer works is with a growing proportion of workers, but that has long not been the case in many developed countries. The solution for all these countries (even the US) is to dismantle all wealth transfer to old people. It might be the only way to incentivize…

Doesn't this create a situation where the old rely on their own younger generation to support them?

And therefore inequality between older people who have families (or have families that care about them) and those that don't?

I can see this particularly being a problem for countries like the UK which has long encouraged "upwardly-mobile" people to move away from their towns of origin in pursuit of economic opportunity, leading to families being widely dispersed across a country which, despite its fairly small size, is not especially fast to travel around.

Re: UK's hardware talent is being wasted

#945

Post by Earw0rm » Tue, Jan 21, 2025, 10:34 AM UTC

pjc50 wrote: post #700

Earw0rm wrote: post #184

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The problem isn't building stuff, it's building stuff where stuff needs to be. We built plenty of out-of-town shopping centres, business parks and industrial estates in the 70s, 80s, 90s. We stopped because it turns out they're, for the most part, shit. Given the choice, people will WFH and order off Amazon rather than go within a mile of these places. What we need is to tackle the vested interests in the towns and c…

Like Brexit, there's a huge overhang of misinformed old people who hate change, but have no vested interest in the real economy because their pensions stay the same even if they block growth. > against a backdrop of rural and less educated people mistrusting anything going on in the growth cities, and I don't just mean London. Quite. It's time for a campaign of bigging up the second and third cities. Of course, this…

This. London can't grow much more - it can densify up to a point, but you can't build much more on the edges of town without some enormously expensive infrastructure upgrades through the middle. Which they should probably do anyway, a tube line, a Crossrail line and a new HS line every decade or so, but neither Labour nor Tories are into that politically, because of London-envy in the rest of the country.

Manchester, Birmingham, Newcastle and the larger university cities on the other hand, masses of scope, and on a much smaller budget and shorter timescale.

Re: UK's hardware talent is being wasted

#946

Post by bArray » Tue, Jan 21, 2025, 10:34 AM UTC

zipy124 wrote: post #718

bArray wrote: post #553

I'm somewhat bucking this trend as a hardware engineer in London, a few comments: > Geographical Constraints: Unlike lucrative software jobs, hardware engineering demands physical presence. Not completely true. Our engineers take hardware home, and I have a mini-lab at home for developing hardware. If COVID2.0 kicked off tomorrow, we would be robust against this. > Venture Capital: European VCs, mostly bullish on fin…

One bedroom house shares in london (Zone 2 or further) are closer to £1-1.2k a room currently btw. They maybe get that high in Zone 1, but there's almost no reason to live in euston or kings cross over living in camden/kentish town for example in the northern direction.

Maybe it changed, I won't pretend I checked yesterday. I think it's still valid, you're still looking at a significant percentage of your wage.

Re: UK's hardware talent is being wasted

#947

Post by TheOtherHobbes » Tue, Jan 21, 2025, 10:36 AM UTC

yurishimo wrote: post #941

dash2 wrote: post #934

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Surely even prime agricultural land is vastly (thousands of times?) less valuable than lab space for engineering companies.

Only if you place no value on the land simply existing as it does now and providing aesthetic value. Most people privileged enough to sit on a planning council coincidentally also trend towards valuing peace and quiet and are hesitant to approve projects that may disrupt their assumed way of life. From the outside looking in, rural UK council politics seems like the epitome of “I got mine so bug off”. I think this is…

All of the UK's cities - apart from museums like Oxford and Cambridge - are full of real estate investment sprawl. There is no reason some of those spaces couldn't be used as labs and light factories. In fact there are plenty of brown field conversion projects turning old mills (etc) into new light industry hubs.

The bigger problems in the UK are business rates (extortionate), profiteering by landlords and land owners, insanely expensive utilities, crumbling physical infrastructure, and Brexit.

We could have had a government that invested/fixed in all of those things, but the big landords and land owners decided they didn't like that idea. They'd prefer to keep the country struggling and backward, because it appeals to their sense of aristocratic self-importance.

Re: UK's hardware talent is being wasted

#948

Post by DrScientist » Tue, Jan 21, 2025, 10:39 AM UTC

tomhoward wrote: post #921

DrScientist wrote: post #748

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Interested in your opinion on crowd-funding as a way of raising initial capital - ie cut out professional investors and go direct to potential customers?

I've seen it work once, but it was hard over the long term: LIFX (smart light globes) [1], which was launched on Kickstarter in 2012 by people working from the same co-working space and accelerator I was involved with then (so I kinda had a backstage view on it). Products like that work if there's natural consumer appeal built into the product, that you can convey in a video that gets people excited imagining how muc…

Thanks - there is no doubt software startups, with typically limited capital requirements are easier than almost anything else.

> Products like that work if there's natural consumer appeal built into the product,

I see customers as a wider pool than end consumers - they can also include businesses - quite a few large businesses also have investment arms.

For example you mentioned Philips - they have one - https://www.philips.com/a-w/about/innovation/philips-venture...

I guess the worry for startup's there is if you too close then they might 'steal' - however big companies are typically quite keen on upholding IP laws - they use their venture arms to spread their bets - partial stakes ( and inside knowledge ) on a whole array of startups.

Re: UK's hardware talent is being wasted

#949

Post by TheOtherHobbes » Tue, Jan 21, 2025, 10:43 AM UTC

GasVeteran wrote: post #940

bombcar wrote: post #884

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It'd be better than not having them. Major problems are rarely solved with one fell swoop, but instead thousands and thousands of small improvements.

It would be better if we just change the immigration policy. Last time I checked there was 400,000 leaving the country each year and somewhere between a million and 1.4 million entering. I live in the countryside (I live in a small flat btw so I don't care about property prices) and I don't want everywhere in the country built over, which seems to be something here everyone wants for some bonkers reason. If you want…

It's actually around 750,000, mostly third world, and around half of those are students.

Importing cheap foreign labour from the third world was always one of the goals of Brexit. This game gets played over and over - import cheap labour to keep wages down, lament about how the country is being invaded, and then blame immigrants for lack of investment, corporate profiteering, and other structural policy problems.

Re: UK's hardware talent is being wasted

#950

Post by Earw0rm » Tue, Jan 21, 2025, 10:50 AM UTC

youngtaff wrote: post #887

Earw0rm wrote: post #705

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Oh, I’m not saying old houses are better (although many of them have more generous sized rooms and plots) I’m saying as an absolute that the quality of most new build houses in the UK is shit from both design and construction perspectives A key test for me is look at the back of a new build house and see how ugly many of them are - they literally design them to have curb appeal but no appeal when you’re sitting in th…

The garden thing feels like a cultural bug. Sort of, everyone thinks they ought to have a garden, but most people don't actually, in practice, want to do the work to maintain one, nor do they want to pay the extra for the amount of space that makes a good and useful one.

Most of those new-builds with tiny, astroturf-and-slabs gardens and wooden fence panels would be better built as apartment blocks with a shared park. Or, if your cultural aversion to apartments is too strong, as seems to be the case in much of Anglo culture ("my own roof over my own head"), row/terrace-style housing again with outdoor space provided in the form of a shared public or private park.

It seems to work well in parts of Inner London anyway, the Georgian garden squares are way nicer than a garden almost any individual resident would have time to maintain. I don't know why we can't have more of that.