[DaiPlusPlus]

> Bit of a downer for the UK to see them list in the US

I wonder to what extent the overarching business culture of the UK (which I'd categorise as being generally apathetical, if not hostile, to the engineering profession) might have anything to do with it.

(...speaking as a former UK eng myself)

[helsinkiandrew]

> I wonder to what extent the overarching business culture of the UK (which I'd categorise as being generally apathetical, if not hostile, to the engineering profession) might have anything to do with it.

That's nothing to do with it - the company is only listing on NASDAQ - ARM has office all over the world but will still be based and managed in the UK along with most of its employees (engineers) like when it was owned by a Japanese company.

Listing on the tech heavy NASDAQ rather than the LSE gives the company more access to investors that are likely to buy shares: retail, commercial, and hundreds of index trackers and funds - increasing the share price.

[azinman2]

Are there really big capital inventors who will say “nope I don’t work on that exchange”?

[dublinben]

Well, the fifth largest ETF in the US is the sharply named QQQ which exclusively follows the Nasdaq-100 index. Everything larger tracks a broader domestic index like the S&P 500.[0]

Listing on the LSE relegates you to "international" funds, which make up a third or less of most portfolios. These have historically lagged US fund performance, quite significantly in the last ten years.[1]

[0] https://www.etf.com/etfanalytics/etf-finder

[1] https://www.morningstar.com/stocks/revisiting-case-internati...

[boringg]

There are costs to working on different exchanges and out of country exchanges.

[DrScientist]

More likely there is just more capital available in the US markets - the Arm listing won't be small.

A lot of US funds have restrictions as to how much they can invest outside the US.

[cowsandmilk]

> A lot of US funds have restrictions as to how much they can invest outside the US.

I'm not sure that's relevant. ARM is listing American Depository Shares, so this is still usually viewed as an international investment.

[DrScientist]

Are you sure - I always thought the whole point of ADRs was to make foreign company shares available on the American markets?

In fact the SEC says

'ADRs allow U.S. investors to invest in non-U.S.companies '

https://www.sec.gov/investor/alerts/adr-bulletin.pdf

[jacooper]

Why?

[DrScientist]

Not protected by US regulation and law.

So if you are a US pension fund that has all it's funds in Nigeria ( to pick an example ) - can it be said to be safe under US law?

Ironically the inverse problem EU countries have with US tech firms holding their citizens data - however it that case the response is generally 'la la la'.

[vasco]

https://www.investor.gov/introduction-investing/investing-ba...

[sapiogram]

> which I'd categorise as being generally apathetical, if not hostile, to the engineering profession

Any chance you could elaborate on this? Arm exists and is British, after all.

[msy]

The UK has a long intellectual tradition which creates a steady stream of creative and capable engineers. Capital however is predominately held via inherited wealth and its controllers want rentier incomes with low risk. As a consequence there is low appetite for risky new ventures and those that want to undertake them mostly migrate elsewhere. What's left is a stock market dominated by octogenarian+ dianosaurs, a decaying rump of manufacturing, a finance sector that mostly makes its bread laundering the capital of the world's corrupt and corruptors and a tiny creative industry that clings on despite suffering through waves of either government neglect, or worse yet, government interest.

[bartread]

> want rentier incomes with low risk.

I don't know if I buy your point about inherited wealth but there is what I'd describe as a stifling culture of rentseeking that, if not actively encouraged is certainly tolerated and overlooked, at many levels of society, and across both businesses and public organisations. And once you become aware of it you start to realise how obnoxious and oppressive it is.

We certainly don't lack for talent, but we're very good at suppressing or wasting it.

[te_chris]

Excellent comments both yours and the one you replied to. Once you see it you really can’t unsee it.

The UK is a marvel that it manages to cultivate such an incredible creative scene in the shadow of the rent seeking mediocrity.

[usrusr]

From my continental Europe perspective I suspect that Americans will inevitably look at those inherited wealth structures through their assumptions of unbounded rent maximization, oblivious to a certain element of responsibility that will be far more present in Europeans, continental or not. "Only because you can squeeze out that penny doesn't necessarily mean that you should" is something that exists in most places that aren't the US. American wealth seems to have that siloed off into charity completely separate from how the money is made than others, "exploit hard/donate hard". I'm certainly not suggesting that everything is fine in the UK, but I do think that certain assumptions that are true in American will tint the picture quite considerably.

[hsjqllzlfkf]

"there is a culture of rent seeking" must be the understatement of the year. What the UK understands as "entrepreneurship" is buying property to rent. This is everyone from your grandma to the shiniest MBAs.

[bartread]

Aye. Nothing against housing associations that provide much needed social housing but the vast majority of private landlords[0], including AirBnB owners, are absolute parasites that have an entirely corrosive effect on communities and society as a whole. Indolent freeloading bloodsuckers.

[0] I'm sure there are exceptions: in fact I know there are. There are always exceptions. 20-odd years ago for a while I shared a flat with a couple of guys where the private landlord deliberately charged far below market rent in order to be able to offer affordable accommodation to people who weren't well off. Good people, the family that owned that place.

[truckerbill]

You don't buy the point about a country with royal family that owns vast swathes of land?

[bemusedthrow75]

No such point was made (regarding a royal family).

Incidentally, the Royal Family themselves privately own 1/250th of the UK's land, and it is mostly not particularly valuable. Only about £15bn.

As a proportion this is only four times what the richest private landowner (the Emmersons) in the USA owns of the USA. And the Emmersons have come by their share pretty quickly by comparison, wouldn't you say?

The Duke of Westminster (not a member of the royal family) has a physically much smaller (private) estate that is worth more than half of the royal estate.

What the royal family own privately should not be confused with what the "Crown" owns. The Crown estate is basically owned and operated by the state.

[cjrp]

> As a proportion this is only four times what the richest private landowner (the Emmersons) in the USA owns of the USA. And the Emmersons have come by their share pretty quickly by comparison, wouldn't you say?

If anything, I feel like the speed (or how recently the land was acquired) is actually in the Emmersons favour here. A generation or two ago somebody got wildly successful, vs. land being inherited because your 30x great-grandfather was Henry VIII.

[deskamess]

Canada has many similarities. The inherited wealth is essentially banks and oligarchs. You pretty much have to be risk free to get any funding. Lots of window dressing and marketing to make Canada look good. If it were not for US companies (Cisco, Google, etc) the Canadian tech salary would be closer to Europe. Once you start living here you realize the truth about how much they value tech, protectionism, the incompetence of the telecom sector, stodgy banking and finance, poor education, unaffordable housing, and declining access to health (Ontario and stories from the Maritimes since health is provincial - cannot speak of Alberta/BC/etc).

All subpar but the marketing and virtue signaling is great. A lot of 'make Canada look good' comes at the expense of Canadians.

[speed_spread]

Quebec has had a few wins over the years with massive indirect subsidies toward strategic industries, notably gaming and AI. Public money is spent to attract big players which hire a critical mass of talent which leads to more players moving in and eventually some private risk capital becoming available for startups pending to the needs of the big guys. Nothing comparable to the American VC system though.

[ckdarby]

I live in Quebec. It's all for show to prop Quebec up as a place to even do business in.

There's nothing in the tech space that is worth even looking at twice in this province that isn't headquartered elsewhere. Most larger companies open up here just to tap into the potential talent that don't want to leave their home province and a lot of companies aren't willing to put in the effort of dealing with Quebec being the exception to everything.

If you want to understand Quebec it really boils down to three points:

- Protect French language - Protect culture - Have more children. This achieves 1 & 2 in a cycle.

Things that are going well for the province, cheaper car insurance, cheaper housing, cheaper electricity, and subsidize daycare. Oh! This all ties back into our 3 rules.

All these advantages come at the cost of higher taxes, but that is apart of the strategy. Don't build wealth, but just provide enough for hope, dreams of having a family and rope as many into this to fulfil the 3 points.

[sofixa]

> Quebec has had a few wins over the years with massive indirect subsidies toward strategic industries, notably gaming and AI

And aviation. The Bombardier C-Series is a very advanced plane, and the first modern plane developed outside of Boeing or Airbus (outside of the smaller regional Embraer). Sadly American protectionism was the final nail in the coffin for the programme, but Airbus is comitted to the Mirabel site and assembly line, so Quebec still is one of the top aviation hubs in the world.

[Fluorescence]

> Capital however is predominately held via inherited wealth

Curious to see you prove that beyond an imagined stereotype. It's not as though we are in the first generation of US entrepreneurship and there is not a huge quantity of US inherited wealth in those VC funds. The founders of Intel, Apple, Walmart, Standard Oil etc. have all passed on. And on the other side, it's not like there haven't been a dozen generations since Norman lords chopping up all the land wealth. I think only one British billionaire is an aristo, the rest are business folk.

People underestimate the effect of how wealth attracts wealth in terms of commercial hubs - money chases opportunity and opportunities chase money and they end up in the same place for all sorts of reasons. It's just a system effect rather than a consequence of higher virtues that some love grant themselves.

[pjc50]

Hmm, maybe it will be fun to go through https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_British_billionaires_b...

- Dyson: actually an innovator! Made many of the same criticisms of the UK lack of tech strategy. Promoted Brexit, which has made the situation worse by erecting barriers to a key UK market.

- Ratcliffe: owns INEOS: oil refineries. Old school engineering? Or just provision of capital?

- Hinduja: purchaser of Ashok Leyland, which became a huge success once unshackled from disastrous management of British Leyland. Counts as "engineering" but not "tech"?

- Grosvenor, 7th Duke of Westminster: classic aristo landlord. Owns large areas of London.

- Platt: hedge funds.

""The reality is that there is no willingness within the Eurozone to share wealth," he said. "In the United States, if California is having a really difficult time, the rest of the United States will send money to California. This is not the case in Europe." -- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_Platt_(financier) , perhaps a surprising advocate of redistribution

- Coates: gambling. Counts as "tech startup" (bet365)

- Bamford: heir to JCB, the excavator company. "Engineering". Brexiter, as a result of being sued for antitrust by EU

- Branson: definitely self-made, across a large number of different companies. Space billionaire, closest figure to British Musk.

- Currie: also INEOS. Almost no wp bio.

- Reece: also INEOS. Almost no wp bio.

- Cadogan, 8th Earl Cadogan: aristo. Dead.

- Lewis: trader. Like Soros, profited from Black Wednesday. Under arrest in Manhattan.

- Reuben: metals. Seem to have made a killing from 90s Russia.

- Graff: diamonds. Looks like classic self-made from nothing story?

- Calder: Jive records.

- Morris: Home Bargains. Wildly successful discount shopkeeper.

(you know who's NOT on this list? Anyone to do with ARM. Even Hermann Hauser appears to have only £150m net worth)

[DaiPlusPlus]

> you know who's NOT on this list? Anyone to do with ARM. Even Hermann Hauser appears to have only £150m net worth)

I wonder if ARM's success, or rather, popularity and market dominanance, is because they (intentionally or otherwise) devalued themselves enough.

[fidotron]

Indeed. You can see in some of the comments here the American mentality simply could not have made ARM successful because they would have been too busy competing with their own customers. For ARM to take off and be trusted they had to knowingly leave valuable profit margins around for their customers to be able to take advantage of.

The defining question is if the world is better off by having people play that game or the one where everyone tries to takeover everything all the time.

[londons_explore]

Indeed - they appear to be great engineers and terrible business-people.

They have collected very little profit from their market-dominating IP.

[hnhg]

I would be surprised if many Brits know of ARM as a British success story. Ditto for Raspberry Pi or Deepmind. These things are just not celebrated, it seems.

[pjc50]

If you ask people in the street to name a famous living British technologist, they might come up with Tim Berners-Lee or James Dyson, but they are never going to name Sophie Wilson.

(I wonder what answers you would get?)

[bemusedthrow75]

A decent number of Brits know about the Raspberry Pi, but it is true to say that a hell of a lot more know what the BBC micro:bit is.

None of them would recognise Eben Upton (except as Jason Statham)

[hnhg]

I cannot prove it, and this is entirely anecdotal, but my friends and I have observed it first-hand from VC dealings and friends in the right UK circles. Inherited generational wealth and class in my experience powers UK investment, particularly in the start-up scene, much more than in the USA. Of course, there are some exceptions I can think of in the UK but it is very much tied up with the class system there and understanding this makes life easier. The same situation affects other European countries to some degree, and many people I know have had to go to US VC firms to get funding. I have spent a lot of time working in all of these countries to some extent and the UK class system seems to be increasingly stifling. YMMV though.

[scrlk]

So I need the correct "old boys" school tie and a pair of red trousers to get funded by UK investors? :^)

[DaiPlusPlus]

Make that knee-high grey shorts, a graze on your knee, and a Prefect following closely behind you with some implement of abuse.

[Fluorescence]

Nah, the OP is talking bollocks. The angels I know are all middle/working-class entrepreneurs. There is no upper-class conspiracy holding people back, there just isn't much money. Non-Brits don't really understand that class is not money. Red trousers are closer to farmers than businessmen. If you are British and want to be a tech investor, you go to the US too.

[te_chris]

Absolutely. As others have alluded to: angels abound, but look at the pedigree of the associates and partners at VC funds based in London and it all falls into place. I assume it’s because it’s a relatively easy job that you don’t need much talent for. Perfect for an intelligent but bored dauphin.

[pipo234]

> a stock market dominated by octogenarian+ dinosaurs, a decaying rump of manufacturing, a finance sector that mostly makes its bread laundering the capital of the world's corrupt and corruptors

Ah! Now I get it. That rhymes with companies like Shell and Unilever leaving the EU in favour of UK after brexit.

(Not that Frankfurt, Milan, Amsterdam or Paris are known to be heavy investors in tech innovation, btw.)

[Lio]

Well Shell (and BP) are really likely to get sweetheart deals on North Sea oil from Rishi Sunak which might have swayed them.

Now, I know what you're thinking, that that's just because both firms coincidentally signed multi-billion dollar deals coincidentally with Sunak's family business, Infosys, to coincidentally outsource all their IT jobs but I assure you that's a mere coincidence.... probably. :P

[ur-whale]

> Capital however is predominately held via inherited wealth and its controllers want rentier incomes with low risk

You just described the capital markets in the entire western Europe, not just the brits.

[bemusedthrow75]

But also the USA, probably.

If you look past the tech bubble economies where the "new money" owners are, and into the world of physical assets, what you find is a constellation of families concentrating wealth, swirling around the central families of the 21st Century -- the Waltons, the Mars family, the Kochs, and so on down -- a power series of family wealth that has ordinary investors in the long tail.

The USA is easily distracted by the vibrancy of the market-driven tech economy, and hoodwinked into ignoring the astonishing growth of private equity controlled by inherited wealth.

[bemusedthrow75]

Though even the rent-seekers ought to see some value in ARM.

[bhewes]

But then they did Brexit and the island has to work again.

[pjc50]

Goes all the way back to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Two_Cultures and beyond.

The UK has a great engineering tradition, especially from the Victorian and Empire eras, all the way up to WW2, but it seems that after that there was a dramatic and incredibly short sighted turn to economisation and avoiding investment.

The absolute poster child for this was the UK space programme, which was cancelled just before the launch of its first rocket. The director of the programme decided to defy orders and launch anyway, on the grounds that everything was ready and he was in Australia. But this pervades everything. The TBMs for Euston HS2 have been bought, but are going to spend the next year buried doing nothing, because there's a persistent desire to cancel HS2 after most of the work has been done but before any of the benefits are gained.

Concorde somehow escaped cancellation multiple times. The UK developed its own nuclear reactor technology (Magnox) then gave up and let Electricite de France run everything.

I've heard this complaint from several people in Cambridge's "startup" industry too. There are hardly any angel investors. The amounts of money available are tiny. Got an idea? Tough, you'll have to develop it in your own literal garden shed at your own expense. The local capital owners are far more interested in property, which doesn't require any thinking.

[paganel]

I'm not British, but it is my understanding that after WW1 and WW2 the money had just dried up when it came to capital-intensive projects. I've just finished reading a book [1] that explicitly mentions the lack of available money as a reason for the Brits having to give up their Sea Power status just after WW2.

[1] https://www.amazon.com/Seapower-States-Maritime-Continental-...

[pjc50]

This was certainly a real problem, as was the whole IMF rescue business in the 70s, but not across the whole postwar period. More could have been done with the oil wealth than turn it into a real estate boom, for example.

Realistically the UK gave up sea power status sometime during WW2 when we were massively outbuilt by the US, and the collapse of imperialism as a ""business model"" took care of the rest by making us fall back on our own resources rather than simply taking them.

[rjmunro]

> Concorde somehow escaped cancellation

Was that because it was owned by a government treaty with France? Neither country could cancel without the other.

The final result was way overbudget and not a market fit, but a bunch of skills and technology went on to Airbus.

[scrlk]

UK engineering jobs typically have uncompetitive compensation.

[DaiPlusPlus]

That's just the result, not the cause.

[sofixa]

Uncompetitive compared to?

[tchaffee]

Compared to the US. Dan Abramov who works for Facebook and is one of the primary engineers of the hugely popular React framework makes less than one of my junior engineers.

[progbits]

And when he gets sick gets free healthcare while your junior will go bankrupt. Compensation isn't comparable without comparing external costs and benefits.

[zarzavat]

As much as I like the NHS, it’s pretty shit compared to the healthcare a Facebook employee would get in the US.

Wait weeks to see a GP, long waiting times to see a specialist or for treatment, rationing of access to technology like MRIs, and a risk of dying in a hospital car park or corridor, or being killed by an overworked A&E doctor.

Don’t get me wrong, the NHS is great, I love that Boris Johnson got more or less the same care in St Thomas’ that a homeless person would have received (perhaps a bit better).

But on an individual level, the FB engineer in US certainly has better care available to them than one in the UK.

[boeingUH60]

What a silly, coping lie. A Facebook engineer in the US gets good private healthcare insurance.

[tchaffee]

I agree you need to consider total compensation. It's still not even close though.

The company pays half the cost of excellent healthcare and the remaining payment is very affordable. Maybe in the case of a very serious long term illness you might go bankrupt, in which case the NHS these days is also not as much of a guarantee as it used to be.

The risk to reward ratio is acceptable. Most healthy young people with talent are far better off working in the US and saving enough to retire at 45 years old. I say this as someone who would like it to not be true having loved living and working in the EU and UK for many years. But the numbers do not add up. It's especially sad because it results in brain drain. The saddest part of it is that there is no reason Facebook can't afford to pay the Dan Abramovs of the world the compensation they would get in the US. I'd like to better understand why the gap is so big.

[dom96]

And as a FB employee gets private healthcare as a perk and would also get it in the US. The US comp is much higher than the UK's even taking into account healthcare.

[commonlisp94]

> he gets sick gets free healthcare

Free at the cost of a significantly larger portion of his salary in tax for his entire life.

[sentinalien]

They're fairly competitive compared to the rest of the world. He is also working for a US company who could pay him more if they really wanted to. US salaries are high because the US has a glut of engineering jobs and is also a difficult place to immigrate to (generally requires you to have family ties or a job offer which is not easy to obtain when you might not be granted a work visa and won't realistically be able to start for about 6 months). If the US ever adopted a more lax immigration system in line with the UK, Canada, the EU etc I would expect US engineering salaries to drop.

[tchaffee]

> They're fairly competitive compared to the rest of the world.

That's accurate. But what surprises me is how much in demand software engineers are globally and how little they get paid in most countries. It doesn't make any sense to me that Dan Abramov could more than triple his salary at Facebook just by being employed by the US branch. The value he provides to the company would in no way change.

[kriro]

In what world is the post-Brexit UK immigration system lax?

[DaiPlusPlus]

As it's 2am here, I'll rattle off assorted bullet-points in no particular order:

* The UK's sudden deindustrialisation (1970s-1990s) was inevitable but foreseeable and yet still poorly managed by both political parties, IMHO: my perception is Labour was more interested in propping up whatever heavy-industry remained rather than ease the UK into the future - and as for the Tories... probably best I say nothing there.

* Even before deindustrialisation the overarching business-culture in medium to large businesses in the UK was, and still is, tied to the entrenched class system, insofar as the board-level positions, upper management, sometimes even middle-management, and many specialties like legal, are held by a kind of unofficial aristocacy that looks-out for each-other rather than what's best for the business that they run (let alone the country): some combination of Eton, Harrow, having read Classics at Oxbridge, you can see what I'm getting at. This alone explains how Boris Johnson won his party's leadership and remained in-office despite clear evidence of misconduct in office, and so on and so on. Nepotism is rife here: the middling, uninterested, types get to work at daddy's friends's firm if they can't get recruited by the banks when they do their milk-runs.

* For reasons I haven't fully explored yet, despite the UK being the birthplace of the industrial revolution, and of so many inventions we still rely on today, and of great engineers like Isambard Kingdom Brunel - the engineering profession was never elevated to something Etonians would be interested in - it became a very middle-class occupation. That itself isn't a real problem as far as I'm concerned - the problem comes back to how the layers of management would be literally a class apart from engineering, and that class-divide results in engineering being excluded from management and leadership decisions, no-matter how central or critical engineering is to the company's identity or very purpose - for this reason you won't find many former-engineers being promoted to leadership or management or their experiences and inputs being valued: after all, the board read Classics so of course they know far better about how to run a successful business than a silly engineer from Lancs who plays with his funny slide-rule all day long.

* Even in more progressive companies without the problem of aristocratic management it's difficult to get access to capital, especially for anything remotely risky.

* A small, but still contributing point, that I feel matters slightly, is that different social groups in the UK tend to have differing mental pictures of what "engineering" even is: for many people (possibly even most people? maybe at least oop north...) they'll tell you an engineer is someone who stokes the fire on a stream-train, or fixes their telly when it breaks - MAYBE a civil-engineer - while our preferred answer: "someone who solves problems" would probably be 3rd or 4th down on the Family Fueds survey screen. This is my perception and I hope I'm wrong. As an anecdote, I was in secondary-school and 6th Form during the last of the Labour years when the careers advice service ("Connexxions"[1]) was pushing a very egalitarian view of how careers, further-ed and higher-ed, and professional development should operate - I support their goals, but I feel they got the messaging wrong and misrepresented how many careers operated - for a solid example, I still have my A2-sized full-colour print careers guidebook (with lots of flashy photos to boot) we all got when we were 14 (15? 16?) which certainly contributed towards the perception that (excepting civil engineering) that "engineer" is just another word for "technician": while the book did do justice to civil and chemical engineering, it made no mention of software engineering or electronics engineering, while mechnical engineering was really under-sold to its readers, and electrical engineering was down-right misrepresented. Experiences like these are only going to put-off kids from considering engineering precisely at that age when they're thinking about what they want to do with their life.

* More broadly, I don't think the UK really has many (any?) public-figures who are celebrated as engineering figures - in fact all, of the celebrities I know who have engineering backgrounds got famous for deciding to stop being an engineer: Rowan Atkinson (Mr. Bean) is an elctrical engineer who went to Queen's College, Carol Voderman did engineering at Cambridge, and so on - while the people I suppose we could be celebrating, like James Dyson, clearly act against the interests of the UK's engineering sector (he moved huge chunks of the company to Singapore). Yes, we have Rolls-Royce jet-engines, BAE Systems, and an assortment of luxury carmakers - but I'm convinced they're only still around because they are strategic national interests, and the UK government has had to bail them out of bankruptcy more times than we'd like, so excepting the defence sector, the UK has no real equivalent of NASA with which to inspire its young children, pre-uni students, and mid-career-shifters.

* Another aspect that I think matters, even if only somewhat slightly, the attitudes of those-in-charge (regardless of their class background: Tory or Labour) towards people-on-the-spectrum and those adjacent to it (i.e. us) - it's a nebulous thing I can't pin-down easily - but until 6th Form I was under constant pressure to conform (because if you don't support any footy team at all then you must be a right spesh) - it starts right from Reception year in Primary. Of course this is not unique to the UK, I've heard the exact same stories told from people I know who grew up in Iowa or Idaho - but those states aren't exactly known for their engineering sectors either. This extends to an undercurrent of scepticism of things like ADHD; while paternalism and gatekeeping remain in the medical profession, especially in mental health (though things are definitely better than they were 20-30 years ago) - right down to the anti-trans crap Rishi Sunak is still pushing to deflect criticsm of 13 years of Tory rule, never mind it led to the murder of a teenage girl. At least David Cameron wasn't that bad.

* One of the things that Boris Johnson's government did while in power was to up-end the 6th Form examinations system - I'll admit I don't know all the details, but I understand his changed the system to be much closer to the (almost social-Darwinian) way things were when Boris himself was doing his A-Levels: where your final subject grade depends far more on how you do in your finals exams instead of continuous assessment/coursework, with no or very limited opportunities for resits, and removing choices like a-la-carte module selection - but it is exactly and only because of the flexibility afforded to me when I was at that age that my comorbid ASD+ADHD-addled brain was able to get into university (and a very good one at that), whereas I'm certain that I would not be able to manage today with that level of intense exam-prep in only a 2-month window - and without my degree I would not be able to qualify for the H-1B (where a BSc is an absolute requirement) and eventually get my US Green Card.

* It is true that the UK does, actually, succeed in software in one crucial area: video games: Rockstar, DMA, Rare, Codemasters, Hello Games (No Man's Sky), just to name a few - but as others in this thread have remarked: successive UK governments, again, regardless of party, fail to give the sector the credit and support it needs and the UK's success here is in-spite of everything, not because of it. Crucially, the UK's games sector was built on the home-computer revolution of the 1980s - successive governments have had plenty of opportunities to repeat that success, but so far all I've seen is the 2016 BBC micro:bit project - which honestly felt like a gimmick than something to inspire kids with.

* Things aren't all bad though: I'm happy to see things like Scratch being taught in primary-schools and A-Level Computer Science now being closer to undergraduate level than glorified-ICT than it was in my day - but these things won't address the larger social, cultural, and attitudinal issues at play here.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Connexions_(agency)

[dazc]

I think a simpler answer is that for directors looking for a cash windfall the US markets are currently a more favourable choice.

[bemusedthrow75]

> Arm exists and is British, after all.

Our current government is indifferent to this.

[DrBazza]

All modern UK governments have been largely indifferent on protecting British industry, and when they do it normally blows up in their faces. It's now a case of 'fool me once, shame on you; fool me twice, shame on me'.

[DaiPlusPlus]

Not entirely indifferent - they did intervene on national-security grounds in 2021: https://news.sky.com/story/government-intervenes-in-sale-of-...

[bemusedthrow75]

I had forgotten about this, to be honest, but national security grounds is either what it says on its face or "what is the smallest amount of intervention we can do here to satisfy all those critics talking about something we don't understand".

Our Prime Minister thought getting the Royal Mint to produce NFTs was a good idea. In 2022.

[gswdh]

I'm not sure what that poster was referring to, however in my experience (as a brit), is that the UK is replacing any kind of industry into a service economy aka. people buying shit they don't need. You see this in a number of ways like the physical replacement of industrial areas into shopping centres or the fact the UK can't manufacture rail locomotives - the place where they were invented...

Having said this, there is still a reasonable amount of industry in the UK, the UK is by far the best country in the EU to buy engineering supplies but I think this is a remnant of the past. Most of the major engineering companies in industrial estates are Asian or American owned, now.

[Matl]

> the UK is by far the best country in the EU to buy engineering supplies

Germany has a far stronger industrial base still, I'd imagine if you want access to the EU you'd base yourself there.

[klelatti]

> the UK is by far the best country in the EU

The UK is no longer in the EU. Quite a significant point!

[spiralpolitik]

The fact that the UK government allowed ARM to be sold to Softbank in the first place speaks volumes for how much the UK government values engineering.

[t43562]

The fact that they allowed Imagination Technologies to be sold to a Chinese company in this age of GPU powered AI is ......... even worse of an example

[duskwuff]

Imagination was sold in 2017, well before the AI boom.

[highwaylights]

Same. I think this is the correct answer.

[DaiPlusPlus]

It can't be - sentimentality rarely gets in a way of a business-deal this big. But it might explain why ARM themselves (whether employees or shareholders, regardless of country) might not put too much effort into staying in the UK, I mean.

[Angostura]

The City is struggling post-Brexit