> • £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.)
The wiki editor(s) who wrote the boosterish Economy subsection of the wiki page on Peterborough [1] (thirty miles away, same county) make it sound as though it is a growing area that does want to grow more.
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.
We'll see. Taking away local control over land development is going to be controversial. A lot of rich and politically connected people are not going to like this. The last three decades in the west has been an endless series of victories for landowners. It's hard to imagine that this time really is different.
The problem always ends up being that it's extremely local (read: NIMBY).
Everyone wants more Z, Y, X. Nobody wants to change where they are to support it. This is why even areas that redevelop in places that are friendly to it, take decades.
The "old" solution was to just build a whole new factory town elsewhere, but that doesn't work as well, and especially doesn't work when you're not building megafactories that employ entire cities.
> 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.
They could do this is one fell swoop with a single bill by the Parliament that dissolves these local councils, and land owners the right (and freedom) to build whatever they want on land they own.
Building safety codes would still apply; but zoning permitting could be erased in one fell swoop with a single bill.
Sure, let’s check in on this in 4 years time and see if they’ve made any significant progress on that. Many, if not most of our problems have obvious solutions, it’s actually executing on them that’s the problem.
United States 11,855 KWH
China 5,474
Germany 6,483
Australia 7,000 (approximate based on recent trends)
Singapore 9,000 (approximate based on recent trends)
United Kingdom 4,701
Energy consumption of the uK is that of a poor developing country.
people will cite the size of uk homes due to lack of land as if you can't build houses with a lot of sq/ft - sq/m vertically ?
the only thing keeping uk afloat at the moment is the friendly immigration policy.
money doesn't move in capital markets but people would rather pump money into property.
...that's not really an illustration of that. When you actually consider population and land size, the numbers don't seem so strange.
Just looking at wikipedia population and area (and a very simple scaling)
% area housing = area_house * population
So...
aus 0.08%
nz 0.42%
us 1.82%
can 0.08%
uk 2.14%
The UK has comparably _more_ of it's land covered with housing than the other nations mentioned.
When you consider population density, UK >> US >> NZ > Canada > Australia.
You would _expect_ countries with much more wide open space to have bigger homes, and the other nations homes aren't so big _when you consider their countries' size and population_.
> [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.
You might find that interesting. It's from the Adam smith institute. Central planning has been seriously damaging the UK since after ww2. Thatcher is blamed for destroying British industry. It started long before her.
I like Sam Bowman a lot, but are you sure the construction issue is central to this issue in particular? I suspect that access to capital is equally important: the UK is very finance-centric. I wonder how many VCs have engineering expertise, for instance.
I remember seeing tons of shipping containers repurposed as offices all over london last year. Was that a way to ease/get-around this real estate issue?
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).
For the last 20 or 25 years the UK has been coasting on the North Sea oil&gas money, I'd say that worked up until the early 2010s, and then on the almost complete financialization of its economy and on selling out whatever pieces of the economy could still be sold out (that includes part of their beloved NHS).
But that can only work for so long and is beneficial in the medium to long-term for a very limited number of people (basically the owners of said financial capital), at some point you have to produce some real wealth, wealth produced from real stuff via resources of the Earth + human ingenuity and, yes, + human work.
> 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.
HN has a very wide range of economic opinions, and some people are extremely uninformed about what it takes to do hard things that can't be grown organically, and what it takes to maintain a business running when it's done the hard thing in the face of competition.
> 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.
Most of those are people complaining about a business having to make changes because it took $50+m in funding and now needs to justify it. The business was only "good" because it got $50m and didn't need to do things like charge enough money. If it hadn't gotten that $50m then those people wouldn't consider it such a good business or even know about it.
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.
Regulations often stem from a particular mindset. However, they also serve to perpetuate that mindset.
As a member of the working class, I find there’s little incentive to build something new or innovate because the effort required to navigate through all the burdensome regulations is overwhelming. On top of that, any additional income I might generate from bringing my ideas or initiatives to market would be taxed at more than 50%. For many people like me, the effort simply isn’t worth it. Instead, we focus our energy on other pursuits, such as family, sports, or friendships.
This shift in focus isn’t inherently bad—a life balanced between family, friends, work, and leisure is often a recipe for happiness. However, societal progress relies heavily on the efforts of a small minority of individuals who are bold (or perhaps crazy) enough to pursue their ideas. When 90% of those individuals are discouraged from taking entrepreneurial risks, society’s capacity for innovation is severely stifled.
In short, it’s clear that excessive regulations and high taxes are holding Europe back from achieving its full potential for growth and innovation.
EU drone regulations ban autonomous drones from being flown. This made me stop work on them, this is not a mindset problem. It's actually a corruption problem as Google wanted to sell their software to coordinate drone flights and the EU people were "persuaded" to enact regulations to make this happen.
> don’t believe and can’t even imagine that more is possible.
And/or don't think that more is better/desirable. I wouldn't consider myself working class, but I was definitely raised with the idea that making obscene amounts of money is actually pretty selfish/immoral and not something one ought to strive for. That doesn't preclude going into business. But it is pretty antithetical to the VC funding model and the creation of billion dollar businesses.
In general, it seems that the culture in America is that wealth is virtuous and confers status, whereas in Europe that at least isn't so universal and some circles it is even seen as shameful (consider that variants on socialism are still mainstream political ideologies in Europe).
In Germany, you can typically finance the first 1-3 years of your start-up through government gifts like "EXIST". That's why you don't need early seed investors.
People need examples of success in their network. Most people have frankly never met or heard of anyone who founded a successful startup- and therefore would never think of taking on such a risk. I agree that in some places there is a sense of malaise, but if we are to believe founders are a 1-2% outlier of the population, I don’t see why America’s 1-2% should be so much more ambitious than the UKs. I think it’s more a cycle induced by lack of funding.
Should individuals routinely risk their own livelihood to benefit a select few capitalist? Does this improve the life of the average American? Seeing how they vote it seems generally it does not?
>Completely agree, the problem in Europe is not regulations or anything like that - it is a mindset issue.
You can change mindsets with regulations that reward taking risks in new businesses/innovations, and punish rent seeking and sitting on inherited real estate for example.
But as long as EUrope is focused on maintaining the status quo of boomers and gentrified dynasties of billionaires that you probably played against in Assassins' Creed, nothing will change.
Let's make simple calculations. In California, near the start of the 20th century there were more than 34 million native Americans living in what was their land. Now there are in California 300-700.000 native Americans.
They were exterminated and replaced by a very small European population. Like sterilising a Petri dish and letting bacteria grow, the opportunities that population experienced were the biggest any population in the world ever had. Just look at a graph of the population growth of US OR California in the last century and compare it to others.
Now there is in California a population of near 40 million people.
That is not a "mindset", this is real growth that they could experience and the rest of the world could not.
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?
Something not talked about - you probably won't be able to lease suitable property if you are doing anything other than apps.
Doing soldering of prototypes? Good luck finding a landlord that would let you do it. The moment they hear "fumes" is a nope, fire hazard, safety risk and won't let you...
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).
Very true, although I suppose a significant fraction of the decline at that time might be a result of the end of the Empire, which given that there are simply no such successful Empires anywhere in the world anymore was almost certainly inevitable.
By comparison, the performance of the UK in the last 20 years vs the US or the Nordics is a singular tragedy.
Yes, "winning" as in not being completely destroyed, occupied, and maybe even enslaved. Check out what Poland looked like in 1940 when it lost, or what Germany looked like in 1945, or, well, 1949.
USSR was also terribly battered by WWII, and its leadership was not highly competent either; I'd say both parameters were much worse than UK's. But it managed to remain a large empire with a high economic potential, and UK could not.
Exactly this. Great Britain colonized huge parts of the globe and had an empire. They were kings of trade and the world. Now they are just a surveillance nanny state and hollow shell of their former self.
Interestingly people, especially poor people, were better nourished during the WW 2 rationing than before the war. Also e.g. universal healthcare was establised post-war.
Is number of war ships, or billionaires, a good measure for a country?
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.
I've been shocked in my career in the UK by just how much founders will rip people off on equity
In basically every UK startup I've worked at they've done 1 or all of the below:
1. Offered options in numbers with no valuation/percentage of ownership. "We offer you 40000 stock options!". When asked to clarify numbers, they delay and never tell you. Inevitably they have a value of a few pence each
2. Withdraw options unilaterally when you leave the company with no option to exercise
3. Never get round to filling in the paperwork so you never actually receive them
I was _shocked_ when i worked for my first US startup and they just...gave me the options. And I could exercise them whenever I wanted. And they expired 10 years after I left the company
> 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.
False. Even good jobs with American companies and what not are subject to ridiculous tax problems in the UK. You give you employees equity but then they have to raise vast sums of capital just to hold on to it to afford their taxes when there is virtually no real liquidity pre IPO.
It's anti success. And there is garbage everywhere, people keep voting for antisocial housing and bad cultures. It's a failing state.
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"
(UK resident, born and bread) Yes this drives me absolutely mad. I'm a poor risk taker and can come up with all those reasons something's a bad idea, but when I've made up my mind to take the risk I want supportive people around not people who would rather you never tried anything outside their "comfort zone".
And the problem runs in families. This is not therapy but every time I talked to my parents about an idea it would be dammed with faint praise or I'd be told I'm wasting my time. It's taken 20 years to work out that the more they dissed an idea is the better it actually was.
I don't know what the regulations are in the UK, but in many European countries, building a house isn't just about knowing how to build a house, it's also about knowing all the DIN requirements. These are necessary for insurance to pay out if something happens to your house. Let's take a simple example: You're wiring your house. Because of a mistake, the house burns down.
Insurance: “Okay sir, who did the electrical wiring?
you: “Me”.
Insurance: “Are you a professional?
you: “No"
Insurance: “Have you had your work certified by a third party?"
you: “Do my buddies count?”
insurance: "Have a good day sir"
There may never be a problem and you may have figured out everything that's required to get your butt covered (good for you in this case), but the fact is that a lot of people don't know about these things, do their own thing and get royally screwed if there's a problem and, God forbid, someone gets hurt.
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.
The part about that plan that worries me is the ageism in software. I'm mid-forties and it's something I think about a lot for when I have to get a new job.
Anyone young should go make as much money as possible, as early as possible, so they can have the same outlook you do in later life.
In the UK’s case, feudalism is alive and well. The entire tax system is designed so parasites descended from thugs like the Duke of Westminster or Charles of Battenberg-Saxe-Coburg und Gotha never have to pay property taxes on their extensive land holdings.
That's because risk-aversion and laziness are the smart things to do. Yes, it would be cool to come up with the next Facebook, but most financial advisors will tell you that the actually best thing you can do is some form of "SP500 and hold 20 years" because from the perspective of an individual, the safe option provides the best expected outcome.
Similarly, why work yourself to the bone for a miniscule chance of success, if you can... just chill instead? I used to be a highly-motivated go-getter, but then I realized, this shit ain't bringing happiness, and I turned into a work-avoider who spends time in the office mostly talking to coworkers and playing games in the toilet. My overall life satisfaction skyrocketed.
Yes, the society at large does need people to do the needful, but this ain't gonna be me.
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
Was a MechE for 10 years here in the US and now I’m a SWE. Even here, no one cares about hardware engineers. Don’t get me wrong, you can make enough to be “comfortable”. But anecdotally, maybe 10% of MechE do design. 10% of that are paid handsomely to be in tech and are “Product Designers”. Even then, almost every tech company want to be a predominantly software company. They just happen to need hardware to execute their product. Admittedly, it’s really hard to do hardware in this economy when one country has 60% of the global manufacturing output and can copy your design, make it cheaper, and make it better. Ironically, the biggest dividing line that makes a hardware product better is good software.
That's what happens when there is not much manufacturing in the country anymore, and everyone is encouraged to go to college. I don't know why the software industry hasn't suffered more along the same lines. Maybe the profit margins for software are higher.
Preach. My friend is a gifted passionate Aerospace engineer (top in his specific stream at Cambridge) and basically is withering away working for the above 2 firms. The location is grim being far from others and generally far from other young exciting people. Additionally in his org, there just isn't a sense of excitement/ urgency which leaves him with little to do. Prioritising career for a career that's not there
Whilst others working in software (myself included) can have a far greater quality of life and salary working in London.
To some extent, this also applies to software. Except for DeepMind and a few other select places like Altos Labs, getting past £100k is hard, especially outside London. Unless you go into finance, of course. But then, you have to stick to London. Finance is like a black hole that sucks a big chunk of the mathematical, CS and statistical UK talent. They have very proactive recruiters trying to e.g. connect with Oxbridge students when they are approaching graduation.
It’s shocking. Software engineers in the UK are treated like engineers in the US were in the 1960s. Low respect, low pay, while city boys strutting around in shiny suits snapping their fingers to get anything they want.
I know plenty of engineers (web application developers) making over £100-£150k outside of London, usually in fairly low-stress remote jobs.
The pay is clearly nothing compared to the US, but I wouldn’t say it was massively hard for them to get where they are. They all have 5+ years experience at a senior level, and are otherwise just reliable, capable, low-maintenance employees, but maybe that’s rare!
I am a former Mech Eng who trod this path. Started at JLR, moved by self teaching into software. Engineering in the UK felt like it moved at a glacial pace that only made sense in the days of final salary pension schemes. Senior management really struggled to get their heads around why young people were so impatient, but we were not competing for the same rewards.
It seems like the salaries quoted here haven't changed much in the past couple of decades. It's a shame. I know in the past there was a brain drain of talent from the UK to Canada due to the salary disparity. Here's an example:
Been there, done that. I still frequently get sent Linkedin specs for companies where the hardware team lead is earning junior SWE money. UK junior SWE money.
> working for Rolls Royce in the middle of nowhere
Most people I know who ended up at RR live in Nottingham or the Peak District and commute in to Derby. Appreciate that’s perhaps not as exciting as London but it’s hardly a shit hole up here.
Agree on pay though. I work for a different engineering conglomerate (foreign owned) and I applied for a HPC role at RR a couple of years ago and the salary was £20k lower. The disparity would be even more now.
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.
The job of secondary financial markets is to redirect areas of surplus unproductive wealth (that makes no return), to productive areas. By the magic of markets, sustained profitability = productive use of resources.
The problem with labourers who work in these secondary markets however, is the same as the guards who watch the gate: they can extract large tolls for being in the right place at the right time.
People in finance are rich because they're well-placed to skim highly productive traffic. However, it is -- in the vast majority of cases -- only skimming. The system functions very well to take unproductive surplus and allocate it effectively.
Though admittedly today, the larger beneficiaries are increasingly monpolies, and so on. But this isnt a side effect of the finance industry, but of the state.
Finance jobs in London / New York (partially) can afford those pay rates because they extract wealth from the rest of the world.
Whether they do so in return for services rendered or are extracting rents by acting as gatekeepers is a question that never quite gets resolved. A little of each I suspect, depending on the context.
It's actually Pretty Bloody Hard(tm) to store or move money/wealth safely and properly, not the least because most of us are all highwaymen when given the opportunity. Banks exist to try and bring some civility to that madness, with the cost being (ideally) a pittance skimmed from the top to keep their highwaymen tendencies at bay.
If you want to call them a protection racket akin to the mafia... you're probably right.
Of course, banks these days are much more than that and there's plenty to rightfully crucify them for. But even still, there's a reason being called a third-rate bank clerk is an insult among the highest order.
It's called capitalism because we use capital to allocate value creation. So obviously finance extracts wealth, that's their job in a capitalist system.
Fundholding GPs don't do badly. A lot get 6 figures if they are partners in a surgery.
I think most Doctors etc need to wait until they're consultants until they make decent money.
But I'm like you - fell into banking due to being a Lotus Notes developer when it was flavour of the month and have never left. I reckon I'm on over double what I would be if I'd ended up working for IBM or Cap Gemini or similar.
[And I should say I ended up in project/programme/change management. I'm not still a Notes Developer]
I don't know, the doctor route seems like a lot of work for the money. My FIL told his kids not to do it, and he was a surgeon who ran a department. They messed around with the doctors' pensions, and it made a lot of them quit. Conditions are also awful, he started the department in a temporary building and retired with it still there.
A doctor is also a kid who got full A grades as a high school graduate. They'd have the pick of what university course to do, and then they end up doing this thing that takes until you're 30, with insane nighttime hours. It just makes no sense to me that there are still kids who think this is worthwhile. It's not even as if you are guaranteed to be allowed to specialize in what you want either, that's a battle with all the other top students.
I have noticed this anecdotally as well in costal areas of the United States.
It’s like textbook Baumol’s cost disease[0], except housing is rising fastest while
the cost of labor nearly not at all, because buyers (hiring firms) just don’t buy
Senior doctors are paid OK actually. Consultants are paid between 105-140k [1] with a big pension contribution too. That's not Goldman pay, but also quite secure and a big pension contribution from the employer which isn't included in the salaey. Also scope for very nice NHS/private combo. Also at this point, to have any medical care in the UK, you basically need to know a doctor...
Now, sure, that salary might be too low, and working for the NHS seems like hell but it would seem the money isn't the main obstacle. Maybe not right now for 2 years ago that was a very good pay.
There are other pay-related issues. Marginal tax between 100 and 150 or so is incredibly high, around 60-70%. This is because many nasty things kick in there. Tax free allowance shrinking for example. Doctors are double screwed in some cases, as by law they have to contribute a lot of their salary to pension, and in this threshold often exceed their allowance - which is a real kick in the nuts, seeing how they can't reduce it, and anyway, pension saving should always be seen favourably in a place like UK. These are by the way some of the reasons for doctor shortages in the UK, senior doctors have little incentive to work harder, many cut their hours with little difference to their net pay.
But these aren't strictly linked to their headline salary.
> These days, what are your options realistically in this country? Particularly if you want to hang around your family in the south?
In 2013 I was working as a CTO in London, managing a team of 40, and I could just about afford a run-down 2-bedroom in a just-ok part of Zone 1, assuming I wanted to make some savings too. My salary wasn't bad for the role, outside of banking. Anyway, that was pretty much the end of living in the UK for me.
90% of the problems in the UK come down to the cost of housing in London (and maybe a couple of other key cities, but mainly London)
This cost is driven by relatively high wages in London, so people on good salaries can afford more, so prices go up as supply is constrained and demand increases.
The rest of the western world is starting to see this, and before London had the issue, city states in the far east like Hong Kong and Singapore had the same problem.
The UK is over educated so everyone who walks into an interview has a degree so it just isn’t worth anything and puts you at the starting line, internships are there to mold nothing into something and if that values too low for you there is a queue of people behind you also with degrees who would be happy for the opportunity.
If your focus is money then higher education is the wrong path anyway, it’s oversubscribed.
In ~2006 I had a similar experience arranging my work placement during university, although I was earning a bit more — £16k for software development in the South East, just outside London. The banks were certainly offering a lot more, £30-something-k.
The university careers person said five banks would each take all fifty of us, just on the basis of us being Imperial College students, so we should apply them and forget anything else we were interested in as it wouldn't pay well. She couldn't understand the person who wanted to work at a computer game company.
We complained to the head of department, who was furious. A short time later there was a new careers person.
I wonder if we ever crossed over, i also worked for Intel in the west country (Swindon) and now whore myself out to aerospace/defence in the same area.
I see what our engineers are paid and its genuinely concerning.
Is the UK more in line with the norm though and the US is the outlier? I would say the UK, Europe, and Japan all have similar wages (although Japan has worse benefits and on the whole a larger expectation of workers so it's not like for like.)
Did you at least get to play with the demo computers? Some of the most fun times before everyone had a super powerful machine were when we got to borrow the top-of-the-line demo machines to play on all weekend. Set up in one of those conference rooms, pizza for everyone.
If you are only doing it for the money, your point is fair - but there are many of us for whom - beyond reasonable necessities - that is at best a secondary consideration.
Anybody who moves from engineering to finance doesn't have their heart in engineering - which is fine, but its not like they had no choice.
Agree though that London and parts of the South place extra pressures on people looking to build a life and home.
> Anybody who moves from engineering to finance doesn't have their heart in engineering - which is fine, but its not like they had no choice.
Ahhh, the classic no true engineer / scotsman argument ... I couldn't possible be an Engineer because I like hard software projects with smart people, good budgets, and tight deadlines.
I also had a similar experience in Northern Italy. I did an unpaid internship for 2 months during my bachelor (you don't really have a choice here) and then remained working part-time from time to time while getting my master. When I graduated they offered me €17k, meanwhile I got a €65k internship offer in Milan...
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.
>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.
I started a non-tech food product company, and have found the exact same thing to be true in my line of work. It's odd.
Here's a conversation I recently had with a potential investor.
"You've got a years worth of sales to convince me you have found ideal PMF?"
Yes.
"You've found the resources you need to scale to the degree that I'd get a good return if sales continue to grow?"
Yes.
"You've built a small team with some industry vets, and have some great talent on your advisory board who know the ups and downs of building a brand and product in your chosen space?"
Yes.
"You've boostrapped your way to $100k in revenue, have developed a cult-like following in your local market and are seeking a small amount to be able to grow the product to a state-wide or nation-wide scale?"
Yes.
"How much do are you looking to raise?"
Not a lot by modern standards. A million dollars would last us several years
"Why should I invest in you? Your industry's traditional exit valuation isn't triple digit. Sorry"
Why the fuck did you come to me and ask for this meeting?
>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.
This needs to be echoed from the rooftops. And seen by a whole bunch of investors/VCs whose hubris has prevented them from investing in anything else.
> Alex: Developed AI drone swarms for disaster relief at 18. Graduated with top honours from Imperial. His job? Tweaking a single button's ergonomics on home appliances.
>These aren't outliers. They're a generation of engineering prodigies whose talents are being squandered.
Just the opposite can still be like a mirror image :\
When I was younger than that in the land of the dollar bill I had already made millions for our clients in financial services.
At the time of course the dollar and the pound sterling were still backed in a non-fiat way at about $2.5/£1 which people could count on for the long term.
Once everything went fiat, nobody could afford anything physical like they could before.
I didn't get out of high school until after 1971 so it was already far too late.
Then I went to the University to study hardware type things so I would have something to sell where concrete value was being added, not merely shuffled around or gradually extracted. The business school had a ridiculous cheating scandal and they weren't as good at math as I would have liked anyway.
But manufacturing momentum continued to dwindle with skyrocketing inflation and labor costs.
Regardless, I'm still not finished improving my abilities to create and/or make all kinds of things from mechanical hardware, electronics, chemicals and more, but only sold one physical product for a limited number of years in my employers' or my own company, which was a side product within a pure service provider. You can be prepared your whole life and still not get up to launching hardware as easily as you can with something having much less raw material cost.
Which is naturally the way it always was, but one day the costs just skyrocketed out of sight and beyond the reach of millions more technologists in a most insidious way, so no more manufacturing for you. And millions is a lot, that grew to include today's big slice containing almost all of the promising creatives who are capable of earth-shaking physical inventions who were fortunately not previously confined to such an exclusive (never be able to afford it again) club. If past progress would have been limited the same way, Bell Labs or NASA could never have even gotten off the ground in the 20th century. Does anybody today have any idea what places like this were supposed to be like in the 21st century? Hint; not less-capable of putting every other contender to shame, and certainly not smaller or non-existent. While still being dwarfed in size by the combined power of industrial research labs supporting domestic manufacturing.
I guess it's just remaining momentum continuing to slow from an era that was already bygone before I got out of college. Once inflation kicked in, average people couldn't afford to buy US-made products any more, manufacturers couldn't afford to keep making them, and it never got better. Reagan came along and it got even worse. Remember, the great mothballing of factories in the 20th century is only temporary until the value of the currency in average peoples' pockets comes back :\
If you want to be able to make anything you could possibly need, you need to already be making everything you already need.
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 expensive and an additional cost. A hardware startup has all the same costs as a software company but with the addition of hardware.
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 I got through more prototypes for the analogue signal paths in an afternoon than the two other EEs had in the previous week.
That’s a big part of it. But mostly it’s that your dev+deploy+evaluate cycle is so much slower. With web software you can write a feature or bug-fix and push to prod in minutes - and repeat that many times a day. With hardware each equivalent cycle is weeks or months (especially in my vertical - farms).
In some shops this is solved by staggering scheduling so people work on several projects. Some aspects of HW can be simulated (think analog with SPICE-likes, or logic level like the chip designers and FPGA users do) so this reduce the need to iterate every time in hardware.
A lot of the iteration work can also be done on the board you received. You don't have to wait for your new board to see if those additional decoupling capacitors will do something, you add them on your current board by hand... You would be amazed at how far rewiring can go, sometimes entire BGAs are removed, installed dead-bug style and each pin wired by hand.
The pace is not really parts supply constrained in my experience. It just takes much longer to build and validate even relatively modest design changes.
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 chains? And yes, I'm fully aware of the theory of comparative advantages, but in the meantime, but manufacturing can still bring great income to many families and nations still compete and even go to wars with each other, right?
When I was a kid (80s) I knew old boys with lathes and mills and pillar drills at the bottom of the garden. They were the last generation, I think, of a tradition rooted in the Victorian era which informally transferred a lot of knowledge from one generation to the next.
My pet theory is that their disappearance is tied closely to the cost of land. I see US-based hardware hobbyists' shops on YouTube, and I think "I couldn't even afford to build a shed that big". The tools themselves are often actually pretty cheap second hand at auction, because the demand is so low, but I live on the back of a postage stamp in comparison with those guys.
(Another possibility is simply that software ate the world.)
The US outsourced its manufacturing to China in the name of comparative advantage. Bob bakes bread, Alice grow apples. Everyone is better off because of specialization.
In Thomas Friedman's latest nyt column, he refers to China's manufacturing dominance as a play to de-industrializing other countries. It may just be globalization is incompatible with political realities.
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.
> That’s not the kind of thing young, unproven founders can pull off, anywhere.
The UK, with a comprehensive social safety net, should be more willing to take small risks. I know it's now what happens, but it'd be important to understand why something that should be actually isn't.
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.
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 much better their life would be. That's what motivates pre-purchasing and also sharing/virality. That's why the LIFX Kickstarter campaign worked. But even with the $1.3M crowdfunding, they needed a lot more funds from investors; the crowdfunding just helped with initial funding and to prove demand.
Still, that company didn't turn out to be a big success. It was hard/slow to get the product into production and shipped to consumers – it took 2-3 years I think. Established lighting vendors like Phillips were quick to get competing products into major retail stores. Along the way the company seemed to have a lot of internal drama, and investors became disenchanted. The company was acquired in about 2019 [2], then that company went bust, then the LIFX assets were acquired again in 2022 [3].
So, from its early signs of huge potential success, it ends up being a cautionary tale and another case study that investors can look at as a reason not to invest in hardware startups.
Another cautionary tale is the "Coolest Cooler" [4], which ended up in a lawsuit [5]. I heard someone mention that a factory they engaged in China held them to ransom (staff went "on strike" in the middle of production) but I don't know details beyond what's been reported.
These cases demonstrate all the ways these kinds of projects can go wrong, and are much harder to turn around than a software project in which you can be building your product to maintain customer satisfaction and growth day-by-day.
And even still, this approach only works for gimmicky consumer products, not B2B products that are more likely to work commercially in the long term.
Edit: Also remember Pebble (watch) which was a huge Kickstarter hit and seemed like a successful company for a few years after that, then suddenly went bust.
Would it be fair to say that the "unicorn" effect is a lot harder to achieve as well? If VC rely on 1 out of N startups doing well then that 1 success needs to achieve over N-fold returns just to break even.
On the other hand I have no trouble coming up with examples of hardware companies that did well: Apple, Nvidia, Intel... but those time scales are titanic.
Not sure they are great examples. Intel is going through a lot of pain now (but it's been very successful in the past). Apple was in a terrible situation before its reverse acquisition by NeXT (NeXT paid one Steve Jobs for all of Apple and got $400 million in change). Nvidia got insanely lucky with Bitcoin, then with AI. Its original plan was to make 3D accelerators for gamers and, maybe, engineering workstations.
All of them were a couple wrong decisions away from doom multiple times.
Think Commodore, who made one of the most popular computers ever, only to be mismanaged into the ground.
Nvidia outsourced their manufacturing, as did a lot of similar startups from the 90s. Even back then, VCs didn't want to invest in hardware companies that were going to actually build their own hardware because that's expensive, they wanted companies that designed their products in the USA and had them manufactured by other fabs.
Nvidia got lucky by building a product that just happened to be amazingly well suited to a technology that would emerge 20 years after they were founded. Credit where it's due, they developed CUDA and gave universities gobs of cash/hardware to train students to leverage CUDA for machine learning and later, AI. But if not for AI, Nvidia would still be a video card designer with a market cap of maybe 5% of its current valuation.
It's difficult to call them a hardware company in the sense that Intel is. They only do designs of hardware, and a lot of their value comes from the software they designed to leverage their hardware in ways beyond their initial purpose.
It's funny that you didn't mention Dell, Lenovo, Sony, or even Microsoft and Nintendo which both make their money off the software than the hardware, but are also companies that produce and selling hardware.
Yep, look at RISC-V, the most promising hardware is from the USA. It is not yet on the latest silicon process, but with the latest GPU, I guess we could run the latest games, until the game devs recompile and QA a bit their games (obviously on elf/linux)
Most promising by what definition? And what subset of applications/markets are you considering?
In the microcontroller space, China is leading on RISC-V. EspressIf, WCH, et.c are already shipping units at scale. Of course these are low value chips, but the volumes are large. The combined shipments for microcontrollers are in tens of billions of units annually. The technology choices in the space changes slowly (32 bit over 8/16bit is quite recent...), but over the next 10 years RISC-V looks poised to take a decent chunk.
I don't know much about the details about how it got started (i.e., how much Palmer Luckey self-funded it in the early stages) but the fact that he'd already built/sold Oculus was always going to make it easier to open doors and close funding deals (even if the politics/FB drama was a complication).
Also, building tech for the US military has some advantages. You have one customer with very high stakes and very deep pockets. Obviously it's hard to get started and you need to be building something that's uniquely useful and valuable for defence purposes, but once you achieve that, once you're in the door of the military industry, you're on pretty solid ground, and that's attractive to investors. The one hardware company i know in Australia that's doing well is also making defence tech.
It's much harder if all your potential customers (in my case, farmers) are small family businesses spread thinly in non-urban areas all over the world. Investors know that makes distrubuition much more challenging.
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.
The culture sector in London is notoriously badly paid. Mostly staffed by the intellectual trophy husbands and wives of the financial sector.
Even similar sized public sector organisations (thinking education) pay far better. A senior headteacher with 50 or 100 staff will do a lot better than a cultural manager.
> Mostly staffed by the intellectual trophy husbands and wives of the financial sector.
Oh so true. Which helps to explain the number of levels of management in UK cultural institutions, because in London there are enough of these people who want a (poorly paid) role that it's better to have 3 layers of management when 1 would do.
The UK pays terribly in a lot of areas when compared to the US, Canada and Australia. In software, the only way to keep up is contracting, preferably in London, preferably in finance.
But my partner also pretty much doubled her pay in retail management when we moved to Australia.
The London financial sector may be losing talent to Europe, but from what I can tell European pay in fintech is not comparable.
Museum jobs are hideously badly paid. In many cases the real work is done for free by "volunteers" (really poor saps on a 2-5 year job interview) before finding out the actual job went to a buddy of the museum director who doesn't even need to show up most of the time.
Software engineers can usually expect to at least 2x their earnings, the median in the uk is £50k and in the US it is £100k, and that is not acounting for the significantly lower tax burden. (That pay excludes medical benefits, if you include the dollar value of that and bonuses and equity the difference rises).
>> 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.
Citation needed. No-one wants to live in Frankfurt.
Feels the same. Moved to UK a couple of years ago, can’t find a £25k job. Found some outsourced work at American companies and now suddenly I’m going to hit the higher tax bracket
If your wife used to manage 60 people and now manages a third of that, it seems like her talent is being wasted NOW, not when she was in the UK.
I'll add that 70K is nothing to write home about in the US, especially if you're not in a low COL state.
The article is about people not going in the field that they're talented at, because it's low paid. Clearly it doesn't apply to your wife which is talented and went in the low paid field.
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.
The UK cannot just "be Singapore". What happened in Singapore was a specific, unrepeatable combination of its geography, the needs of the region, the size of the country, and the culture.
To maintain its wealth today, Singapore relies on a large underclass of underpaid non-citizens. Around 40% of the country are non-citizens.
In addition, London sort of has its own Singapore(s) in the form of the City and Canary Wharf. That's great for those who work there, but it's not feasible for a country of nearly 70 million for everyone to just work in finance.
Final comment:
> Singapore did not depend on neighboring countries to climb out of 3rd world poverty
Singapore's wealth is built on trade and foreign investment. To assume that without other countries it would be equally successful is absurd.
It's a political issue. There are things the UK is good at - finance, culture/media, software and yes hardware innovation, legal services, tourism. But since the GFC especially, none of these things are considered "right" by the electorate.
Instead we romanticise unproductive legacy stuff, and an NHS which, while its staff are in many cases heroic, spends most of its vast budget cleaning up the mess of a population who thinks eating a sensible diet and enacting basic public health policy is "woke".
It's a good thing we banned indoor smoking in public buildings in the early aughts, there's no way you'd get that through in today's political climate.
>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.
In a similar situation to you apparently. Every couple of years I'll take a look at UK as well as NZ and Aus (all places I can legally work) and Japan is still the better option. Even with the yen situation and despite all the doom and gloom others write online, life is still pretty nice here.
As an NZer, jobs in Australia pay wayyyy better and everyone here seems to agree that the lifestyle is better there. Lots of NZers move to Oz to improve their life and opportunities.
The NZ economy isn't doing great.
I'm personally worried that demographics and an incoming Labour government will mean that if you have saved for your retirement our next government will simply tax your savings until you have nothing (they keep talking of a 2% wealth tax: if we go back to a 4% annual return environment that's 50% tax of your savings over time). Plus they are slowly introducing means testing or equivalents.
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.
This seems to be the case for most European countries, particularly here in France. We’re experiencing stagnation, or perhaps even a decline. Launching a product in Europe is significantly more challenging due to the market’s high fragmentation.
I don’t have much hope for the future of tech companies in Europe.
It’s exhausting trying to explain this to American leftists. They believe the UK / EU is rich, their healthcare is amazing and “free”, and no one has to work more than 35 hours a week. They visit London and Paris once in 10 years for vacation and think they understand the economic order.
Well specifically for engineering-related products (both software and hardware).
How can you thrive and be competitive when your competitors in the far-east work for >60 hours per week with a solid ecosystem and generous support from the government?
I am specifically worried about the future of European engineering, unlike US you have much smaller capitals and moats. Many of the products are sustained mainly by legacy built by your predecessors.
If nothing changes then by next-generation most if not all would be devoured by chaebols, Asian Sovereign Wealth Funds, or American PEs. You'll have to work for >60 hours but they not you will enjoy the surplus. Take your poison.
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 political side I'm sure there is plenty more the EU can do but I don't see the will.
The good news is that a relatively small amount of aggressive planning reform (namely, firing everyone involved and never calling it "planning" ever again) will fix most of the (fixable...) worst aspects of modern Britain.
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 cities themselves, as an example you can't grow most of our university cities at the edges without much better transit through the centres (trams at least, maybe metro rail). But the very suggestion and the preservation crowd as well as the existing suburbanites lose their shit.
And this is against a backdrop of rural and less educated people mistrusting anything going on in the growth cities, and I don't just mean London.
The problem is the institutions are unaccountable and can't be easily made controllable by the electorate again. Bank of England, the judiciary etc. These control the country not the MPs. Blair onward
It's not, its just that you are swept into the news cycle of doomerism where engagement is established with FUD. The UK is fine compared to many of its peer nations in many areas.
It's not quite that bad - the news obviously makes it seem like it's worse than it is. Also we finally got rid of the Tories, so at least things are heading in the right direction. I made a list of some positive changes Labour have made already:
* Allow onshore wind
* Means tested winter fuel allowance
* Inheritance tax for farms
* Assisted dying bill (controversial but I think generally people are in favour of this)
* Scrapping the public footpath registration deadline
The only stupid thing I think they've done is the porn site age testing thing, but that was also a Tory policy.
IMO the big problem is the right-wing media. Take something like the winter fuel allowance. Very obviously the right thing to do, and even pensioners were generally in favour (check this article: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/c4gegy4r9ndo ), yet it still somehow a huge controversy with disingenuous articles even on the BBC like this one fuelling the faux outrage: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/c80l9lde5yjo
How can we make any improvements if such obviously good changes meet such an irrational reaction?
Exactly. It's not merely the Fabian state, being ruled by lawyers, by socialist agitators, it is the vast swathes of proles who cheer every time they crush success or do wealth appropriations. It feels like you are always just two steps away from being rounded up in a pogrom for merely having savings.
The PM himself defines working class as people with no savings. It's horrid.
How much savings do you have? Is it used for rent-seeking behaviour? I think that's the key issue the country is facing.
If you have a little padding no-one will be coming for you.
Everyone in power is desparately trying dance around tax reform. When you tax productive work much more heavily than unproductive work (looking at our etf holdings grow and crowding out home/business owners with buy-to-lets), you are going to get stagnation.
Readit News
> • £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.
(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.)
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peterborough
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
Everyone wants more Z, Y, X. Nobody wants to change where they are to support it. This is why even areas that redevelop in places that are friendly to it, take decades.
The "old" solution was to just build a whole new factory town elsewhere, but that doesn't work as well, and especially doesn't work when you're not building megafactories that employ entire cities.
They could do this is one fell swoop with a single bill by the Parliament that dissolves these local councils, and land owners the right (and freedom) to build whatever they want on land they own.
Building safety codes would still apply; but zoning permitting could be erased in one fell swoop with a single bill.
look at this chat - courtesy of perpexity.
United States 11,855 KWH China 5,474 Germany 6,483 Australia 7,000 (approximate based on recent trends) Singapore 9,000 (approximate based on recent trends) United Kingdom 4,701
Energy consumption of the uK is that of a poor developing country.
people will cite the size of uk homes due to lack of land as if you can't build houses with a lot of sq/ft - sq/m vertically ?
the only thing keeping uk afloat at the moment is the friendly immigration policy.
money doesn't move in capital markets but people would rather pump money into property.
Just looking at wikipedia population and area (and a very simple scaling)
So... The UK has comparably _more_ of it's land covered with housing than the other nations mentioned.When you consider population density, UK >> US >> NZ > Canada > Australia.
You would _expect_ countries with much more wide open space to have bigger homes, and the other nations homes aren't so big _when you consider their countries' size and population_.
> [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/
You might find that interesting. It's from the Adam smith institute. Central planning has been seriously damaging the UK since after ww2. Thatcher is blamed for destroying British industry. It started long before her.
[1]: https://worksinprogress.co/issue/the-housing-theory-of-every...
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.
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).
But that can only work for so long and is beneficial in the medium to long-term for a very limited number of people (basically the owners of said financial capital), at some point you have to produce some real wealth, wealth produced from real stuff via resources of the Earth + human ingenuity and, yes, + human work.
It is fairly clear what was the best option.
HN has a very wide range of economic opinions, and some people are extremely uninformed about what it takes to do hard things that can't be grown organically, and what it takes to maintain a business running when it's done the hard thing in the face of competition.
Most of those are people complaining about a business having to make changes because it took $50+m in funding and now needs to justify it. The business was only "good" because it got $50m and didn't need to do things like charge enough money. If it hadn't gotten that $50m then those people wouldn't consider it such a good business or even know about it.
Who says those countries were well governed though? IMO they are all run by idealogical morons
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.
As a member of the working class, I find there’s little incentive to build something new or innovate because the effort required to navigate through all the burdensome regulations is overwhelming. On top of that, any additional income I might generate from bringing my ideas or initiatives to market would be taxed at more than 50%. For many people like me, the effort simply isn’t worth it. Instead, we focus our energy on other pursuits, such as family, sports, or friendships.
This shift in focus isn’t inherently bad—a life balanced between family, friends, work, and leisure is often a recipe for happiness. However, societal progress relies heavily on the efforts of a small minority of individuals who are bold (or perhaps crazy) enough to pursue their ideas. When 90% of those individuals are discouraged from taking entrepreneurial risks, society’s capacity for innovation is severely stifled.
In short, it’s clear that excessive regulations and high taxes are holding Europe back from achieving its full potential for growth and innovation.
And/or don't think that more is better/desirable. I wouldn't consider myself working class, but I was definitely raised with the idea that making obscene amounts of money is actually pretty selfish/immoral and not something one ought to strive for. That doesn't preclude going into business. But it is pretty antithetical to the VC funding model and the creation of billion dollar businesses.
In general, it seems that the culture in America is that wealth is virtuous and confers status, whereas in Europe that at least isn't so universal and some circles it is even seen as shameful (consider that variants on socialism are still mainstream political ideologies in Europe).
You can change mindsets with regulations that reward taking risks in new businesses/innovations, and punish rent seeking and sitting on inherited real estate for example.
But as long as EUrope is focused on maintaining the status quo of boomers and gentrified dynasties of billionaires that you probably played against in Assassins' Creed, nothing will change.
They were exterminated and replaced by a very small European population. Like sterilising a Petri dish and letting bacteria grow, the opportunities that population experienced were the biggest any population in the world ever had. Just look at a graph of the population growth of US OR California in the last century and compare it to others.
Now there is in California a population of near 40 million people.
That is not a "mindset", this is real growth that they could experience and the rest of the world could not.
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?
A lot of people choose to start businesses near their friends or families.
Doing soldering of prototypes? Good luck finding a landlord that would let you do it. The moment they hear "fumes" is a nope, fire hazard, safety risk and won't let you...
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).
By comparison, the performance of the UK in the last 20 years vs the US or the Nordics is a singular tragedy.
USSR was also terribly battered by WWII, and its leadership was not highly competent either; I'd say both parameters were much worse than UK's. But it managed to remain a large empire with a high economic potential, and UK could not.
Is number of war ships, or billionaires, a good measure for a country?
https://blog.nationalarchives.gov.uk/food-thought-rationing-...
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.
In basically every UK startup I've worked at they've done 1 or all of the below:
1. Offered options in numbers with no valuation/percentage of ownership. "We offer you 40000 stock options!". When asked to clarify numbers, they delay and never tell you. Inevitably they have a value of a few pence each
2. Withdraw options unilaterally when you leave the company with no option to exercise
3. Never get round to filling in the paperwork so you never actually receive them
I was _shocked_ when i worked for my first US startup and they just...gave me the options. And I could exercise them whenever I wanted. And they expired 10 years after I left the company
This isn't just an EU thing, for what it's worth. The US is the outlier.
Deleted Comment
It's anti success. And there is garbage everywhere, people keep voting for antisocial housing and bad cultures. It's a failing state.
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.
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.
I'd be interested to hear more about this.
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.
I hear they fixed it eventually but seems like an unnecessary loss.
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.
they dont mean location, they mean ownership of the equity.
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"
And the problem runs in families. This is not therapy but every time I talked to my parents about an idea it would be dammed with faint praise or I'd be told I'm wasting my time. It's taken 20 years to work out that the more they dissed an idea is the better it actually was.
Insurance: “Okay sir, who did the electrical wiring? you: “Me”. Insurance: “Are you a professional? you: “No" Insurance: “Have you had your work certified by a third party?" you: “Do my buddies count?” insurance: "Have a good day sir"
There may never be a problem and you may have figured out everything that's required to get your butt covered (good for you in this case), but the fact is that a lot of people don't know about these things, do their own thing and get royally screwed if there's a problem and, God forbid, someone gets hurt.
There is an element of truth to that, self build projects seem to go about was well as the typical software project.
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.
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.
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.
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.
US vs UK investors are night and day. UK investors only want to see profitability to protect their cautious capital
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.
It can be argued that a responsibility falls on EU equity companies, pension funds, and so on, but they do not make seed investments.
I’m curious, if you think the issue is cultural.
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.
Anyone young should go make as much money as possible, as early as possible, so they can have the same outlook you do in later life.
Europe wasn’t like this for centuries. What is the cause of this mindset?
Similarly, why work yourself to the bone for a miniscule chance of success, if you can... just chill instead? I used to be a highly-motivated go-getter, but then I realized, this shit ain't bringing happiness, and I turned into a work-avoider who spends time in the office mostly talking to coworkers and playing games in the toilet. My overall life satisfaction skyrocketed.
Yes, the society at large does need people to do the needful, but this ain't gonna be me.
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.
Whilst others working in software (myself included) can have a far greater quality of life and salary working in London.
The pay is clearly nothing compared to the US, but I wouldn’t say it was massively hard for them to get where they are. They all have 5+ years experience at a senior level, and are otherwise just reliable, capable, low-maintenance employees, but maybe that’s rare!
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Terry_Matthews
And in general engineering jobs in Canada don't even pay as well as in the USA.
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.
Isn't JLR in Solihull? That's two hours from London.
Most people I know who ended up at RR live in Nottingham or the Peak District and commute in to Derby. Appreciate that’s perhaps not as exciting as London but it’s hardly a shit hole up here.
Agree on pay though. I work for a different engineering conglomerate (foreign owned) and I applied for a HPC role at RR a couple of years ago and the salary was £20k lower. The disparity would be even more now.
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.
The problem with labourers who work in these secondary markets however, is the same as the guards who watch the gate: they can extract large tolls for being in the right place at the right time.
People in finance are rich because they're well-placed to skim highly productive traffic. However, it is -- in the vast majority of cases -- only skimming. The system functions very well to take unproductive surplus and allocate it effectively.
Though admittedly today, the larger beneficiaries are increasingly monpolies, and so on. But this isnt a side effect of the finance industry, but of the state.
Whether they do so in return for services rendered or are extracting rents by acting as gatekeepers is a question that never quite gets resolved. A little of each I suspect, depending on the context.
If you want to call them a protection racket akin to the mafia... you're probably right.
Of course, banks these days are much more than that and there's plenty to rightfully crucify them for. But even still, there's a reason being called a third-rate bank clerk is an insult among the highest order.
I think most Doctors etc need to wait until they're consultants until they make decent money.
But I'm like you - fell into banking due to being a Lotus Notes developer when it was flavour of the month and have never left. I reckon I'm on over double what I would be if I'd ended up working for IBM or Cap Gemini or similar.
[And I should say I ended up in project/programme/change management. I'm not still a Notes Developer]
A doctor is also a kid who got full A grades as a high school graduate. They'd have the pick of what university course to do, and then they end up doing this thing that takes until you're 30, with insane nighttime hours. It just makes no sense to me that there are still kids who think this is worthwhile. It's not even as if you are guaranteed to be allowed to specialize in what you want either, that's a battle with all the other top students.
A consultant gets £100k -> £140K ish from the NHS. However, many supplement that with private work and therefore make significantly more.
It’s like textbook Baumol’s cost disease[0], except housing is rising fastest while the cost of labor nearly not at all, because buyers (hiring firms) just don’t buy
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baumol_effect
Now, sure, that salary might be too low, and working for the NHS seems like hell but it would seem the money isn't the main obstacle. Maybe not right now for 2 years ago that was a very good pay.
There are other pay-related issues. Marginal tax between 100 and 150 or so is incredibly high, around 60-70%. This is because many nasty things kick in there. Tax free allowance shrinking for example. Doctors are double screwed in some cases, as by law they have to contribute a lot of their salary to pension, and in this threshold often exceed their allowance - which is a real kick in the nuts, seeing how they can't reduce it, and anyway, pension saving should always be seen favourably in a place like UK. These are by the way some of the reasons for doctor shortages in the UK, senior doctors have little incentive to work harder, many cut their hours with little difference to their net pay.
But these aren't strictly linked to their headline salary.
[1] https://www.healthcareers.nhs.uk/explore-roles/doctors/pay-d...
In 2013 I was working as a CTO in London, managing a team of 40, and I could just about afford a run-down 2-bedroom in a just-ok part of Zone 1, assuming I wanted to make some savings too. My salary wasn't bad for the role, outside of banking. Anyway, that was pretty much the end of living in the UK for me.
This cost is driven by relatively high wages in London, so people on good salaries can afford more, so prices go up as supply is constrained and demand increases.
The rest of the western world is starting to see this, and before London had the issue, city states in the far east like Hong Kong and Singapore had the same problem.
If your focus is money then higher education is the wrong path anyway, it’s oversubscribed.
The university careers person said five banks would each take all fifty of us, just on the basis of us being Imperial College students, so we should apply them and forget anything else we were interested in as it wouldn't pay well. She couldn't understand the person who wanted to work at a computer game company.
We complained to the head of department, who was furious. A short time later there was a new careers person.
I see what our engineers are paid and its genuinely concerning.
Anybody who moves from engineering to finance doesn't have their heart in engineering - which is fine, but its not like they had no choice.
Agree though that London and parts of the South place extra pressures on people looking to build a life and home.
Ahhh, the classic no true engineer / scotsman argument ... I couldn't possible be an Engineer because I like hard software projects with smart people, good budgets, and tight deadlines.
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.
I started a non-tech food product company, and have found the exact same thing to be true in my line of work. It's odd.
Here's a conversation I recently had with a potential investor.
"You've got a years worth of sales to convince me you have found ideal PMF?"
Yes.
"You've found the resources you need to scale to the degree that I'd get a good return if sales continue to grow?"
Yes.
"You've built a small team with some industry vets, and have some great talent on your advisory board who know the ups and downs of building a brand and product in your chosen space?"
Yes.
"You've boostrapped your way to $100k in revenue, have developed a cult-like following in your local market and are seeking a small amount to be able to grow the product to a state-wide or nation-wide scale?"
Yes.
"How much do are you looking to raise?"
Not a lot by modern standards. A million dollars would last us several years
"Why should I invest in you? Your industry's traditional exit valuation isn't triple digit. Sorry"
Why the fuck did you come to me and ask for this meeting?
>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.
This needs to be echoed from the rooftops. And seen by a whole bunch of investors/VCs whose hubris has prevented them from investing in anything else.
> Sarah: Built a fusion reactor at 16. Now? Debugging fintech payment systems.
> James: 3D-printed prosthetic limbs for A-levels. Today? Writing credit risk reports.
> Alex: Developed AI drone swarms for disaster relief at 18. Graduated with top honours from Imperial. His job? Tweaking a single button's ergonomics on home appliances.
>These aren't outliers. They're a generation of engineering prodigies whose talents are being squandered.
Just the opposite can still be like a mirror image :\
When I was younger than that in the land of the dollar bill I had already made millions for our clients in financial services.
At the time of course the dollar and the pound sterling were still backed in a non-fiat way at about $2.5/£1 which people could count on for the long term.
Once everything went fiat, nobody could afford anything physical like they could before.
I didn't get out of high school until after 1971 so it was already far too late.
Then I went to the University to study hardware type things so I would have something to sell where concrete value was being added, not merely shuffled around or gradually extracted. The business school had a ridiculous cheating scandal and they weren't as good at math as I would have liked anyway.
But manufacturing momentum continued to dwindle with skyrocketing inflation and labor costs.
Regardless, I'm still not finished improving my abilities to create and/or make all kinds of things from mechanical hardware, electronics, chemicals and more, but only sold one physical product for a limited number of years in my employers' or my own company, which was a side product within a pure service provider. You can be prepared your whole life and still not get up to launching hardware as easily as you can with something having much less raw material cost.
Which is naturally the way it always was, but one day the costs just skyrocketed out of sight and beyond the reach of millions more technologists in a most insidious way, so no more manufacturing for you. And millions is a lot, that grew to include today's big slice containing almost all of the promising creatives who are capable of earth-shaking physical inventions who were fortunately not previously confined to such an exclusive (never be able to afford it again) club. If past progress would have been limited the same way, Bell Labs or NASA could never have even gotten off the ground in the 20th century. Does anybody today have any idea what places like this were supposed to be like in the 21st century? Hint; not less-capable of putting every other contender to shame, and certainly not smaller or non-existent. While still being dwarfed in size by the combined power of industrial research labs supporting domestic manufacturing.
I guess it's just remaining momentum continuing to slow from an era that was already bygone before I got out of college. Once inflation kicked in, average people couldn't afford to buy US-made products any more, manufacturers couldn't afford to keep making them, and it never got better. Reagan came along and it got even worse. Remember, the great mothballing of factories in the 20th century is only temporary until the value of the currency in average peoples' pockets comes back :\
If you want to be able to make anything you could possibly need, you need to already be making everything you already need.
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 expensive and an additional cost. A hardware startup has all the same costs as a software company but with the addition of hardware.
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 I got through more prototypes for the analogue signal paths in an afternoon than the two other EEs had in the previous week.
A lot of the iteration work can also be done on the board you received. You don't have to wait for your new board to see if those additional decoupling capacitors will do something, you add them on your current board by hand... You would be amazed at how far rewiring can go, sometimes entire BGAs are removed, installed dead-bug style and each pin wired by hand.
My pet theory is that their disappearance is tied closely to the cost of land. I see US-based hardware hobbyists' shops on YouTube, and I think "I couldn't even afford to build a shed that big". The tools themselves are often actually pretty cheap second hand at auction, because the demand is so low, but I live on the back of a postage stamp in comparison with those guys.
(Another possibility is simply that software ate the world.)
In Thomas Friedman's latest nyt column, he refers to China's manufacturing dominance as a play to de-industrializing other countries. It may just be globalization is incompatible with political realities.
How so? If you aren't willing to buy from China many products will become unavailable and the rest will go up 10x in price.
Disentangling yourself from the global economic system is hard and painful, especially if you have just disentangled yourself from one super block.
The UK, with a comprehensive social safety net, should be more willing to take small risks. I know it's now what happens, but it'd be important to understand why something that should be actually isn't.
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.
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 much better their life would be. That's what motivates pre-purchasing and also sharing/virality. That's why the LIFX Kickstarter campaign worked. But even with the $1.3M crowdfunding, they needed a lot more funds from investors; the crowdfunding just helped with initial funding and to prove demand.
Still, that company didn't turn out to be a big success. It was hard/slow to get the product into production and shipped to consumers – it took 2-3 years I think. Established lighting vendors like Phillips were quick to get competing products into major retail stores. Along the way the company seemed to have a lot of internal drama, and investors became disenchanted. The company was acquired in about 2019 [2], then that company went bust, then the LIFX assets were acquired again in 2022 [3].
So, from its early signs of huge potential success, it ends up being a cautionary tale and another case study that investors can look at as a reason not to invest in hardware startups.
Another cautionary tale is the "Coolest Cooler" [4], which ended up in a lawsuit [5]. I heard someone mention that a factory they engaged in China held them to ransom (staff went "on strike" in the middle of production) but I don't know details beyond what's been reported.
These cases demonstrate all the ways these kinds of projects can go wrong, and are much harder to turn around than a software project in which you can be building your product to maintain customer satisfaction and growth day-by-day.
And even still, this approach only works for gimmicky consumer products, not B2B products that are more likely to work commercially in the long term.
Edit: Also remember Pebble (watch) which was a huge Kickstarter hit and seemed like a successful company for a few years after that, then suddenly went bust.
[1] https://www.forbes.com/sites/hollieslade/2013/12/11/eureka-h...
[2] https://www.geekwire.com/2019/building-energy-monitoring-com...
[3] https://www.techhive.com/article/827458/lifx-smart-light-bra...
[4] https://www.reddit.com/r/shittykickstarters/comments/x4ovj6/...
[5] https://www.reddit.com/r/shittykickstarters/comments/x4ovj6/...
On the other hand I have no trouble coming up with examples of hardware companies that did well: Apple, Nvidia, Intel... but those time scales are titanic.
Not sure they are great examples. Intel is going through a lot of pain now (but it's been very successful in the past). Apple was in a terrible situation before its reverse acquisition by NeXT (NeXT paid one Steve Jobs for all of Apple and got $400 million in change). Nvidia got insanely lucky with Bitcoin, then with AI. Its original plan was to make 3D accelerators for gamers and, maybe, engineering workstations.
All of them were a couple wrong decisions away from doom multiple times.
Think Commodore, who made one of the most popular computers ever, only to be mismanaged into the ground.
Nvidia got lucky by building a product that just happened to be amazingly well suited to a technology that would emerge 20 years after they were founded. Credit where it's due, they developed CUDA and gave universities gobs of cash/hardware to train students to leverage CUDA for machine learning and later, AI. But if not for AI, Nvidia would still be a video card designer with a market cap of maybe 5% of its current valuation.
It's difficult to call them a hardware company in the sense that Intel is. They only do designs of hardware, and a lot of their value comes from the software they designed to leverage their hardware in ways beyond their initial purpose.
I don't know much about the details about how it got started (i.e., how much Palmer Luckey self-funded it in the early stages) but the fact that he'd already built/sold Oculus was always going to make it easier to open doors and close funding deals (even if the politics/FB drama was a complication).
Also, building tech for the US military has some advantages. You have one customer with very high stakes and very deep pockets. Obviously it's hard to get started and you need to be building something that's uniquely useful and valuable for defence purposes, but once you achieve that, once you're in the door of the military industry, you're on pretty solid ground, and that's attractive to investors. The one hardware company i know in Australia that's doing well is also making defence tech.
It's much harder if all your potential customers (in my case, farmers) are small family businesses spread thinly in non-urban areas all over the world. Investors know that makes distrubuition much more challenging.
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.
Even similar sized public sector organisations (thinking education) pay far better. A senior headteacher with 50 or 100 staff will do a lot better than a cultural manager.
Oh so true. Which helps to explain the number of levels of management in UK cultural institutions, because in London there are enough of these people who want a (poorly paid) role that it's better to have 3 layers of management when 1 would do.
But my partner also pretty much doubled her pay in retail management when we moved to Australia.
The London financial sector may be losing talent to Europe, but from what I can tell European pay in fintech is not comparable.
Citation needed. No-one wants to live in Frankfurt.
TLDR: They're not moving to Frankfurt but they are moving out of the UK.
I'll add that 70K is nothing to write home about in the US, especially if you're not in a low COL state.
The article is about people not going in the field that they're talented at, because it's low paid. Clearly it doesn't apply to your wife which is talented and went in the low paid field.
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.
There's really no excuse for a country like the UK other than ordinary plain and simple mis-management from the top.
Singapore did not depend on neighboring countries to climb out of 3rd world poverty. To name an example.
To maintain its wealth today, Singapore relies on a large underclass of underpaid non-citizens. Around 40% of the country are non-citizens.
In addition, London sort of has its own Singapore(s) in the form of the City and Canary Wharf. That's great for those who work there, but it's not feasible for a country of nearly 70 million for everyone to just work in finance.
Final comment:
> Singapore did not depend on neighboring countries to climb out of 3rd world poverty
Singapore's wealth is built on trade and foreign investment. To assume that without other countries it would be equally successful is absurd.
Instead we romanticise unproductive legacy stuff, and an NHS which, while its staff are in many cases heroic, spends most of its vast budget cleaning up the mess of a population who thinks eating a sensible diet and enacting basic public health policy is "woke".
It's a good thing we banned indoor smoking in public buildings in the early aughts, there's no way you'd get that through in today's political climate.
Dead Comment
In a similar situation to you apparently. Every couple of years I'll take a look at UK as well as NZ and Aus (all places I can legally work) and Japan is still the better option. Even with the yen situation and despite all the doom and gloom others write online, life is still pretty nice here.
The NZ economy isn't doing great.
I'm personally worried that demographics and an incoming Labour government will mean that if you have saved for your retirement our next government will simply tax your savings until you have nothing (they keep talking of a 2% wealth tax: if we go back to a 4% annual return environment that's 50% tax of your savings over time). Plus they are slowly introducing means testing or equivalents.
It's hard to admit for French citizens but the EU significantly props up the French economy and reduces the structural issues of the country.
How can you thrive and be competitive when your competitors in the far-east work for >60 hours per week with a solid ecosystem and generous support from the government?
I am specifically worried about the future of European engineering, unlike US you have much smaller capitals and moats. Many of the products are sustained mainly by legacy built by your predecessors.
If nothing changes then by next-generation most if not all would be devoured by chaebols, Asian Sovereign Wealth Funds, or American PEs. You'll have to work for >60 hours but they not you will enjoy the surplus. Take your poison.
Quantity has a quality of its own.
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 political side I'm sure there is plenty more the EU can do but I don't see the will.
We banned building stuff in 1947, we can undo it.
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 cities themselves, as an example you can't grow most of our university cities at the edges without much better transit through the centres (trams at least, maybe metro rail). But the very suggestion and the preservation crowd as well as the existing suburbanites lose their shit.
And this is against a backdrop of rural and less educated people mistrusting anything going on in the growth cities, and I don't just mean London.
* Allow onshore wind
* Means tested winter fuel allowance
* Inheritance tax for farms
* Assisted dying bill (controversial but I think generally people are in favour of this)
* Scrapping the public footpath registration deadline
The only stupid thing I think they've done is the porn site age testing thing, but that was also a Tory policy.
IMO the big problem is the right-wing media. Take something like the winter fuel allowance. Very obviously the right thing to do, and even pensioners were generally in favour (check this article: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/c4gegy4r9ndo ), yet it still somehow a huge controversy with disingenuous articles even on the BBC like this one fuelling the faux outrage: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/c80l9lde5yjo
How can we make any improvements if such obviously good changes meet such an irrational reaction?
The PM himself defines working class as people with no savings. It's horrid.
If you have a little padding no-one will be coming for you.
Everyone in power is desparately trying dance around tax reform. When you tax productive work much more heavily than unproductive work (looking at our etf holdings grow and crowding out home/business owners with buy-to-lets), you are going to get stagnation.