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Comment by tomelders | Hacker News Reader

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.

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> 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.

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/

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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