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by kozikow
4811 days ago
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London is city of finance. There are only few good technology companies that happened there. A few years majority of good people went to investment banking and starting a company was perceived as reckless. Probably a lot of programming places was kind of outsourcing places, not creating long term product. Would you relate your situation to the Silicon Valley, where majority of new tech companies have been created? How would you compare situation of your friends to situation of people who joined Google 15 years ago, or Facebook 8 years ago? I would bet that in UK ratio of revenue of big companies to small companies is much higher than in Silicon Valley. |
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It is true that a lot of London money is made in finance, but we also have some giant engineering companies and subsidiaries, such as Rolls Royce, BAE. Sony, Huawei, IBM, Siemens, and others have large research presences in the suburbs, because engineers are cheaper here than in America, but we have more aggressive IP laws than China or India.
If you want a big company to get lost in as an engineer or project manager, there is no lack of them.
Working at a startup, hoping for an IPO, is a high risk high reward gamble. People choose to do it because it gives them agency over their work and futures in a way that being part of a big machine does not, but most fail, and we should be aware when we take a risk what that risk is, hence my post.
Taking advantage of London's competitive advantage in finance, a lot of financial startups have won really big, setting up major energy trading exchanges and brokerages, though you wouldn't hear of them outside the industry.
I'm more cynical about the current wave of London web startups.
Would I suggest a young Londoner goes to work at a startup? This city has a bit of an unpaid internships culture, and I fear they would get the same experience as at a larger company, for less CV impact and no money. Get into computer security at KPMG, you'll get rich.