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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 engi
by refrigerator 2y ago
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
- GamerAlias 2y agoPreach. 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.
- dzhiurgis 2y agoWait what. Quality of life in rural UK is worse than rat race of London?
- wbl 2y agoWhen a man is tired of London he is tired of life.
- rgmerk 2y agoOr maybe he’s just tired of a specific kind of life which might be fun in your early twenties but is less appealing when you’ve got kids and can’t enjoy the nightlife and culture anyway.
- sebmellen 2y agoHow do you get kids if you can’t meet someone your age to partner up with?
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- Earw0rm 2y agoPlenty of culture isn't gigs and nightclubs - London isn't terribly good, for its population size and economy, for those anyway. Think museums, parks, galleries, theatre, exhibitions. Granted it's not the only city with those, the problem the UK has is that its small, desirable cities are unable to grow or reinvent themselves. Cambridge and Bristol should be ideal for hardware startups, but the cost of both housing and working space is insane for small, provincial cities, partly because NIMBYism and partly because building infrastructure is absurdly expensive when you're constantly having to work around 200 year old buildings and 800yo city plans.
- tomcam 2y agohttps://www.samueljohnson.com/tiredlon.html https://www.samueljohnson.com/tiredlon.html
- dagw 2y agoyou’ve got kids and can’t enjoy the nightlife and culture anyway Having kids while living in the centre of a large city is great, as there is so much culture that is aimed at parents and children. When my kid was small we went to museums and concerts and events all the time that were aimed at kids. There were also several different parks, playgrounds, pools and similar activities to choose from all within easy access. Plus once the kids get slightly older they can use public transport to get around and you don't have to drive them anywhere near as much as if you live in the suburbs.
- nobodywillobsrv 2y ago[flagged]
- nobodywillobsrv 2y agoOr tired of 63% income tax rates in the middle of the income bands
- walthamstow 2y agoDoes London have a different tax policy to where Jaguar Land Rover is based?
- GasVeteran 2y agoYou have to earn (much) more to have the same standard of living as outside of it. Therefore you pay more income tax and the cost of living is higher anyway.
- twic 2y agoSkill issue, just earn a bit more then you're back to 47%.
- lmm 2y agoAbsolutely. No public transport, almost no culture, and housing anywhere nice is even less available than in London. For a young person working at one of these firms, where can you live? Where could you meet someone to date? What can you even do at the weekend?
- timthorn 2y agoJLR is based in the metro area of Britain's second city. It's not exactly the middle of nowhere. Rolls Royce is in Derby, on the edge of the Peak District with much to offer. Much cheaper housing with more space available. And unlike in London, driving a car isn't hounded by terminal congestion.
- porker 2y agoJLR Gaydon is not in the metro area of Birmingham. It's in nice countryside and near a motorway which helps, but it's a fair commute out of Birmingham at rush hour to there. The nice surrounding towns/villages are expensive, and even the shitty ones aren't cheap (hello Banbury) as they're on the edge of commuter distance to London. Derby I haven't lived in but know people who have. It's an old manufacturing town and hasn't much to offer graduates. Or anyone really. The Peak District is great, and if you can live out that way and commute in then do it. But again, you won't have similar people for local friends.
- UK-AL 2y agoThere's a huge JLR presence in Solihull right next to Birmingham. It's also one of the wealthiest areas outside of London. But house prices in the really nice parts of Solihull are also high.
- jack_riminton 2y agoCan confirm, I grew up in Derby and it's an absolute desolate wasteland for anyone with any ambition, intelligence or a need for a modicum of culture. Saying the peak district is good for young people is like saying there's a great lake near Detroit, it's not exactly what they're after.
- walthamstow 2y agoThe UK is two countries, you can either live in/around the prosperous one with high cultural capital, good quality public services inc transport, or you can live in the other one.
- anonymousDan 2y agoMeh. Having lived in both I much prefer the latter.
- GasVeteran 2y agoDepends what you mean by "Quality of Life". I literally won't go to see friends because that would mean travelling to London. I hate the place. It is expensive, hostile, dirty and everyone is rude. I live on the outskirts of the peak district. I can walk/cycle less than 30 minutes out of town and be walking along the old canals, through old villages and get amazing views of the countryside.
- dukeyukey 2y agoTo be fair I live in Zone 2 and I can be on old canals and villages (albeit now subsumed into London) in ~20 minutes walking. I grew up in rural Wales, and as nice an upbringing it was, there's a reason I have a single family member left, who's trying to move away!
- Symbiote 2y agoPeople in London probably live nearer to a canal or river, on average, than you do. They're all maintained nicely for walking. 30-60 minutes would take many Londoners to the countryside, the South Downs, Chilterns, etc.
- GasVeteran 2y agoThey don't have the countryside, clean air and amazing views.
- Symbiote 2y agoYes, I expect there are immigrants standing in the way.
- GasVeteran 2y agoAre they? It sounds hard to believe. But I haven't been to London in a very long time.
- twic 2y ago> everyone is rude I take it you've never been to Yorkshire then?
- dukeyukey 2y agoWhat makes you think QoL in London is bad? I grew up in a rural farming town and much prefer London. Housing is expensive but that's about it.
- dzhiurgis 2y agoLiving there for 5 years. Unless you are in finance and live in city, it’s a shitshow.
- twic 2y agoI lived there as a graduate student and then as a non-finance software engineer for about fifteen years. I liked it, as did dozens of my friends. It's absolute fantasy to call it a shitshow.
- dukeyukey 2y agoBeen here for nearly 8, not working in finance and still quite liking it. Housing is expensive, but that's about it. Everything else (jobs, amenities, transport, people) is fantastic.
- dzhiurgis 2y agoMy favourite reflection on UK was by Abroad in Japan host - first night he sees someone pissing on an ATM.
- ctz 2y agoMy impression is that top aerospace people do not now work in aerospace, but in Motorsport.
- zipy124 2y agomotorsport is similarly low salary, at least specifically F1. It is like game-dev in software in that there are far more people who want to do it than the number of jobs available so they can afford to pay you in the cool experience of working on F1 rather than in cash terms.
- nextos 2y agoTo 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.
- shermantanktop 2y agoIt’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.
- torginus 2y agoThat's a weird statement considering I'd have guess the greatest amount of respect and adoration (not necessarily money) (non-software) engineers have gotten in the US would've been during the Space Race and Cold War years. It was real respect for the trade as well, not some secondhand respect that people who make a lot of money and wield a lot of social influence get.
- kjkjadksj 2y agoIt was respected in the sense that there was a need then in american manufacturing for engineering. But the compensation was nowhere near other professional class jobs. So really the respect seemed a bit false: to get people into the door pigeonholed so they can’t leave for higher compensation. Then when manufacturing was outsourced after the 1960s, many of these jobs disappeared. Now people in Guanzhou are designing the factories and process controls.
- dukeyukey 2y agoThis isn't my experience at all, and I've been in London tech for 8 years now. I'm not entirely sure what "low respect" means here, but anywhere I've worked the company is pretty wary of knarking of their developers because we can just up and find another job basically immediately. We get paid a fair bit too - not sure compared to finance, but not hard to hit the 95th percentile or so.
- syntaxing 2y agoWas 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.
- wakawaka28 2y agoThat'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.
- lotsofpulp 2y ago>Maybe the profit margins for software are higher. This is easily confirmed by checking public financials of publicly listed companies. The profit margins are much higher, and the liability is much lower. The only exception is for those hardware manufacturers at the cutting edge whose products cannot be commodified, such as TSMC and ASML and the ilk.
- Brybry 2y agoThe U.S. is still the second largest manufacturer in the world by a large margin [1][2] Like, yes, manufacturing's % of US GDP is low (and has been decreasing for a long time) and manufacturing employment is flat or slowly increasing but we're still making a lot of stuff. [1] https://www.nist.gov/el/applied-economics-office/manufacturing/manufacturing-economy/total-us-manufacturing https://www.nist.gov/el/applied-economics-office/manufacturi... [2] https://worldpopulationreview.com/country-rankings/manufacturing-by-country https://worldpopulationreview.com/country-rankings/manufactu...
- linhns 2y agoIn the end, it's a results business. Software just get higher pay earlier in the career so people will have to go for it.
- thijson 2y agoIt 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: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Terry_Matthews 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.
- devnullbrain 2y agoBeen 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.
- coastermug 2y agoI 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.
- youngtaff 2y agoCoventry is hardly the middle of nowhere
- eastabrooka 2y agoYeah but then you have to be in Coventry
- twic 2y agoCoventry is the capital of nowhere.
- youngtaff 2y ago60 mins from central London, 20 mins from central Birmingham
- zipy124 2y agoI even know a decent amount of people who did engineering at the top unis in the UK, only to go into audit at the big 4....
- esskay 2y agoHey now you could also go and work for Airbus...but it does mean having to go to Stevenage, as well as getting terrible pay.
- louthy 2y ago> Rolls Royce in the middle of nowhere 100 miles north of London. 1 hour on the train. > Jaguar Land Rover in the middle of nowhere 100 miles north of London. 1 hour on the train.
- pjc50 2y agoBit of a distance to go for a pint in the evening. Isn't JLR in Solihull? That's two hours from London.
- louthy 2y ago> Isn't JLR in Solihull? That's two hours from London. Not 100% sure, I'm from the middle of nowhere, sorry, Derby - where Rolls Royce is primarily based. I know there's peak-time, non-stop, trains between London/Derby that take about an hour. I know this because when I got my first job in London, I still hadn't found a place to stay, so I was commuting from Derby to London every day. And when I finally moved to London it took me almost as long to get to work even though I was living in the city! I just assumed with JLR being around Birmingham that travel to/from London would be about the same (because Birmingham is very close to Derby). EDIT: Just checked with trainline.com, there's several morning trains from London Euston to Birmingham (New Street) that take 1hr 17mins.
- Symbiote 2y agoIt's 89 minutes minimum from Derby to London. The fastest trains stop once, in Leicester. It's also £135 off-peak return, so a night out in Birmingham might be more appealing.
- rpep 2y ago> 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.