I saw a list of European unicorns (on HN in fact I think) and probably about 2/3 were UK/London based. That’s right now. The other ones are scattered around, so this might be your best bet in this part of the world.
As another comment says, you’ll mostly get political comments, so here goes: UK universities, while still very good, are dropping quite significantly in various league tables since Brexit. This is for a range of reasons: non-UK applicants now get a full US-style price, with little support or loans. They are less attractive for academics too. 2/3 of UK unis dropped since the Brexit votes, Cambridge is at a historical low of 7th in the world, behind ETH. Student visas are sth like £1000 per year on top of that. If you think this will continue, and talented and driven young people will choose other countries, this will extinguish, in the long term, the supply of talent to startups and tech.
UK’s attitude to immigration will also be unpredictable. On the one hand, it states that it is keen to attract talent etc, on the other hand visas will be largely awarded based on salaries (maybe not so good for early stage startups). Also there are no guarantees that eg the partner of a visa taker will be awarded one, or that visas will be extended. This is another reason why people might give the Uk a wide berth - and these would be potentially your cofounders, colleagues, investors.
On the flip side, finance was thought to leave London en masse, and didn’t. Banks etc established a presence in EU countries, but most of the business logic staff are actually staying out.
Also UK is at heart a country of innovation, where novelty and innovation are welcome, and entrepreneurship runs in the blood, more so than in many other places. Brexit won’t change that.
So... who knows? I’m an EU citizen, now also British and well settled here. I like it, but probably wouldn’t choose it now.
>On the flip side, finance was thought to leave London en masse, and didn’t
It's a bit early to say, isn't it? Finance is still working under temporary arrangements. Most of the regulations regarding services remain to be negotiated.
Banks moved a skeletal staff to EU offices already a long time ago, and no one else.
As far as regulated business goes, it was clear from the start pretty much that there will be no passporting. The extent of other regulatory burdens remains unclear.
The point is, unless some highly unexpected new regulation comes in, it looks like banks at least kept the business and decision making in London, and only moved enough operational staff to EU to support operations there.
Funds for sure seem to have stay put in London, some moved but this is definitely a minority.
> Funds for sure seem to have stay put in London, some moved but this is definitely a minority.
I’ve seen it reported that £1 trillion of assets were being moved out. Was that report incorrect, or was it a misleading number that is somehow vastly less relevant than it appears at first glance?
Assets are often held somewhere very different than the jobs, business, taxes etc. Banking licenses for example require holding enough capital in the jurisdiction to cover for unexpected shocks. But where the decisions physically take place is a whole different question.
In practice, for the Brexit/London question, it seems London banks set up small offices in the continent to ask as a front for regulators and EU clients, moved capital as necessary, but kept all significant business in London - so far at least.
Remember, this is finance, capital is transferred via a wire. It’s not mining, real estate or farming.
Your answer, while interesting, hasn’t changed my confusion.
When you wrote that “funds” mostly stayed put, what do you mean by “fund”? An ELI5 style explanation would be great, because to me (with no economics/finance qualifications) a “fund” is the money.
It would hardly make sense to move more than a skeletal staff before the terms are known. I think we will have to wait and see.
It's also questionable in the long run whether the EU will permit all of these transactions to take place if the bank has only a token presence within the EU. At the moment everything is happening under temporary authorization.
> I saw a list of European unicorns (on HN in fact I think) and probably about 2/3 were UK/London based
While unicorns are an interesting measure (even though it favours the biggest startups - are 2x 500Mi startups "worse than" 1x 1Bi startup?), I always wonder how much of it is some form "language blindness". How much value is on startups or companies that don't get on HN or "don't speak English" much?
Agreed, this was the first proxy that came to mind.
This is probably quite good for VC funded companies, as there is some transparency in this. But, apart from the arbitrary 1bn cutoff, what is a startup? What about more established, but still innovative companies? What about ones that are not VC funded?
London wasn't that great when it comes to tech jobs compared to US/Canada. Starting salary for grads at FANGs is around a third of what it is at large US cities when living costs are no more than 30-40% lower for example. Compared to rest of Europe London is a lot better with notable exception of Switzerland which is a non-EU country. So to me it would seem that membership in EU is not a necessary condition for good tech jobs with competitive pay.
I'd be a lot more worried about the general shift to working from home than leaving EU when it comes to London's importance as a tech center.
I always feel like salary comparisons are a little biased by a slightly US-centric definition of a comfortable lifestyle (e.g. including a car, parking, bigger house requirements, etc) as well as underestimating some built-in benefits of other countries like free healthcare.
Are there good sources out there that would afford a holistic cost comparison of a typical London lifestyle (Tube, 1-bedroom in Zone 1-2, weekend abroad in Europe, etc.) vs SF, LA or NY for instance?
Otherwise agree that long-term the work from home trend could be slightly more concerning, but this won't materialise as soon as most think. There is still a lot of value in being physically close to networks of influence and decision-makers, which in the UK would very much still remain in London.
I get the impression US salaries usually come out way ahead for software people (in other fields, not so much).
The only point where it starts to get questionable is when you consider stuff like, how much would you pay to live in a city that doesn't have needles all over the sidewalks, or, what is the value of living in a society that isn't brutally unfair and visibly dystopian?
Personally, I put a pretty high value on abstract stuff like fraternity and equality, and I feel like it has a really good effect on quality-of-life, but I can also see why people just go for the biggest paycheck. If you're planning on living in a kind of bubble, and just ignore the wider social context, you don't really need to live in a functioning society.
US is a nation of immigrants where you can basically fully integrate in a matter of months.
In non-English speaking countries this is impossible. If you put a lot of weight on fraternity and equality you have to consider that if you move to France or Germany you will always be "that foreigner who moved here".
Just something more to consider. Although I do agree also with your post.
You're absolutely right. There are, however, bubbles - I don't know about France, but there are few cities in Germany where you aren't made to feel 'foreign' unless you go to a government office or something. Of course you do occasionally bump into racists, and the concept of integration in Germany is, well, 'assimilation' (literally), but like most countries in Europe, it's very variable.
While this might be true, this is not what I've experienced. I lived in the US for 7 years. I went to school there, worked there and paid taxes. But I had to leave because I didn't get the H1B visa. So while people couldn't tell I was a foreigner, as far as immigration is concerned, I was always a foreigner. Even if I would have gotten the H1B visa, as someone born in India, it would have taken me 20+ years to get a green card...
Yes of course I by no means implied that there are no obstacles involved in immigrating to the US.
The OP was talking about the more social aspects so I wanted to remark about an often overlooked aspect.
Yeah, I understand what you mean. I just wanted to point out that often this aspect is also overlooked when it comes to immigration in America. The social aspects mean nothing to me when I could never be certain about my status in the US. In fact if I'd not integrated as much socially, I'd probably be much happier in life right now after having been forced to leave. On the other hand I completely agree with you about the social aspect. I'm worried about how I will fit in to Europe once I move there, and whether I will always be considered a foreigner. I'm trying to convince myself that it's the better choice for me since I was forced to move there. But at the end of the day, I can't help thinking that Europe just doesn't have the same diversity and open culture as California did when I lived there. Who knows, maybe I will be pleasantly surprised when I go there. However, like I said before, in Europe I have certainty about my immigration status. As a highly skilled migrant, I don't have to keep worrying about "What happens if I don't get the H1B visa", "It's been 10 years, and I still haven't received the priority date for my Green Card".
>If you're planning on living in a kind of bubble, and just ignore the wider social context, you don't really need to live in a functioning society.
Your example is also about a bubble. It's not social context but your own personal sense of happiness that you're talking about as I see it. You can have clean streets and little crime but be a dystopian society. Singapore and Japan come to mind. Muslim refugees in France would see society very differently than a native french person. Talking about others living in bubbles seems to me to be just a way to makes oneself feel better about the bubble one lives in themselves.
You might be right - that said, there's no comparison when it comes to poverty between where I live now (east germany) and where I come from (London). Poor people in London are simply far more poor, even though London is far more wealthy than east Germany.
What I was initially pointing at was, if you think about the portion of pay one gets, and the portion of pay that goes to the state, I think high taxation is often worth the money in terms of quality of life, because it delivers goods that are simply beyond anybody's budget otherwise. Jeff Bezos can't go on a 4am walk through LA without a shadow of worry, but I can do that in my city. That's a tangible freedom that I can buy with my paycheck, and he cannot really buy with his.
Obviously money on its own doesn't solve deeper issues - and Europe has a lot of problems, especially around questions of nationality and belonging. But I think in the narrow sense, of what you get for what you pay, high tax - welfare state societies are generally competitive even for very high earners, just because they deliver a lot of things that you literally can't pay for, no matter how rich you are.
>That's a tangible freedom that I can buy with my paycheck, and he cannot really buy with his.
Sure he can, his multiple well armed guards will ensure he is safe even in the worst part of LA at 4am. He also has multiple homes and I guarantee you that his suburban homes have little crime around them. Cities aren't primarily where the well off live in the US and the places they do live are very safe.
The typical London lifestyle for people with a respectable income -- tech money, not finance money -- is more like living in Zone 3 and working in Zone 1. I think there is a lot of proportionality between standard of lifestyle and income between London and expensive US cities, a similar level of income buying a similar lifestyle (adjusted for local context). A big difference is that high incomes are much more widely distributed across industries in the US than London. If you are a middle manager in a boring industry like publishing, you aren't going to get £150k in London but you can in the US, even outside the big cities. The diversity of people that can afford an upper-middle class lifestyle in the US is much greater. Even dialing back US standards of lifestyle to something contextually appropriate, the kind of work that affords a "comfortable" lifestyle is much narrower in London.
An under-rated feature of US cities is the diversity of occupations that can command relatively high incomes. London does this better than many European cities but it still has a long way to go. Living on a tech salary in London is a bit like living on a good non-tech salary in SF or Seattle. Comfortable in the abstract but there is visibly a tier of people that the city culture values much more.
>A big difference is that high incomes are much more widely distributed across industries in the US than London.
[...]
>An under-rated feature of US cities is the diversity of occupations that can command relatively high incomes.
The way I've explained this to people is that it's entirely possible in the US to rise to the top of your profession in any industry without ever moving to NY or LA, except maybe finance for NY and film/television for LA.[1] The equivalent is possible in Australia, Canada, and Germany, but impossible in the UK or France.
[1] And even here there are exceptions. For the entirety of the century that Hollywood has been "Hollywood", the creative types in LA have worked under control of the money men in NY. This is still true, except that the money men are now also in Dallas (AT&T), Philadelphia (Comcast), or Tokyo (Sony). In finance, one can become a managing director at a New York investment bank while always based in a regional office like Chicago, Atlanta, Dallas, or San Francisco (I think Byron Trott never left Chicago during his Goldman career).
> An under-rated feature of US cities is the diversity of occupations that can command relatively high incomes.
I find this super interesting, especially when linking salary back to how much society values that job type. For instance it seems that many European countries value societally their teachers and professors, yet it is a rather underpaid profession, all things considered. Similarly, a maitre d’ would be quite well regarded in France or Italie, yet would not command a high-salary.
Thus it feels like your point on there being more diverse sectors being cogent with a comfortable lifestyle in the U.S. rings true.
Veering away from the main point, but I wonder if, as pointed in other comments, that is somewhat balanced by less people being, comparatively, in the poor and very poor category. That is to say, less of a difference between top lifestyles and bottom lifestyles overall. I would need to properly research that though, as salary alone won’t give us that variance.
A large part of the income distribution differences result from wages being very compressed around the median for a given occupation in Europe. For most occupations in the US, the top 5% earn much more money than the median person in their occupation (or the population generally), even for occupations like waiters and cleaners that we don't think of as high-paying. This creates a different set of expectations culturally; everyone knows at least a few enterprising people that make a surprising amount of money doing nominally low-wage, low-status work and therefore having access to a visibly comfortable life.
I think "poor" is relative to cultural expectations, so I am not sure how to measure that over different geographic regions. The infamously poverty-stricken regions of the US, like Appalachia or Mississippi, really do have serious systemic poverty but even the middle-class there is often viewed as poor by the standards of other regions. However, the lifestyle afforded by the 40th percentile household income in most European countries would identify as "poor" in much of the US, despite being definitionally middle-class. In much of the US, "poverty" is primarily associated with social problems like drugs and crime, not economic resource issues per se outside of a few sparsely populated regions, which isn't that different than what I see in Europe. I grew up in abject poverty of non-social kind, which is pretty rare in the US. In hindsight, I think the government did a reasonable job of handling that case.
>as underestimating some built-in benefits of other countries like free healthcare.
If you're at FAANG (which the original post was talking about) then there's little advantage of free healthcare imho. You get top of the line company paid for healthcare. You can see a top specialist in a week with no referrals needed and someone almost as good same day.
That’s a really good point. My understanding however was that you still need to pay some parts of the treatments, even with top healthcare?
I’m no specialist on the US system, so could be wrong, but I heard from a friend who paid $4K cash for a broken ankle (arguably out of a total bill of $25K+, and not sure what type of healthcare they had), whereas your bill in the U.K., France or Spain for the same injury would be exactly zero (as an example, from countries I know better). The same would be true, I believe, for child birth for instance (again, I could be wrong as relying on second-hand accounts in both cases).
Agreed on the type of specialist you would get in the U.K., although in my experience it’s always been very feasible to see top specialists when warranted, even on public healthcare. You would typically get faster access for non-essential care on a private basis though.
Overall, it seems from Yours and other comments that the salary multiple in U.S. tech specifically may still be significant and would probably make these moot.
>I’m no specialist on the US system, so could be wrong, but I heard from a friend who paid $4K cash for a broken ankle (arguably out of a total bill of $25K+, and not sure what type of healthcare they had), whereas your bill in the U.K., France or Spain for the same injury would be exactly zero (as an example, from countries I know better)
UK, yes. In France, aren't there copayments? I thought the French system typically covers 70% of hospital bills.
That's not true. For example in Germany there is an explicit difference between statutory healthcare and private healthcare. Private healthcare will get you to the front of the line and will give you easy access to all services. With statutory healthcare you will have to go around searching for specialists who have time for you, as most will refuse you on account of them being "fully booked".
> most [specialists] will refuse you on account of them being "fully booked"
I don't deny that this does happen, but it's not as inevitable as you make it sound. I've seen about a dozen separate specialists over the years for various reasons, and have never had such problems. There were a few outliers where I had to wait several weeks for an appointment, but that was only for non-urgent matters and I was never refused service. In most cases, I can get an appointment within 1-5 days of calling the doctor's office.
My suspicion is that such overload as you describe is a regional issue, so if, as an immigrant, you need to rely on certain specialists because of chronic ailments, it may be worth to investigate the availability of the relevant specialist doctor beforehand.
>That is a given for every resident in most European countries.
Based on what I've heard it's not a given in the UK for example. Need non-guaranteed GP referral (ie: they may say no) for a specialist and there's often a long waiting period.
Agree direct comparison is tough and multifactored and would be highly individual (how do you put a price on being a 2 hr train ride away from Paris whilst having much better job opportunities than Parisians). However, given that compensation in US is a large multiple higher I think it would be easy to agree it's better overall. For comparison Big Law pays 20-30% lower on average in London vs. NYC and finance pays marginally lower (outside of quant finance where London pays a lot lower than NYC as hedge funds don't have to compete with FANGs for tech talent that wants high pay).
Swiss tech companies find that there isn't enough talent within Switzerland unless they are focusing purely on the Swiss market. Cost of living is higher than London in somewhere like Geneva.
For growing US tech companies, what is the main reason why they want to open a tech office in Europe? If it's just regulatory / business / tax stuff, there's no need to employ developers: it could just be business & legal side. If it's access to talent then London is still great. Perhaps that will decline as it won't be as easy to bring EU citizens over to work there.
I know that the Silicon Valley salaries can be several times higher than in London, but for some Europeans it just doesn't seem super attractive to live and work in the US.
FANG salaries and financial rewards aren't relevant to most software engineers, though the proportion may be higher on HN.
Realistic salaries more generally also can't be taken out of the wider context of living in a country with different social values and funding of them (I'm trying to be polite in reference to the comparative British/European vs USA perspectives of and funding with regard to social support and social disparities).
Switzerland is not that great either I believe. Looked it up last year, I could make ~1.5 times what I make now, but prices are on average at least 2 times higher than where I live now.
I would agree to this about working from home. But this applies every city as well - New York being notable because of the mass emigration during COVID.
London beats any European city by a substantial amount, even including cost of living. I don't see why that would change. Switzerland as you point out has similarly high wages.
I can't see innovation, talent or companies moving to the EU at any stage. It's a regulatory horror show and has massive brain drain to places that actually pay developers reasonable wages.
Developers in Sweden are paid the equivalent of 51k USD. This means even including cost of living such as health insurance, you can make substantially more in the US, London or Switzerland.
Developers in the EU get shafted big time. Free health insurance is not worth half, or even one-third the salary.
Finland, Sweden, and Denmark have a much healthier startup scene than the UK does. You can also go further afield and explore places like Lisbon, which have a growing buzz.
In some ways they have a much healthier startup scene than SV does.
You won't earn $400k - guaranteed until the restructuring and breakup layoffs hit - but you will be happier and less stressed, and your kids will be too. And you won't be living in a city that has become a dystopian nightmare.
If you're all about the money then of course you won't get what's cool about the EU.
And that's fine. Because not only do companies have cultural fit, so do countries.
I don't think you can speak for everyone when you claim not to care about literally millions of dollars in lost opportunity by not living in a country that doesn't shaft you.
It's millions. The delta between the average US salary and the average EU salary is gigantic, and if invested in a conservative investment portfolio consisting of index funds means by choosing to live in the EU you're willingly giving up many millions of dollars by time you're in retirement.
When I'm retired, I don't want to be broke and penniless and I certainly wouldn't be thinking that the free healthcare I received was worth the amount I was scammed.
On what planet is healthcare worth many millions of dollars? It's not worth it. You're better off by any calculation in the US. Substantially so.
51k when you're doing the same stuff that someone in the US is making 175k for? You're being robbed in broad daylight.
To put it another way, consider that a senior level developer in Sweden makes substantially less than a fresh grad in the US.
> When I'm retired, I don't want to be broke and penniless and I certainly wouldn't be thinking that the free healthcare I received was worth the amount I was scammed.
> On what planet is healthcare worth many millions of dollars? It's not worth it. You're better off by any calculation in the US. Substantially so.
You're missing pensions, which EU countries have, which mean in most cases you won't find yourself broke and penniless when you retire. And work hours, which are substantially less. And vacation time, which is literally multiple times more ( 5 weeks paid minimum in France for instance), and "unlimited sick time" ( it's sick there's even such a concept in the US). What good are your millions if you have to wait to retirement to actually use them, being too busy working 60 hour weeks? Or having to go into work sick? Or ffs, after the birth of a child?
All senior developers I know make significantly more than 51000.
Yeah, other people in other countries make more money, and it was a competition for who is richest when they die, Sweden would really suck. But I really enjoy my life here, and I don’t plan to wait until I retire to do that. (And I lived abroad for five years, including 2 years in the US, so I have something to compare with).
Throughout my career, people have told me I don’t earn enough, that I can get paid more.
Ok, but I’m still wealthier in my 30s than most people are when they retire — my biggest regret in life to date is not having a family, not the even bigger pile of money I could’ve earned if I’d gone to Silicon Valley or invested £10k into BTC in May 2010.
As a developer in Stockholm in a not particularly exciting big company in a not particularly exciting position I making about $80000. I have daycare for my two kids within 200 meter from my home, and I pay less than $200 per month and kid for that. I have a safe bicycle commute that takes less than half an hour. I have the forest behind the house. In my area kids as young as 7 roam around without direct supervision on their bicycles. Im currently on paid (ok, it doesn’t cover 100% of my salary, but enough) parental leave and will be for another three months. After that I will probably use my legal right to work 80% while the kids are small. And of course free healthcare.
I know that this is far from what everyone wants, and wasn’t what I looked for 10 years ago, but for me, now, it is almost perfect. And I don’t think there’s many places in the world I can live like this.
No, it's called getting shafted. The EU has more or less the same wealth floating around as any other western country, but it's in total stagnation.
We can argue about why this is, but the end result is that asset prices are high, while there's no incentive to cycle money through the economy in a way that allows wealth building.
Not even the government is willing to spend, which is a problem because the government has set itself up to be the subsidizer of everything. The scale of the problem is easily appearant when you see Brussels celebrating a €10b climate package. Exactly what is €20 per citizen supposed to achieve?
The money saved does not go into the healthcare. The healthcare is paid from taxes paid from salaries etc. So the bigger the salary the more funding for healthcare.
I’m not complaining about the situation. Supply and demand determines IT wages quite well. For some reason US based devs are simply more in demand.
Financiers in London are paid similar to financiers in NYC, it's not about solidarity, it's about supply and demand. And forces of supply and demand are not working in developers' favour in European countries. I myself switched from being a quant dev to a trader within a large bank (and now a fund) and the work is a lot more interesting/rewarding and better paid.
As a Canadian based in the UK for nearly 20 years, I'm making plans to go back to Canada or join family in the US.
London is expensive compared to Canadian cities, even Vancouver, but pay for tech workers is comparable, if not a bit lower than in Canada. The US has higher pay than both, but it's only about 30% and you have more cost out of pocket, especially healthcare.
Much of the energy in London in the past 20-30 years is driven by EU nationals. A lot of multinationals and tech companies are based in the south-east to access this talent pool. Many companies have whole teams based in London serving the respective European markets (French speaking, Germans speaking, Italian speaking, etc.). This will change in the next decade or so.
London will likely be less attractive as a place to work for Europeans: since they cannot work without organising a visa and depending on the UK government (given also that the government said out loud they would put up EU residents' rights as stakes in their Brexit negotiations);
and likely less attractive as a place for to non-Europeans to work, since they can't get access to Europe via London.
Finding workers for your unicorn startup in the UK will be much more challenging.
I think the biggest impact will be the loss of access to EU workers without hassle. I would have gladly worked for a company based out of the UK in the past; now I assume I am not welcome and can't be asked to find out what would be involved.
I’m not sure what you’ll gain from this question other than political comments.
Some will say no because of possible tariffs the EU could apply to sales into the Eu. It tends to forget that the rest of the world exists.
Some will say yes given the UK now has the ability to reduce taxes, invest in areas that it couldn’t before and provide competitive opportunities which anyone in the EU couldn’t
So it’s really down to the UK to take advantage of its freedom.
> possible tariffs the EU could apply to sales into the Eu.
Isn't that what the 2000 page trade deal they just signed is for?
> It tends to forget that the rest of the world exists.
the EU offers unilateral zero tariffs on all goods except weapons to all Least Developed Countries. Seems a strange way to "forget that the rest of the world exist"
I’m going to be modestly cynical here. I don’t think they will take advantage, not for a decade or three minimum. The Tories were foolish enough that they thought Brexit was a path to prosperity to begin with, and Labour is allergic to anything not owned by the state, at some points proposing expropriations in the power sector which were exciting enough to get pension funds to move money to special vehicles in Asia with treaties saying the UK won’t expropriate their holdings.
The biggest macro thing would be free trade treaties with markets like the US and Asia (obviously including China, but elsewhere too) and streamlining regulatory standards to be efficient - not to be all “oh no the big capitalists will exploit everyone,” just better targeted and less bureaucratic; you can glimpse this in the way the UK was first to approve vaccines for covid.
But all that has to compete with maintaining trade access to the EU and that’s a huge barrier if it remains and a huge loss if it doesn’t.
What’s supposed to make startups and tech more competitive there now? Maybe if the Euro collapses in a banking crisis somehow (?!?) but I’m not seeing it.
That’s certainly the hope of some in the government, though I’m not sure if I’d count on them to execute in supporting it. A lot of services based in the UK/London were there because it was a natural gateway to Europe, and that will no longer be the case since the new deal just struck doesn’t include them from what I understand. I see more downsides than upsides at the moment.
Brexit was about UK nativism. As the USA steps out of its own nativist administration, the UK has fewer like-minded global partners with real shared interests.
I'm an American that lived in London for 2 years in the 90s - the high tide for an American abroad - so that's the POV I bring to your question. The following decades have seen mostly retrograde changes. I cannot imagine it becoming -easier- for a non-native in Britain in the 2020s... can you? Germany and even France now bring a genuine interest in cultivating technology economies by welcoming global investors AND workers. I would put Berlin or even Paris ahead of London for the next decade if you're looking for an exciting soup of technology culture, opportunity, reasonable costs, and relative freedom to operate. I'm not being arbitrary in saying this - the company I co-founded, Spoonflower, runs its European operations out of Berlin.
That said, I loved London and still do - such a civilized place to visit. I was there just before Covid times, and was absolutely amazed by the changes to LHR immigration and Crossrail that allowed me to go from deplaning my transatlantic flight to my hotel in central London in 55 minutes. I can't wait for the city to re-open and Crossrail to be complete. There are few pleasures to equal a walk by the Thames on a long sunny day - perhaps summer 2021?
For software, I don’t expect much to change. I’m basically as Remain-y as it’s possible to be, but the post-Brexit issues are:
• Mutual recognition of qualifications: usually not as important in software as what you do after your degree, but even when it is the “engineer” in “software engineer” isn’t a protected term.
• Customs and border controls: solution for software is “the internet!”
• Work visas when visiting the content from the UK: apparently not needed for short business trips?
• Work visas for those going to the UK: IIRC the UK wants a minimum pay threshold such that most of us would reject a pay offer that low even straight out of university.
• Pay/living costs: possibly a real issue — as others point out, the UK is already not very competitive for pay and London is somewhat expensive.
•• Regarding pay: while the exchange rates may swing sharply in the next few months, I expect that a year from now they will mostly be close to the current values.
•• Regarding living costs: if it hasn’t been for COVID, I’d have expected housing costs to go down and everything else to go up (when measured in £), given COVID I have no idea what to expect.
I’d actively try to dissuade you if you were doing anything involving hardware, chemicals, medicine, law, space, or food; and I’d still put 5% on this developing like the Northern Ireland Troubles; but software as a particular domain is probably either fine, or at the very least the problems will be unrelated to Brexit.
Biggest and pretty serious difference I see is that, in the past a lot of devs from EU moved to UK for contracting, as that's why the most money was to be made. Now I suspect it will be impossible or impractical. However, I don't follow the details anymore but this probably aligns with the end of contracting boom anyway (due to IR35 tax regulations).
We will find out is the only sensible answer, as the question is too complex really.
But, one obvious impact will be labour supply. Fewer European area devs will come to the UK, which will make things less attractive for big tech companies.
This might cause wages to go up or alternatively a points based immigration system will allow any programmers to apply for a visa from anywhere in the world. I have no idea to be honest, it will be interesting to see what happens.
I don't think you are right about labour supply. UK has always had the upper hand when it comes to immigration. Half the world wants to move there.
They will have absolutely no problem attracting devs from all over the world.
A follow up question to this. What do people feel about relocating to the EU.
Both this question and the question that OP is asking have been on my mind a lot lately. But I don't really have much choice in the matter, because of my situation. I was living in the US for 7 years but I had to leave because I did not get the H1B visa. I could have gone to Canada, but right now they are apparently taking upwards of 9 months to process work permits so I got turned down by a lot of FAANG companies. I ended up deciding to move to Europe.
This decision has been really hard on me for a number of reasons. Other than the fact that all my friends are there and so are all my professional connections, being a first language English speaker, I think that I would also feel more at home in the US or Canada. Then there is the matter on compensation and opportunity. El the only things I've heard about jobs in the EU is that there are few opportunities and the pay is less. I feel like I've been forced to take a step backwards in my career.
I moved to London to do a startup in December 2019. All I can say is do not do this. The government during covid has been horribly inefficient, I just received my NHS ID in the last month (taking upwards of a year to process, during which time they denied me covid testing after I had the necessary symptoms) and I received my NINO 6 months after moving here, however now with covid they aren't even processing these anymore.
In terms of brexit, any sort of gains for a startup will be possible only if the British government allows them to be (for example with deregulation or the removal of GDPR or the reduction/easing of bureaucratic proceses). In my experience betting on the British government to do the right thing is a bad bet. They have the digital London effort but it seems more like a PR stunt than a good-willed effort to attract startups.
You will also encounter strange socio-economic effects that you would not see in other places, for example being an engineer and starting a startup here is viewed as a negative while being a business major is a positive. There is a big divide between capital and labour that perpetuates itself through these stereotypes that are not present in places like America.
>You will also encounter strange socio-economic effects that you would not see in other places, for example being an engineer and starting a startup here is viewed as a negative while being a business major is a positive.
Your experience might be a bit more localised to the part of the UK you're in than you think rather than being a UK thing. I've never found people care enough to provide negativity or positivity regarding where you've chosen to specialise your education in most cases.
>In terms of brexit, any sort of gains for a startup will be possible only if the British government allows them to be
Agreed. Lack of access to capital and the lack of tax planning for anyone but the rich holds the UK back compared to the states.
I don't agree with much the current government did, but one sentiment that Cummings expressed that was correct was that when novel tech gets bought over by US giants (eg Deepmind), is a failure on the UK's part. They're essentially allowing all the future upside to be exported.
Not that I blame anyone that accepts a buyout offer, if they didn't, then there'd probably be no upside to capture at all due to lack of risk-taking private funding.
I don't think undoing the GDPR would be doing "the right thing", personally. I'm hoping that's legislation we keep for the time being, until we can figure out how to do it better. But fundamentally it's pulling in the right direction.
You're right that in a lot of the UK software folks are viewed as 'beneath' the management and business types though, and not valued in the same way as they are in other economies. Useless arseholes with few worthwhile skills can get paid a ton if they can talk themselves into a position as a delivery manager or project manager.
In regards to GDPR, I agree it's the right thing for consumers, but it puts compliance pressure on startups. So from the perspective of a startup, I could see its removal being a positive.
(Note that is just from the perspective of a startup)
Don't collect information about your customers that you don't need to provide the service to them.
If they decide to delete their account and request that they be forgotten, delete that data that you only needed while providing the service.
It's not hard to comply, and it's a cost of doing business that you have to accept. If you implement it right, then you'll be compliant by default. Not sure how not being compliant is a positive for any startup.
It's the law in the EU, so unless you want to cut out a market of half a billion people, you have to comply.
It shouldn't be acceptable for startups, nor anyone else, to play fast and loose with personal data, just as it isn't with financial data.
Unless your business model revolves around usage of personal data, in which case GDPR is a very useful set of minimum baseline requirements for handling the data, compliance is fairly trivial.
It's too early to know right now. We can see that there has clearly been a lot of damage caused by Brexit but it may bring on more opportunities in the future depending on how regulations and relationships with other nations develop.
All bets are off. Covid showed we don't need bums in seats for tech jobs and people can be trusted.
Brexit will only have an effect if the government do something big like make a massive tax haven for certain industries and there's only talk of increasing taxes to pay for Covid.
Pick a place for the people not the scene. Be a digital nomad until you find a connection.
The UK is good for a market to sell into because of the strength of the pound and because it's a service based economy. These two things are not going to change.
If you’re coming from a less well-off country and have the flexibility to take advantage of any post-Brexit easier immigration flux, I’d definitely take the risk and go for it.
If you’re coming from a country that’s roughly as prosperous and have some luxury of time, I’d delay any decision by at least a year.
There will most likely still be more opportunity in London than anywhere else in Europe, but hard to tell what it’ll be like compared against the rest of the world.
There are brand new immigration protocols coming with the introduction of a points-based system. Plus the "Home Office will continue to refine the system in the light of experience and will consider adding further flexibility into the system..." [1]. I read that as points for various characteristics could vary quickly. Also the option to apply for the EU Settlement Scheme remains until mid-2021 if someone moved very recently.
Sure, that's just two avenues that jump to mind. There may be many more less orthodox routes that appear as the dust settles. We're witnessing a major shift in the status quo.
Cambridge is nice (I lived there before the referendum), but it’s also tiny — the non-student population is slightly smaller than Apple’s total workforce.
As another comment says, you’ll mostly get political comments, so here goes: UK universities, while still very good, are dropping quite significantly in various league tables since Brexit. This is for a range of reasons: non-UK applicants now get a full US-style price, with little support or loans. They are less attractive for academics too. 2/3 of UK unis dropped since the Brexit votes, Cambridge is at a historical low of 7th in the world, behind ETH. Student visas are sth like £1000 per year on top of that. If you think this will continue, and talented and driven young people will choose other countries, this will extinguish, in the long term, the supply of talent to startups and tech.
UK’s attitude to immigration will also be unpredictable. On the one hand, it states that it is keen to attract talent etc, on the other hand visas will be largely awarded based on salaries (maybe not so good for early stage startups). Also there are no guarantees that eg the partner of a visa taker will be awarded one, or that visas will be extended. This is another reason why people might give the Uk a wide berth - and these would be potentially your cofounders, colleagues, investors.
On the flip side, finance was thought to leave London en masse, and didn’t. Banks etc established a presence in EU countries, but most of the business logic staff are actually staying out.
Also UK is at heart a country of innovation, where novelty and innovation are welcome, and entrepreneurship runs in the blood, more so than in many other places. Brexit won’t change that.
So... who knows? I’m an EU citizen, now also British and well settled here. I like it, but probably wouldn’t choose it now.