Fair point. My personal definition of a reasonable living standard, is being able to save a house deposit and eventually buy a 2-up 2-down terraced house, without forgoing all social life or basic no frills holidays. Such as house costs £70-80k in a cheap part of a northern city, £120k in a more up-market part, and, as for London, well maybe its under £300k on the very last stop on a tube line - Morden for example.
In London you're likely to end up in a shared apartment for years. It might be a nice apartment, with good housemates, but it'll never be yours, and what happens when you get married and have kids? Lots of people answer "well then I move a 45 min train ride away". My other definition of decent standard of living involves not paying out thousands of £ to catch a stressful crowded train every day. ;)
May sound weird, but don't forget the Job Centre. I got a previous job at a startup via the Job Centre. My employers hadn't thought of advertising there until Business Link or some entreprisey support place like that suggested it. They've got a good job search facility. Don't think it costs anything to advertise a job there. People mistakenly think people only go there to collect dole but actually it is a place to look for a job too!
I probably sound like a broken record on HN, but this is surely a big part of the problem - living costs in London. Even £40k doesn't give a great standard of living in London, due to ridiculous accommodation and transport costs. I think that startups should locate somewhere much cheaper but still attractive to grads, somewhere north. Examples - Birmingham, Nottingham, Sheffield, Leeds, Newcastle.
Nowadays unis get ranked partly on what % of their grads are in employment x number of months after graduating, so its important to them to get graduates placed in jobs. I've come across a Computer Science department having a careers contact, who emails out vacancies to students. Maybe you might get somewhere by contacting unis and trying to get these careers contacts? (assuming a few of them do this?)
Thank you. :) As a fan of PG's articles regarding language power, I've wondered why he didn't make more comparisons of other languages to Smalltalk (whether positive or negative)
I acknowledge London is in many ways a fantastic place to live and grow a business. Its great for the UK if we can have a growing startup hub based in London. However, while many startups will flourish in London, so many others would be completely dead in the water if they tried to grow while facing London costs.
Living just outside London is surely more costly than living in a comparable area of a city further north, when you take into account a rail season ticket? Also, commuting times get silly.
There's loads of talent scattered across the UK. Whats the point of trying to get that talent to move somewhere where everyone else already wants to live, and quality of life in many ways is poor as result? Silicon Valley is different because they actually pay enough for people to live there. Maybe that's the answer - startups need to start paying £70k to developers in Shoreditch when the same person would have been happier being paid £20k to live in Derby?
Thanks for the response though- its interesting to debate these things. :)
For the UK startup scene to really succeed ..... how about if people located their startups in places where people can actually afford housing costs ? such as - Sheffield, Leeds, Birmingham, Nottingham, Newcastle etc .
You might be in a strong position with that part-time job, if it covers basic living costs. It leaves extra time that full-timers don't have. With this time, you can try ideas that may or may not pay off, like freelancing, start your own company, or contribute to open source in the hope of gaining a reputation that brings in work / job offers.
Often on HN there's talk of quitting a full-time job to start a start-up. That's high-risk unless you're married or in long-term relationship with someone who has a secure job. But working part-time while doing your own thing part-time too sounds potentially good to me, however boring or unsatisfying the part-time job is. And BTW it'd be a lot worse if you had a full-time boring job, right? ;)
You say it hasn't worked out .... well, it just hasn't worked out YET. In a few weeks time ski resorts will be hiring for the winter. How about doing that for a few months? You might be very glad you did. :)
Additional info : Changing this slightly to drop range header when more than 10 ranges (i:e the 5 on the third line becomes a 10 instead ), can avoid problems where serving of large pdfs get broken by this fix.
I agree with that. But, a typical course contains bits that don't change e.g algorithm theory and bits that do , e.g programming skills learned from implementing algorithms, which, back in the day would have been in Pascal or C, nowadays is in Java or Python, and in future maybe some other language.
So taking such a course would have 2 aims - get a good grounding in theory, and get some buzzwords on your resume / c.v too .
People who don't understand the difference between CS and making RoR websites , sadly include many hiring managers, right? ;)
Interesting. Does this mean that people who want to come to the US as a contractor could now bypass the "body shops" by creating their own "body shop"? This would mean that you have almost the same employment rights as a US citizen so long as you own a body shop company that employs yourself!
Agree with this. With £27k debt for tuition alone, plus other debts for living costs, in a field that changes so fast as Computer Science, you'd be paying off this debt long after much of what you'd have learned would be obsolete. Far better to go straight into work, and study part-time (if employers will take you without a degree that is, which they might if they realise that 18-yr olds can be smart and cheap). It'll be interesting to see what 18-yr olds do in response to these fees. Sadly I fear many may not be clued up at that age, and will study Computer Science then regret later.
IMHO one thing the client needs to do to get a decent Python programmer apply is either relocate that job somewhere cheaper, or pay significantly more. In London, too much of that £45k is going to be swallowed up by accommodation costs.
The uk is a crowded island and anything we can do to reduce the number of lorries (trucks) on our roads would be good. An example is, why do potatoes from Cornwall get sold in Yorkshire and vice versa since both areas could be self-sufficient in potatoes? Why are we wasting fuel, vehicles, truck drivers time (and their whole lives really) shifting potatoes around depending on the market price? A more extreme example is that New Zealand apples and lamb are sold in the UK, both of which are readily available from this country, not only at different times of year. I've even seen "Organic" New Zealand apples in Sainsburys. Well they might be organically grown but certainly not organically produced overall if they're shipped halfway around the globe. Another bugbear I have is, here in the East Midlands we have freight planes landing and taking off at night. Some people aren't getting a decent night's sleep so that others can get Mange Tout and sugar snap peas from Ghana or wherever. So in summary if you want the planet to be a nicer less stressful place with less lorries and planes, try to buy local!
Maybe its because your work is too solitary? It is very difficult to remain motivated when working alone as you don't get the feedback of having seen people benefit from your work and have a smile. Unfortunately this seems to be how a lot of IT/computing work is by its nature.
I'm glad someone else thinks this too. In Nottingham a 2-bedroom terraced house in a good area can be rented for £500 a month and in a bad area £300, a whole year's bus travel is £350, or £199 for 100 days of your choosing, and there are extensive cycle lanes. There' s lots of fun stuff going on , varied nightlife. Its under 2 hours on the train to London when you need to go. To me this is the sort of place people should be doing startups, not London. £18k salary here would get you a reasonable existence for a few years while in a startup company.
It seems to me to start a startup one has to have some basic business sense which means one understands balancing ingoings and outgoings. Therefore it seems a bit flawed to try to start a company somewhere so insanely expensive that, like you say, its employees spend 70%-80% on accommodation. Its rather important to retain key early technical staff. Not very easy for that to happen in London.
I think that the web has made the "dark side" of H1B more widely known. H1B holders often feel like indentured servants. There are many stories of people who slaved away for years while trying to get a Green Card but didn't get one in the end. Also , post 9-11, with the associated paranoia and security hassles, living a plane flight away from your extended family, especially in the US, would seem far less attractive. Its a pity because there are some great tech opportunities in the US right now. My solution would be , the US needs a better tech visa program where people have a chance to stay in the US on a more equal footing with Americans (and thereby become employers themselves, which helps Americans too). Also the US needs to stop treating every normal innocent visitor like they're a potential threat of some kind.
Agreed, and even many experienced developer jobs are advertised at only about £40k. When you look at the cost of living in London, its simply not worth it. I'm amazed they manage to recruit at all frankly. You could quite possibly have a better material lifestyle by living in a cheaper area in northern england and stacking shelves in a supermarket for a living. I can never understand why so many high tech companies base themselves in London, when they could relocate up north and get very talented developers for much less who will stick around and who will be happy too as a £20k salary in the north actually gives them a chance of buying a house.
One thing missed by this article - the house price boom over the last few years means that people who bought before the boom should have much lower outgoings for housing. A 30-something with much of their house paid off is in that respect in a better position to take risks than a 20-something paying rent and perhaps wondering if they ought to save for the downpayment/deposit on a house purchase.
Another issue is that learning how to cook healthy food quickly and cheaply can take years to learn and your food costs can diminish with age.
That's interesting. Completely agree about the cuts that take a long time being cheaper. I tried cooking brisket for the first time a couple of days ago. It only took 30 mins in the pressure cooker. BTW a pressure cooker saves time and money and energy and lets you eat cheaply and healthily. All students and entrepreneurs should have one IMHO. The entire population of India can't be too far wrong on the merits of pressure cookers. As for the brisket, well it was good, but didn't seem cheaper or better than lean(ish) minced beef, and didn't go as far as we hoped. So maybe we'll stick to making spaghetti bolognaise...
one strange thing about the UK IT industry is that the majority of jobs are in London and the SE, where the cost of living is so high that you may well in fact be better off financially if you live somewhere cheaper and work in retail or as a bus driver or some other job that while not totally stress-free, does not require constant updating.
What if your software is better architected e:g programmed by people who ruthlessly avoid unnecessary complexity? It may be that a competitor with deep pockets wastes lots on an over-complex or vaguely/fuzzily designed competing product. OTOH, I suppose sadly they've got a lot more to spend on marketing and that is what may kill you.
One thing not many people have mentioned, is avoid open plan. I currently have the misfortune to work in an open plan office and basically get far less productive work done than when I worked in one with cubicles where you at least could get some work done without being distracted by other people (I'm not saying that cube farms are ideal either .... )
This is a nice idea but I believe is in the wrong location and the government has missed an opportunity. London simply has far too expensive housing and is too crowded and a lot of smart people won't live there. Silicon Fen in near Cambridge also has very high housing costs. A UK silicon valley needs to happen where its cheap to live, geeks actually want to live there, and there are decent transport links to London. I think a better tactic would be to electrify the Midland Mainline to make the trains to/from the north faster. Then you could make tech hubs in places like Nottingham (which is a fun place for 20-somethings to go out AND has cheap family housing too) or Sheffield (ditto and has rock climbing on the doorstep as well).
Its ridiculous how so much tech work in the UK is concentrated in the crowded expensive south-east, and I believe an enlightened government would try to capitalise on the talent in the rest of the UK.