<story><title>Silicon Milkroundabout: Forget the banks, come and join a London startup</title><url>http://siliconmilkroundabout.com/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>gaius</author><text>The truth is in the UK the &lt;i&gt;only&lt;/i&gt; industry paying a decent wage for technical work (not just CS grads, but engineering, physics, maths, etc) is banking.&lt;p&gt;I am a Mech Eng graduate and my CV has been floating around in various databases for years, and I still get recruiters calling me and offering less than half of my current salary (and I&apos;m no rockstar, just an ordinary worker) to go and work on something mechanical for a big engineering company. It really is a joke.&lt;p&gt;This is all tied up in the vestiges of the class system, technical people are still thought of as &quot;blue collar&quot; (despite being better educated than most white collar workers) and the management class will never pay us fairly - except in banking where they are quite clear about what is worth what. I gather in the US it&apos;s different, they don&apos;t have all that baggage holding them back.</text></item><item><author>ladon86</author><text>Yes, this is what&apos;s needed. I like the line about the banks. My biggest peeve with the UK scene is that we lose so much talent to banks and consultancies, especially among graduates; anything to turn that around is a step in the right direction.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>pnathan</author><text>I don&apos;t believe that&apos;s true in the US. Software works seems to be white collar.&lt;p&gt;But I still make a point of referring to my fellow software people as &apos;software engineers&apos;, since (1) it&apos;s how my company styles the titles[1], and (2), it reinforces the idea that we&apos;re not &quot;code monkeys&quot;, grunting and beating on keyboards for bananas per day (not that I&apos;d turn down fruit if offered :-) ).&lt;p&gt;[1] I work at a hardware/software company, we have an array of mechanical and electrical engineers as well.</text></comment>
<story><title>Silicon Milkroundabout: Forget the banks, come and join a London startup</title><url>http://siliconmilkroundabout.com/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>gaius</author><text>The truth is in the UK the &lt;i&gt;only&lt;/i&gt; industry paying a decent wage for technical work (not just CS grads, but engineering, physics, maths, etc) is banking.&lt;p&gt;I am a Mech Eng graduate and my CV has been floating around in various databases for years, and I still get recruiters calling me and offering less than half of my current salary (and I&apos;m no rockstar, just an ordinary worker) to go and work on something mechanical for a big engineering company. It really is a joke.&lt;p&gt;This is all tied up in the vestiges of the class system, technical people are still thought of as &quot;blue collar&quot; (despite being better educated than most white collar workers) and the management class will never pay us fairly - except in banking where they are quite clear about what is worth what. I gather in the US it&apos;s different, they don&apos;t have all that baggage holding them back.</text></item><item><author>ladon86</author><text>Yes, this is what&apos;s needed. I like the line about the banks. My biggest peeve with the UK scene is that we lose so much talent to banks and consultancies, especially among graduates; anything to turn that around is a step in the right direction.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>lucraft</author><text>Not sure about class, perhaps developers just are more valuable to banks than startups. Otherwise it sounds right.&lt;p&gt;However I&apos;m sure I would have gone stir crazy with boredom by now if I worked in a bank :) (I have low boredom tolerance)</text></comment>