Hacker News Reader

Comment by 23B1 | Hacker News Reader

Had a handful of UK-based employees join our company in a merger; I was shocked at how underpaid experienced professionals were compared to our (U.S.) wages – and I was incensed when our investors balked at a (nominal) raise for them.

I have a hard time separating agendas from reality these days, but I'd love to get someone who is smart on the UK's to understand how that country got there, especially considering my (probably wrong) impression that things like healthcare, a major expense here in the U.S., seem to be taken care of. I understand wages are stagnant, but... why?

View on HN

Every US company I’ve worked with that ended up with a London dev branch as part of an acquisition seems well aware of the wage disparity. They pull over the cream of the crop on L1 visas. It’s like temp-to-perm except 1000 times worse because it’s Sr resources with families broken on the countrywide collusion to underpay IT workers.

Part of it seems to be that the UK based companies don’t expect massive success. They have a thing, it makes some people at the top a pretty good living, that’s enough. They obviously could create massively successful companies based on the talent available, but no one wants to.

Or possibly more accurately: the people who want to realize that proximity to other like-minded people is critical to success, and they leave.

Every originally-from-the-UK tech worker I know in the US is well aware of how lucky they were to get out.

Read "Britania Unchained" (available at various shadow libraries). Then, when you've read it, realise that it was written by Kwasi Kwarteng, Priti Patel, Dominic Raab, Chris Skidmore and Liz Truss.

It's garbage front to back. We elect fucking idiots who are in thrall to a tiny clique of rabidly anti tax arseholes who would rather set their granny on fire than pay any tax at all. And then we wonder why the country is on fire.

Obligatory notes for non-UK readers:

We didn't in fact elect the Truss administration in any meaningful sense. Nor did we elect the current Sunak administration in any meaningful sense. In fact historically close to half of our Prime Ministers have landed the job without first leading their party to victory in a general election.

Our system of government places the vast majority of the real power at national level. That power is normally wielded by a Prime Minister who is only indirectly elected by commanding majority support among the directly elected MPs in the House of Commons. That means the PM and the government they in turn appoint can change without any general election taking place.

In theory MPs are supposed to hold the government to account on our behalf. Unfortunately those MPs are themselves elected via a First Past The Post voting system that is infamously unreasonable on almost any mathematical basis that should matter. It frequently results in a large majority of MPs for a single party that did not win anything like a majority in a general election while simultaneously reducing smaller parties that still won a significant minority of the popular vote to parliamentary irrelevance.

As ever with these political problems the feedback loops consistently prevent anything being significantly improved. At any given time the one of our two largest parties that almost always has a majority of MPs and runs the government as a result would have to surrender its dominance in order to effect meaningful change in our democratic structures and turkeys rarely vote for Christmas. So we end up with a situation not so different to the US, where there are effectively only two parties that matter and the real decisions are often made before the main election when the parties select their preferred candidates internally. And each party ends up being a "broad church" with a lot of internal disagreement and inconsistency because breaking up into smaller parties that more faithfully represent the true opinions of their members would guarantee losses in every election forever if the other guys didn't do the same thing.

Yeah but at the same time, tons of d*ckheads in the south keep voting for the same cohort of Tory Ratbags, so the faces change but the policies and chaos remain.

Next labour will get in, not be able to fix anything because they have no real policies, and they'll be back again.

Forget about tories and labour for a while. Have you considered that your system of governance itself is the problem?

As an outsider, that's what it seem like to me.

There are increasing calls for proportional representation in the UK. I'd say awareness of this has massively increased in the last decade.

You're voted down but right - it's hilariously bad, written as if by a teenager that has just discovered Ayn Rand.

Its a short read.

I'm from the UK and moved to the US 10 years ago.

Software engineer salaries in the UK are on the 75th percentile of earnings vs the 90th percentile in the US. The US also has higher variance of income, so at the 90th percentile one would earn 2.6x the median salary vs 2.0x in the UK. If you are a highly paid professional the US is a pretty good place to be.

Just before the banking crash of 2008 pay for software engineers in London working in finance were fairly competitive with Silicon Valley. You generally got paid better as a contractor, £500-600/day which was then about $950-1150/day which if you worked all year (six month contracts were common) worked out at £120k/year ($230k) which was about double what you'd get as an employee so lots of senior engineers would do that (no need to worry about healthcare!)

Since the crash of 2008 the US dollar has increased a lot against other currencies and has grown much more than Europe. The Obama administrations stimulus helped the US recover more quickly while the Eurozone was forced into austerity while it was forced to work through the contradictions in the way the Euro was set up, with countries issuing debt in a currency they no longer controlled.

The US tech sector went through a huge boom in the past decade which drove up tech salaries here more generally. It was also pretty good for UK tech salaries as Google and Facebook opened large offices in London.

The UK was a huge financial centre similar in size to New York with bank bailouts spread over just 60M instead of 300M people, but being outside the Euro the UK was not forced into austerity in the same way many EuroZone countries were. The Tory government used it as a way to shrink the state. This stymied growth and ultimately sowed the seeds for Brexit which I think was a misguided anti-establishment backlash, in its way quite similar to Trump in the US but with longer lasting consequences.

The government's Office of Budget Responsibility estimates Brexit to ultimately end up costing about 4% of GDP over 15 years. Certain financial services jobs are moving to the EU for regulatory reasons and it could well kill off much of the UK car industry which was heavily integrated with the EU. The UK was particularly focussed in engines/powertrains so will be heavily hit by the switch to electric vehicles and there seems little reason for global car makers to invest in the UK when they could invest in the much larger EU.

Even now, software developer salaries in London are higher than pretty much everywhere else in Europe except Zurich. But the rental costs are just obscene. Sometimes I think about moving back to Europe for a while but I'm not sure I'd move back to the UK since after a decade of austerity it all seems a bit grim.

Even though we will get rid of this awful Tory government soon the Labour Party has promised not to make any substantial changes to ameliorate the costs of Brexit, ruling out rejoining the single market.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com