The last days of Silicon Roundabout

Where do you suggest?

I only speak English to any decent level, German to a barely conversational degree, and given brexit, the right to work in a German speaking country is not a given.

I sure as hell am not ever going to live in the (no offence) right-wing dystopia of the USA.

That leaves me with what? Canada or Australia? Both far away, with equally “bad” salaries and far away from my roots?

Anecdotally, I see more people in this sector moving to places such as Canada, Australia and New Zealand than to the USA. I think there is a perception here that while salaries might be higher in the USA, there are hidden costs both financially and socially (such as health insurance payments, getting to grips with the American "way of life" etc). The American "way of life" in particular is not seen as "glamorous" (again anecdotally) and I think most view it as a bit of a step down, while the other countries I mentioned are viewed as a step up.

Afaik, there are more UK citizens living in Australia than all the rest of Europe combined.

That said I know of a fair few people who emigrated.

It’s also quite difficult to move to the US from the UK, a lot easier to move to Canada, Australia, New Zealand or the rest of Europe.

Most people I know in basically any other industry make less money pre-tax than I have left over after tax, deductions, rent, and bills. I’m sure I could find things to do with more money, just as anyone can, but I definitely hit the point a while ago where more money would significantly improve my level of happiness.

Given that, why would I pack up my entire life and start over in another country?

A low level of respect follows the money. London has a lot of traders, big company execs, politicians, lawyers, accountants etc they all pay more than IT.

First of all, working in tech in the UK you can make $130,000 which is 3-4x the median annual salary. Very few Brits would describe that is "extremely low".

That's enough money to have a few kids, a wife who doesn't work, and a pretty decent lifestyle.

Why move a 10-hour flight away from all my friends and family, just because I could earn enough to drive a Lamborghini instead of a Lotus Elise?

There are plenty of good reasons to move [to the US] too of course, and I do know quite a few who have (including my sister who loves it, and I suspect is never going to move back to rainy Britain)

There might be another reason you don't see many brit developers in the US though, we probably just don't produce that many of them. I worked in London for 20 years and the typical dev team had less than 50% Brits in it even there. Looking at Hollywood we seem to produce a lot more actors that can do a passable American accent than developers.

For salaries, we're better paid than the vast majority of white-collar workers to the point it becomes a running joke. I once got asked by a standup comedian doing a set what my job is, I said software dev, and he answered "blimey you must be fuckin loaded". We're not at the level of the US, but we're probably higher than most of Western Europe, at least after CoL (e.g. https://www.electronicsweekly.com/news/business/uk-developer...). It can be tricky to compare salaries across countries, but I can't imagine the massive amounts of European developers came to London for the climate.

As for respect, I don't really know what you mean. Beyond professions like nurses/social workers, I (and I hope most people) don't really base respect on profession. We probably get more professional respect in the workplace, we get away with stuff the other departments definitely don't, but personal respect? Just doesn't come into it, unless you're a social worker or nurse or something.

£25,000 South East England

£30,000 North West England

£45,000 London (last offer in UK I didn't take)

Moved to Canada

£60,000 Toronto

£75,000 Toronto

£85,000 Toronto

£105,000 base £35,000 RSUs Toronto

If by "countries with higher paying tech sector" you mean the USA, with all due respect and without going into a huge discussion, I much prefer staying in UK, or the European continent in general. There is more to life, happiness, comfort, long-term goals and self-realisation than the number of dollars deposited in my bank account by my employer.

With remote working and the Internet the idea of relocating where your job is, is quite antiquated, at least for my standards. If I really need the money, I'll try and find a way to get paid US salaries while living in the EU.

As a software engineer working 100% remote and living in London I get paid 3-4x the average London salary, which is enough _for me_ to live more than comfortably and I don't really feel I need to earn $500k a year to improve my quality of life. I can't afford a private jet, but I don't need one, either.

US corporate working culture is rather different to here. Here, if you don't take 4+ weeks holiday, your manager will have a word with you for working too much. Complaining about being back at work after a holiday is expected. At the end of the day, you log off and go home, and you don't think about work again until the next morning except in exceptional cases. Everyone knows and accepts that work is work, not the point of your life. 3PM Friday drinks is still a part of the culture in many companies, as is knocking off early on a nice day and going to the pub.

Obviously it's not like this in every job (particularly low salary or menial), but every job I and most of my acquaintances have had has been vaguely like this.

Then of course there's safety, environment, toxic politics, healthcare, etc. plus generally just liking what you're familiar with. I love the USA, but there are things that are hard to get used to, like car-only suburbs, jaywalking laws, beaches that close at night or are privately owned, rules against outdoor drinking...

I also find UK tech has less of an ageism problem than the USA. People sometimes return here after they start to find their age is causing problems finding work in the US.

I have also learned a lot about perceptions of the U.S. Later tonight, when I don the armor I constructed from discarded soda bottles, and leave my home storage locker to scavenge the dumpster scraps from a Kardashian's birthday party, I will reflect on the downsides of Americans' societal choices.]

First point, I’ve travelled a lot to the US and would definitely not live in SF due to the insane levels of inequality and homelessness. I also like diversity and think it’s a competitive advantage in some domains, SF seems to be a bit of a monoculture. But I do like cities like Boulder and NYC. So it may depend on where in the US you’re looking.

I did consider a move to the US. The biggest deciding factor was the lack of social services, primarily a national health service, but also a welfare state. Partly this was for selfish reasons - I want a safety net for me and my family - but also because I don’t want to see other people suffering.

The U.K. is headed towards the same inequality and poor social provision as the US, we’re both already outliers in the western world, but the additional factor of older family here means I’m unlikely to move to the EU (if I can), at least not yet. So if anything, I’m headed in the other direction.

The gap between London and UK-but-not-London salaries is probably pretty comparable to the one between London and San Francisco, but most people won't move a few hundred kilometers to London to get the extra money. The proportion of people willing to move across the ocean, leave behind friends and family, and embrace a new culture, is lower still.

But I think the other commenters have it right: when British people dream of living overseas, they dream of Australia, Canada, Spain, and the south of France.

The taint of cynical fatalism is the main thing that distinguishes us from the rest of the Anglosphere. It makes us unable to participate in corporate boosterism. And it often prevents us from taking opportunities. Nowhere on the same level as the Russian national character, but it's definitely an important part of British culture and humor.

As is snobbishness about Americans. This dates back to the war and beyond ("over paid and over here" https://www.telegraph.co.uk/travel/destinations/europe/unite...), and I suspect this lurks beneath the surface; moving to America would not only mean surrounding yourself with Americans, but admitting that they'd won. (Again, even if you're a liberal-internationalist Brit, Americans are the last foreigners it's OK to be prejudiced against)

Having moved from Cambridge to Edinburgh to secure a better salary/house price tradeoff, I get a double dose of this: Scotland is entirely made of people whose ancestors didn't flee the country in a previous economic disaster (either the Highland Clearances, the end of Empire, or Thatcherism), and that biases people against leaving.

(I've thought about it myself on a couple of occasions; the first time I was young and single and feared moving to a country where I knew nobody, and the second time was yesterday reading a government statement that we're definitely not running out of gas over the winter)

As a Brit who's spent a fair amount of time in the Midwest I beg to differ. One example I often came across was that I would interlace what I said with relatively subtle humour, as everyone does back home, but find that instead of conveying multiple meanings people would take everything in flat earnest, often being rather miffed and perplexed. On the other hand Americans would smack me in the face with their gregarious intonations and beaming white teeth whenever they thought they had something funny to say, something that grew more and more irritating and bizarre to me over my stay.

It also bothered me that even close friends often struggled to understand my pretty typical London accent, when I've had to guzzle American speech patterns off of screens my entire life. The only British English dialect you could expect anyone to be familiar with was that off of 1960s TV shows like Monty bloody Python. Grrr.

Because math, plus UK immigrants are a lot less obvious in the US

> I'm surprised, because there's no language barrier

There's actually some language barrier (UK English is not US English). But its lower than for lots of other places, sure. That just means its a lot faster for a UK immigrant to pass (in speech) for a native.

> and a minimal cultural barrier,

I’m not really sure that's true.

> the vast majority of my coworkers are from places that are much harder to immigrate from

Sure, but the vast majority of people who aren't currently in the US are from places that (1) aren't the UK, and (2) have a much bigger income deficit for software engineers than the UK does compared to the US.

My move was partly because of the Investigatory Powers Act, partly because of Brexit.

I considered several countries, including the USA, Ireland, Canada, New Zealand. My reasons for rejecting the USA were a mixture of political and economic: even the Democrats are uncomfortably right-wing for me; I place a negative value on the 2nd amendment; I would rather walk or cycle than have a car; the legal minimum paid holiday in the EU is 4 weeks[0], plus public holidays, plus (this might just be Germany IDK) paid sick leave and paid compassionate leave and (not that this has yet happened but it is on my bucket list) an enormous amount of paid parental leave; the American healthcare system is terrifying (I am currently getting adverts on Facebook to crowdfund some American strangers’ care, not even sure why I see that ad); every anecdote about American cops (even the experiences of people I know personally) has been negative.

I do like several of the things America has done — Big tech, everything NASA — and there is appeal in both the higher salaries and better weather the Bay Area has compared to both the UK and Berlin, and I severely underestimated the difficulty of learning German, but given the nature of my political rejection of the UK is such that even Democrats in control of every branch of DC would still be marginal for me, Trump winning (and on a platform that denigrated migrants, a category I became a member of the moment I left the UK) totally eliminated it.

[0] https://eur-lex.europa.eu/LexUriServ/LexUriServ.do?uri=CELEX...

Edit:

Forgot to mention: when actually visiting the US on four separate one-month visits, I was repeatedly shocked by poor tech adoption, poor quality housing, and the high cost of healthy food options even in supermarkets.

Where was this, exactly?

I personally doubt the government's involvement made any difference to Silicon roundabout whatsoever. It was already well known as our tech hub in those days and the rents were low enough to attract creatives. It was also a matter of time before it became more gentrified and property value 'literally' doubled.

The market has stabilized and the salaries demanded seem to exceed what typical "growth and engagement" startup crap is willing to pay, where as before there seemed to be a surplus of talent happy to take these lower wages.

But it's not hard to hire if you have a sustainable business that can afford to pay good wages. When someone complains to me how hard it is to hire I always talk about this magical thing called "money" and where if you put more of it on the table you'll magically get more candidates in the next day. But instead they still focus on pool tables and "culture".

It could also be that the startup market is saturated and the "growth and engagement" bubble is popping? It used to be that any tech company that can show growth (even without a solid business plan to turn that into profit) could get insane amounts of money thrown at them, where as now every idea has been hashed and rehashed multiple times and you need an actual business plan addressing your predecessors' failures - simply boasting how many users you have on your sinking ship won't cut it (or at least not as much).

It isn't even close (tbh, the UK isn't really competing with the EU anymore...the EU is just so far behind).

Btw, the reason why people have moved out of Silicon Roundabout is the same reason banks moved out of Canary Wharf. Rents too high, office space not growing fast enough (Google moved into Holborn, outgrew that, moved to Victoria, outgrew that, and is now building a huge new office in King's Cross). VC funding is up something like 15x since the Roundabout was created, the growth was just too rapid for such a small area.

I really dont understand why people want to work there. Its a really expensive shithole still. Granted there are now lots of new offices full of tech workers, but thats not a selling point.

Facebook and google moved out of soho for kings bloody cross.

I suspect the real reason is that its the only site left big enough to put multi-thousand person offices in still. (along with the _really_ expensive chain shops that we tech workers apparently need.)

People moved to shoreditch because it was cheap, thats why it looked like a shithole. Now it still looks like a shithole, but lacks every other appealing feature.

It was interesting to see the area develop over those years.