This is spot on. All the smart and ambitious people I know who studied (non-software) Engineering at university in the UK have ended up going into software engineering via self-teaching or finance/consulting because the only hardware engineering career paths seem to be working for Rolls Royce in the middle of nowhere with terrible pay, or alternatively working at Jaguar Land Rover in the middle of nowhere with terrible pay
Was a MechE for 10 years here in the US and now I’m a SWE. Even here, no one cares about hardware engineers. Don’t get me wrong, you can make enough to be “comfortable”. But anecdotally, maybe 10% of MechE do design. 10% of that are paid handsomely to be in tech and are “Product Designers”. Even then, almost every tech company want to be a predominantly software company. They just happen to need hardware to execute their product. Admittedly, it’s really hard to do hardware in this economy when one country has 60% of the global manufacturing output and can copy your design, make it cheaper, and make it better. Ironically, the biggest dividing line that makes a hardware product better is good software.
That's what happens when there is not much manufacturing in the country anymore, and everyone is encouraged to go to college. I don't know why the software industry hasn't suffered more along the same lines. Maybe the profit margins for software are higher.
Production of software is nearly 100% R&D. Making a million copies of a software product has a trivial cost. There are no assembly line workers in software (and the very word "assembly" means a different thing). A software engineer very often brings in revenue many times their salary.
Production of hardware is some R&D, and then actual manufacturing. Production of each physical item costs you. Production of every physical item has a chance to go wrong. Production of each physical item requires a number of humans (often a large number) to do repetitive, high-precision, high-skill work, as fast as practical. You can augment or replace some of them with robots but it also costs you, and you can't replace all the humans with satisfactory results.
So, with hardware, the cost of the workforce plays a major role, while with software it does much less. To produce physical things, you need a lot of people who are not well-off, and for whom factory work is an upgrade of their financial and social standing. A "developing country", with huge swaths of population leaving rural life for a better city life and factory work, is best in this regard. Ideally you sell your product to richer folks, maybe outside the country of production.
Of course there can be situations where the workers are highly paid, and produce very valuable things through their skilled work. Ford in 1950s famously paid the assembly line workers very well, so that they could buy the cars they produce, and valued their employment. But this does not always occur; people doing work that does not add a lot of resale value also want to live well, especially if the society does not want a flood of immigrants who are willing to work for much less. Check out how much the work of a plumber costs in Switzerland. So only high-precision, high-margin, low-volume manufacturing remains in Switzerland, such as precision optics, precision industrial and medical equipment, or premium mechanical Swiss watches. The US is in a somehow similar situation.
>So, with hardware, the cost of the workforce plays a major role, while with software it does much less. To produce physical things, you need a lot of people who are not well-off, and for whom factory work is an upgrade of their financial and social standing. A "developing country", with huge swaths of population leaving rural life for a better city life and factory work, is best in this regard. Ideally you sell your product to richer folks, maybe outside the country of production.
You don't need a lot of people who are not well-off. You can automate the entire process. The problem with automation and labor saving technology is that it is capital intensive. The higher the capital investment per job (higher capital intensity), the bigger the chunk of money that flows to capital rather than labor.
This means that the cost of the workforce in a software company plays a bigger role than in a hardware company, where financing costs to pay for labor saving technology play a bigger role.
There are mining companies in Africa, who have nothing but an army of people equipped with shovels digging a small scale open pit mine. There is no way the labor cost here is the biggest constraint. An excavator and wheel loader could accomplish more with less people, but it would mean getting a USD loan to import foreign equipment and then selling for export to pay the foreign debts, rather than local production.
This all resonates very strongly with me. We have tons of automation - the proverbial "economies of scale", but we haven't managed to solve the last mile.
Auto assembly seems like a poster child. There's wild automation going on, but the typical plant still requires thousands of employees doing things by hand. Musk tried to automate a lot more of this away with newer/better robotics, but failed. (Tesla has still achieved a lot here, but it's been more towards creating designs that are more amenable to the current state of robotics).
IMO, this problem should be solvable now. I.E. we don't need "new physics" to reach another step-function in automation. We need more investment. We're still largely in the mindset of "special-purpose" automation.
> Production of software is nearly 100% R&D. Making a million copies of a software product has a trivial cost.
> Production of hardware is some R&D, and then actual manufacturing
Totally. And if you think deployment errors are bad, wait until you see how many production errors exist and how many items out of your line come out working and within spec
For a PCB it’s called a rework, and it’s very common for first spins of boards to have to do one.
Also common is to patch around issues, when possible, in firmware. This is often lower cost/effort, but can’t fix everything.
There are similar kinds of fixes for purely mechanical parts. Depending on the part and problem, mechanical can be easier than a PCB rework (eg: modify a part in CAD and 3D print or get your local machine shop to do a run).
Or require a particular type of motor oil with a particular type of metal-based lubricant additive when you realise 100,000 cam shafts have shipped made of metal you’d assumed was to a higher spec but isn’t, just so the engine will make it through warranty period with insanely long service intervals.
I briefly looked at a couple used vehicles just outside of warranty and one within warranty that had literally had two oil changers in 100,000k, that’s 60,000 miles for the uninitiated.
> You cannot release a patch for a mechanical part
In NATO, this is frequent and normal. Many, many "recalls" are issued by military manfacturers, then local support staff spend X hours to replace the defective part. It is not so different from automobile recalls.
Yeah I remember one of my friends working for a German auto company during the 2008 financial crisis and having insane stuff routinely happen like an auto manufacturer having to buy truckloads of sensors from a subcontractor that had nowhere to go as car manufacturing lines were stopped.
Failing to do so would have meant these manufacturers would go under, (along with their own subcontractors) and once demand shot back up, cars would be literally impossible to manufacture as key suppliers went out of business.
The U.S. is still the second largest manufacturer in the world by a large margin [1][2]
Like, yes, manufacturing's % of US GDP is low (and has been decreasing for a long time) and manufacturing employment is flat or slowly increasing but we're still making a lot of stuff.
I don't think we make a lot of stuff but we do make some of the most expensive stuff. So a lot of stats really don't reflect how unbalanced our trade is in real terms.
Interesting that you say that, my understand of the data is that manufacturing output has never been higher - ignoring lingering Covid shocks - https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/IPMANSICS
But because productivity is higher https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/M0100CUSM070NNBR - which doesn’t mean the workers are working harder: a man with a shovel can work as hard as he likes, but he’s never going to compete with the business owner who invested in productivity and gave his worker an excavator.
Therefore employment in the sector is down due to increased productivity, not decreased output.
But increased productivity is a radically different thing from decreased output. A claim that manufacturing should employ more, in the face of increased productivity, That’s a claim that manufacturing should replace other endeavours in the economy which, is a complex claim at the very least.
Eh, well, this is a bit embarrassing! On mobile, I can’t local a chart that covers the post war until now, best I can find is https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/OUTMS which shows late 80s onwards BUT shows a drop at 2008 onwards which goes against my argument (notwithstanding the big gap between both charts)
The nominal value of highly automated processes has never been higher. Meanwhile, ordinary people are not able to find as many good jobs as they once did. Wages in almost every industry are stagnant at best, at least when adjusted for inflation.
>A claim that manufacturing should employ more, in the face of increased productivity, That’s a claim that manufacturing should replace other endeavours in the economy which, is a complex claim at the very least.
It is a complex claim but I'll make it really simple. We import most of the things we rely on. Everything from plastic toys to car parts to critical medicines are all imported. Letting yourself become totally dependent on other countries while our STEM grads are underemployed, and would-be manufacturing line workers are forced to do bullshit like driving for Uber, is no way to run a country. It is going to backfire one day unless there is a major reversal in the trend.
You can't have so many engineer jobs unless you have manufacturing, and if you did have manufacturing then there would be "common man" manufacturing jobs too. It's all connected. Every job market that is really critical for national security is depressed by this outsourcing and importation of cheaper goods and labor.
Sure, but when you don't even have the automated process within your country then there are approximately zero jobs created of any kind. The Chinese own their own factories and make much of their own manufacturing equipment, even exporting some of it. We should be producing more of our own stuff and creating meaningful jobs for our citizens. Working on an assembly line or as a maintenance worker in a factory might strike some people as menial, but the alternatives for people with the same level of education are mostly worse.
I’ve drove a laser cutter for ten years, I wouldn’t call it engineering, more glorified dump truck driver, with a temperamental dumb truck that is more art than science to operate.
The technology has got a shinier interface since I started, but the fundamental problems are the same.
When it breaks, you call the service technician, unless your the one in a thousand employee who happens to be a boilermaker by trade, an IT service technician and software neonate, also handy with a soldering iron, can install and repair refraction systems, work on live mains safely, research and install additional power supply protection devices, lighting suppression, UPS, knows there way around layers 1 through 7…
And that company treated me like I was some kind of freak.
But yeah, generally a laser cutter operator pushes buttons, and empties catch trays if they’re lucky.
Engineers design the things, the operators are largely meat for the grinder.
>Maybe the profit margins for software are higher.
This is easily confirmed by checking public financials of publicly listed companies. The profit margins are much higher, and the liability is much lower. The only exception is for those hardware manufacturers at the cutting edge whose products cannot be commodified, such as TSMC and ASML and the ilk.
I've been told that acceptable software margins are around 75%. Hardware focused yields closer to 20%-40%. Hence why there is such a strong push towards software-only.
Preach. My friend is a gifted passionate Aerospace engineer (top in his specific stream at Cambridge) and basically is withering away working for the above 2 firms. The location is grim being far from others and generally far from other young exciting people. Additionally in his org, there just isn't a sense of excitement/ urgency which leaves him with little to do. Prioritising career for a career that's not there
Whilst others working in software (myself included) can have a far greater quality of life and salary working in London.
motorsport is similarly low salary, at least specifically F1. It is like game-dev in software in that there are far more people who want to do it than the number of jobs available so they can afford to pay you in the cool experience of working on F1 rather than in cash terms.
Absolutely. No public transport, almost no culture, and housing anywhere nice is even less available than in London. For a young person working at one of these firms, where can you live? Where could you meet someone to date? What can you even do at the weekend?
JLR is based in the metro area of Britain's second city. It's not exactly the middle of nowhere. Rolls Royce is in Derby, on the edge of the Peak District with much to offer. Much cheaper housing with more space available. And unlike in London, driving a car isn't hounded by terminal congestion.
JLR Gaydon is not in the metro area of Birmingham. It's in nice countryside and near a motorway which helps, but it's a fair commute out of Birmingham at rush hour to there. The nice surrounding towns/villages are expensive, and even the shitty ones aren't cheap (hello Banbury) as they're on the edge of commuter distance to London.
Derby I haven't lived in but know people who have. It's an old manufacturing town and hasn't much to offer graduates. Or anyone really. The Peak District is great, and if you can live out that way and commute in then do it. But again, you won't have similar people for local friends.
UK people are so god damned spoiled. Sometimes I will pull up street view imagery of a random town in scotland or wherever in the UK that I see locals from there on reddit make a seething comment about. Then I will look at the town center and its basically greenwich village: walkable, pubs and shops all over the place, bus network goes everywhere, actual regional rail potentially, everything the american urbanist dreams about. You know where you actually meet people on a date in 2025? On an app, which they have users on all over the UK.
Sure, but at that point you're having to buy a car (which is much harder as a young person - car prices have gone up, insurance has gone up faster, the driving test is harder than it was and lessons cost more...), you'll need somewhere to park it which adds to your housing costs, you still can't go drinking, and in general you're cut off from a lot of what young people are doing.
Even tiny UK towns have excellent walkable mainstreets and are small enough to walk from field to field on the other end in no time. It is a far cry from the american obligatory car experience where it might be a 2 hour walk to your nearest grocery store even in a city suburb.
It would be very expensive to take a taxi (of any sort) out of London to a scenic place, but it's easy to take a train to plenty of them, or hire a car for the day through an app.
There is a culture there. I am not sure what people mean when they say there isn't a culture outside of the London. If you mean things like events, art exhibs etc. We have those here. If you mean bars, pubs and restaurants we have those here to.
Is it as glitzy as London. No. But saying there is "no culture" is just absolutely asinine.
I lived there as a graduate student and then as a non-finance software engineer for about fifteen years. I liked it, as did dozens of my friends. It's absolute fantasy to call it a shitshow.
Been here for nearly 8, not working in finance and still quite liking it. Housing is expensive, but that's about it. Everything else (jobs, amenities, transport, people) is fantastic.
The UK is two countries, you can either live in/around the prosperous one with high cultural capital, good quality public services inc transport, or you can live in the other one.
Depends what you mean by "Quality of Life". I literally won't go to see friends because that would mean travelling to London. I hate the place. It is expensive, hostile, dirty and everyone is rude.
I live on the outskirts of the peak district. I can walk/cycle less than 30 minutes out of town and be walking along the old canals, through old villages and get amazing views of the countryside.
To be fair I live in Zone 2 and I can be on old canals and villages (albeit now subsumed into London) in ~20 minutes walking. I grew up in rural Wales, and as nice an upbringing it was, there's a reason I have a single family member left, who's trying to move away!
Or maybe he’s just tired of a specific kind of life which might be fun in your early twenties but is less appealing when you’ve got kids and can’t enjoy the nightlife and culture anyway.
Granted it's not the only city with those, the problem the UK has is that its small, desirable cities are unable to grow or reinvent themselves. Cambridge and Bristol should be ideal for hardware startups, but the cost of both housing and working space is insane for small, provincial cities, partly because NIMBYism and partly because building infrastructure is absurdly expensive when you're constantly having to work around 200 year old buildings and 800yo city plans.
you’ve got kids and can’t enjoy the nightlife and culture anyway
Having kids while living in the centre of a large city is great, as there is so much culture that is aimed at parents and children. When my kid was small we went to museums and concerts and events all the time that were aimed at kids. There were also several different parks, playgrounds, pools and similar activities to choose from all within easy access. Plus once the kids get slightly older they can use public transport to get around and you don't have to drive them anywhere near as much as if you live in the suburbs.
You have to earn (much) more to have the same standard of living as outside of it. Therefore you pay more income tax and the cost of living is higher anyway.
To some extent, this also applies to software. Except for DeepMind and a few other select places like Altos Labs, getting past £100k is hard, especially outside London. Unless you go into finance, of course. But then, you have to stick to London. Finance is like a black hole that sucks a big chunk of the mathematical, CS and statistical UK talent. They have very proactive recruiters trying to e.g. connect with Oxbridge students when they are approaching graduation.
It’s shocking. Software engineers in the UK are treated like engineers in the US were in the 1960s. Low respect, low pay, while city boys strutting around in shiny suits snapping their fingers to get anything they want.
That's a weird statement considering I'd have guess the greatest amount of respect
and adoration (not necessarily money) (non-software) engineers have gotten in the US would've been during the Space Race and Cold War years.
It was real respect for the trade as well, not some secondhand respect that people who make a lot of money and wield a lot of social influence get.
It was respected in the sense that there was a need then in american manufacturing for engineering. But the compensation was nowhere near other professional class jobs. So really the respect seemed a bit false: to get people into the door pigeonholed so they can’t leave for higher compensation. Then when manufacturing was outsourced after the 1960s, many of these jobs disappeared. Now people in Guanzhou are designing the factories and process controls.
This isn't my experience at all, and I've been in London tech for 8 years now. I'm not entirely sure what "low respect" means here, but anywhere I've worked the company is pretty wary of knarking of their developers because we can just up and find another job basically immediately. We get paid a fair bit too - not sure compared to finance, but not hard to hit the 95th percentile or so.
Glad to hear it’s working out for you. I’ve talked to too many UK devs who feel handcuffed when they get even 50% of the US equivalent, because it’s a pay cut to go elsewhere. But, as you say, it’s all relative.
I know plenty of engineers (web application developers) making over £100-£150k outside of London, usually in fairly low-stress remote jobs.
The pay is clearly nothing compared to the US, but I wouldn’t say it was massively hard for them to get where they are. They all have 5+ years experience at a senior level, and are otherwise just reliable, capable, low-maintenance employees, but maybe that’s rare!
That is indeed very rare. A simple sanity check you can look at how many people earn about 100k in the UK, we know the figure for above 125k is 500,000 [1]. We can subtract the number of other jobs that we know for sure pay above this for example lawyers at magic circle firms which start on >150k for newly qualified lawyers, consultants in the NHS, directors of large corportaions, and we end up with a very small amount of people in other industries that earn these figures. Even before that we know the median is about £50k, and I can tell you from experience you can hire very very good software people on those wages, even in London.
From personal experience, I also know of software guys making that, but I also know far far more people earning below that, and these are oxford/cambridge/imperial/UCL grads....
> and these are oxford/cambridge/imperial/UCL grads.
There are many bad things we can say about software hiring, but one of the good things is that (outside the US at least), it's much more concerned with what you can do than the name recognition of the institution where you studied.
Just want to echo the other replies and say i think this is rare. It happens, but it's rare. I have >15 years experience, and currently work in finance making plenty. A while ago, i spoke to a recruiter about opportunities outside finance; everything he had topped out at ~90k for engineers, a bit higher for team leads.
But then, i also have friends working at a few non-finance companies on 100-150k. Small places, willing to pay for quality. Seems to be unusual though!
Then they are very few and far between. Generally the absolute limit is £90k. I've never seen any role for more than 90K unless it was a company in London and those are typically hybrid and not remote.
I only have the figures for end of 2018[1], but meta employed around 2300 people in the UK, if we assume the same distribution of jobs as elsewhere in the world about half will be engineers, so 1150 engineers. There aren't that many of these jobs. At goldman its a lot higher, aboutn 10,000[2] globally, but they only have around 3,300 employees in the Uk so if its the same ratio as global (25% tech), then that means around 800 developers. Again you'll note this is a very small number compared to the number of top graduates a year, with class sizes of 100-200 per university.
So like I said originally these jobs are few and far between. The point is that in the UK the salaries are much lower than those in the US and this is across all experience ranges.
That bad? Huh. Last time I was a permanent employee in the UK was nearly a decade ago now, and I think I was on something like £37k, I think some of my friends (Cambridge graduates and slightly older than me), even back then, were on £65-75k.
I kinda assumed inflation would have raised all of those by about 50% since then.
I am not a top software engineer( (otherwise I'd be working fang tbh) and I earn 85k up north. Hybrid role that's local as well.
I know people that earn a lot more than me.
It's just the recruiters are a joke and advertise silly salaries from local companies that are out touch. You have to know what companies are serious or not, and just apply direct or via recommendations.
Those are government, so probably have even better pensions than private sector.
And there was job advertised for lead software engineer by computer futures(probably an agency) for 80k
I didn't even look deep. I know there are even better jobs.
There are jobs that pay more than 65k. Just have to know where to look.
If you're working for undercapitalized local private companies, then yeah not going pay very much.
I'd also recommend looking at remote jobs. My really smart friends who can beat the competition got 100k+ jobs working remote that are officially based in London but they work up north. Then come down for meeting once or twice every few months.
A lot of the fintechs allow for fully remote and pay well.
We are comparing salaries of Software Engineers between the US and the UK. A Senior Developer position won't pay more than 90K in the UK outside of London. In the US I see well over that for a Senior Developer position.
Even in your examples (which are higher position than what was being discussed) they didn't top out past 90K (just like I said). Whereas in the US you can earn much more quite easily.
> You've moved the goal posts. You said 60k if your lucky.
No I didn't. I suggest you re-read the thread. I said 75K-90K max.
> I just found multiple jobs that pay more than that easily.
There are always certainly outliers. However most of those places usually have a bunch of iffy things going on e.g. you have to live at your workstation/laptop, or they are in the middle of no where. Enforced pair programming (fuck that btw), or have a stupid interview process (no I won't go through the humiliation rituals anymore).
However the vast majority of positions are paying max 65-70K for a Senior Dev.
I am glad that you managed to find something. But the rest of us haven't been as lucky.
I am a former Mech Eng who trod this path. Started at JLR, moved by self teaching into software. Engineering in the UK felt like it moved at a glacial pace that only made sense in the days of final salary pension schemes. Senior management really struggled to get their heads around why young people were so impatient, but we were not competing for the same rewards.
It seems like the salaries quoted here haven't changed much in the past couple of decades. It's a shame. I know in the past there was a brain drain of talent from the UK to Canada due to the salary disparity. Here's an example:
> Isn't JLR in Solihull? That's two hours from London.
Not 100% sure, I'm from the middle of nowhere, sorry, Derby - where Rolls Royce is primarily based. I know there's peak-time, non-stop, trains between London/Derby that take about an hour. I know this because when I got my first job in London, I still hadn't found a place to stay, so I was commuting from Derby to London every day. And when I finally moved to London it took me almost as long to get to work even though I was living in the city!
I just assumed with JLR being around Birmingham that travel to/from London would be about the same (because Birmingham is very close to Derby).
EDIT: Just checked with trainline.com, there's several morning trains from London Euston to Birmingham (New Street) that take 1hr 17mins.
Fair enough, looks like the non-stop train doesn't exist any more. Shame, it was 1hr and 5mins when it existed! Still, 1hr 29mins is still not 'middle of nowhere' territory, so I'll stick with my original point ;)
Been there, done that. I still frequently get sent Linkedin specs for companies where the hardware team lead is earning junior SWE money. UK junior SWE money.
> working for Rolls Royce in the middle of nowhere
Most people I know who ended up at RR live in Nottingham or the Peak District and commute in to Derby. Appreciate that’s perhaps not as exciting as London but it’s hardly a shit hole up here.
Agree on pay though. I work for a different engineering conglomerate (foreign owned) and I applied for a HPC role at RR a couple of years ago and the salary was £20k lower. The disparity would be even more now.
We started as a US company in 2019 to make fundraising easier, and I think this did have a material impact. It's operationally quite annoying, but chances are that we would have had to do it eventually, to efficiently employ US people without paying Deel extortionate fees
If you want to do it properly you need to setup an inter-company loan agreement, transfer pricing, you need accountants and tax specialists for both UK and US, ... so the costs will definitely be significant. I don't think there are any shortcuts. Ideally, you find an accountant that is familiar with this setup.
