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> which I'd categorise as being generally apathetical, if not hostile, to the engineering profession Any chance you could elaborate on this? Arm exists and is

> which I'd categorise as being generally apathetical, if not hostile, to the engineering profession Any chance you could elaborate on this? Arm exists and is British, after all.

scrlk 3y ago
UK engineering jobs typically have uncompetitive compensation.
- DaiPlusPlus 3y ago
  That's just the result, not the cause.
- sofixa 3y ago
  Uncompetitive compared to?
  - tchaffee 3y ago
    Compared to the US. Dan Abramov who works for Facebook and is one of the primary engineers of the hugely popular React framework makes less than one of my junior engineers.
    - progbits 3y ago
      And when he gets sick gets free healthcare while your junior will go bankrupt. Compensation isn't comparable without comparing external costs and benefits.
      - dom96 3y ago
        And as a FB employee gets private healthcare as a perk and would also get it in the US. The US comp is much higher than the UK's even taking into account healthcare.
        Tijdreiziger 3y ago
        And what about long-term illness? If he fell ill for 1+ year, would his salary and healthcare be guaranteed or would he go bankrupt?
        tchaffee 3y ago
        That's is indeed where the US system fails. Overall though I think the risk reward ratio favors the US for young healthy engineers. Save up enough to retire at 45 and then get yourself to a country with good nationalized healthcare.
        DaiPlusPlus 3y ago
        All US employers I've worked for included disability and long-term injury insurance as standard benefits, in addition to always offering the best-tier health-plans (from non-profit insurers too). Unemployment insurance is another (legally mandatory) benefit that outshines whatever I'd get in the UK because it isn't considered a public-benefit (i.e. it's not the state or Feds paying it ("welfare" as yanks call it), it's still a insurance pool model where the payouts are proportional to your salary and not some arbitrary income limit the DWP set for the year, nor is means-tested or requires me to use-up my savings first - so in WA ( https://esd.wa.gov/unemployment/calculate-your-benefit https://esd.wa.gov/unemployment/calculate-your-benefit ) I'd be getting about $4k/mo for 6 months, for comparison I quickly ran the numbers on benefits-calculator.turn2us.org.uk (there's no official UK calculator, wat) just now and got... £300/mo - and that's only after I exhaust all my savings first. (To be fair, I could just purchase private unemployment insurance in the UK too, except I'd be paying for it myself out-of-pocket (though it might be a tax-deductible expense?) whereas in WA employers are required to pay into it at no cost to the employee, IIRC).
        tchaffee 3y ago
        > long-term injury insurance It eventually runs out. The US healthcare system can eventually bankrupt you no matter how careful you are, if your health problems are serious enough.
        3y ago
      - tchaffee 3y ago
        I agree you need to consider total compensation. It's still not even close though. The company pays half the cost of excellent healthcare and the remaining payment is very affordable. Maybe in the case of a very serious long term illness you might go bankrupt, in which case the NHS these days is also not as much of a guarantee as it used to be. The risk to reward ratio is acceptable. Most healthy young people with talent are far better off working in the US and saving enough to retire at 45 years old. I say this as someone who would like it to not be true having loved living and working in the EU and UK for many years. But the numbers do not add up. It's especially sad because it results in brain drain. The saddest part of it is that there is no reason Facebook can't afford to pay the Dan Abramovs of the world the compensation they would get in the US. I'd like to better understand why the gap is so big.
      - boeingUH60 3y ago
        What a silly, coping lie. A Facebook engineer in the US gets good private healthcare insurance.
        DaiPlusPlus 3y ago
        Hot-take: It's an emotional defence mechanism: on-the-whole the UK and US are far too similar and integrated that it's natural for middle-class Brits to larely consider themselves peers, and not near-peers, of their US counterparts - so when you have that view of yourself and your place in the world but then look at the stark the income disparity, you're going to comfort yourself with all of the bad things about the US (and the US' bad things are legion) - and invoking the egalitarian NHS happens because the UK gets its impression of the US healthcare "system" (industry?) from things like Michael Moore's Sicko or Times columnists reporting on all the messed-up healthcare injustices that happen in the US - but there is a very real ignorance of what healthcare is like in the US when the system does actually work well for you. And if it isn't NHS vs. "doesn't &everyone* get medical-bankruptcy?" then it'll be about guns, or the death penalty, or overt racism in the south, or corporate america's excesses, or US foreign-policy, and so on. Because those are the things that Channel 4 will report on - but you won't see or read stories that upset anyone's feelings on their place in the world: and it works on everyone: I've already mentioned Guardian-reading types, but also and especially the Brexit-types: who still desperately want to believe the British empire could be brought-back because the Daily Express told them so.
      - zarzavat 3y ago
        As much as I like the NHS, it’s pretty shit compared to the healthcare a Facebook employee would get in the US. Wait weeks to see a GP, long waiting times to see a specialist or for treatment, rationing of access to technology like MRIs, and a risk of dying in a hospital car park or corridor, or being killed by an overworked A&E doctor. Don’t get me wrong, the NHS is great, I love that Boris Johnson got more or less the same care in St Thomas’ that a homeless person would have received (perhaps a bit better). But on an individual level, the FB engineer in US certainly has better care available to them than one in the UK.
        tchaffee 3y ago
        The one case where your argument fails is very serious illnesses where you can't continue to work. In the US you will end up with worse care. And let's hope the NHS problems are temporary. When I worked in London and the US ten years ago, I always preferred the NHS because the waiting times were shorter and the quality of care was much higher. I used the NHS a few weeks ago. It wasn't horrible and I got good quality of care within a reasonable time. But it's nothing close to how good it used to be so for the serious part of my care I went to the far better hospital in Brazil covered by my employer provided insurance. I would guess the NHS will change. Voters are unhappy with the reckless defunding of what used to be a national pride. The US does provide better care right now if you are rich or privileged enough to have a job that is in demand. But a well funded NHS is a far better system if the political will to get back to that exists.
        RhysU 3y ago
        > ...very serious illnesses where you can't continue to work. In the US, if possible, carry long term disability insurance to mitigate this risk.
        Nextgrid 3y ago
        > I would guess the NHS will change. Voters are unhappy with the reckless defunding of what used to be a national pride. I am not sure that is the case? The country seems to have a weird obsession with the NHS and seems to downplay/overlook its problems. Frankly even before its recent woes, I found it pretty shit compared to socialized healthcare in France. The current state of the NHS should prompt riots, yet everyone seems complacent in seeing their literal lifeline being destroyed by greedy, incompetent & senile oligarchs.
      - m4jor 3y ago
        [flagged]
      - commonlisp94 3y ago
        > he gets sick gets free healthcare Free at the cost of a significantly larger portion of his salary in tax for his entire life.
        tchaffee 3y ago
        The tax differences aren't that big, and they come with other nationalized services in addition to healthcare. Per capita healthcare costs in countries with nationalized healthcare can be 50% less than in the US. So you're getting much better value for your money when you pay taxes for that healthcare. https://www.healthsystemtracker.org/chart-collection/health-spending-u-s-compare-countries/ https://www.healthsystemtracker.org/chart-collection/health-...
        commonlisp94 3y ago
        Ok, but that's a completely different argument than it being free.
    - sentinalien 3y ago
      They're fairly competitive compared to the rest of the world. He is also working for a US company who could pay him more if they really wanted to. US salaries are high because the US has a glut of engineering jobs and is also a difficult place to immigrate to (generally requires you to have family ties or a job offer which is not easy to obtain when you might not be granted a work visa and won't realistically be able to start for about 6 months). If the US ever adopted a more lax immigration system in line with the UK, Canada, the EU etc I would expect US engineering salaries to drop.
      - kriro 3y ago
        In what world is the post-Brexit UK immigration system lax?
        extraduder_ire 3y ago
        Compared to the US system of workers' visas, it's incredibly lax. Unless I'm misinformed. I haven't had to think about it much though, as I'm an Irish citizen and can come and go as I please.
      - tchaffee 3y ago
        > They're fairly competitive compared to the rest of the world. That's accurate. But what surprises me is how much in demand software engineers are globally and how little they get paid in most countries. It doesn't make any sense to me that Dan Abramov could more than triple his salary at Facebook just by being employed by the US branch. The value he provides to the company would in no way change.
gswdh 3y ago
I'm not sure what that poster was referring to, however in my experience (as a brit), is that the UK is replacing any kind of industry into a service economy aka. people buying shit they don't need. You see this in a number of ways like the physical replacement of industrial areas into shopping centres or the fact the UK can't manufacture rail locomotives - the place where they were invented... Having said this, there is still a reasonable amount of industry in the UK, the UK is by far the best country in the EU to buy engineering supplies but I think this is a remnant of the past. Most of the major engineering companies in industrial estates are Asian or American owned, now.
- Matl 3y ago
  > the UK is by far the best country in the EU to buy engineering supplies Germany has a far stronger industrial base still, I'd imagine if you want access to the EU you'd base yourself there.
- klelatti 3y ago
  > the UK is by far the best country in the EU The UK is no longer in the EU. Quite a significant point!
dazc 3y ago
I think a simpler answer is that for directors looking for a cash windfall the US markets are currently a more favourable choice.
msy 3y ago
The UK has a long intellectual tradition which creates a steady stream of creative and capable engineers. Capital however is predominately held via inherited wealth and its controllers want rentier incomes with low risk. As a consequence there is low appetite for risky new ventures and those that want to undertake them mostly migrate elsewhere. What's left is a stock market dominated by octogenarian+ dianosaurs, a decaying rump of manufacturing, a finance sector that mostly makes its bread laundering the capital of the world's corrupt and corruptors and a tiny creative industry that clings on despite suffering through waves of either government neglect, or worse yet, government interest.
- pipo234 3y ago
  > a stock market dominated by octogenarian+ dinosaurs, a decaying rump of manufacturing, a finance sector that mostly makes its bread laundering the capital of the world's corrupt and corruptors Ah! Now I get it. That rhymes with companies like Shell and Unilever leaving the EU in favour of UK after brexit. (Not that Frankfurt, Milan, Amsterdam or Paris are known to be heavy investors in tech innovation, btw.)
  - Lio 3y ago
    Well Shell (and BP) are really likely to get sweetheart deals on North Sea oil from Rishi Sunak which might have swayed them. Now, I know what you're thinking, that that's just because both firms coincidentally signed multi-billion dollar deals coincidentally with Sunak's family business, Infosys, to coincidentally outsource all their IT jobs but I assure you that's a mere coincidence.... probably. :P
- deskamess 3y ago
  Canada has many similarities. The inherited wealth is essentially banks and oligarchs. You pretty much have to be risk free to get any funding. Lots of window dressing and marketing to make Canada look good. If it were not for US companies (Cisco, Google, etc) the Canadian tech salary would be closer to Europe. Once you start living here you realize the truth about how much they value tech, protectionism, the incompetence of the telecom sector, stodgy banking and finance, poor education, unaffordable housing, and declining access to health (Ontario and stories from the Maritimes since health is provincial - cannot speak of Alberta/BC/etc). All subpar but the marketing and virtue signaling is great. A lot of 'make Canada look good' comes at the expense of Canadians.
pjc50 3y ago
Goes all the way back to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Two_Cultures https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Two_Cultures and beyond. The UK has a great engineering tradition, especially from the Victorian and Empire eras, all the way up to WW2, but it seems that after that there was a dramatic and incredibly short sighted turn to economisation and avoiding investment. The absolute poster child for this was the UK space programme, which was cancelled just before the launch of its first rocket. The director of the programme decided to defy orders and launch anyway, on the grounds that everything was ready and he was in Australia. But this pervades everything. The TBMs for Euston HS2 have been bought, but are going to spend the next year buried doing nothing, because there's a persistent desire to cancel HS2 after most of the work has been done but before any of the benefits are gained. Concorde somehow escaped cancellation multiple times. The UK developed its own nuclear reactor technology (Magnox) then gave up and let Electricite de France run everything. I've heard this complaint from several people in Cambridge's "startup" industry too. There are hardly any angel investors. The amounts of money available are tiny. Got an idea? Tough, you'll have to develop it in your own literal garden shed at your own expense. The local capital owners are far more interested in property, which doesn't require any thinking.
- paganel 3y ago
  I'm not British, but it is my understanding that after WW1 and WW2 the money had just dried up when it came to capital-intensive projects. I've just finished reading a book [1] that explicitly mentions the lack of available money as a reason for the Brits having to give up their Sea Power status just after WW2. [1] https://www.amazon.com/Seapower-States-Maritime-Continental-Conflict/dp/0300230044 https://www.amazon.com/Seapower-States-Maritime-Continental-...
  - pjc50 3y ago
    This was certainly a real problem, as was the whole IMF rescue business in the 70s, but not across the whole postwar period. More could have been done with the oil wealth than turn it into a real estate boom, for example. Realistically the UK gave up sea power status sometime during WW2 when we were massively outbuilt by the US, and the collapse of imperialism as a ""business model"" took care of the rest by making us fall back on our own resources rather than simply taking them.
DaiPlusPlus 3y ago
As it's 2am here, I'll rattle off assorted bullet-points in no particular order: * The UK's sudden deindustrialisation (1970s-1990s) was inevitable but foreseeable and yet still poorly managed by both political parties, IMHO: my perception is Labour was more interested in propping up whatever heavy-industry remained rather than ease the UK into the future - and as for the Tories... probably best I say nothing there. * Even before deindustrialisation the overarching business-culture in medium to large businesses in the UK was, and still is, tied to the entrenched class system, insofar as the board-level positions, upper management, sometimes even middle-management, and many specialties like legal, are held by a kind of unofficial aristocacy that looks-out for each-other rather than what's best for the business that they run (let alone the country): some combination of Eton, Harrow, having read Classics at Oxbridge, you can see what I'm getting at. This alone explains how Boris Johnson won his party's leadership and remained in-office despite clear evidence of misconduct in office, and so on and so on. Nepotism is rife here: the middling, uninterested, types get to work at daddy's friends's firm if they can't get recruited by the banks when they do their milk-runs. * For reasons I haven't fully explored yet, despite the UK being the birthplace of the industrial revolution, and of so many inventions we still rely on today, and of great engineers like Isambard Kingdom Brunel - the engineering profession was never elevated to something Etonians would be interested in - it became a very middle-class occupation. That itself isn't a real problem as far as I'm concerned - the problem comes back to how the layers of management would be literally a class apart from engineering, and that class-divide results in engineering being excluded from management and leadership decisions, no-matter how central or critical engineering is to the company's identity or very purpose - for this reason you won't find many former-engineers being promoted to leadership or management or their experiences and inputs being valued: after all, the board read Classics so of course they know far better about how to run a successful business than a silly engineer from Lancs who plays with his funny slide-rule all day long. * Even in more progressive companies without the problem of aristocratic management it's difficult to get access to capital, especially for anything remotely risky. * A small, but still contributing point, that I feel matters slightly, is that different social groups in the UK tend to have differing mental pictures of what "engineering" even is: for many people (possibly even most people? maybe at least oop north...) they'll tell you an engineer is someone who stokes the fire on a stream-train, or fixes their telly when it breaks - MAYBE a civil-engineer - while our preferred answer: "someone who solves problems" would probably be 3rd or 4th down on the Family Fueds survey screen. This is my perception and I hope I'm wrong. As an anecdote, I was in secondary-school and 6th Form during the last of the Labour years when the careers advice service ("Connexxions"[1]) was pushing a very egalitarian view of how careers, further-ed and higher-ed, and professional development should operate - I support their goals, but I feel they got the messaging wrong and misrepresented how many careers operated - for a solid example, I still have my A2-sized full-colour print careers guidebook (with lots of flashy photos to boot) we all got when we were 14 (15? 16?) which certainly contributed towards the perception that (excepting civil engineering) that "engineer" is just another word for "technician": while the book did do justice to civil and chemical engineering, it made no mention of software engineering or electronics engineering, while mechnical engineering was really under-sold to its readers, and electrical engineering was down-right misrepresented. Experiences like these are only going to put-off kids from considering engineering precisely at that age when they're thinking about what they want to do with their life. * More broadly, I don't think the UK really has many (any?) public-figures who are celebrated as engineering figures - in fact all, of the celebrities I know who have engineering backgrounds got famous for deciding to stop being an engineer: Rowan Atkinson (Mr. Bean) is an elctrical engineer who went to Queen's College, Carol Voderman did engineering at Cambridge, and so on - while the people I suppose we could be celebrating, like James Dyson, clearly act against the interests of the UK's engineering sector (he moved huge chunks of the company to Singapore). Yes, we have Rolls-Royce jet-engines, BAE Systems, and an assortment of luxury carmakers - but I'm convinced they're only still around because they are strategic national interests, and the UK government has had to bail them out of bankruptcy more times than we'd like, so excepting the defence sector, the UK has no real equivalent of NASA with which to inspire its young children, pre-uni students, and mid-career-shifters. * Another aspect that I think matters, even if only somewhat slightly, the attitudes of those-in-charge (regardless of their class background: Tory or Labour) towards people-on-the-spectrum and those adjacent to it (i.e. us) - it's a nebulous thing I can't pin-down easily - but until 6th Form I was under constant pressure to conform (because if you don't support any footy team at all then you must be a right spesh) - it starts right from Reception year in Primary. Of course this is not unique to the UK, I've heard the exact same stories told from people I know who grew up in Iowa or Idaho - but those states aren't exactly known for their engineering sectors either. This extends to an undercurrent of scepticism of things like ADHD; while paternalism and gatekeeping remain in the medical profession, especially in mental health (though things are definitely better than they were 20-30 years ago) - right down to the anti-trans crap Rishi Sunak is still pushing to deflect criticsm of 13 years of Tory rule, never mind it led to the murder of a teenage girl. At least David Cameron wasn't that bad. * One of the things that Boris Johnson's government did while in power was to up-end the 6th Form examinations system - I'll admit I don't know all the details, but I understand his changed the system to be much closer to the (almost social-Darwinian) way things were when Boris himself was doing his A-Levels: where your final subject grade depends far more on how you do in your finals exams instead of continuous assessment/coursework, with no or very limited opportunities for resits, and removing choices like a-la-carte module selection - but it is exactly and only because of the flexibility afforded to me when I was at that age that my comorbid ASD+ADHD-addled brain was able to get into university (and a very good one at that), whereas I'm certain that I would not be able to manage today with that level of intense exam-prep in only a 2-month window - and without my degree I would not be able to qualify for the H-1B (where a BSc is an absolute requirement) and eventually get my US Green Card. * It is true that the UK does, actually, succeed in software in one crucial area: video games: Rockstar, DMA, Rare, Codemasters, Hello Games (No Man's Sky), just to name a few - but as others in this thread have remarked: successive UK governments, again, regardless of party, fail to give the sector the credit and support it needs and the UK's success here is in-spite of everything, not because of it. Crucially, the UK's games sector was built on the home-computer revolution of the 1980s - successive governments have had plenty of opportunities to repeat that success, but so far all I've seen is the 2016 BBC micro:bit project - which honestly felt like a gimmick than something to inspire kids with. * Things aren't all bad though: I'm happy to see things like Scratch being taught in primary-schools and A-Level Computer Science now being closer to undergraduate level than glorified-ICT than it was in my day - but these things won't address the larger social, cultural, and attitudinal issues at play here. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Connexions_(agency) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Connexions_(agency)
bemusedthrow75 3y ago
> Arm exists and is British, after all. Our current government is indifferent to this.
- DrBazza 3y ago
  All modern UK governments have been largely indifferent on protecting British industry, and when they do it normally blows up in their faces. It's now a case of 'fool me once, shame on you; fool me twice, shame on me'.
- DaiPlusPlus 3y ago
  Not entirely indifferent - they did intervene on national-security grounds in 2021: https://news.sky.com/story/government-intervenes-in-sale-of-uk-chip-designer-arm-over-national-security-implications-12280485 https://news.sky.com/story/government-intervenes-in-sale-of-...
  - bemusedthrow75 3y ago
    I had forgotten about this, to be honest, but national security grounds is either what it says on its face or "what is the smallest amount of intervention we can do here to satisfy all those critics talking about something we don't understand". Our Prime Minister thought getting the Royal Mint to produce NFTs was a good idea. In 2022.

> which I'd categorise as being generally apathetical, if not hostile, to the engineering profession Any chance you could elaborate on this? Arm exists and is British, after all.

scrlk 3y ago

UK engineering jobs typically have uncompetitive compensation.

DaiPlusPlus 3y ago
That's just the result, not the cause.
sofixa 3y ago
Uncompetitive compared to?
- tchaffee 3y ago
  Compared to the US. Dan Abramov who works for Facebook and is one of the primary engineers of the hugely popular React framework makes less than one of my junior engineers.
  - progbits 3y ago
    And when he gets sick gets free healthcare while your junior will go bankrupt. Compensation isn't comparable without comparing external costs and benefits.
    - dom96 3y ago
      And as a FB employee gets private healthcare as a perk and would also get it in the US. The US comp is much higher than the UK's even taking into account healthcare.
      - Tijdreiziger 3y ago
        And what about long-term illness? If he fell ill for 1+ year, would his salary and healthcare be guaranteed or would he go bankrupt?
        tchaffee 3y ago
        That's is indeed where the US system fails. Overall though I think the risk reward ratio favors the US for young healthy engineers. Save up enough to retire at 45 and then get yourself to a country with good nationalized healthcare.
        DaiPlusPlus 3y ago
        All US employers I've worked for included disability and long-term injury insurance as standard benefits, in addition to always offering the best-tier health-plans (from non-profit insurers too). Unemployment insurance is another (legally mandatory) benefit that outshines whatever I'd get in the UK because it isn't considered a public-benefit (i.e. it's not the state or Feds paying it ("welfare" as yanks call it), it's still a insurance pool model where the payouts are proportional to your salary and not some arbitrary income limit the DWP set for the year, nor is means-tested or requires me to use-up my savings first - so in WA ( https://esd.wa.gov/unemployment/calculate-your-benefit https://esd.wa.gov/unemployment/calculate-your-benefit ) I'd be getting about $4k/mo for 6 months, for comparison I quickly ran the numbers on benefits-calculator.turn2us.org.uk (there's no official UK calculator, wat) just now and got... £300/mo - and that's only after I exhaust all my savings first. (To be fair, I could just purchase private unemployment insurance in the UK too, except I'd be paying for it myself out-of-pocket (though it might be a tax-deductible expense?) whereas in WA employers are required to pay into it at no cost to the employee, IIRC).
        tchaffee 3y ago
        > long-term injury insurance It eventually runs out. The US healthcare system can eventually bankrupt you no matter how careful you are, if your health problems are serious enough.
        3y ago
    - tchaffee 3y ago
      I agree you need to consider total compensation. It's still not even close though. The company pays half the cost of excellent healthcare and the remaining payment is very affordable. Maybe in the case of a very serious long term illness you might go bankrupt, in which case the NHS these days is also not as much of a guarantee as it used to be. The risk to reward ratio is acceptable. Most healthy young people with talent are far better off working in the US and saving enough to retire at 45 years old. I say this as someone who would like it to not be true having loved living and working in the EU and UK for many years. But the numbers do not add up. It's especially sad because it results in brain drain. The saddest part of it is that there is no reason Facebook can't afford to pay the Dan Abramovs of the world the compensation they would get in the US. I'd like to better understand why the gap is so big.
    - boeingUH60 3y ago
      What a silly, coping lie. A Facebook engineer in the US gets good private healthcare insurance.
      - DaiPlusPlus 3y ago
        Hot-take: It's an emotional defence mechanism: on-the-whole the UK and US are far too similar and integrated that it's natural for middle-class Brits to larely consider themselves peers, and not near-peers, of their US counterparts - so when you have that view of yourself and your place in the world but then look at the stark the income disparity, you're going to comfort yourself with all of the bad things about the US (and the US' bad things are legion) - and invoking the egalitarian NHS happens because the UK gets its impression of the US healthcare "system" (industry?) from things like Michael Moore's Sicko or Times columnists reporting on all the messed-up healthcare injustices that happen in the US - but there is a very real ignorance of what healthcare is like in the US when the system does actually work well for you. And if it isn't NHS vs. "doesn't &everyone* get medical-bankruptcy?" then it'll be about guns, or the death penalty, or overt racism in the south, or corporate america's excesses, or US foreign-policy, and so on. Because those are the things that Channel 4 will report on - but you won't see or read stories that upset anyone's feelings on their place in the world: and it works on everyone: I've already mentioned Guardian-reading types, but also and especially the Brexit-types: who still desperately want to believe the British empire could be brought-back because the Daily Express told them so.
    - zarzavat 3y ago
      As much as I like the NHS, it’s pretty shit compared to the healthcare a Facebook employee would get in the US. Wait weeks to see a GP, long waiting times to see a specialist or for treatment, rationing of access to technology like MRIs, and a risk of dying in a hospital car park or corridor, or being killed by an overworked A&E doctor. Don’t get me wrong, the NHS is great, I love that Boris Johnson got more or less the same care in St Thomas’ that a homeless person would have received (perhaps a bit better). But on an individual level, the FB engineer in US certainly has better care available to them than one in the UK.
      - tchaffee 3y ago
        The one case where your argument fails is very serious illnesses where you can't continue to work. In the US you will end up with worse care. And let's hope the NHS problems are temporary. When I worked in London and the US ten years ago, I always preferred the NHS because the waiting times were shorter and the quality of care was much higher. I used the NHS a few weeks ago. It wasn't horrible and I got good quality of care within a reasonable time. But it's nothing close to how good it used to be so for the serious part of my care I went to the far better hospital in Brazil covered by my employer provided insurance. I would guess the NHS will change. Voters are unhappy with the reckless defunding of what used to be a national pride. The US does provide better care right now if you are rich or privileged enough to have a job that is in demand. But a well funded NHS is a far better system if the political will to get back to that exists.
        RhysU 3y ago
        > ...very serious illnesses where you can't continue to work. In the US, if possible, carry long term disability insurance to mitigate this risk.
        Nextgrid 3y ago
        > I would guess the NHS will change. Voters are unhappy with the reckless defunding of what used to be a national pride. I am not sure that is the case? The country seems to have a weird obsession with the NHS and seems to downplay/overlook its problems. Frankly even before its recent woes, I found it pretty shit compared to socialized healthcare in France. The current state of the NHS should prompt riots, yet everyone seems complacent in seeing their literal lifeline being destroyed by greedy, incompetent & senile oligarchs.
    - m4jor 3y ago
      [flagged]
    - commonlisp94 3y ago
      > he gets sick gets free healthcare Free at the cost of a significantly larger portion of his salary in tax for his entire life.
      - tchaffee 3y ago
        The tax differences aren't that big, and they come with other nationalized services in addition to healthcare. Per capita healthcare costs in countries with nationalized healthcare can be 50% less than in the US. So you're getting much better value for your money when you pay taxes for that healthcare. https://www.healthsystemtracker.org/chart-collection/health-spending-u-s-compare-countries/ https://www.healthsystemtracker.org/chart-collection/health-...
        commonlisp94 3y ago
        Ok, but that's a completely different argument than it being free.
  - sentinalien 3y ago
    They're fairly competitive compared to the rest of the world. He is also working for a US company who could pay him more if they really wanted to. US salaries are high because the US has a glut of engineering jobs and is also a difficult place to immigrate to (generally requires you to have family ties or a job offer which is not easy to obtain when you might not be granted a work visa and won't realistically be able to start for about 6 months). If the US ever adopted a more lax immigration system in line with the UK, Canada, the EU etc I would expect US engineering salaries to drop.
    - kriro 3y ago
      In what world is the post-Brexit UK immigration system lax?
      - extraduder_ire 3y ago
        Compared to the US system of workers' visas, it's incredibly lax. Unless I'm misinformed. I haven't had to think about it much though, as I'm an Irish citizen and can come and go as I please.
    - tchaffee 3y ago
      > They're fairly competitive compared to the rest of the world. That's accurate. But what surprises me is how much in demand software engineers are globally and how little they get paid in most countries. It doesn't make any sense to me that Dan Abramov could more than triple his salary at Facebook just by being employed by the US branch. The value he provides to the company would in no way change.

gswdh 3y ago

I'm not sure what that poster was referring to, however in my experience (as a brit), is that the UK is replacing any kind of industry into a service economy aka. people buying shit they don't need. You see this in a number of ways like the physical replacement of industrial areas into shopping centres or the fact the UK can't manufacture rail locomotives - the place where they were invented... Having said this, there is still a reasonable amount of industry in the UK, the UK is by far the best country in the EU to buy engineering supplies but I think this is a remnant of the past. Most of the major engineering companies in industrial estates are Asian or American owned, now.

Matl 3y ago
> the UK is by far the best country in the EU to buy engineering supplies Germany has a far stronger industrial base still, I'd imagine if you want access to the EU you'd base yourself there.
klelatti 3y ago
> the UK is by far the best country in the EU The UK is no longer in the EU. Quite a significant point!

dazc 3y ago

I think a simpler answer is that for directors looking for a cash windfall the US markets are currently a more favourable choice.

msy 3y ago

The UK has a long intellectual tradition which creates a steady stream of creative and capable engineers. Capital however is predominately held via inherited wealth and its controllers want rentier incomes with low risk. As a consequence there is low appetite for risky new ventures and those that want to undertake them mostly migrate elsewhere. What's left is a stock market dominated by octogenarian+ dianosaurs, a decaying rump of manufacturing, a finance sector that mostly makes its bread laundering the capital of the world's corrupt and corruptors and a tiny creative industry that clings on despite suffering through waves of either government neglect, or worse yet, government interest.

pipo234 3y ago
> a stock market dominated by octogenarian+ dinosaurs, a decaying rump of manufacturing, a finance sector that mostly makes its bread laundering the capital of the world's corrupt and corruptors Ah! Now I get it. That rhymes with companies like Shell and Unilever leaving the EU in favour of UK after brexit. (Not that Frankfurt, Milan, Amsterdam or Paris are known to be heavy investors in tech innovation, btw.)
- Lio 3y ago
  Well Shell (and BP) are really likely to get sweetheart deals on North Sea oil from Rishi Sunak which might have swayed them. Now, I know what you're thinking, that that's just because both firms coincidentally signed multi-billion dollar deals coincidentally with Sunak's family business, Infosys, to coincidentally outsource all their IT jobs but I assure you that's a mere coincidence.... probably. :P
deskamess 3y ago
Canada has many similarities. The inherited wealth is essentially banks and oligarchs. You pretty much have to be risk free to get any funding. Lots of window dressing and marketing to make Canada look good. If it were not for US companies (Cisco, Google, etc) the Canadian tech salary would be closer to Europe. Once you start living here you realize the truth about how much they value tech, protectionism, the incompetence of the telecom sector, stodgy banking and finance, poor education, unaffordable housing, and declining access to health (Ontario and stories from the Maritimes since health is provincial - cannot speak of Alberta/BC/etc). All subpar but the marketing and virtue signaling is great. A lot of 'make Canada look good' comes at the expense of Canadians.

pjc50 3y ago

Goes all the way back to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Two_Cultures https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Two_Cultures and beyond. The UK has a great engineering tradition, especially from the Victorian and Empire eras, all the way up to WW2, but it seems that after that there was a dramatic and incredibly short sighted turn to economisation and avoiding investment. The absolute poster child for this was the UK space programme, which was cancelled just before the launch of its first rocket. The director of the programme decided to defy orders and launch anyway, on the grounds that everything was ready and he was in Australia. But this pervades everything. The TBMs for Euston HS2 have been bought, but are going to spend the next year buried doing nothing, because there's a persistent desire to cancel HS2 after most of the work has been done but before any of the benefits are gained. Concorde somehow escaped cancellation multiple times. The UK developed its own nuclear reactor technology (Magnox) then gave up and let Electricite de France run everything. I've heard this complaint from several people in Cambridge's "startup" industry too. There are hardly any angel investors. The amounts of money available are tiny. Got an idea? Tough, you'll have to develop it in your own literal garden shed at your own expense. The local capital owners are far more interested in property, which doesn't require any thinking.

paganel 3y ago
I'm not British, but it is my understanding that after WW1 and WW2 the money had just dried up when it came to capital-intensive projects. I've just finished reading a book [1] that explicitly mentions the lack of available money as a reason for the Brits having to give up their Sea Power status just after WW2. [1] https://www.amazon.com/Seapower-States-Maritime-Continental-Conflict/dp/0300230044 https://www.amazon.com/Seapower-States-Maritime-Continental-...
- pjc50 3y ago
  This was certainly a real problem, as was the whole IMF rescue business in the 70s, but not across the whole postwar period. More could have been done with the oil wealth than turn it into a real estate boom, for example. Realistically the UK gave up sea power status sometime during WW2 when we were massively outbuilt by the US, and the collapse of imperialism as a ""business model"" took care of the rest by making us fall back on our own resources rather than simply taking them.

DaiPlusPlus 3y ago

As it's 2am here, I'll rattle off assorted bullet-points in no particular order: * The UK's sudden deindustrialisation (1970s-1990s) was inevitable but foreseeable and yet still poorly managed by both political parties, IMHO: my perception is Labour was more interested in propping up whatever heavy-industry remained rather than ease the UK into the future - and as for the Tories... probably best I say nothing there. * Even before deindustrialisation the overarching business-culture in medium to large businesses in the UK was, and still is, tied to the entrenched class system, insofar as the board-level positions, upper management, sometimes even middle-management, and many specialties like legal, are held by a kind of unofficial aristocacy that looks-out for each-other rather than what's best for the business that they run (let alone the country): some combination of Eton, Harrow, having read Classics at Oxbridge, you can see what I'm getting at. This alone explains how Boris Johnson won his party's leadership and remained in-office despite clear evidence of misconduct in office, and so on and so on. Nepotism is rife here: the middling, uninterested, types get to work at daddy's friends's firm if they can't get recruited by the banks when they do their milk-runs. * For reasons I haven't fully explored yet, despite the UK being the birthplace of the industrial revolution, and of so many inventions we still rely on today, and of great engineers like Isambard Kingdom Brunel - the engineering profession was never elevated to something Etonians would be interested in - it became a very middle-class occupation. That itself isn't a real problem as far as I'm concerned - the problem comes back to how the layers of management would be literally a class apart from engineering, and that class-divide results in engineering being excluded from management and leadership decisions, no-matter how central or critical engineering is to the company's identity or very purpose - for this reason you won't find many former-engineers being promoted to leadership or management or their experiences and inputs being valued: after all, the board read Classics so of course they know far better about how to run a successful business than a silly engineer from Lancs who plays with his funny slide-rule all day long. * Even in more progressive companies without the problem of aristocratic management it's difficult to get access to capital, especially for anything remotely risky. * A small, but still contributing point, that I feel matters slightly, is that different social groups in the UK tend to have differing mental pictures of what "engineering" even is: for many people (possibly even most people? maybe at least oop north...) they'll tell you an engineer is someone who stokes the fire on a stream-train, or fixes their telly when it breaks - MAYBE a civil-engineer - while our preferred answer: "someone who solves problems" would probably be 3rd or 4th down on the Family Fueds survey screen. This is my perception and I hope I'm wrong. As an anecdote, I was in secondary-school and 6th Form during the last of the Labour years when the careers advice service ("Connexxions"[1]) was pushing a very egalitarian view of how careers, further-ed and higher-ed, and professional development should operate - I support their goals, but I feel they got the messaging wrong and misrepresented how many careers operated - for a solid example, I still have my A2-sized full-colour print careers guidebook (with lots of flashy photos to boot) we all got when we were 14 (15? 16?) which certainly contributed towards the perception that (excepting civil engineering) that "engineer" is just another word for "technician": while the book did do justice to civil and chemical engineering, it made no mention of software engineering or electronics engineering, while mechnical engineering was really under-sold to its readers, and electrical engineering was down-right misrepresented. Experiences like these are only going to put-off kids from considering engineering precisely at that age when they're thinking about what they want to do with their life. * More broadly, I don't think the UK really has many (any?) public-figures who are celebrated as engineering figures - in fact all, of the celebrities I know who have engineering backgrounds got famous for deciding to stop being an engineer: Rowan Atkinson (Mr. Bean) is an elctrical engineer who went to Queen's College, Carol Voderman did engineering at Cambridge, and so on - while the people I suppose we could be celebrating, like James Dyson, clearly act against the interests of the UK's engineering sector (he moved huge chunks of the company to Singapore). Yes, we have Rolls-Royce jet-engines, BAE Systems, and an assortment of luxury carmakers - but I'm convinced they're only still around because they are strategic national interests, and the UK government has had to bail them out of bankruptcy more times than we'd like, so excepting the defence sector, the UK has no real equivalent of NASA with which to inspire its young children, pre-uni students, and mid-career-shifters. * Another aspect that I think matters, even if only somewhat slightly, the attitudes of those-in-charge (regardless of their class background: Tory or Labour) towards people-on-the-spectrum and those adjacent to it (i.e. us) - it's a nebulous thing I can't pin-down easily - but until 6th Form I was under constant pressure to conform (because if you don't support any footy team at all then you must be a right spesh) - it starts right from Reception year in Primary. Of course this is not unique to the UK, I've heard the exact same stories told from people I know who grew up in Iowa or Idaho - but those states aren't exactly known for their engineering sectors either. This extends to an undercurrent of scepticism of things like ADHD; while paternalism and gatekeeping remain in the medical profession, especially in mental health (though things are definitely better than they were 20-30 years ago) - right down to the anti-trans crap Rishi Sunak is still pushing to deflect criticsm of 13 years of Tory rule, never mind it led to the murder of a teenage girl. At least David Cameron wasn't that bad. * One of the things that Boris Johnson's government did while in power was to up-end the 6th Form examinations system - I'll admit I don't know all the details, but I understand his changed the system to be much closer to the (almost social-Darwinian) way things were when Boris himself was doing his A-Levels: where your final subject grade depends far more on how you do in your finals exams instead of continuous assessment/coursework, with no or very limited opportunities for resits, and removing choices like a-la-carte module selection - but it is exactly and only because of the flexibility afforded to me when I was at that age that my comorbid ASD+ADHD-addled brain was able to get into university (and a very good one at that), whereas I'm certain that I would not be able to manage today with that level of intense exam-prep in only a 2-month window - and without my degree I would not be able to qualify for the H-1B (where a BSc is an absolute requirement) and eventually get my US Green Card. * It is true that the UK does, actually, succeed in software in one crucial area: video games: Rockstar, DMA, Rare, Codemasters, Hello Games (No Man's Sky), just to name a few - but as others in this thread have remarked: successive UK governments, again, regardless of party, fail to give the sector the credit and support it needs and the UK's success here is in-spite of everything, not because of it. Crucially, the UK's games sector was built on the home-computer revolution of the 1980s - successive governments have had plenty of opportunities to repeat that success, but so far all I've seen is the 2016 BBC micro:bit project - which honestly felt like a gimmick than something to inspire kids with. * Things aren't all bad though: I'm happy to see things like Scratch being taught in primary-schools and A-Level Computer Science now being closer to undergraduate level than glorified-ICT than it was in my day - but these things won't address the larger social, cultural, and attitudinal issues at play here. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Connexions_(agency) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Connexions_(agency)

bemusedthrow75 3y ago

> Arm exists and is British, after all. Our current government is indifferent to this.

DrBazza 3y ago
All modern UK governments have been largely indifferent on protecting British industry, and when they do it normally blows up in their faces. It's now a case of 'fool me once, shame on you; fool me twice, shame on me'.
DaiPlusPlus 3y ago
Not entirely indifferent - they did intervene on national-security grounds in 2021: https://news.sky.com/story/government-intervenes-in-sale-of-uk-chip-designer-arm-over-national-security-implications-12280485 https://news.sky.com/story/government-intervenes-in-sale-of-...
- bemusedthrow75 3y ago
  I had forgotten about this, to be honest, but national security grounds is either what it says on its face or "what is the smallest amount of intervention we can do here to satisfy all those critics talking about something we don't understand". Our Prime Minister thought getting the Royal Mint to produce NFTs was a good idea. In 2022.