> • £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 whole economy is struggling, but industries that need physical space are especially hard hit. Your local council can't block you from writing more code, but can stop you from building lab space near where people want to live and work.
My first job out of uni was in a wonderful small engineering firm in Cambridge. Lab space there is eye-wateringly expensive because it's illegal to build enough, so we were based in a makeshift lab in an attic next to the sewage works. I loved working there, but it shows that we're restricting our small businesses unnecessarily through our planning system.
The solution is frustratingly simple, but politically suicidal for any government that tried to implement it: just legalise development subject to basic design codes. I hope we see some planning reform before it's too late for our struggling innovation industries.
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.)
This is a disease that has infected the entire West. It's just become impossible to do anything that requires space. Even industrial giants like Germany are now de-industrializing because it's just too hard to get permits for building anything new. Sure, labor costs, energy costs, environmental regulations, etc. are all bothersome, but what really makes German industry emigrate is how hard it is to get permission to change anything. It's such a self-inflicted wound.
> [The TCPA] moved Britain from a system where almost any development was permitted anywhere, to one where development was nearly always prohibited. Since [it] was introduced in 1947, private housebuilding has never reached Victorian levels, let alone the record progress achieved just before the Second World War.
> Today, local authorities still have robust powers to reject new developments, and little incentive to accept them. Historically, local governments encouraged development because their tax bases grew in line with the extra value created, but this incentive has been eroded by successive reforms that have centralised and capped local governments’ tax-raising powers.
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!! -- to Google. I think part of the issue is cultural - the level of ambition in the UK is just small compared to the US. Individual founders like Demis or Tom Blomfield may have it but recruiting enough talent with the ambition levels of early Palantir or OpenAI employees is so hard because there are so few. Instead, a lot of extremely smart people in the UK would rather get the 'safe' job at Google, or McKinsey than the 'this will never work but can you imagine how cool it would be if it did' job at a startup.
There are probably political reasons as well. Unfortunately the UK has not been well governed for 20 years or so, and hence economic outcomes as a whole have been abysmal.
> 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 (
Yes we have many comments on HN talking about how harmful the US VCs attitude is because they force good businesses into choosing between being unicorns and not getting funding.
I do not know the truth of it, but clearly its not obvious.
> Unfortunately the UK has not been well governed for 20 years or so, and hence economic outcomes as a whole have been abysmal.
I commented on this earlier. The UK's economic outcomes have been similar to comparable European economies (like Germany) and better than some (like France). Whatever the problem is, its not unique to the UK: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42766107
I do not think the UK is well run, but I think the west in general is badly run. Poorly thought out regulation, short termism in both politics and business, a focus on metrics subject to Goodhart's and Campbell's laws, and a poor understanding of the rest of the work (leading to bad foreign policy).
Completely agree, the problem in Europe is not regulations or anything like that - it is a mindset issue. It is one of things that europeans can learn from Americans.
My hypothesis is that this is a combination of old money and class consciousness. In other words, the rich are risk averse because all they care is preserving their wealth and the working class don’t believe and can’t even imagine that more is possible.
I'm from EU and would be totally open to move to UK if there was an opportunity to make more there while working on something cool. But there simply isn't?
Then there are US startups where I could likely make 2 or 3x what I make in EU or UK.
So why would talent every consider moving to the UK to build a startup in 2025 anyway?
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).
The safe job earns much much more unless you are the founder. Equity pay for start-ups in the UK for devs is very poor, or non-existent, and the base salary also very poor (and not even guaranteed to be paid if they go under). You can instead work for a company like nvidia, google or meta and get a huge base, and nice equity on top.
If UK startups paid equity to their devs, I would work a lot harder when I've worked at them, but startups require working hard and long hours and if I've got no skin in the game, what incetive do I have to make sure the company is successful.
> Instead, a lot of extremely smart people in the UK would rather get the 'safe' job at Google, or McKinsey than the 'this will never work but can you imagine how cool it would be if it did' job at a startup.
This isn't just an EU thing, for what it's worth. The US is the outlier.
Same. I grew up in Canada and my country didn't fund my dreams. The US did. It is a shame and the amount of loss that Canada has every single year because the dumb VCs who exist in Canada cannot look at that big picture.
For example, right now there is not a single VC in Canada who does large pre seed / seed investments based on an idea and the founding team.
In the US you can get a 1 million cheque within a week.
That is the real reason Canada is failing on a macro scale.
Circa 80% of world trade is done in USD, and the US literally creates it out of thin air, and it will all bleed into the economy somehow, someway.
Without sovereign protection you just can not compete with that, ever. It's really that simple.
Simply look at China they may export loads of goods but it's predominantly priced in USD, and what do they do with all that excise USD, the only thing they can do, buy US debt. It's truly perverse.
Or look at every UK company that was bought up with those very same magic dollars.
There are definitely political - and ultimately, military-industrial - reasons for this. The UK is deeply, deeply embedded in the Anglo-centric 5-eyes criminal superstructure, and plays a huge part in the subversion of human rights at immense scale around the world, that this criminal entity commits every second of the day.
The spook factor bleeds into every technological advancement which occurs in the UK, from GCHQ outwards, like a kraken with deep, deep tentacles.
I've worked with multiple UK-based startups which, as soon as they start to gain traction in international waters/markets, immediately becomes the target for GCHQ embedding/plants. This kills the startup.
Until the British people start prosecuting their war criminals and seeks justice for the immense human rights abuses that occur, every millisecond of every day, as a result of their out of control military-industrial oppression apparatus, there is simply no hope for UK technological industry.
The world sees this, even if the people of the UK do not - and routes around it, accordingly.
Nobody really wants to work with UK-based technology groups, knowing that they are liable for immediate corruption the moment their technology becomes relevant to, say, the people of Brazil, or Africa, or China.
My view is that the US startup culture exists because of wealth inequality at the $1-$20m net worth level. Wealth inequality is socially incentivized at that level because of the lack of a decent social safety net. If you don't save money then at 50 you may end up homeless on the street due to bad luck. But if you don't get bad luck then you end up at 50 with a large amount of money that you don't have much to do with. So you start investing some in riskier things because who cares.
US founders not from wealthy backgrounds can often get $500k from friends and family. I doubt those in the UK can do so.
There's massive massive social costs due to this in the US so be careful what you wish for.
Not just in startups. Feels like Arm lost almost their whole software division over a few years. This was an extremely stable high-profit-margin business, and it was obvious that it was uncompetitive on the labour market. But something in the culture stopped management from increasing salaries, so everyone buggered off to foreign companies.
I hear they fixed it eventually but seems like an unnecessary loss.
> The UK lost Deep Mind - which could have been OpenAI!! -- to Google.
Deepmind is still in the UK. And more, including foreign, bidders driving up prices for acquisitions and investments, will lead to more people making the jump.
I lived in Ireland for 10 years. It's not the same as the UK but there _is_ cultural overlap. Every time you shared a new idea with _anyone_, even things as simple as "I want to buy a site and build a house on it", the first thing you hear is how that's a bad idea, you will fail, it will never work, and you need to leave it to "professionals".
Not to mention the whole idea that trying to be successful is "notions" and should be sneered at.
Edit: To compare -
Me: "I want to build a house"
Irish friends: "That's a bad idea, you'll never make it work, you'll go bankrupt and it will kill you..."
California/Oregon friends: "Fuck yeah I'll bring a nailgun"
Going through our pre-seed round atm and it is incredibly frustrating. I haven't raised in the US so it may be similar there, but the amount of time wasted for a relatively small amount of money is painful.
I'm also not sure what the government can do. SEIS/EIS is a great scheme, but the SEIS limit of £250k feels almost too small to do anything meaningful, and EIS funds are generally later stage or re-investment from SEIS.
As a former founder (formerly living in London) trying to raise VC funding in London this is exactly what my experience.
I once did a pitch contest and they required we put together a business plan with financials. You want me to...what? Who on earth can read a pro forma for a pre-revenue SaaS business and say "ah yes this is worth of investment because this pro forma looks great".
> The UK lost Deep Mind - which could have been OpenAI!! -- to Google.
You're focusing on one success story out of thousands.
90%, or more, of US startups only exist to be sold to the highest bidder or to coast indefinitely long in infinite investor money, and never turn a profit.
There's still expectation in Europe at large that your company should have an actual business plan and a path to profitability.
I was also trying to raise recently. It's interesting to me that the UK has an absolutely incredibly generous startup investment scheme (SEIS)[0], and still hasn't managed to make this work. SEIS is ludicrously generous, and should make getting funding a breeze in the UK, and yet ... somehow it isn't.
0: If a few hurdles are jumped through, then an investor who gives you £250k can get £125k relief on their income tax (not what they'd have paid on £125k, literally the whole £125k), and then claim a further 50% back of the remainder from the government if you go bust.
Set UK/EU tech salaries at maybe 30%-50% of US, and factor in higher taxes. Then integrate over 40 years, resulting in a number from which investments can be drawn. Add to the corresponding US number all the profitable exits from previous ventures. There's just so much more US investment capital available.
It can be argued that a responsibility falls on EU equity companies, pension funds, and so on, but they do not make seed investments.
Quite frankly, it's cultural and the thing I hear a lot is simply: fuck that for a job!
I could quite happily get on fine at one of those big American style startups but I don't get excited about hype, I don't have the work culture it demands and I don't have a price on my soul. I'd rather earn a lot less, have extreme stability, have better family time and balance. On top of that there's something tasteless and unethical about a lot of the big startups. Do they really bring good things to society? Do I really want to be part of that?
If I can walk away with half the money, live a modest life and stand with my principles intact, I will take that over twice the money.
I don't think this is political at all. It's not a race either and we have no innate responsibility to build things like this.
I agree and it's a real shame, we used to spearhead some of the most initiative companies in technology (Acorn, Arm, Sinclair, Sage, Deepmind). Now it's just a shadow, while places like Silicon Valley or Stockholm have jetted ahead the UK just sort of stagnated - it's kind of embarrassing.
Brit / American checking in and agreeing. My first startup was a B2B SaaS and hiring in the UK was fantastic - the arbitrage was just silly. Experienced software developers (10+ years) @ GBP 70k / year - and that was close to non-finance full-market pay. The same people were averaging $250k in NYC / SF.
And yet, the UK hires were often better off after all expenses than the US hires.
Largely due to housing being slightly cheaper (other posters have pointed out, London is on par with SF / NY - the big difference being London expands, NYC and SF are both "islands" - yes SF is a peninsula, but commuting up 280 or 101 is not a pleasant experienced).
Also, even offering private healthcare (BUPA) - the UK hires were cheaper. I'm in my late 30s and reasonably healthy - my all-in, gold-plated UK policy was GBP 2k / year - I was at $2,000 / month in the US.
*However* - salaries in the UK are unsustainably low.
Three reasons:
[1] BOMAD - The Bank of Mom and Dad (parents paying / lending the deposit for a house so the mortgage is at a low rate) is effectively exhausted. This means that current entrants into the housing market are either renting (which is nearly as expensive as NYC, especially after the inflationary / interest rate jump), or saving to "buy" a house (I enclose in quotes because at a 95% mortgage you don't own much of your house).
[2]
Professional salaries outside of finance are way too low. My fiancee works in a highly skilled, professional field and her salary in 2024 was, in nominal terms the same as my starting salary in NYC 17 years ago working for a large investment bank IN THE BACK OFFICE - where salaries were decidedly blue-collar. My unproven hypothesis is that the UK professional world is still largely geared towards those with alternative assets, private incomes (especially high-prestige non-professional jobs, especially around politics). This makes it impossible to compete with US venture backed startups, even post-ZIRP, because the offer is always going to be better. And yet that private-income driven base has largely been eroded through capital gains, inheritance tax and general downward social mobility (or, perhaps, less doom-and-gloom - averaging towards the center. The difference in wealth and income between the upper-middle class and the lower-middle class has narrowed significantly).
[3] There has been over the last 5-7 years significant negative messaging and tax policy against economic success. A confiscatory top-tax band, an erosion of a "job perks" friendly tax regime and a political climate that is very anti-success, even prior to the labour govt (largely started at the same time, though perhaps not by, Theresa May's 2015 speech and focus on "Just about managing").
VC in the UK is hard, largely because the majority (though by no means all) VCs are focused on aping mid-market pension managers. Their ambition is limited to businesses that already work (and yet anything transformative by definition does not work yet) - and are interested mostly in post-revenue companies with linear or lightly superlinear growth.
This, IMNSHO, is largely caused by the fact that, given state expenditure and the corp and personal tax burden, there simply isn't enough capital for US style VC - the portfolio approach requires capital to absorb failures. Most VCs here cannot afford failure.
The closest we get is the EIS / SEIS tax policy, which allows the offsetting of losses in failed businesses (by the equivalent of Accredited Investors) - as well as a friendly Cap Gains treatment of successes. But these are largely made as common stock investments by individuals - and limited to a very small scale.
Which brings me to my final point - the SAFE note is not only not ubiquitous here, it's rare. Even pre-seed investments are either common stock or (more rarely) convertible notes. This requires a level of diligence (even on small tickets) that make capital formation incredibly burdensome.
There's absolutely a path to resolving this - but the UK first has to make a political and cultural decision to embrace startup-led GDP growth, which is has not yet made.
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 terrible pay
Here'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, that kind of thing. Someone offered me £12K/year. Even for a student, that seems kind of low as I'd be looking for a short term accommodation somewhere. I kept it secret from the business school because I knew they'd pressure me to take it.
A couple of weeks later, I got an offer from Intel. Not in engineering, but in marketing. £15k, just about enough to pay rent and eat. But a lot more than engineering. I took the job and has a great time, and I still know people there. Turned down the return offer, due to the firm itself seeming a bit complacent, but also...
During the internship I went to see my friend in central London. He had landed the coveted Goldman's internship. Fully paid apartment for the period, with a view of the river, plus money. £37k/year if you include the free rent.
So when I went back to university for the final part of the degree, it was clear where I was going to look for work.
I got a job at a prop trading shop, and in the first week a guy told me about his story. He had originally taken one of the jobs in the west country, some sort of aerospace engineering. He had accidentally seen his boss's paycheck, and that made him start looking for work in finance.
These days, what are your options realistically in this country? Particularly if you want to hang around your family in the south?
Finance, big law, consultancy, certain US tech businesses. I don't even understand how doctors live here.
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 plenty of early success and validation of all my market theses, but it’s super hard to get any investors interested. Plenty say “exciting” and want to chat. All lose interest when you start talking funding needs and path to market.
In a world in which investors and other startup industry contacts are accustomed to seeing a bootstrapped SaaS app showing signs of growth and revenue just a few months in, with a hardware startup it’s just impossible to avoid looking like a failure by comparison - due to all the costs, delays and complications involved with getting an MVP to market. And because successful hardware startups are so scarce relative to software ones, it’s hard even to get any good advice; there’s just barely anyone around with good, relevant experience to share (and I already know many of the people who have built companies in this vertical in past decades, none of whom are in SV).
I’ve come to the conclusion that the only way to make it work is to start by achieving success as a software startup, then transition into hardware to later - but even then you’d have to convince investors that it’s worth the risk.
In short, the whole tech industry has been spoiled by easy SaaS wins over the past decade, and that’s all that most investors are willing to even consider.
The exceptions are “start-big and-get-huge-fast” plays like Groq - but the founders of that company were already highly credentialed and connected when they started, and even then vanishingly few investors are willing/able to fund new companies like that. That’s not the kind of thing young, unproven founders can pull off, anywhere.
It's not just in the hardware sector, it's across the board.
My (American) wife moved to London years ago and was a manager in a prestigious London museum overseeing 60 people.
She has over 20 years experience in some of our top museums and her salary in 2023 was a paltry £30k.
We just moved to the US and within a couple of months she has a job in museums here but now paying 2.3x the salary (converted back to £) and only managing a team of 20 people.
Less stress, more resources for uniforms and initiatives and annual salary increases here way above inflation.
As a Londoner I feel quite aggrieved by the situation. It's one thing to increase your salary 50% as a lot of engineers do moving to the US. But to 230% increase your salary is just nuts.
Only London's financial sector pay was globally competitive - but now with Brexit's rules fully locked in even that sector is slowly losing its talent and customers to Europe and beyond.
I left the UK after graduating at 21, fully intending to come back within a couple of years. Its weird watching it from the outside for 10 years waiting for a "good time" to move back and realizing that time isn't coming more and more each year.
The salaries in Japan arent great honestly, but mine, the quality of life and how far my money goes is so much better than if I lived back at the UK. Every time I go back it seems more and more people are struggling to pay for basic expenses - and even if I moved back it seems get a great salary I'd have to live in London, which I dislike.
I imagine lots of people far more talented than me must also be feeling the pull to not stay in the country too. Its festering politically and economically. Besides family there really is no benefit to remaining.
God, this place is such a sh*thole (literally if you count the sewage in the water). It's depressing. Every week, X is going downhill, Y is failing, we're out of money. I am so hopeless about my country's future. I feel that this is our century of humiliation.
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 UK.[2]
Plants are in Mexico, Malaysia, Taiwan, and Hungary.
To get prices down, engineers have to be very familiar with what goes on in manufacturing. If you separate engineering from manufacturing, you get overpriced designs.
Not that many people who went to a good engineering school in a first-world country today want to spend their lives inside a big factory in a low-wage country. But that's what it takes to make stuff.
This is interesting, but as other commenters have noted, the general point applies more broadly than hardware versus software, or UK versus the US - if you're only trying to optimise for income, 'go work in the US and/or the financial industry' is solid advice for many people, and the macroeconomic incentives driving this are not easy to shift. I also make much less than my counterparts in the US - but here in South Africa moving to the UK to work in the finance industry is considered a major win for many people, because the salaries are better and is considered higher 'prestige' for some reason.
Eleven years ago during my MSc. in theoretical physics I was writing Fortran code to solve scattering equations to serve as input into quantum field theory calculations. Since then I've worked for a bunch of startups, alternating between writing boring backend services and doing 'data science' that is often no more complicated than linear regression or writing SQL queries. The continual hype, toxic positivity, and unhinged growth expectations has made me essentially tap out mentally. I also consider this a 'waste of my talent' (not that I was ever really a great physicist!), but as I get older I am no longer sure what would have satisfied me in that regard (is this bad or good? - I honestly don't know). More money would be nice I guess. I typically get bored/frustrated and change companies every few years - I'm currently 3 years in at a fintech (elixir backend).
I agree with this call to action. Sadly, I think there are more fundamental issues in the UK economy.
For all intents and purposes, Venture Capital is dead in the UK.
While companies do get funded in the UK and are technically "UK domiciled" - in action most of their Engineering and Product teams are located in Eastern Europe or India, or are startups from those markets (and China) who domiciled in the UK to raise from foreign investors.
There just isn't enough liquid capital to invest in the UK compared to other investment classes available.
> Consider:
Dyson: From a Wiltshire barn to a global technology powerhouse, now innovating in Singapore and Malaysia.
The founder of Dyson is a Brexit proponent who enjoys outsourcing and playing games with tax havens. I doubt he's doing any "innovating" in those places.
Does OP think CS prodigies are building world changing stuff? 90% of the top 1% are building SaaS. Perhaps the 0.01% get to work on actual foundation model ML research or cutting edge theoretical CS. Everybody else will optimize buttons in CSS to pay their bills. Software just pays more, it isn't an exception to economic forces.
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. Which means we are less powerful.
> Sarah: Built a fusion reactor at 16. Now? Debugging fintech payment systems.
It's striking to imagine a fully functional fusion reactor that could benefit humanity, yet its creator now focuses on fintech payment systems. This highlights the importance of a strong middle class, which seems to be declining globally. A thriving middle class, with disposable income and free time, creates the conditions for innovation. Without it, even brilliant minds like Einstein might spend their entire careers working on immediate economic needs rather than pursuing breakthrough discoveries.
Things are tough all over. I’m based in Sheffield, and we have an Advanced Manufacturing Research Centre and obviously a rich history of manufacturing and engineering across the city that pioneered chrome steel. But the process for new enterprises always seems the same, you get some small, timid spinout from one of the universities, that spends years iterating through various crumbs of grant money, and maybe finds a corporate partner to commercialise some tech. Everyone’s excited about Northern Gritstone, the new regional VC which has raised £300m and deployed about £40m so far, but even that is itself basically a university spinout.
I was at an event recently where everyone was excited about a programme to create thousands of new apprenticeships in the steel industry in the region, and sat at the one table of tech people I couldn’t help feel they’d probably do better if you just taught them to code, even in this job market. Or alternatively if we actually want a steel industry to challenge China let’s do that. But no half measures.
The UK has vanishingly little risk capital compared to the US. It has very few exits and almost no secondary, so what angel money exists is often tied up long term. The British Business Bank are trying to convince more pension funds to expose their assets to the risk/return of VC funds but that’s a long and controversial battle. Startup investing is largely driven by income tax breaks rather than dreams of outsized returns. And of course property is such a reliable investment in the UK that it sucks up most of the free money anyway.
A lot of this is (the lack of) network effects and we get grumpy if you say it’s a cultural thing. But just once I’d love to hear someone saying they’re investing in their local ecosystem, or creating an accelerator, or whatever, because they want to make loads of money. That isn’t something you can comfortably say out loud at most startup events in the UK. Lots of talk of Impact Investing, an endless merry-go-round of gobshites wanting to give advice and mentoring, or “do you have any “SEIS left?” Lots of tech agencies working on making other people’s ideas go big, selling reliable hours instead of unreliable equity. And a good enough quality of life that all this is fine!
But it can be really hard to find somewhere to plug into and get the energy from. Kudos to those that are making/have made the slog here.
Not to disagree with the thrust of the article, but I think they're wrong on
> Hardware is riskier than software: No longer true
If you're building hardware you need to source materials for the thing, manufacture the thing somewhere, store the thing somewhere and distribute the thing. All steps that either don't exist with software or are orders of magnitude easier. All this stuff costs money and adds risk, making hardware inherently harder and riskier than software.
Obviously building stuff is still possible, but if you're going in with a VC "how do we scale this to 100 million users in 2 years" mindset then there's a lot of logistics in there for hardware.
Interestingly, the 3 British designers who made up Flare Technology, had a big influence on console and computer designs in the 80s/90s:
They were responsible for the ZX Spectrum (partly), Konix Multisystem, Atari Falcon, ATW (and Blossom graphics card), Atari Jaguar, Super FX chip, Nuon
Just a note - 100k jobs aren't that common in software in the UK. Perhaps they're there in finance but there are a lot of people looking for software jobs now who accept much less. I've managed to avoid the finance sector my whole career in the UK by working for telcos, since I felt that, for me personally, finance was intensely boring and motivated by all the worst and most short term values.
IMO the whole attitude to finance here is difficult because not enough people have become rich through software/electronics to be angel investors. It's still a place where the big old money comes from people in banking. The arts are respected, being rich is respected, but the rest of us are still "techies" and that's an attitude prevalent throughout the population. The person who fixes your washing machine gets called an "engineer."
It's a matter of who has the power.
Success breeds success and we have had some great ones - it's just that the whole economy is still skewed towards finance. People want the pound to have a high value. Investment comes here to seek "safety". Costs are high. Everything is short term. We have "spaffed billions" on leaving our local trading bloc but moan a lot about investing in HS2. In other words we're not really united and trying to build a future. The population is aging and some of it thinks "only a few more years for me" and "I'm alright jack".
Do I really know? This is all just the bullshit whirling around in my head.
There's a chance with net-zero. It will require huge investments. If you want to do hardware then I suggest you think about that. Octopus Energy's Kraken system, heat pumps that work together to spread out demand over the day, home energy controllers, battery chargers ...who knows. One word of warning though: I'm actually from Africa and any idea that ends with "....for disaster relief in Africa" is a mistake. If your idea only works in poor countries then I think you'll never make any money. Nobody really cares significantly about disaster relief, especially the potentates of those countries who have allowed the disastrous situations to occur through their own mismanagement.
I see this in the USA too - electrical engineers fiddling with css to make buttons dance, published computer scientists working on trivial systems for massive data centers billing systems - the tech market does always seem inefficient, and yet, at some point the market is going to have more knowledge and expertise than it needs, especially if AI predictions play out. What happens then?
You'd need to change the basis of JV and IPO in the UK, the nature of chartered engineering, and probably the laws on being declared bankrupt. America has a financial regulatory environment which is somewhat unique, and encourages this kind of innovation. The UK has a different view both of the financial risk management, and of the consequences of engineering.
The history of canals, bridges, roads, railroads and lighthouses in the UK is littered with people blowing wads of money up. Speculation was rife. I think it led to caution which has stayed with us across the victorian era into the modern day.
If you want an object lesson in "god, could we do this better" -I was told Australia had world-class optics industry, at the end of WWII due to the need to diversify the supply chain and get away from European sources now in the Axis. Russia and Japan seized the day, while Australia basically _shut itself down_ and gave away any market lead. People laugh at russian cameras but the glass was excellent, they got half of German tech at wars end.
[+] [-] ashergill|1 year ago|reply
> • £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 whole economy is struggling, but industries that need physical space are especially hard hit. Your local council can't block you from writing more code, but can stop you from building lab space near where people want to live and work.
My first job out of uni was in a wonderful small engineering firm in Cambridge. Lab space there is eye-wateringly expensive because it's illegal to build enough, so we were based in a makeshift lab in an attic next to the sewage works. I loved working there, but it shows that we're restricting our small businesses unnecessarily through our planning system.
The solution is frustratingly simple, but politically suicidal for any government that tried to implement it: just legalise development subject to basic design codes. I hope we see some planning reform before it's too late for our struggling innovation industries.
[+] [-] pjc50|1 year ago|reply
(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.)
[+] [-] tormeh|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] shawabawa3|1 year ago|reply
Labour just got into government and literally the third bullet point in their manifesto is:
* Reform our planning rules to build the railways, roads, labs and 1.5 million homes we need and develop a new 10-year infrastructure strategy.
So i would hope it's not political suicide to follow through on that
[+] [-] archsurface|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] henryaj|1 year ago|reply
> [The TCPA] moved Britain from a system where almost any development was permitted anywhere, to one where development was nearly always prohibited. Since [it] was introduced in 1947, private housebuilding has never reached Victorian levels, let alone the record progress achieved just before the Second World War.
> Today, local authorities still have robust powers to reject new developments, and little incentive to accept them. Historically, local governments encouraged development because their tax bases grew in line with the extra value created, but this incentive has been eroded by successive reforms that have centralised and capped local governments’ tax-raising powers.
[0] https://ukfoundations.co/
[+] [-] r_thambapillai|1 year ago|reply
The UK lost Deep Mind - which could have been OpenAI!! -- to Google. I think part of the issue is cultural - the level of ambition in the UK is just small compared to the US. Individual founders like Demis or Tom Blomfield may have it but recruiting enough talent with the ambition levels of early Palantir or OpenAI employees is so hard because there are so few. Instead, a lot of extremely smart people in the UK would rather get the 'safe' job at Google, or McKinsey than the 'this will never work but can you imagine how cool it would be if it did' job at a startup.
There are probably political reasons as well. Unfortunately the UK has not been well governed for 20 years or so, and hence economic outcomes as a whole have been abysmal.
[+] [-] graemep|1 year ago|reply
Yes we have many comments on HN talking about how harmful the US VCs attitude is because they force good businesses into choosing between being unicorns and not getting funding.
I do not know the truth of it, but clearly its not obvious.
> Unfortunately the UK has not been well governed for 20 years or so, and hence economic outcomes as a whole have been abysmal.
I commented on this earlier. The UK's economic outcomes have been similar to comparable European economies (like Germany) and better than some (like France). Whatever the problem is, its not unique to the UK: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42766107
I do not think the UK is well run, but I think the west in general is badly run. Poorly thought out regulation, short termism in both politics and business, a focus on metrics subject to Goodhart's and Campbell's laws, and a poor understanding of the rest of the work (leading to bad foreign policy).
[+] [-] mrtksn|1 year ago|reply
My hypothesis is that this is a combination of old money and class consciousness. In other words, the rich are risk averse because all they care is preserving their wealth and the working class don’t believe and can’t even imagine that more is possible.
[+] [-] bboygravity|1 year ago|reply
I'm from EU and would be totally open to move to UK if there was an opportunity to make more there while working on something cool. But there simply isn't?
Then there are US startups where I could likely make 2 or 3x what I make in EU or UK.
So why would talent every consider moving to the UK to build a startup in 2025 anyway?
[+] [-] bell-cot|1 year ago|reply
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).
[+] [-] zipy124|1 year ago|reply
If UK startups paid equity to their devs, I would work a lot harder when I've worked at them, but startups require working hard and long hours and if I've got no skin in the game, what incetive do I have to make sure the company is successful.
[+] [-] maeil|1 year ago|reply
This isn't just an EU thing, for what it's worth. The US is the outlier.
[+] [-] ilrwbwrkhv|1 year ago|reply
For example, right now there is not a single VC in Canada who does large pre seed / seed investments based on an idea and the founding team.
In the US you can get a 1 million cheque within a week.
That is the real reason Canada is failing on a macro scale.
@dang hopefully I have kept this well balanced.
[+] [-] Guthur|1 year ago|reply
Without sovereign protection you just can not compete with that, ever. It's really that simple.
Simply look at China they may export loads of goods but it's predominantly priced in USD, and what do they do with all that excise USD, the only thing they can do, buy US debt. It's truly perverse.
Or look at every UK company that was bought up with those very same magic dollars.
[+] [-] aa-jv|1 year ago|reply
There are definitely political - and ultimately, military-industrial - reasons for this. The UK is deeply, deeply embedded in the Anglo-centric 5-eyes criminal superstructure, and plays a huge part in the subversion of human rights at immense scale around the world, that this criminal entity commits every second of the day.
The spook factor bleeds into every technological advancement which occurs in the UK, from GCHQ outwards, like a kraken with deep, deep tentacles.
I've worked with multiple UK-based startups which, as soon as they start to gain traction in international waters/markets, immediately becomes the target for GCHQ embedding/plants. This kills the startup.
Until the British people start prosecuting their war criminals and seeks justice for the immense human rights abuses that occur, every millisecond of every day, as a result of their out of control military-industrial oppression apparatus, there is simply no hope for UK technological industry.
The world sees this, even if the people of the UK do not - and routes around it, accordingly.
Nobody really wants to work with UK-based technology groups, knowing that they are liable for immediate corruption the moment their technology becomes relevant to, say, the people of Brazil, or Africa, or China.
[+] [-] marcinzm|1 year ago|reply
US founders not from wealthy backgrounds can often get $500k from friends and family. I doubt those in the UK can do so.
There's massive massive social costs due to this in the US so be careful what you wish for.
[+] [-] bjackman|1 year ago|reply
I hear they fixed it eventually but seems like an unnecessary loss.
[+] [-] eru|1 year ago|reply
Deepmind is still in the UK. And more, including foreign, bidders driving up prices for acquisitions and investments, will lead to more people making the jump.
[+] [-] CalRobert|1 year ago|reply
Not to mention the whole idea that trying to be successful is "notions" and should be sneered at.
Edit: To compare -
Me: "I want to build a house"
Irish friends: "That's a bad idea, you'll never make it work, you'll go bankrupt and it will kill you..."
California/Oregon friends: "Fuck yeah I'll bring a nailgun"
[+] [-] constantcrying|1 year ago|reply
Not only is the bureaucracy difficult, the labor laws make it very difficult to hire and compensate talent.
Germany wants innovation to be done by large corporations, not by start ups.
[+] [-] 946789987649|1 year ago|reply
I'm also not sure what the government can do. SEIS/EIS is a great scheme, but the SEIS limit of £250k feels almost too small to do anything meaningful, and EIS funds are generally later stage or re-investment from SEIS.
[+] [-] mbesto|1 year ago|reply
I once did a pitch contest and they required we put together a business plan with financials. You want me to...what? Who on earth can read a pro forma for a pre-revenue SaaS business and say "ah yes this is worth of investment because this pro forma looks great".
London is all about banking and it shows.
[+] [-] troupo|1 year ago|reply
You're focusing on one success story out of thousands.
90%, or more, of US startups only exist to be sold to the highest bidder or to coast indefinitely long in infinite investor money, and never turn a profit.
There's still expectation in Europe at large that your company should have an actual business plan and a path to profitability.
[+] [-] jakey_bakey|1 year ago|reply
US vs UK investors are night and day. UK investors only want to see profitability to protect their cautious capital
[+] [-] petesergeant|1 year ago|reply
0: If a few hurdles are jumped through, then an investor who gives you £250k can get £125k relief on their income tax (not what they'd have paid on £125k, literally the whole £125k), and then claim a further 50% back of the remainder from the government if you go bust.
[+] [-] yobbo|1 year ago|reply
It can be argued that a responsibility falls on EU equity companies, pension funds, and so on, but they do not make seed investments.
[+] [-] zmgsabst|1 year ago|reply
I’m curious, if you think the issue is cultural.
[+] [-] gazchop|1 year ago|reply
I could quite happily get on fine at one of those big American style startups but I don't get excited about hype, I don't have the work culture it demands and I don't have a price on my soul. I'd rather earn a lot less, have extreme stability, have better family time and balance. On top of that there's something tasteless and unethical about a lot of the big startups. Do they really bring good things to society? Do I really want to be part of that?
If I can walk away with half the money, live a modest life and stand with my principles intact, I will take that over twice the money.
I don't think this is political at all. It's not a race either and we have no innate responsibility to build things like this.
[+] [-] baxtr|1 year ago|reply
Europe wasn’t like this for centuries. What is the cause of this mindset?
[+] [-] Shinchy|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] fadesibert|1 year ago|reply
And yet, the UK hires were often better off after all expenses than the US hires.
Largely due to housing being slightly cheaper (other posters have pointed out, London is on par with SF / NY - the big difference being London expands, NYC and SF are both "islands" - yes SF is a peninsula, but commuting up 280 or 101 is not a pleasant experienced).
Also, even offering private healthcare (BUPA) - the UK hires were cheaper. I'm in my late 30s and reasonably healthy - my all-in, gold-plated UK policy was GBP 2k / year - I was at $2,000 / month in the US.
*However* - salaries in the UK are unsustainably low.
Three reasons: [1] BOMAD - The Bank of Mom and Dad (parents paying / lending the deposit for a house so the mortgage is at a low rate) is effectively exhausted. This means that current entrants into the housing market are either renting (which is nearly as expensive as NYC, especially after the inflationary / interest rate jump), or saving to "buy" a house (I enclose in quotes because at a 95% mortgage you don't own much of your house). [2] Professional salaries outside of finance are way too low. My fiancee works in a highly skilled, professional field and her salary in 2024 was, in nominal terms the same as my starting salary in NYC 17 years ago working for a large investment bank IN THE BACK OFFICE - where salaries were decidedly blue-collar. My unproven hypothesis is that the UK professional world is still largely geared towards those with alternative assets, private incomes (especially high-prestige non-professional jobs, especially around politics). This makes it impossible to compete with US venture backed startups, even post-ZIRP, because the offer is always going to be better. And yet that private-income driven base has largely been eroded through capital gains, inheritance tax and general downward social mobility (or, perhaps, less doom-and-gloom - averaging towards the center. The difference in wealth and income between the upper-middle class and the lower-middle class has narrowed significantly). [3] There has been over the last 5-7 years significant negative messaging and tax policy against economic success. A confiscatory top-tax band, an erosion of a "job perks" friendly tax regime and a political climate that is very anti-success, even prior to the labour govt (largely started at the same time, though perhaps not by, Theresa May's 2015 speech and focus on "Just about managing").
VC in the UK is hard, largely because the majority (though by no means all) VCs are focused on aping mid-market pension managers. Their ambition is limited to businesses that already work (and yet anything transformative by definition does not work yet) - and are interested mostly in post-revenue companies with linear or lightly superlinear growth.
This, IMNSHO, is largely caused by the fact that, given state expenditure and the corp and personal tax burden, there simply isn't enough capital for US style VC - the portfolio approach requires capital to absorb failures. Most VCs here cannot afford failure.
The closest we get is the EIS / SEIS tax policy, which allows the offsetting of losses in failed businesses (by the equivalent of Accredited Investors) - as well as a friendly Cap Gains treatment of successes. But these are largely made as common stock investments by individuals - and limited to a very small scale.
Which brings me to my final point - the SAFE note is not only not ubiquitous here, it's rare. Even pre-seed investments are either common stock or (more rarely) convertible notes. This requires a level of diligence (even on small tickets) that make capital formation incredibly burdensome.
There's absolutely a path to resolving this - but the UK first has to make a political and cultural decision to embrace startup-led GDP growth, which is has not yet made.
[+] [-] refrigerator|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] lordnacho|1 year ago|reply
So I went interviewing in the engineering firms to the west of the country. Aerospace, materials, that kind of thing. Someone offered me £12K/year. Even for a student, that seems kind of low as I'd be looking for a short term accommodation somewhere. I kept it secret from the business school because I knew they'd pressure me to take it.
A couple of weeks later, I got an offer from Intel. Not in engineering, but in marketing. £15k, just about enough to pay rent and eat. But a lot more than engineering. I took the job and has a great time, and I still know people there. Turned down the return offer, due to the firm itself seeming a bit complacent, but also...
During the internship I went to see my friend in central London. He had landed the coveted Goldman's internship. Fully paid apartment for the period, with a view of the river, plus money. £37k/year if you include the free rent.
So when I went back to university for the final part of the degree, it was clear where I was going to look for work.
I got a job at a prop trading shop, and in the first week a guy told me about his story. He had originally taken one of the jobs in the west country, some sort of aerospace engineering. He had accidentally seen his boss's paycheck, and that made him start looking for work in finance.
These days, what are your options realistically in this country? Particularly if you want to hang around your family in the south?
Finance, big law, consultancy, certain US tech businesses. I don't even understand how doctors live here.
[+] [-] tomhoward|1 year ago|reply
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 plenty of early success and validation of all my market theses, but it’s super hard to get any investors interested. Plenty say “exciting” and want to chat. All lose interest when you start talking funding needs and path to market.
In a world in which investors and other startup industry contacts are accustomed to seeing a bootstrapped SaaS app showing signs of growth and revenue just a few months in, with a hardware startup it’s just impossible to avoid looking like a failure by comparison - due to all the costs, delays and complications involved with getting an MVP to market. And because successful hardware startups are so scarce relative to software ones, it’s hard even to get any good advice; there’s just barely anyone around with good, relevant experience to share (and I already know many of the people who have built companies in this vertical in past decades, none of whom are in SV).
I’ve come to the conclusion that the only way to make it work is to start by achieving success as a software startup, then transition into hardware to later - but even then you’d have to convince investors that it’s worth the risk.
In short, the whole tech industry has been spoiled by easy SaaS wins over the past decade, and that’s all that most investors are willing to even consider.
The exceptions are “start-big and-get-huge-fast” plays like Groq - but the founders of that company were already highly credentialed and connected when they started, and even then vanishingly few investors are willing/able to fund new companies like that. That’s not the kind of thing young, unproven founders can pull off, anywhere.
[+] [-] incog_nit0|1 year ago|reply
My (American) wife moved to London years ago and was a manager in a prestigious London museum overseeing 60 people.
She has over 20 years experience in some of our top museums and her salary in 2023 was a paltry £30k.
We just moved to the US and within a couple of months she has a job in museums here but now paying 2.3x the salary (converted back to £) and only managing a team of 20 people.
Less stress, more resources for uniforms and initiatives and annual salary increases here way above inflation.
As a Londoner I feel quite aggrieved by the situation. It's one thing to increase your salary 50% as a lot of engineers do moving to the US. But to 230% increase your salary is just nuts.
Only London's financial sector pay was globally competitive - but now with Brexit's rules fully locked in even that sector is slowly losing its talent and customers to Europe and beyond.
[+] [-] tidenly|1 year ago|reply
The salaries in Japan arent great honestly, but mine, the quality of life and how far my money goes is so much better than if I lived back at the UK. Every time I go back it seems more and more people are struggling to pay for basic expenses - and even if I moved back it seems get a great salary I'd have to live in London, which I dislike.
I imagine lots of people far more talented than me must also be feeling the pull to not stay in the country too. Its festering politically and economically. Besides family there really is no benefit to remaining.
[+] [-] James_K|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] Animats|1 year ago|reply
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 UK.[2] Plants are in Mexico, Malaysia, Taiwan, and Hungary.
To get prices down, engineers have to be very familiar with what goes on in manufacturing. If you separate engineering from manufacturing, you get overpriced designs.
Not that many people who went to a good engineering school in a first-world country today want to spend their lives inside a big factory in a low-wage country. But that's what it takes to make stuff.
[1] https://www.digikey.com/en/products/filter/chip-resistor-sur...
[2] https://jobs.bourns.com/go/Engineering/9254400/
[+] [-] awanderingmind|1 year ago|reply
Eleven years ago during my MSc. in theoretical physics I was writing Fortran code to solve scattering equations to serve as input into quantum field theory calculations. Since then I've worked for a bunch of startups, alternating between writing boring backend services and doing 'data science' that is often no more complicated than linear regression or writing SQL queries. The continual hype, toxic positivity, and unhinged growth expectations has made me essentially tap out mentally. I also consider this a 'waste of my talent' (not that I was ever really a great physicist!), but as I get older I am no longer sure what would have satisfied me in that regard (is this bad or good? - I honestly don't know). More money would be nice I guess. I typically get bored/frustrated and change companies every few years - I'm currently 3 years in at a fintech (elixir backend).
[+] [-] alephnerd|1 year ago|reply
For all intents and purposes, Venture Capital is dead in the UK.
While companies do get funded in the UK and are technically "UK domiciled" - in action most of their Engineering and Product teams are located in Eastern Europe or India, or are startups from those markets (and China) who domiciled in the UK to raise from foreign investors.
There just isn't enough liquid capital to invest in the UK compared to other investment classes available.
[+] [-] Onavo|1 year ago|reply
> Consider: Dyson: From a Wiltshire barn to a global technology powerhouse, now innovating in Singapore and Malaysia.
The founder of Dyson is a Brexit proponent who enjoys outsourcing and playing games with tax havens. I doubt he's doing any "innovating" in those places.
Does OP think CS prodigies are building world changing stuff? 90% of the top 1% are building SaaS. Perhaps the 0.01% get to work on actual foundation model ML research or cutting edge theoretical CS. Everybody else will optimize buttons in CSS to pay their bills. Software just pays more, it isn't an exception to economic forces.
[+] [-] hbrav|1 year ago|reply
I really want to know what we can do to fix this. As a country, we aren't building things that people want. Which means we are less powerful.
[+] [-] mertnesvat|1 year ago|reply
It's striking to imagine a fully functional fusion reactor that could benefit humanity, yet its creator now focuses on fintech payment systems. This highlights the importance of a strong middle class, which seems to be declining globally. A thriving middle class, with disposable income and free time, creates the conditions for innovation. Without it, even brilliant minds like Einstein might spend their entire careers working on immediate economic needs rather than pursuing breakthrough discoveries.
[+] [-] thom|1 year ago|reply
I was at an event recently where everyone was excited about a programme to create thousands of new apprenticeships in the steel industry in the region, and sat at the one table of tech people I couldn’t help feel they’d probably do better if you just taught them to code, even in this job market. Or alternatively if we actually want a steel industry to challenge China let’s do that. But no half measures.
The UK has vanishingly little risk capital compared to the US. It has very few exits and almost no secondary, so what angel money exists is often tied up long term. The British Business Bank are trying to convince more pension funds to expose their assets to the risk/return of VC funds but that’s a long and controversial battle. Startup investing is largely driven by income tax breaks rather than dreams of outsized returns. And of course property is such a reliable investment in the UK that it sucks up most of the free money anyway.
A lot of this is (the lack of) network effects and we get grumpy if you say it’s a cultural thing. But just once I’d love to hear someone saying they’re investing in their local ecosystem, or creating an accelerator, or whatever, because they want to make loads of money. That isn’t something you can comfortably say out loud at most startup events in the UK. Lots of talk of Impact Investing, an endless merry-go-round of gobshites wanting to give advice and mentoring, or “do you have any “SEIS left?” Lots of tech agencies working on making other people’s ideas go big, selling reliable hours instead of unreliable equity. And a good enough quality of life that all this is fine!
But it can be really hard to find somewhere to plug into and get the energy from. Kudos to those that are making/have made the slog here.
[+] [-] remus|1 year ago|reply
> Hardware is riskier than software: No longer true
If you're building hardware you need to source materials for the thing, manufacture the thing somewhere, store the thing somewhere and distribute the thing. All steps that either don't exist with software or are orders of magnitude easier. All this stuff costs money and adds risk, making hardware inherently harder and riskier than software.
Obviously building stuff is still possible, but if you're going in with a VC "how do we scale this to 100 million users in 2 years" mindset then there's a lot of logistics in there for hardware.
[+] [-] alexisread|1 year ago|reply
to transport (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Advanced_Passenger_Train https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tracked_Hovercraft https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hovertravel https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sinclair_C5 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maglev#Birmingham,_United_King...)
to chip design (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inmos transputer, static RAM, VGA standard).
Interestingly, the 3 British designers who made up Flare Technology, had a big influence on console and computer designs in the 80s/90s: They were responsible for the ZX Spectrum (partly), Konix Multisystem, Atari Falcon, ATW (and Blossom graphics card), Atari Jaguar, Super FX chip, Nuon
[+] [-] t43562|1 year ago|reply
IMO the whole attitude to finance here is difficult because not enough people have become rich through software/electronics to be angel investors. It's still a place where the big old money comes from people in banking. The arts are respected, being rich is respected, but the rest of us are still "techies" and that's an attitude prevalent throughout the population. The person who fixes your washing machine gets called an "engineer."
It's a matter of who has the power.
Success breeds success and we have had some great ones - it's just that the whole economy is still skewed towards finance. People want the pound to have a high value. Investment comes here to seek "safety". Costs are high. Everything is short term. We have "spaffed billions" on leaving our local trading bloc but moan a lot about investing in HS2. In other words we're not really united and trying to build a future. The population is aging and some of it thinks "only a few more years for me" and "I'm alright jack".
Do I really know? This is all just the bullshit whirling around in my head.
There's a chance with net-zero. It will require huge investments. If you want to do hardware then I suggest you think about that. Octopus Energy's Kraken system, heat pumps that work together to spread out demand over the day, home energy controllers, battery chargers ...who knows. One word of warning though: I'm actually from Africa and any idea that ends with "....for disaster relief in Africa" is a mistake. If your idea only works in poor countries then I think you'll never make any money. Nobody really cares significantly about disaster relief, especially the potentates of those countries who have allowed the disastrous situations to occur through their own mismanagement.
[+] [-] JohnMakin|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] ggm|1 year ago|reply
The history of canals, bridges, roads, railroads and lighthouses in the UK is littered with people blowing wads of money up. Speculation was rife. I think it led to caution which has stayed with us across the victorian era into the modern day.
If you want an object lesson in "god, could we do this better" -I was told Australia had world-class optics industry, at the end of WWII due to the need to diversify the supply chain and get away from European sources now in the Axis. Russia and Japan seized the day, while Australia basically _shut itself down_ and gave away any market lead. People laugh at russian cameras but the glass was excellent, they got half of German tech at wars end.