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AromasinHNSource author
Lessons learnedExperience excerpt · English

I'm sure if I moved to London and focused on software engineering I could make more, but that …

… I'm sure if I moved to London and focused on software engineering I could make more, but that shouldn't be the only route to wealth in this country. I've spent so long trying to build out a minimum viable product in my spare time, so I can make my start-up dream a reality, but going through integration hell needs to take up all of your time, every day, for a long time, to get through the hurdles in any meaningful time frame. Every time I go back to it, I feel like I'm back at square one. 6 years of saving and I have zero runway to take this full-time to give it the time it needs. What's embarrassing is that I discussed this with my colleagues, and they didn't quite fathom how fucked it is for young engineers in this country until I had the conversation with them. I was getting the same salary now as my mentor did when he was my age; in the early '90s. Wages haven't just stagnated. When adjusted for inflation, they shrank massively. That's not even considering the £60k of student loan debt I get hammered by every month.

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reedf1HN

I considered a startup after university in the UK. The talent arbitrage is absurd, physics grads with 1sts from top Russell Group unis fighting to be paid £30k/yr. For me it came down to security, life is expensive, rent is expensive. I didn't have a spare parental garage to setup five computers - I barely had room in my flat for one desk . I barely had money for that flat let alone internet, and food. I had zero capital, as in literally zero. The plan was to get an entry level job to provide some base line, but that base line never really provided enough life security that I felt comfortable leaving the system once I was inside it.

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robertlagrantHN

I honestly think if you asked the average Brit on the street what an engineer was, they'd say "it's someone who MOTs your car".

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dan-robertsonHN

Is a ‘computer hardware engineer’ different from a ‘hardware engineer’? I think of a ‘hardware engineer’ as someone who works on the development of ICs (or things on FPGAs). I would guess that people in such a role are paid a lot less than software engineers (at comparably sized companies) in the US, and a bit less in the UK (though maybe with more variance). But the numbers you give are lower than I would expect for eg ‘hardware engineer working at Arm/Qualcomm’. There’s also hardware engineering in finance, which can pay well, but not a lot of it.

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K0baltHN

I have a question. What if there was a place that you and a few colleagues could go where you could have your living space and office space provided, basic food served, and basic amenities. Such a place would probably be somewhat isolated and probably not in your own county. If such a place existed that catered to founders in exchange for minimal equity, is that something that would interest you, theoretically?

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