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Comment by alephnerd | Hacker News Reader

Kinda related, but why the heck are all third-party recruiters British? Every single third-party recruiting agency seems to be British

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Also from Ireland. I think English language being their main strength, versus in non-English speaking EU countries where recruiters tend to only look locally where their native language gets spoken instead of venturing into foreign countries where they don't know the language and culture very well.

The other I think is how hungry and agresive the UK is for service sector opportunities, having always positioned it's economy as a middle-man. They have that US inspired go-getter mentality, that's lacking on the mainland.

It’s because inequality is brutal in the island, while the mainland is a bit more equalitarian. So was the UK up until Thatcher really. She released the Kraken of capitalism, and now the UK feels like a small version of the US, inequality wise. Thatcher’s reforms increased GDP and wealth but also massively grew the number of working poor.

Although she also massively increased the wealth of the working class by opening up more property ownership. UK wealth inequality is amongst the lowest in Europe.

You mean her political jiu jitsu of making council homes available for sale?

Yes it created a new owner class that was enamoured with her, but the end consequence of it is probably the housing crisis/asset bubble that the UK has been living with for 15 years or so.

Buying a council home did make a lot of new owners rich, but it's likely it harmed the long term prospects for the whole country. That was a lot of Thatcher. Deindustrialization annihilated the working middle class. In Germany industry was never destroyed for the sake of the service sector.

I don't disagree at all, and I never said I didn't. That said, I do think the UK is quite well placed to export services as opposed to goods - English-speaking, favourable timezone, strong body of corporate law, and a very good tertiary education system all favour services over goods.

I'd also say the UK is more comparable to France, which deindustrialised to a similar degree.

>In Germany industry was never destroyed for the sake of the service sector.

Until they ran out of cheap Russian gas.

Germany also has a high level of wealth inequality. Buying a home there is a luxury for the rich now. Yeah, rent protections and what not, but good luck to the average German affording rent and utilities in 30 year on a pension.

The fact that you think Germany is anywhere near as deindustrialised as the UK, because of the increasing cost of energy, is a bit funny to me. The UK was brutally deindustrialised.

The UK manufacturing output is 8.69% of GDP. https://www.macrotrends.net/global-metrics/countries/GBR/uni...

German manufacturing output is 18% of GDP in 2022. That's over twice the UK. https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/NV.IND.MANF.ZS?location...

Look at data, stop reading sensationalistic news articles. I doubt that Germany has lost over half its industrial capacity since 2022.

Worth seeing that the UK figure is comparable to the France, the US, Canada, and way higher than Australia. Germany is the outlier here.

Absolutely Germany is the outlier. That's reason I mentioned it. From visiting and talking to people, it's one of the healthiest economies I've ever seen.

Unfortunately I can't read this paper, but it seems to have the opposite conclusion that you have.

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S01436...

"This paper concentrates on the 1% richest households in the UK in a comparison with the other four large Western European countries: Germany, France, Italy and Spain. In the European context the UK is an outlier of extreme inequality. "

"The UK sits half way between the USA and mainland Europe in economic space. The UK levels of inequality are now huge by normal European standards, but not so huge when compared to the average levels of economic inequality experienced within the USA."

The quite literal title of that paper is "Income inequality in the UK". I said "wealth inequality". They are different things.

I think focusing on the one indicator that props up a certain POV can be deceiving.

One more data point:

https://equalitytrust.org.uk/scale-economic-inequality-uk

So the wealth gini coefficient is indeed lower I expected.

The income gini coefficient however is among the highest in Europe, just as I expected.

Is it possible you're cherry picking statistics?

No it isn't - I'm well aware UK income inequality is high, whereas wealth inequality is quite low. That's why I said "wealth inequality", and that Thatcher improved it. Right-to-Buy basically made home ownership vastly more accessible to the working class in a way that hadn't happened before. It's bad that it coincided with an economic reworked that we're still recovering from, but I can't discuss everything in every comment.

I'm not sure how much the right to buy directly increased wealth vs. the lack of subsequent council house construction which changed supply vs. demand and drove up the market prices for all houses.

To me, house price inflation feels like all other inflation: the number may be going up, but people aren't actually better off for it.

Pretty much. Right to Buy made her popular, and made a single generation of people richer, but at the cost of destroying the housing market in the long term.

In the link you shared according to 2022 Gini wealth inequality[1] the UK is right in the middle, not too high, not too low. Who's the one cherry picking statistics? The highest wealth inequality according to that, is in Sweden.

[1] https://equalitytrust.org.uk/sites/default/files/images/hero...

Yeah I saw that. Every other indicator is going the other way however, as I’m sure you can tell since you read the article.

Yes, totally agree. I really wish they would disaggregate GDP by Geography and Income bracket. If you factor out London's GDP the rest of the UK has a GDP/capita similar to Mississippi, the State with the lowest GDP in the USA.

The anglosphere may have high GDP/capita but if you factor by Income bracket, that GDP is heavily concentrated in the top income brackets.

I’ve wondered this too. One theory I have is that in the UK doing an undergraduate degree is a humanities subject has much higher social status than the US. This leads more of the “top” high school students to do these degrees. When they graduate they obviously need a job and recruiting works week due to needing good language and soft skills. Maybe a bs theory though :)

> in the UK doing an undergraduate degree is a humanities subject has much higher social status than the US

I'm not really sure there's much of a difference between any subjects in the UK. Like, maybe stuff like Physics is seen as better? There's a big thing against "Micky Mouse degrees", that aren't seeing as leading to a job.

Recruiters themselves are seen as one step above estate agents, which is _not_ a high status.

I have a pretty low opinion of estate agents; but my opinion of recruiters is much lower. I'd put them in a class alongside - I dunno, politicians, maybe.

Nah, even recruiters who mix up Java and JavaScript aren't as bad as politicians :P

Yes, I can agree and I think that the corona lockdowns at least here in Europe accelerated this impression. Before 2021 it was very rare, that I would talk to a recruiter from UK, mainly those from Facebook, after 2021 it was the new normal.

During the mid phase of corona, let’s call it the Work from Home aka ZOOM phase, big tech hired massive amounts of developers all over the world and English was and is the lingua franca in everything Computer Science related.

I guess that the internationalization and corona together with English being the common denominator played a huge part here as well as cultural considerations. People from UK are tight to the main markets like USA, Canada, EU and India.

Just my 5 cents.

The UK recruitment industry is extremely competitive/aggressive. After Covid, they realised they could even outcompete the Americans on their home turf.

UK estate agents are also expanding abroad at an increasing pace.

I get about half local (dutch) recruiters and half british or irish.

Still all useless AF though.

"I see you used C# during an internship 10 years ago, would you be interested in a Senior C# Developer-Role in a different country?"

While completely ignoring that all I've ever worked as is a System Engineer/Linux Admin/Engineer.

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