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UK's hardware talent is being wasted

https://josef.cn/blog/uk-talent
> The reality for most graduates is even grimmer:

> • £25,000 starting salaries at traditional engineering firms

> • Exodus to consulting or finance just because it's compensated better

This is _exactly_ my career so far.

The key thing about the British economy is that while most things operate in a free market, construction is centrally planned by councillors who are incentivised to block most development. So the whole economy is struggling, but industries that need physical space are especially hard hit. Your local council can't block you from writing more code, but can stop you from building lab space near where people want to live and work.

My first job out of uni was in a wonderful small engineering firm in Cambridge. Lab space there is eye-wateringly expensive because it's illegal to build enough, so we were based in a makeshift lab in an attic next to the sewage works. I loved working there, but it shows that we're restricting our small businesses unnecessarily through our planning system.

The solution is frustratingly simple, but politically suicidal for any government that tried to implement it: just legalise development subject to basic design codes. I hope we see some planning reform before it's too late for our struggling innovation industries.

I used to live and work in Cambridge. In many ways it's a victim of its own success; people will, not unreasonably, argue that it's a beautiful little town of historic buildings, embedded in a primarily agricultural county of either prime agricultural land or protected wetland. They're not going to let you build Shenzen in Shelford no matter what the economic benefit might be. Meanwhile it's close enough to London that the property prices tick upwards to London commuter weighting.

(This is also why we have expensive electricity, because people oppose building any infrastructure. I'm coming round to the idea that there should just be county-by-county referendums where people have to pick either blanket allowing energy development or having a bill surcharge.)

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This is a disease that has infected the entire West. It's just become impossible to do anything that requires space. Even industrial giants like Germany are now de-industrializing because it's just too hard to get permits for building anything new. Sure, labor costs, energy costs, environmental regulations, etc. are all bothersome, but what really makes German industry emigrate is how hard it is to get permission to change anything. It's such a self-inflicted wound.
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> but politically suicidal for any government that tried to implement it

Labour just got into government and literally the third bullet point in their manifesto is:

* Reform our planning rules to build the railways, roads, labs and 1.5 million homes we need and develop a new 10-year infrastructure strategy.

So i would hope it's not political suicide to follow through on that

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An illustration of this which I happened to be looking at: Average home sizes (sq ft, sq m):

  Australia      2,303 214
  New Zealand    2,174 202
  United States  2,164 201
  Canada         1,948 181
  UK               818  76
Edit: formatting.
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Yup. From Sam Bowman's Foundations[0]:

> [The TCPA] moved Britain from a system where almost any development was permitted anywhere, to one where development was nearly always prohibited. Since [it] was introduced in 1947, private housebuilding has never reached Victorian levels, let alone the record progress achieved just before the Second World War.

> Today, local authorities still have robust powers to reject new developments, and little incentive to accept them. Historically, local governments encouraged development because their tax bases grew in line with the extra value created, but this incentive has been eroded by successive reforms that have centralised and capped local governments’ tax-raising powers.

[0] https://ukfoundations.co/

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=O7PVEaPh6Fw&pp=ygUUYWRhbSBzbWl...

You might find that interesting. It's from the Adam smith institute. Central planning has been seriously damaging the UK since after ww2. Thatcher is blamed for destroying British industry. It started long before her.

The housing theory of everything is true [1]. When land is scarce landlords can eat up any surplus produced by both labor and capital!

[1]: https://worksinprogress.co/issue/the-housing-theory-of-every...

I like Sam Bowman a lot, but are you sure the construction issue is central to this issue in particular? I suspect that access to capital is equally important: the UK is very finance-centric. I wonder how many VCs have engineering expertise, for instance.
I remember seeing tons of shipping containers repurposed as offices all over london last year. Was that a way to ease/get-around this real estate issue?
This is the true cost of the bank bailouts. This is the moral hazard incarnate.
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And the author's most recent tweet [1] (apart from one referring to this HN post):

> Is it just me or is UK’s hardware scene really kicking off again?

> Founder friends have just raised millions, moved into massive warehouses, imported CNC machines and some started metal casting.

> Even SaaS VC friends are talking about hardware now

[1] https://x.com/joseflchen/status/1881058447946391848

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> I think it’s more that the bar for getting a hardware startup off the ground is much higher than a software startup - everywhere in the world.

I hear ya on this, and it's not just the setup costs, or the testing or the certification... It's a non trivial task to run a hardware company. Even the stuff you don't expect. For instance, a good friend of mine founded a health startup that makes wearables, and they were almost torpedoed in the first year of operation by some mouthy influencer who went about publicly calling their beta release product a fraud. This is despite the fact it worked and did what it should.

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This problem isn't limited to hardware engineers, nor to UK. All across Europe, a massive brain drain is occurring, and the way it's going we'll become developing countries in a couple of decades at most.
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