London’s Tech Boom Is More Than Just Hype, the Hard Numbers Say So | Hacker News Reader

London’s Tech Boom Is More Than Just Hype, the Hard Numbers Say So

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64 pointsvvvv94 comments

It's easy to forget how small the UK is, which leads to London centric commentary when people talk about the UK tech scene. In reality, a startup could be based comfortably outside of London where the cost of living and the cost of operating are a lot cheaper, creating not only a better deal for founders and employees, but investors money would be going where it's needed and not on rent or rates. I've recently had the opportunity to see what rents people are charging for office space at the moment and it's obscene.

The London investors will still be there. The talent in London is usually from somewhere else in the UK or Europe anyway. It's a cool city, but it's not as cool as having a successful startup of your very own.

> In reality, a startup could be based comfortably outside of London where the cost of living and the cost of operating are a lot cheaper

No. There are virtually no skilled people outside perhaps London, Cambridge and Oxford. I know, as I've had to try and recruit people outside those areas. It's virtually impossible to find anyone who is a) good and b) not self-employed and quite happy about staying that way. Even the M4 corridor is a hopless vacuum of talent these days.

Best place is suburban London or no office if you want to cut costs.

One of the cool things about the M25 area though is there are lots of skilled immigrants from South Africa, the Ukraine and India who are considerably better than us natives (I'm native to the UK).

As for the city, it's not somewhere I'd work again.

I'm not London based and I don't think the rest of the UK is a wasteland. Evidently neither do some huge tech firms (e.g. IBM Hursley)

That said I am a contractor and you'd have to pay six figures to tempt me permanent...

Hursley is mostly a contractor pump these days or "Rational Rats" as we call them.

Spot on with the 6 figures comment. It's the place to be :)

There are virtually no skilled people outside perhaps London, Cambridge and Oxford.

That's total horseshit.

The comment that you are replying to did qualify the statement by saying that they were looking for employees not self-employed contractors.

Fair enough. The idea that all the people employable outside London, Cambridge or Oxford are all self-employed contractors who are not interested in salary positions is also total horseshit.

It's not hard finding people; it's hard finding quality people because they've all moved to London for the salary or are self-employed.

When I say quality, I mean people who can pick up anything we throw at them and pick the right tech for the job rather than be tied to a tech platform, not Joe average ASP.Net webforms or Kate average Oracle monkey.

We need people who pick the tools for the job, not factory pressed programmers.

Also have you tried hiring anyone anywhere in the UK that can actually write C? Totally damn impossible even offering £120k.

Well if you need a C contractor and my general level of snark hasn't put you off, in this thread or others on HN, feel free to get in touch with david.hicks@starnose.net

I'm not saying I'm perfect, but I have been pretty shocked at the standards I've encountered since I left big blue and decided to go it alone a few years back.

They do exist. The finding people process is very broken. Can guarantee there will be quite a few C programmers at the conference I am organizing http://operatingsystems.io/

I know a few people who write very good C and they all live outside London. Only one of them makes anything near £120k though.

But most of them will commute to London out side of some really niche centres of excellence and non of those would be areas that tech crunch covers eg RBR and the other F1 teams near Mk and say Hybrid air vehicles out at Cardington

Are you a recruiter?

> creating not only a better deal for ... employees

Oh, please. They are cutting salaries severely as soon as you leave London.

not if you want to attract the incumbent talent away from London. In the short term at least, the people with the "best" experience will be found in London. Whereby "best" I mean that they will have worked on the biggest projects at the cutting edge.

I haven't seen this in practice. What I have seen is that reduction in commute and rent costs being factored in straight away.

See the chap below: "While wages are 10-15%~ lower here than in London, the low cost of living more than makes up for it." - how kind.

Total UK population is nearly double California's population so it isn't that small. the problem is that London has a prestige to it, so business in London is seen as more serious than business elsewhere (and salaries higher) so it draws the talent.

Small as in physical size. Even with a sparsely populated Scotland, the UK has around half the landmass of California so its possible to commute to/from London from a great number of locations.

You can't commute from Harvard to Mountain View everyday but you can commute to London from Oxford, Cambridge or Bristol. For occasional meetings, travelling to/from Glasgow/Edinburgh is doable.

We should take advantage of this and support and encourage startups to bootstrap in less expensive post-codes rather than competing for office space with investment banks.

Commuting from Bristol to London on a daily basis is borderline ridiculous - by train it's probably a three hour trip each way (factoring in time to get to where you need to be in London and getting back from Bristol to wherever you live), and by car it's well over 2 hours with no traffic. Manchester is arguably slightly faster by train (but much slower by car) - and a 12 month season ticket would cost you an eye-watering £14,336.

Birmingham is probably the biggest city in the UK where I would consider commuting into London as being something a sane person would just maybe think about doing on a daily basis, and that's still over 90 minutes on the train and a touch over £10K annually.

>> Commuting from Bristol to London on a daily basis is borderline ridiculous >> by train it's probably a three hour trip each way

Its 1 hour 30 mins from Bristol Parkway to Paddington. If you have to cross London, then yeah, it will suck.

edit: I'm not recommending commuting to London, kind of the opposite. I'm using it to illustrate the geographical distances. A Silicon Valley type hub is needed in the US because of the continental distances between major cities. In the UK, we should be exploiting better connected cities to make a UK hub rather than continuing to ram everything into London.

Well, if you live nearer Parkway than Temple Meads, then it would certainly make more sense to go from there, certainly. As for crossing London... let's say you work in Old Street - that's a good half an hour from Paddington. I think you'd be lucky to have a door-to-door trip take less than three hours.

I commute into Oxford Circus from Castle Cary (in Somerset, roughly the same journey time as from Bristol Temple Meads) one day a week: I set off from my house at 6.50am, driving to the station allowing myself ample time to collect my ticket and so as not to miss my train in case of getting stuck behind tractors, and I get into the office at 9.50am. On a good day. I don't mind the six hours of travel one day a week (and I am occasionally quite productive on the train, though often on the journey home I tend to get mildly drunk reading The Economist) - but doing all five days would drive me insane.

Also London is one of the cities in the EU zone with the highest cost of life (maybe it is really the highest of the entire EU). If you work there as a junior and you must live inside the city it is very problematic to find a even just decent flat and have still enough money to survive decently in the short term.

When working in London, I found the living in London v. living outside London cost negligible. What you save on rent you spend on travel.

The other issue I had was choosing to work in or outside London. My experience is that being in London is preferable, because of the increased number of opportunities that a denser network and more events tend to bring about.

When I worked in central London a two bed flat (ex council property) near the office was £750k Compared to ones a 60 min commute away at 120k annual season is £4k for that trip.

I remember my boss a director of a FSTE 100 company commenting that he could not afford to live in central London

But it's crowded, dusty and it stinks, so there's that going for working elsewhere...

Really London has a buzz all of its own I get a buzz just getting of the train at black friars and looking down river and seeing tower bridge and the globe theatre.

I had a drink at lunch Friday on the site of shakespeare's house a stones thrown from St pauls.

Ok old street is a bit of a dump but don't let that put you off

I lived in London for ten years. There is a buzz, there is always something going on. Then I moved away. Then I came back to work in the west end and the city.

It was when I came back I noticed how tired, sick and depressed everyone looked. How long it takes to get anywhere. How crowded the streets are. And seriously, the dust and the smells are horrible.

If you're still in a phase of life where you enjoy it then best of luck to you. I really loved the place for a long time. Now... give me practically anywhere else. I like clean air and space.

And its where all the transport links go so you have a much bigger pool to pull employees from than if you set up in some out of the way place like say maidenhead as 3 did.

Wouldn’t it be harder to recruit developers in other UK cities?

I'm living in Leeds at the moment and I'm working as a technical marketer at a technology driven small business. We've had little difficulty finding quality developers. While wages are 10-15%~ lower here than in London, the low cost of living more than makes up for it.

Have you considered that the reason you're having trouble is because you think that wages are 10-15% lower than London? You are competing directly with London. Therefore you should probably just put "London Comparable Salary" in your advert and see how that works out.

Agreed. There are hundreds if not thousands of developers in Sheffield/Leeds/Manchester etc. The vast majority of these developers are in Digital Marketing (websites for other companies) and not really in any kind of startup or technology company, but I know they would want to do that instead.

in my experience, I was working in Leeds and now I'm in london, the difference is higher than that, at least 30% more, but I have to say my life was better in Leeds.

Interesting. Is that doing a direct comparison between Leeds and London?

Also - if you don't mind me asking - why did you prefer your life in Leeds? I do really like it in Leeds, but the lack of meetups and networking opportunities are quite disappointing, so I was contemplating a move to London for a year or two. I'd love to hear about your experiences.

This is my experience: I spent three years in Leeds (1 master+2 working) and one in London.

Maybe I had a deeper emotional connection with Leeds, I went there to study for a master, the first experience out of my country, I made loads of friends. It was easy to do anything I wanted, studying, have fun, visit other places... When I moved to London find a decent accommodation for a decent price was hard, moving around is time consuming, everything requires more time and it's more complicated.

Leeds is not a small city, but everything is close, I used to walk to go to work (20 minutes). The city center was close and small, I rarely used cabs or other vehicles.

London is huge, you can find everything you possibly want, but everything is far. I'm quite lucky, I work in the city center and my commute is 40 min, I have a colleague that commutes for 1h 15 min and he thinks he is lucky. All this erodes your free time.

London has like 10 million people and a lot of tourists,so it's always busy: having so many people around makes me stressed.

I went to some meetups and I was partially disappointed: a lot of them, despite looking interesting, were in fact boring and without substance.A few of them were really good but I stopped now cause I don't have enough time and energy. I'm not good at networking, I chat when I'm at conferences and meetups but usually it ends there as I feel that keeping in touch is not worth the effort (with a few exceptions)

The big plus for me is my job: I'm doing really interesting things with really good people and that's why I'll stay here for another three years at least

London is not perfect but it's really the capital of something, you can feel it, it's definitely a good thing to spend some time here.

Do ask me if you have more questions

Hopefully the elections next year will bring back the more sensible highly skilled migrant immigration policies from the past that will allow highly skilled foreigners to participate in and contribute to this boom.

Current policy introduced by the coalition government, as I understand it [1], is that a highly skilled migrant in the UK from outside the EU would simply not be allowed to build a revenue generating side project, either by themselves or in a partnership. The best they can legally do is find somebody to take their IP and hire them into a new business - an unlikely prospect, and a risky one - and even then they'd be limited to 20 hours of work per week unless the new business goes through a complicated legal process to become a visa sponsor. And after 5/6 years the foreigner may be declined leave to remain and forced to return to their home country, regardless of what they may have built up in the mean time.

[1] This is what my research shows. I'd love to learn that I'm wrong, being somebody who has to make a decision about whether to take this 5/6 year gamble while starting a family.

There are ways for non EU folks to come here settle here. I'm not up on the details as they keep changing but basically if you come here to do a degree/masters they tend to let you stay on and work after and if you stick 10 years you can apply for UK citizenship. There's some sort of earnings requirement like you have to be making over £30k or something like that and be paying tax. I'm not sure it matters if the earnings come from employment or your own business.

(some bumph here http://www.workpermit.com/news/2013-11-15/uk-immigration-min...). The norm seems to be to do a masters and then stay on with a job, then you could do a startup if you can get funding / customers to pay a suitable salary I think. I've got a couple of friends, one Indian, one Chinese here that way.

Sadly not. It's just another way of obtaining a Tier 2 (General) visa, which comes with all the restrictions I have described. Telling somebody they can stick around for 5/6 years, contributing taxes and economic growth, starting a family, etc. but that they can't start their own business, and they may be told to leave in the end through no fault of their own, is a very lopsided proposal.

EDIT: prior to 2010, there was a highly skilled migrant programme. You would be allowed to perform any kind of work in the UK, provided you met certain requirements. So you could arrive, work a highly skilled position and build a side business. Sure, it could fail, but at least that's through your own fault and you'd be working on it from day 1 so you'd find out sooner or later if you should remain or not.

Today, you cannot do this. You have to hang around for 5/6 years, hope you get indefinite leave to remain (ILR), and only then are you allowed to start a business. But you might be refused ILR, and then you have to leave. It's a nonsensical policy when you consider people's private lives are involved.

Most UK employers don't allow side business.

good luck enforcing that

get caught and they will fuck you over and you will be shit out of luck in court.

There is the Tier 1 (Entrepreneur) visa, though it's not at all straight-forward - you need £200k investment, or £50k under conditions that I'm not sure it's possible to actually meet.

https://www.gov.uk/tier-1-entrepreneur/overview

Right, just a 200k investment :) This belies a very specific view of how enterpreneurship works. Google, Facebook, Microsoft, Apple... none of these companies would have met a similar requirement in their times. Furthermore, by the time most people have 200k to investment a business they're likely to have settled in a geographically locked private life.

So how do you suggest they tell someone is really an entrepreneur? Genuine question.

£200k is not a very huge amount of money by London standards. Maybe fully loaded cost of 2 senior developers for a year, if you get creative making it stretch.

Any threshold below that would effectively be a open doors situation.

It's not like in the US it would've been much easier for a foreigner: for an E2 Visa you're expected to have 100k-150k$

I'm not discussing the US? I'm expressing my hope that the UK returns to its more sensible pre-2010 highly skilled migrant policy.

Sure, I completely agree with the sentiment.

I just pointed it out since you used 4 US companies as examples, and I thought you could be implying that it could be easier to start a company there for a foreigner.

Personally I'm for making immigration easier but how necessary is it for businesses considering that they can hire from anywhere in EU with very few hurdles? Are there really many people outside the EU that are so skilled that an alternative can't be found within the EU?

According to e.g. the CEO of Citibank [1] and the mayor of London [2], immigration reform would really benefit the UK. The OECD suggests that there's no reason not to [3].

However, it's more complicated than that. The current policy is actively deterring young, skilled people from developing their skills and connections in the UK, which is a great concern for the House of Lords Science and Technology Committee [4] - who clearly understands that immigration is a long-term process, and governments can't treat people like sheep if they hope to attract talent.

If you were 30, about to start a family, would you immigrate knowing that you're not allowed to make money from tinkering on a side project for the next 5/6 years? And that after that time you wouldn't even be sure if you and your family could remain in the UK? It's a tough decision. And yet the best of the best are exactly in that position -- the people who tinker on the side are exactly the people who become the best, not the ones doing a 9-5 day job.

The irritating thing is that the policies were great prior to 2010, until Cameron decided to make a policy of reducing immigration to levels that are simply impossible ("tens of thousands"). His only way to control immigration is non-EU immigration, which is a very small percentage of actual UK immigration. It turns out that just a few days ago the government has finally started to acknowledge the sham [5], after years of criticism. Unfortunately in the meantime, people have to make very difficult life changing decisions in the face of this political drama.

[1] http://www.workpermit.com/news/2014-06-27/minister-uk-will-n...

[2] http://www.workpermit.com/news/2014-06-17/london-mayor-londo...

[3] http://www.workpermit.com/news/2014-05-23/migration-is-econo...

[4] http://www.workpermit.com/news/2014-04-14/lords-denounce-uks...

[5] http://www.workpermit.com/news/2014-09-17/deputy-pm-uk-has-s...

The only way it would benefit the UK would be by maintaining or further lowering the already low tech wages.

This is not to be encouraged.

Hang on, you are working in Australia from the UK, you asshole. There are few things more absurdly hypocritical than emigrants who complain about immigration.

I was for a while yes. Difference being that in Australia businesses are crying out for employees and there's enough money to pay everyone properly. In the UK the only shortage is the shortage of people willing to work for peanuts. I'm not anti immigration. I'm against business opening it up further to suppress already low wages.

But you are complaining about a suggestion to change the migration rules to make it easier for migrants to start businesses while here, which would increase the competition for employees and raise wages.

The data in my [3]rd link does not support your belief.

well, hiring from silicon valley for one thing

But my point is that the hiring pool is already huge (the entire EU). Are there lots of people in SV who want to move to London and who have skills that nobody in the EU does?

I'm in South Africa. I work for a global company with offices in London. I have very specific knowledge that makes me a natural candidate for employment by the London office that nobody in the EU would have. But I have private life and certain freedoms here in South Africa, which I have to give up to work in the UK under the current visa scheme. I would have to terminate all my side projects that earn revenue, and only work on non-income generating projects - or perhaps become a couch potato.

How does that benefit the UK, bearing in mind I can easily get the visa with these restrictions? All the UK is going to end up with, under this policy, is a majority of migrants with no dreams to do anything bigger than what their boss tells them to do.

Thanks. Like I said in the original comment I'm for opening up immigration. I just wonder how many people there are like you. Are there enough to convince government the spend the time and money to change the immigration laws.

> Are there enough to convince government the spend the time and money to change the immigration laws

I'm expressing my hope that the UK returns to the pre-2010 highly skilled migrant policy. There was a reason for that policy; had they not stuffed around with it to make a particularly weak political statement, this situation wouldn't exist to rectify.

Add me to that list. Also from South Africa.

Can you not get an intra company transfer?

And cant move on intra company transfer

yes given that you have all the eu to recruit from there is no real justification for the skill shortage argument.

I have been very impressed with the London HN meetup:

http://www.meetup.com/HNLondon/

~250 attendees, pizza, beer, comedians and great talks from people like Stripe, Facebook & CityMapper. Well worth travelling to from outside London.

London is the place to be in Europe. I only wish there were proper large tech companies head-quartered here and capable of competing with financial sector in salaries.

There are offices of a few large tech companies around but it makes sense for them only to have a sales presence in London because it's so incredibly expensive.

And for workers the UK is not great. Salaries are very low (when compared to other english-speaking nations) and so are expectations in many companies.

Google has a non sales presence in the UK, has done for a long time (indeed they claim not to have sales people in UK for tax reasons!). Amazon has just announced it is moving from Slough to Shoreditch. I am fairly sure Facebook has engineers here. The older tech companies were based in the traditional M4 corridor (Microsoft, Oracle, etc) but many companies there are moving to London, as it is easier to hire people.

Salaries are lower than the US, maybe, or parts of it, but lower than other English speaking countries?

I based that on my experience of the USA and Australia. I got a 60% raise to do the same job for the same company when I moved from London to Perth a few years ago.

Tech salaries outside of finance in the UK in general are pretty depressed IMHO. As far as I can tell this is for a complex of reasons - engineers not expecting very much cash, the good ones all either go abroad or into finance, companies are used to mediocre engineers therefore are not willing to pay well etc etc.

Me, I'm a high priced contractor because it's the only way I've found to replicate a US/AU salary. And I'm worth it. On my last project I committed twice as much code as the three permanent engineers combined.

Agree with this, I work in tech in London for a company that has a NY and SF office, they pay CS grads (first or 2nd year out of school) between 90 and 110 thousand dollars. Exactly the same position in London gets me just under 30 thousand pounds (48k usd) the only way for me to earn anywhere near even the 90 range would be to move in to finance

Well they are taking the piss. Leave and go somewhere that pays market rate.

That is market rate in the UK. Tech people are not well valued here.

Well it is very hard to hire anyone good at that rate in London. There is a rapid elevator as people go from inexperienced to more useful, so the first few years people should be getting good increases every year.

I am aware that there are a whole lot of marginally profitable firms trying to hire at these low rates, and that people do take these jobs, so there is a sort of "going rate", and there are companies who hire employees at low rates while hiring freelancers at triple rates as if they were permanent staff.

There are plenty of junior PHP+mysql developer jobs for example advertised in the 30-40k area, and that is with people paying 10k+ to a recruiter for the "service" - and thats a pretty low end skill with little value added.

Perhaps computer science graduates in the UK don't make the same kind of money that they do in the Bay Area, but do you really think those salaries are actually justified in any real sense? Should a junior developer fresh out of his computer science degree really be earning more than, say, a trainee doctor?

The bay area is a weird phenomenon, and I wouldn't want it replicated everywhere. However. I don't believe that software folks in the UK are remunerated in line with their skills and value, nor the money they bring in Just what they have been lead to believe they are worth by business and by their own risk-averse, non entrepreneurial nature.

This is pretty much the definition of market value I guess!

I think people who work in technology in the UK - in London at least - are remunerated similarly as well as, if not better than, the other more traditional professions, by which I mean lawyers, doctors, and teachers (the latter were always traditionally paid worse, but are paid a bit better now). Outside of London, it's probably a different story, where I think tech workers probably do worse on the whole.

If you work in tech and you feel hardly done by, and you're of the entrepreneurial sort, you can quite easily become a contractor and make an awful lot of money. I don't think that's so easily done in other professions.

There will always be outliers who make staggering amounts of money - a partner at a magic circle law firm, or a very high level accountant at one of the big four, might command seven figures rather than six; but we have those in tech too: CTOs.

I don't really think that's true, at least outside the financial sector.

That said I agree that contracting is the way to go, which is why I have been a contractor ever since I returned from Australia.

--edit-- apart from the teachers of course. They get paid very little. I believe this is true pretty much everywhere though?

The contracting market is kind of odd though - people somehow find the money to pay people two to four times as much as their regular employees, on long time contracts, partly because they are not paying enough to get good people as employees. Its broken HR.

Yup. It is weird.

One of the factors is that you have no hidden costs (NI, pensions etc) with a contractor. Another is that you can get rid of them whenever you like, in theory. A third one I've heard is that you can keep your company/department's official headcount low this way, which is sometimes good for accounting purposes for some reason, while you actually get to have more people.

But yeah, it is weird.

You also don't have to pay for their holidays, and often not for their equipment (IR35 even suggests that contractors should use their own computers, in fact), for their attendance at company events, expenses (in some cases), etc.

In theory a contractor should be able to hit the ground running with no training required, too. Obviously in the harsh bitterness of reality that's often not the case...

None of those factors make up the difference, which is usually around a factor of 3. Computers are cheap, you need to pay travel expenses if you send them anywhere, NI is not a huge cost... and in the UK laying people off is not actually that hard.

I actually think it is an accidental steady state, because there is such a huge gap, the good people shift to freelance fast, and lots of not so good people do, and the only people left in the low paying permanent jobs are disgruntled and underpaid.

I'll give you a factor of two - three seems a bit much to me. (Perhaps we're not quite talking about the same thing though, I'm not sure.)

I'm surprised you would say that laying off people in the UK is "not actually that hard", though - in my experience, at companies where the HR department actually insist that matters are handled correctly, it can be an extremely onerous and lengthy process, fraught with difficulties and complexities (like "constructive dismissal") at every turn.

Firing contractors is easy - ask them not to come back in. If their contract stipulates some sort of notice period (rarely more than a fortnight), pay them not to come in for the remainder of it.

agreed I saw a job ad for an experienced ground worker that was paying a lot more than some development jobs.

Btw ground worker is he politically correct term for a navvy - so a gang boss digging ditches earns more than a devloper FFS

A navvy is less than a groundworker, and a ground worker is less than a gang boss.

> A ganger, or site foreman, costs approx. £100 per day, a semiskilled labourer £90 and a general labourer £80. In the Southeast, these rates may be up to 50% higher.

http://www.homebuilding.co.uk/advice/project-tips/builders/g...

http://www.glassdoor.co.uk/Salaries/ground-worker-salary-SRC...

shows about £15 per hour.

Not my understanding at all and I used to work for a top 5 consulting engineer.

Ground workers are the people that prep the ground (ie paddy wi a shovel) a qualified chippy a or sparky is a different matter.

Btw did you know that for tech supervisors in mining the going rate for a single shift at the weekend is £2k and that's counting towards a FS pension!

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Sorry but I disagree with nearly all of that.

>> "many CS graduates I meet really want to work in tech rather than finance"

I would hope so considering what they studied CS. And I'm are many finance grads want to work in finance rather than tech.

>> "They want you to work 60+ hours give or take"

This also applies to a lot of startups. Even in places that don't enforce extra long hours you often feel pressured to arrive early and stay late.

>> "There is dress code - really ? 2014 and we still enforce people to wear suits ? we grew up idolizing steve jobs so no thanks."

Didn't Steve Jobs have his own uniform (turtle neck, jeans, trainers)? Even places that don't require a suit usually have some sort of dress code (jeans, shirt). In a small startup you will have to meet investors or potential customers and in these situations it's required to look at least respectable. It sucks but appearances matter.

>> "Tech is way more fun and the chances of making it big is what drives many young people."

Personally I think tech is more fun but I know lots of people who have fun working in the financial sector.

>> "A tech career to many people is a lot like an struggling actor's career however the difference is there is less luck and more hardworking."

I disagree completely. There is LOTS of luck in the startup game. Sure you have to work hard but there are tonnes of people who work their asses off and don't succeed even though they have a good product. If you read about the work ethic of the worlds biggest actors I think you'd be surprised. Most of them got there by working their asses off too. And they also got lucky.

> This also applies to a lot of startups. Even in places that don't enforce extra long hours you often feel pressured to arrive early and stay late.

Not my experience, working in several London tech companies.

> Didn't Steve Jobs have his own uniform (turtle neck, jeans, trainers)? Even places that don't require a suit usually have some sort of dress code (jeans, shirt). In a small startup you will have to meet investors or potential customers and in these situations it's required to look at least respectable. It sucks but appearances matter.

Only one of those tech companies I worked for enforced a dress code. It was the one that went bankrupt. I don't think this is coincidence.

>> "Only one of those tech companies I worked for enforced a dress code. It was the one that went bankrupt. I don't think this is coincidence."

You can't be serious.

London's coming along although we're a bit lacking in big hits compared to the US with Google, MSFT, Facebook et al worth ~$406bn, 391bn and $202bn respectively. The London areas biggest hit (if you include Cambridge as it's an hour away) is ARM worth about $22bn. Things are definitely on the up here but with some catching up to do.

I have to agree. I have seen the Shoreditch triangle come a long way and having taken my skill set around Europe, there really is no place like home but we aren't exactly silicone valley.

I look forward to some home grown giants over the next few decades.

silicone valley in London would be Soho nudge nudge

I've been working in tech in London for just over a year, and even in that short time I feel the spirit has evolved. People are thinking bigger and smarter.

There is also a rudely healthy crypto currency scene in London, which I suspect will explode once they find a way through the banking/regulation maze.

As a Brit who lived in America and Asia for a long time, the change in the entrepreneurial culture in London/UK is amazing and it really has all happened in the last year or so according to the people I speak to.

Neat, I happen to be in London (Shoreditch) reading this. Just in town for the day (Sunday). Any HN peeps up for meeting up? @euwyn on Twitter or email in profile.

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