Tech Giants Take Their Talent Hunt to Cambridge, UK
nytimes.com
nytimes.com
Joke is on them, I'm a new tech immigrant to Cambridge and I still can't buy a house here.
4 x my salary would get me a 2 bed flat if i didn't mind living in a ghetto.
But seriously, if you want to know what the housing market in Cambridge is driven by, look at the new things they're building. The "affordable" housing is far beyond anyone doing a "normal" job who just wants to live locally, say a school teacher or a nurse at one of the hospitals. Even those of us lucky enough to work in the relatively well-paid tech sector mostly couldn't afford one of the new luxury flats or town houses that keep springing up near the railway station, some of which have seven-figure asking prices.
For those reading this in the US who might be used to SV wages in tech, earning enough over here to get a seven figure place almost certainly means that either you had a very successful exit already or you have an unusually well-paid gig probably down in London. No-one on anything close to normal salary or freelance rates in tech sectors can get that kind of mortgage, so otherwise if you didn't already own a place that you can trade up from, you're totally locked out of that high-end market. And yet people keep building whole estates of properties like that, and then trickling them onto the market over the next year or two to keep the prices high.
I find it quite depressing that having been entrepreneurial and even modestly successful by any normal standard, we would probably still have made more money if we'd just invested in buy-to-let property in Cambridge instead of starting our first business and then reinvested in growing the property portfolio since. The UK housing market (and our incentives for taking a risk and starting out on your own in business) are messed up.
On the other hand, buying in conjunction with the local housing associations is more feasible, so it's not all doom and gloom.
We sold to a family with young kids who wanted to live there - which I preferred.
And this is one of the reasons for the brain drain that the mention before. Silicon Valley firms pay significantly more than the competition, and they are still paying almost half of what they do in the US.
It isn't only about money, but it would be naive to deny it's impact on people's decision on where to live and work.
The salary would be bad enough. The big US tech companies are nearly all publicly traded. So that $142,000 is really $250,000 or more in total compensation. The UK, and Europe more broadly, not only can't compete with the salaries, they can't compete with the ability to dish vast stock compensation thanks to the immense market caps that Google et al. have. If you're really great at something, Google can trivially give you millions of dollars in stock if it makes sense. What company in Britain can compete with that?
The skeptics will say something about healthcare in the US as a counter. The top 1/4 in the US have easy, fast access to some of the most elite medical care on the planet. And if you're making $142k in salary in the US, your healthcare is entirely paid for.
There are only two strong counters, one is that the quality of life can be very high in parts of wealthy Western Europe, and the other is cultural (preferring one culture over another).
- Exploits the poor and non-citizens
- Overthrows governments and bullies smaller countries
- Has only the most rudimentary social security system
- Does not really have a concept of healthy work/life balance. With little time off and none at all for people with newborns.
- Takes near-zero environmental responsibility
- Literally spies on the entire population of the rest of the world
...I mean, in the UK alone you'd need to evaluate what, if anything, separates the modern British morals from the morals of the British Empire which was not a very nice organisation [1]. They technically didn't overthrow and bully, but that was because they conquered and colonised. I don't think the lineage of government institutions has changed that drastically.
The modern anglosphere (UK, Australia, US, New Zealand, Canada) are all part of the spying-on-everyone gig.
The social security system and environmental comments I'll grant you; but the reason for that is (ironically, given your comment) that people don't want to contribute taxes for it. Work life balance I have no comment.
[1] EDIT The stereotype I picked up was that a good foundation of modern British wealth was a bunch of things they 'found unattended' overseas. I gather the Indians still claim that some parts of British royal jewelry were stolen from them and should be returned with an apology.
Bit offtopic, but this is complicated. A lot of the jewellery were taken from present-day Pakistan (or were gifts from kings in that area) so it's not clear to which country they should be returned to.
The UK, alongside the US, overthrew a democratically elected government in Iran in 1953. This is not a point of contention, it's been openly stated by the CIA.
I genuinely thought the GP was making a joke until the bit about time off.
> Plus Google has four more holidays in the US than in the UK. I'm not sure what the definition of federal holidays is vs. public holidays in Europe, but a quick Google suggests US has 10 while the UK has 8 public holidays.
How many engineers do you know who made full use of their five weeks every year and were able to be promoted?
- Defends the global liberal world order and upholds free trade through spending half it’s budget on a military which protects the entire continent of Europe.
And with the pending trade war with our Allies and Trump’s threats to NATO this point may not be valid much longer.
...
aliens?
They probably do pose a realistic threat to the Baltic states - but that's because they are very small and isolated.
Where are you getting these numbers? I really doubt that Russia is spending 1/5th their GDP on the military. Wikipedia says it's $69 billion, which is more than order of magnitude below NATO [0], [1].
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Military_budget_of_the_Russian...
[1] https://www.nato.int/nato_static_fl2014/assets/pdf/pdf_2017_...
The figure of $69 billion overall military spending seems consistent with the 10 billion figure I gave for Russian spending on nuclear weapons.
I got that figure from here: http://www.icanw.org/the-facts/catastrophic-harm/a-diversion... The figures are a bit old and I accidentally used the older of the two. But unless they're way off, it's true that Russia is spending more on nuclear weapons than any country other than the US. It's also spending more than France and the UK combined (France and the UK being the only European countries with a strategic nuclear capability).
Besides all that, the idea that nukes are somehow the cheap option for Russia is pretty nuts when you consider that Russia still maintains a fleet of ballistic missile submarines -- an expensive hobby by anyone's standards. You could pay for lots of conventional weapons with the money spent on that. They're even building shiny new ones: https://thediplomat.com/2017/06/russia-to-launch-its-deadlie...
http://money.cnn.com/2018/05/02/news/russia-defense-spending...
Calling them "Upper Volta with Missiles" was a bit harsh - they do spend a larger percentage of their GDP then most European countries but with such a small economy I'm not sure it makes much difference. After all - nobody feels particularly threatened by Canada.... (which has a larger GDP).
Cheap compared to what alternative? It's not clear what you mean by this. They're spending a fat chunk of their military budget on nukes, they're spending far more on nukes than they need to spend just to be a nuclear power (since they're maintaining all three delivery options), and they're spending more on nukes than any other country except the US.
>they do spend a larger percentage of their GDP then most European countries but with such a small economy I'm not sure it makes much difference
Just check the figures. Russia's military budget is a bit higher than the UK or France's. Russia generally ranks 4th or 5th in the world for military expenditure.
>. After all - nobody feels particularly threatened by Canada...
Because Canada doesn't have nukes or anything like the same military budget. You seem to be confusing GDP with the level of military threat posed. They're only loosely related.
My last post as HN is supposed to be better than this kind of nationalistic -swinging but I think the idea that Europe is reliant on US for protection is pretty absurd. Multiple nuclear states, you can't just assume that all of our nukes are faulty (and nor would anyone else). Nor would they be unable to maintain them without the US if relationships soured so far. We lease them from US companies because we are (historically!) allies! Similar level of standing military as the US, which could be ramped up above given larger population and GDP.
There's a fair statement: "US contributes unfairly much to NATO" And a completely mental statement: "Europe is dependent upon the US for protection"
>you can't just assume that all of our nukes are faulty (and nor would anyone else)
No, but you also can't assume that we have enough nuclear capability to successfully respond to Russian first strike. No-one really knows how well the relevant systems will work. France is the only other EU country with any significant nuclear capability.
You're right they're not Germany's, my bad: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_sharing
They're the US' nukes but this is all predicated on NATO which was previously assumed. If US withdraws from NATO then they won't get to keep nukes in Germany, so they either lease them or withdraw them.
I think the two important points are that 1. Europe has the capacity to build and sustain a massive nuclear arsenal 2. They already have enough to usher in the apocalypse for anyone who invaded them including Russia. 500 vs 3000 is kind of irrelevant when you could already kill millions upon millions. 3. Some of the seeming reliance of Europe on America for nukes is by choice and a consequence of the previously rock-solid alliance. In the event of the breakup of that alliance the independent capacity of Europe to summon the apocalypse would be a lot more obvious
No, it's not. The reason for having thousands of warheads is not to blanket the earth in a nuclear apocalypse. It's to have enough failsafe and fallbacks that you are guaranteed to destroy the opposing force's arsenal before they can hit you. 5 missiles at once can be trivially intercepted. 500 missiles at once is unstoppable. The first exchanges in a nuclear salvo would be aimed directly at each other's silos. The vast majority of research in nuclear weapons today is in penetration capability of hardened targets (which systems like the UK's Trident do not possess) not widespread killing of civilians, and whoever maintains a superior capability in this respect will have the upper hand in any negotiation.
For all of Trident's limitations, it is impossible to argue with a straight face that the current US executive's desire to maintain the liberal world order and free trade (hahahaha) offers the UK a more reliable defence from threats against UK interests.
Let's hope not.
>not to achieve perfect balance between the city-eradication potential of the respective nuclear powers.
The UK's nuclear deterrent consists of one or two Trident submarines active at any given time which carry 8 Trident missiles each. (They can carry up to 16, but don't at the moment.) Don't be under the impression that the UK can deploy anything like its full stockpile of warheads in the event of a nuclear conflict.
>it is impossible to argue with a straight face that [...]
You're reading some kind of political slant into my comment that just isn't there. I'm not a fan of the current US administration.
The deterrent provided by the US is not the special relationship, but the US's enormous nuclear arsenal, which it probably would deploy against Russia if Russia launched a nuclear attack against the UK. They would do the same if Russia launched a nuclear attack against any NATO power, so the special relationship doesn't really come into it.
None of which has any real bearing on whether the UK might be a more or less unpalatable place to live than the US for political reasons anyway. :-)
You can't seriously be saying that the Russians are now confident that they would receive no nuclear response from the US if they decide to, say, nuke Paris, just because Trump is in power.
The thing about nuclear war is that you can't attach the UK without attacking France. What's more, you can't attack Russia without attacking the UK and France. In a nuclear winter we all die. Everywhere.
It's like letting of a hand grenade in an elevator. You can throw it at the guy in the corner if you like, you're still going down too.
[0] https://ukdefencejournal.org.uk/no-america-doesnt-control-br...
I didn't say that it was. But we do depend on the USA for maintenance and support. The independent all-party Trident commission concluded that the deterrent could not be maintained for more than a few months if the US were to withdraw cooperation: https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/defence-and-security-blo...
>All the other what ifs you've mentioned are the same for both sides.
No, because Russia and USA have the nuclear triad. The UK only has one method of delivery. France has two.
You've already ruled out any 'five eyes' countries (United States, United Kingdom, Australia, Canada and New Zealand), much of Europe (for similar reasons), China, Russia (okay, these literally break all of them), Japan and South Korea (work/life balance), almost all of the middle east, much of South America, much of Africa, etc.
Maybe one of the Nordic countries avoids these issues. Maybe.
Surely there's still copay?
Someone with worse insurance is looking at a bill in the $1000's or even $10,000
(The rabies vaccine is very expensive. The theoretical cost of the treatment, which the insurance company theoretically paid, was about $30,000.)
And if I break a bone, or my partner breaks a bone, there's _no_ copay. I can certainly think of things I'd rather do with $80 than pay for the privilege of claiming on insurance.
For that additional £20k in gross salary, your take home pay only increases by £8k, so the _marginal rate_ for each additional pound in that bracket is 60%.
If you go up to 200k USD compared to 150k GBP, then you get to keep about 66% of it in California and about 60% in the UK. That's a difference that's quite easily lost in the noise when you consider differences in overall cost of living, healthcare, etc. etc.
I've found that Americans have a very fixed perception of America having low taxes and Europe having high taxes. But taxes in the UK are really not that much higher (except VAT in comparison to sales tax).
Of course that depends a lot on which taxes you look at.
For total personal income taxes for an employee on salary, the highest marginal rate (ignoring the odd 60% band at £100k-120k) is currently 47%, and you reach that when your salary passes £150k.
If you go independent and start getting paid through a limited company and then paying yourself, the highest marginal tax rates are effectively about 50% if you pay out through dividends or 54% if you pay out through salary.
And then people wonder why we don't see more successful entrepreneurial types setting up new companies so they can take on bigger projects and create more jobs... I mean, who wouldn't want to pay thousands more in taxes for the same original revenue earned by their work, and take on a bunch of extra paperwork filing and other statutory obligations, while simultaneously losing out on a bunch of statutory employment rights and protections?
You can take 25% tax free.
And yes, you have to pay tax on the lot, but If you are paying 60% then momma, you are having a retirement and a half.
Employee share saves, 20K ISA, Salary Sacrifice into pensions, EIS at up to 1,000,000 a year for 30% tax relief SEIS is 50% relief but only 150k a year oh and their is VCT another 200k per anum at 30%.
And you pay as much property tax as a lower middle class person does in the states.
What about when you're not pulling $200k because you had an illness, had an accident, started a business that didn't go well or just got fired?
There is nothing surprising in the fact that the top 25% earners have access to healthcare. The point of public healthcare is to make sure that the remaining 75% will not get indebted to barely survive.
What would worry an European worker would be :
- What would happen to my (and eventually wife's and kids') access to healthcare if I lose my job ?
- What if I want to start a business ?
- What if I want to go back to college ?
- What if I have to take care of a family member full-time ? Who protects me and this member ?
I am sure US medical care is very elite but what I also see is that a very large part of people who fell into poverty in the US did so because of unexpected health problems that would be taken care of in most European countries.
[What happens to my healthcare] if I want to start a business?
[What happens to my healthcare] if I want to go back to college?
...
I think you misunderstood my question, sorry if it was not clear : What kind of healthcare do I have in those situations ?
In most of Europe you have access to very good healthcare with no conditions attached. You get covered in all those situations. Of course if you are a young single tech worker with no health issue this does not feel important but accidents happen, illness happens.
I mean it is great that the US is 2nd for being pro business but being in pre-brexit UK, Germany or France don't harm your business prospects. I worked for smallish French companies (~20 employees) whose customers were mainly Americans it never seemed that it was a problem.
I mean you propose
> Most companies pay for your college, or if not the entire term, at least 2 years. You could also go to one of our excellent community colleges for peanuts.
Here if you manage to join our very best engineering schools you get paid for attending. The rest is not higher than 1000$ and the most expensive schools are business school with tuitions of at most 20k$/year. We also have online courses. And degrees are less and less important everywhere in the western world. I am a college dropout and it never hurt my career in Europe
Or you say
> Outside of the heavily taxed Northern European countries, not many countries in Europe take care of you and your family member full time outside of some fringe benefits
For the sake of the argument, let's assume that as you say it is not that common in EU. The good thing here is that neither you nor your family member will have to pay absurd amount of money for healthcare and as I said above
> "a very large part of people who fell into poverty in the US did so because of unexpected health problems that would be taken care of in most European countries."
See : https://eu.usatoday.com/story/money/personalfinance/2017/05/...
"medical debt is the No. 1 source of personal bankruptcy filings in the U.S., and in 2014, an estimated 40% of Americans racked up debt resulting from a medical issue."
I (personally) don't believe that a country can be a meritocratic society if getting ill at a bad moment in your life requires you to take "that extra 30% of your income you are not taxed, and opening up a high-yield portfolio for a rainy day" to pay healthcare bills that are way higher that in Europe.
I mean even without healthcare insurance whether public or private : A surgery at the hospital I was born in cost 1660,43 €. Any surgery. They have a price for what they call "Costly Specialty", it is 2734,85 €. So you are not European or you don't have any healthcare insurance, this is the worst case scenario for you here. We can do the comparison for almost every treatment and even without insurance it is ridiculously way cheaper because of the bargaining power a state who provides healthcare to millions of people have vs big pharma.
The thing that you seem to miss with your high salaries (here in tech) is that you spend a lot of money paying people with high salaries (here health professional) so they can pay back their excessive college debt, that allowed them to pay some the most expensive universities in the world.
And this pattern is everywhere when you deal with american knowledge economy including 150k$ tech workers who most likely have an education related debt. How indebted fresh graduates are supposed to live in one of the most expensive area of the world and to pay off their debt without this kind of salaries ? Now compare that to a debt free engineer at 75k$ living in Berlin whose only future debt "risk" is a mortgage
And if it really was an issue this same person could close the gap in revenue by becoming a freelance or working for a Swiss or Luxembourgian company as a remote or trans-border employee since we have a free-market with freedom of movement across more than two dozen countries.
So I don't say that to convince you that you need public healthcare and public education nor that EU is better. I try to make you understand that in reality an European engineer with a "75k$ in EU vs 150k$ in US" kind of choice will not care because in the end it is the same thing. In the end US and EU have quite different economies, very different social structures and very different labor laws. Labor markets take all of that into account into the wages.
Now for the stock there can be an important difference, I always had shares in my previous companies and I know that big companies give some too. I don't know if FAANG gives stock in EU. I doubt that we have many EU companies that gives as much stock but more importantly I doubt that there are many company anywhere in the world including in the US whose performance in stock exchanges is as good as FAANG's
and it's for every employee, including those not working for tech giants (e.g. people stacking shelves in supermarkets)
if you normally work 5 days/week that's 5.6*5 == 28 days paid holiday/year
(and this is the minimum, so most jobs give you more)
I had around 4 weeks at Microsoft (3 weeks + 5 seniority days).
so 33 total (6.6 weeks)
the guarantee of 5.6 weeks paid holiday doesn't guarantee when they are taken, as long as you receive at least 5.6
I've always received 6.6 weeks, some of which my employers request I take on bank/public holidays.
the other big difference is in the UK I've never even heard of anyone even feeling remotely pressured into not taking their full entitlement (in fear of being labelled a slacker)
I've yet to see any private employer in the US that gives employees every public holiday applicable in their jurisdiction; heck even public employers often don't, as federal government doesn't give state holidays in the location and state and local agencies often don't give all federal holidays.
MLK, Washington's Birthday, Labor Day, and Columbus Day are particularly frequently not granted by private employers. Columbus Day and MLK are each not given by some nonfederal public employers (to my knowledge, a non-overlapping set.)
I’m sure most full time employees get Labor Day off actually. That’s the whole point of it actually.
See:
https://www.quora.com/What-are-the-12-paid-holidays-at-Googl...
https://www.quora.com/What-are-the-paid-holidays-at-Microsof...
https://www.glassdoor.com/Benefits/Facebook-Paid-Holidays-US...
Civil servants also get a privilege day - it used to be two half days Queens Birthday and Maundy Thursday
It's much nicer to live in a country with clear employment laws. (Particularly since not everyone around you will work in tech.)
Some companies BS on unlimited vacation, but I ignore those unless I trust them alot.
That sounds a lot like an immigration violation, if she wasn't a US citizen to start with.
they would be charged in the same way an American would
(the same is true for education subsidies)
I bet Google's hours are much longer.
Even Amazon employees do pretty well, getting 2 weeks paid time off + 1 week of "personal days" (de facto vacation days) in year 1, then that goes up to 3 weeks PTO + 1 week of personal days starting year 2 IIRC.
They are working at a US company, but at least they are still paying UK taxes and contributing to the UK economy.
if you work 5 days/week ("full time") that's 5.6*5 == 28 days paid holiday, guaranteed by law
this includes people stacking shevles in supermarkets, not just people with market power working for Google and Amazon
Ah, the usual "I do it because I want to do it, there's just so much work to do and it's not going away, you know how it is in this position, you can't never really disconnect"
My mate made 125k on 5 years worth of stock options at BT and that was open to all staff - oh ad that's mostly tax free.
I would think the counters would also include:
* Getting to go on vacation ever, at all.
* Weather and closeness to family.
Not even close to true.
I was making about that much and had insurance and we were billed multiple thousands of dollars for a bog standard pregnancy/delivery. Sure, if I was not insured at all, it would have probably been hundreds of thousands--who knows? Anyway, I've never seen a health insurance policy where your health expenses were "entirely paid" for.
I'd say another major factor here is that the UK market significantly undervalues talent, compared to the US, Australia and other markets I've heard of. It may be better than continental Europe, but it's pitiful compared to the money in other countries.
Which is why I'm a contractor now, salaries for permanent work in London are not comparable to work in the US, and outside of London they are just plain derisory.
since then I just got pitched a 100,000 K euro Job in Portugal (flat 20% tax!!!!) and a £60K one in London maybe I jumped to soon.
I wouldn't say the UK market particularly undervalues talent, in the city at least. Most of my peer group are on a day rate of 800-900 which (assuming you take 5 weeks of holidays) would translate to at least USD 248k gross. Chatting to our traders they are pretty jealous of our 9-5 hours, 2 hour lunch breaks and relaxed dress code.
The vast, vast majority of salaried software guys make far less than that, especially outside of the capital. Hell, I pull in about 75% of that much and consider myself very fortunate as a contractor. And I see ads and 'opportunities' all the time for experienced people in the 40-50k range.
About 8 years ago I moved from London to Western Aus and was immediately earning (as a permanent employee) in the six figure range, when AUD and USD were at parity. In London, doing the same job for the same company, I had been on less than £50k.
There were only two downsides. One, pretty bad public transport and driving was often not an option. Two, very few flats, so you’d mostly share with others in houses.
Last but not least, there is a great divide between the students, the so-called professionals (meaning tech, medical research, aeronautics etc.) and town people. The frictions were commonplace.
I was in the gown group, but even within this group there are additional degrees of stratification.
But I wouldn't describe that as friction? If anything, it seems the opposite of friction, there are separate groups of people who are smoothly gliding past each other... I guess what I'm wondering is, do you feel there are any concrete problems or inconveniences caused by the town/gown distinction?
It's the high salaries that cause gentrification, not gentrification that causes high salaries.
Consider that Azure, AWS, Google Cloud Platform, etc. are all huge in the UK, yet most of the work on them is taking place in the US. Ditto for Oracle, Office 365, the Google Suite and even consumer stuff like Craigslist, Reddit or Apple's services (that the UK never home produced something like Reddit continues to boggle my mind). Why pay for the best people in the industry to work in the UK when we can just stand on the shoulders of work being done in the US?
If you look at industries where the UK does take an innovative role like finance or bioinformatics, the salaries seem a lot more competitive, though are still not at US levels due to the UK's lower cost of living I guess.
For consumer goods it seems they're comparing a cheap UK supermarket to Whole Foods in SF, and for rents they must be ignoring square footage and/or using different definitions of city center to get those comparisons. I checked out rental prices in SF on a recent visit and found SF pretty good value compared to London.
It's actually possible for me, a not-especially-good junior/mid developer to consider living alone with a <40 minute commute in London; that seemed to be a no go for guys making far more than me in SF.
All that being said, I saved a stupid amount of money in SF working on intern level wages. If your goal is to slum it and accumulate money, London does not come close. SF is a place to go and pile up money with a get out plan in mind.
Talking to people from around the US, it's just generally cheaper in other places in the US. Gas is cheaper, insurance, (non-SF)rent etc.
As far as space is concerned, in my experience one of the Bay Area's biggest problems was inefficient use of space in every which way possible. Even beyond the lack of usage of vertical space, every room I had was pretty huge, double bed, desk, room to do just about any kind of yoga I could think of and still a ton of extra on top of that. I'd have happily traded half of it for a few hundred off my rent.
I'd need to know what metrics are being used for quality (e.g. I'd take an absolute slum of a single room over sharing in prime apartment).
Probably the biggest is that the UK doesn't have the number of large tech companies in one place needed to push up wages. ARM is in Cambridge, Rockstar is in Newcastle, Dyson near Bristol. The only exception is in Banking where the salaries are much higher than the UK average (but still lower, as tech is views as second to other roles, not as the primary focus).
Other reasons are that the UK has a better social safety net. That to many people in many places in the uk there is no such thing as an engineer, if you work with computers you work in IT (and can you fix my laptop please?).
There is in many places (especially older companies with non-tech middle managers), also a management problem. You can't pay an engineer more than a (non-technical) middle manager, because the manager is (obviously) more important, as they can tell then engineers what to do. And all the engineers do is what management tells them to, so they're replaceable. This is obviously not a good environment for productive engineering, but explains why some companies see engineers as a cost centre rather than a revenue generating centre.
- More regulation around employee protection
- Excellent talent drawn from less wealthy EU states who may be willing to accept a slightly lower wage than locals
- Lots of STEM graduates from UK universities
- A different work life balance
- Tech skills are not seen as valuable as law/banking/medicine
- A more profit-first rather than growth-first startup mindset
What’s special about Silicon Valley is that nowhere else comes close, that the minimum efficient scale for a great many software ideas is small, that it’s new, the addressable market is close to the entire global economy, and most importantly, they’re talent constrained, not capital constrained.
Is that because of labor regulations there?
Most companies I know much rather have permies than contractors.
Pay tends to be quite a bit higher for contractors but without all the perks like pension contributions and leave that a permanent position has. However, as a contractor, you have more control over your life.
As a contractor, it's also easier to get exposure to different tech, rather than be stuck doing the same thing day in and out.
They just disappear for weeks and then pop up again as if nothing happened. I don't know if it's a cultural thing like Indian programmers who always say yes even when they mean no, or I've just met unreliable ones.
It would be very weird for someone employed full time in Poland to disappear for weeks.
Also there is a good overlap for companies based on the east coast to do hand over, which I believe is common in finance.
The UK for an American tech company is a large stable country within 1-2 hours of the timezone of the largest single market in the world and has a shared language and culture.
If you want to sell into Europe then Britain made sense...until the fuckwits voted for leave (yeah I'm bitter, they fucked over everyone my age and under).
I think this is where the 'Remoaner' labels come from.
Plus on top of that many of the pro-leave arguments have proved to be outright lies already ...and we still haven't even left yet.
oh and the Gross Incompetence of David Cameron in how they wrote the goddam question.
Friendliest people I've ever seen, though.
Not really. Only some things are significantly affected by the local cost of living: rent, food, nights out for instance. Sure, they probably make up the majority of your spending, but CoL is almost irrelevant for
- Buying luxuries: a Porsche or an iPhone are nearly the same price everywhere in the world
- Going on vacation
- Savings, if you don't intend to stay where you currently live forever
Depending on your lifestyle, these categories could easily make up most of your income, in which case $5k per year is terrible even if it covers the CoL in Tunis.
When the GBP was a bit stronger you could fund a trip to NY and buy an iPhoneX/Macbook instead of buying in the UK.
I think this doesn't affect my point though, which is mainly that iPhones are just as expensive in generally cheap places.
"Luxuries the same price around the world" is just straight wrong. I don't know how anyone could think that who has lived in various countries, especially for American goods.
For example, no matter where I've lived in the world, it was 25%-50% cheaper to wait until I visited family in Texas to purchase new Levi's.
The US is a big country and there's plenty of places that most people wouldn't like to live (every country has locations like this), but if you're a tech worker, there's no place better in the world to live than in the US. You don't have to live in the Bay Area, you can live in Seattle, New York City, Boston, Los Angeles, or Atlanta. Don't like the city? Okay, there's plenty of affordable suburbs to live in all over the country.
Plus your cost of healthcare will either be free or heavily subsidized, taxes will be lower, you'll be making more money, and the opportunities for career advancement, VC funding (if you want to go the startup route), and opportunities to network will be much greater here.
America is an amazing place to live, whether the internet wants to believe it or not.
The visa scene is US is fickle and very unfriendly even for folks in high tech companies. For instance, the Green Card process is same for a software developer (no matter what company she is in) and a taxi driver. Of course, I don't have anything against taxi drivers, but I do believe education and professional qualifications should play some role in the Green Card process.
Across the entire UK there were only 4 police shootings in to 2016 and only 2 total in all of 2012-2014.
I'm willing to bet America has 4 yesterday (even adjusting for proportion populations)
Also, do you know how does their healthcare compare?
To be fair, we definitely have a problem with normal/non-political conversations suddenly turning political as well. It's even a problem that started in 2016, too :/.
Because it's not all about the money. People make mistake by comparing salaries on their own which is not correct, you need to compare what's left of your salary after you've afforded the same level of lifestyle.
You might look at $140k as a lot of money and £40k as very little money but you need to put that into perspective. My salary comes with tax deducted and you have to pay someone to do your taxes for you. That's the first difference and it's quite vocal.
I don't mind and honestly prefer to have 40-50% tax taken away from my salary to enjoy certain social benefits which you would need to pay extra for and there are some things that just aren't in the US, like pension. You don't have pension, you have 401k which is a voluntary savings account basically. Besides the state pension that I will get once I retire (and will continue to receive as long as I'm alive), I also get 5% of my gross salary taken away every month and my employer tops it off with another 5%. If nothing else, at least I'm set when I retire and I don't have to worry if I'll have enough money until the day I die after retirement.
Some countries in Europe, much like the one I come from, have half smaller salaries than the UK and I would still take £20k salary over $140k in US because you can't put a price on a 5min commute to work and letting your children play outside without supervision, going for a walk at 11pm without having to worry that something might happen to you, not having ghettos or "bad areas" in your city, being able to go to a hospital and have a surgery without paying anything, sending your kids to university without paying anything... like I said, to each their own. If you only look at money itself and nothing else then yes, $140k in US is much better.
> you can't put a price on a 5min commute to work and letting your children play outside
That's very achieveable in parts of the US, and unachieveable in parts of the UK.
> having ghettos or "bad areas" in your city
Not exclusive to the US by any means. Plenty of nice cities in the UK have ghetto/bad areas.
> sending your kids to university without paying anything
If you live in England, this is definitely not applicable. Based on [0] (no idea how reputable the source is, but the first I could find) The average student loan debt is just shy of £35k. Anyone who borrowed for university from 2012 or later is paying 3% + RPI interest on their loans - That's fairly substantial.
[0] https://www.statista.com/statistics/376423/student-loans-eng...
Sure, the worst areas in the US are worse than the worst areas in the UK, but that doesn't mean that the worst areas in the uk don't suck. You said you couldn't put a price on not having ghettos, not that the ghettos in the UK are better than the US equivalent. Besides, being on HN, the majority of us aren't going to be living in the Missions or Paisley.
> Also student loans are paid for by the UK government, and you only have to pay it off after graduating, and even then it's basically a small percentage of your earnings.
Right, but you still have to take out a 35k loan, and pay 9% of your earnings for 25 Years, or until it's paid off. That definitely doesn't sound like having to pay nothing to me.
The student loan really isn't that big of a big deal, because it's 9% of your salary OVER £25,000. So at the moment on £27k, I pay about £15 a month. If I stop going to work or earn less than £25k then I won't have to pay anything back (unlike normal loans).
Ideally the tuition fees would be free like in Scotland, but the English loans aren't as big of a deal as you're making them out to be.
The student loans also include money for living costs (if desired), some of which is free (and doesn't have to be paid back) depending on household income. We also pay year by year, so we wouldn't have to commit to £35k straight off the bat, just £9k per year. So if you decide to drop out after first year, you'd be in £9k of debt (or slightly more if you took out extra money for living costs).
Source:
Nevertheless, since I'm commenting already might as well add two more things. One thing is I get 29 days of PAID annual holiday. I've head from my US colleagues that in US you can take about a week or two of UNPAID holiday in a year.
Not to mention that women can go on maternity leave for a whole year and then come back to work without losing any rights whatsoever and also get paid 40 weeks of their maternity leave while in the US women can take up to 3 months of UNPAID maternity leave and only if they've worked for a company at least a year.
If I had to give an answer to the question 'why now?', I would say because of investment, and also Cambridge has really modernised as a city in the last few years. Plus it is a genuinely nice place to live- good schools, you can cycle and walk everywhere, and cars aren't really allowed in the city centre.
I don't doubt that the parent wasn't being absolutely comprehensive in the scope of their answer, but surely you appreciate that direct communication in person is.. well, at the very least 'efficient'?
I can't believe you're actually wanting a source for this, lol
No, I don't. I believe written communication is far more efficient. Cavemen talk. Writing is the greatest technology we've ever invented. Forget all your latest devops crazes, you can't do anything useful without writing.
My life experience tells me that there are vast tracts of productivity that are served very well by direct collaboration with other humans.
I said it's caveman technology, which is surely indisputable. In my experience it's thoroughly inefficient for discussing technical matters. That's probably why not much technology was developed before writing.
What amuses me about this exchange here is how even in 'collaborating' through writing, at least four individuals aren't able to meaningfully describe what they really intend. The internet, writ black and white, polarises and makes nuance absolute and all hope of sense is lost! :)
For what it's worth, I do appreciate where you're coming from - there's no forelorn dread I feel more than the suggestion of a completely superfluous face to face meeting... .
- ed
Also, I have to repeatedly remind friends and family, as well as business contacts, that the best and most assured way to get in contact with me is to send me an email. It has been for nearly 20 years now. Always!
Categorically wrong. Two examples:
1) Years ago I was moving out of a shared house and looking for someone to move into my room. One person in particular would only communicate via email about coming to view the room. Consequently days elapsed before we'd got a final arrangement that could have been sorted out with a 10 minute phone call, despite having my number, and me having theirs. Then, when I took half a day off to wait in for this person to visit, they missed the appointment. When I checked my email it turned out they'd emailed me a few minutes before they were due to turn up to tell me they weren't going to make it. Again, despite having my phone number. Already irritated by their behaviour this obviously left me fuming.
2) Just the past few days I've been dealing with an "urgent" support incident where the two people involved have been exchanging emails for three days: a conversation that could be easily accelerated with a call.
In both these cases direct synchronous communication is the key: this might be face to face or on the phone, or a video call, but in no way is written communication more efficient.
I disagree. Yesterday I was trying to organise a visit to a luthier for a guitar repair. He told me to phone him, so I phoned, he didn't answer. I left a voicemail, and he phoned me back 15 minutes later, I missed him. On the third attempt, we spoke. I explained what I had written in the email, and he told me that I should call in with the guitar. Overall, it took ~20 minutes of back and forth to resolve an issue that could have been answered in the reply where he told me to phone him.
If you phone me, you are likely to call me at an inconvenient time and interrupt what I'm doing. If you send me an email, and I'm free, I'll respond immediately. If I'm in the middle of something, I'll respond when I'm finished what I'm doing.
And it turns out if you're solving nontrivial problems as a software team, you're talking is more of the collaborative kind than the one-way-information-distributing kind.
1) Alistair Cockburn has a communication chart [0] suggesting that face-to-face at a whiteboard is the most effective form of communication. He's been showing the chart for at least a decade, to rooms full of engineers from all the big players and lots of little players. If he were wrong, he'd eventually run out of consulting clients, but that hasn't happened. I realize this is a weak argument.
2) YCombinator co-locates its funded teams. I'd wager they're familiar with the arguments for and against remote work, that they're technology savvy, that they're data-driven, and they're incentivized to get the most for their money. I realize that this second argument is the same as my first, but I think these arguments should make you think about why they put a premium on in-person collaboration.
Uh.. create an alternative work place with comparable benefits and compensation?
Relocating TO the US from other countries is often a nightmare, no matter how talented you are.
And I personally care more about how much I like the culture and environment around me after work and on the weekends than how much I'm being paid.
SF is really great, but it's not London.
All that is to say, there's more to it than money. At least for some people.
The article talks about academics being lured away from teaching, which is a problem, I imagine that academics could perhaps guide students in the companies they employed at, like a paid course? Although there's a difference between pure research and getting stuff done.
With all these people working at US companies it creates hubs of knowledge, networks of people, that in turn could spawn new companies, which in the long run is surely a good thing.
Does anyone have a like-for-like comparison? What do the FAANGS pay for the same thing in one place or the other? Is Glassdoor reliable for these stats?
I don't think the comparison is so easy, because London has a huge financial tech market which SV probably doesn't. But those incomes might end up in the "finance jobs" column rather than "tech". HFT coders get paid a fair bit, but could reasonably claim to be either.