Hacker News Reader

Comment by GamerAlias | Hacker News Reader

Preach. 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.

View on HN

My impression is that top aerospace people do not now work in aerospace, but in Motorsport.

motorsport 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.

Wait what. Quality of life in rural UK is worse than rat race of London?

When a man is tired of London he is tired of life.

Or 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.

How do you get kids if you can’t meet someone your age to partner up with?

Plenty 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.

https://www.samueljohnson.com/tiredlon.html

you’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.

> Having kids while living in the center of a large city is great

If you can afford a flat that's big enough for you and the kids

We drop the kids off at my parents and go for dinner at any one of hundreds of top quality restaurants. Can't do that in Kettering.

Or tired of 63% income tax rates in the middle of the income bands

Does London have a different tax policy to where Jaguar Land Rover is based?

You 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.

Skill issue, just earn a bit more then you're back to 47%.

Absolutely. 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?

JLR 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.

JLR 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.

There'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.

Can 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.

Isn't that what everyone says about their hometown? :)

Well, every crap hometown yes. But in this case Derby has been officially voted the biggest dump in the UK recently: https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-13479767/Derby-vote...

> No public transport

When I live in London I didn't drive, which was kinda nice but also meant I've only been out of city like once a year.

Sitting in traffic sucks of course, but driving rurally opens so much.

As for weekends - driving and hiking I guess?

Sure, but at that point you're having to buy a car (which is much harder as a young person - car prices have gone up, insurance has gone up faster, the driving test is harder than it was and lessons cost more...), you'll need somewhere to park it which adds to your housing costs, you still can't go drinking, and in general you're cut off from a lot of what young people are doing.

No Uber/Lyft in the UK?

It would be very expensive to take a taxi (of any sort) out of London to a scenic place, but it's easy to take a train to plenty of them, or hire a car for the day through an app.

Even tiny UK towns have excellent walkable mainstreets and are small enough to walk from field to field on the other end in no time. It is a far cry from the american obligatory car experience where it might be a 2 hour walk to your nearest grocery store even in a city suburb.

Wherever you live in London, there are commuter (and intercity) railway lines that can take you out of it.

For example I lived not far from Putney. Putney to Windsor & Eton Riverside takes 39 minutes and costs £6.90.

https://www.openstreetmap.org/#map=11/51.5330/-0.1146&layers...

There is a culture there. I am not sure what people mean when they say there isn't a culture outside of the London. If you mean things like events, art exhibs etc. We have those here. If you mean bars, pubs and restaurants we have those here to.

Is it as glitzy as London. No. But saying there is "no culture" is just absolutely asinine.

UK people are so god damned spoiled. Sometimes I will pull up street view imagery of a random town in scotland or wherever in the UK that I see locals from there on reddit make a seething comment about. Then I will look at the town center and its basically greenwich village: walkable, pubs and shops all over the place, bus network goes everywhere, actual regional rail potentially, everything the american urbanist dreams about. You know where you actually meet people on a date in 2025? On an app, which they have users on all over the UK.

The 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.

Meh. Having lived in both I much prefer the latter.

Depends 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.

To 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!

People 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.

They don't have the countryside, clean air and amazing views.

Yes, I expect there are immigrants standing in the way.

Are they? It sounds hard to believe. But I haven't been to London in a very long time.

> everyone is rude

I take it you've never been to Yorkshire then?

It is the combination of what I described is the real issue. If it was just "people are a bit rude" I personally wouldn't be that worried about it.

What 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.

Living there for 5 years. Unless you are in finance and live in city, it’s a shitshow.

I 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.

Been 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.

My favourite reflection on UK was by Abroad in Japan host - first night he sees someone pissing on an ATM.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com