from Hacker News

The British Are Coming for Your White-Collar Job

by techterrier on 4/4/24, 8:20 AM with 94 comments

  • by float4 on 4/4/24, 11:29 AM

  • by callamdelaney on 4/4/24, 11:49 AM

    Yes outsourcing to the UK where the average salary is ~$37,000 is I'm sure highly cost effective for US firms. Where we'd reach to say India for cheap labour the US now comes to us. I've seen US Interns get paid more than the vast majority of brits.

    Even the average dev salary is only say, double that average. Not even accounting for taxes - which supposedly cover healthcare but almost none you can readily access.

  • by alephnerd on 4/4/24, 11:49 AM

    Kinda related, but why the heck are all third-party recruiters British? Every single third-party recruiting agency seems to be British

  • by Rinzler89 on 4/4/24, 11:48 AM

    Would you mind also looking a bit further please, like on the main European continent? Our wages here are even lower than in London/UK and we also speak good English. You can hire a developer here for what you'd pay a barista at your San-Fran HQ. Thanks!

  • by jonatron on 4/4/24, 12:30 PM

    At my last job in London, jobs were being replaced by workers in cheaper countries such as Belarus, Ukraine, and India.

  • by mike_hearn on 4/4/24, 12:43 PM

    There's quite a bit of slippy argumentation in this article.

    The anecdote about the filming of Barbie is misleading. The UK has been strongly competing with Hollywood for filming for years, as it's one of the few places in the world that has the local high-end moviemaking infrastructure to compete with Hollywood, but without the militant unions. This isn't a new phenomenon and the unions factor is mentioned near the end of the article, even though movies are presented as a new trend at the start.

    Then the article goes off on a big Brexit-related hit job. They say "Sterling has lost 15% of its value against the dollar since the 2016 Brexit referendum", "For the stagnating post-Brexit UK economy..." and "The pound’s sharp drop in value". For the real currency story see my other comment but briefly the currency had been in decline since 2014, but reached its pre-referendum value about 18 months after the vote when it became clear the promised 800,000 job losses and "emergency taxes" weren't going to happen. The actual leaving of the EU had little apparent effect either, with GBP/USD being the same now as in 2020.

    That makes sense because the UK economy is services-heavy and the EU single market only did anything for goods trading, not services. That's why the UK has always exported more services to the USA than the EU and why leaving didn't actually impact UK/EU trade despite what the article claims. There's a Parliamentary report that shows a graph of long term UK/EU trade (in slow decline due to the falling size of the EU relative to rest of the world) and you can't actually see Brexit on it at all, because the effect was too temporary to show up.

    The WSJ also tries to blame inflation on Brexit but again, a quick check of the real charts shows that this isn't the case:

    https://tradingeconomics.com/united-kingdom/inflation-cpi

    Inflation wandered around between the 0%-2% band that the central bank was targeting up until the economically disastrous lockdowns and associated money printing to pay for things like furlough and eat-out-to-help-out (which the US wisely did not copy). The GFC had a much bigger impact on inflation than Brexit.

  • by 1vuio0pswjnm7 on 4/4/24, 9:20 PM

  • by jgbbrd on 4/4/24, 11:54 AM

    I'm an American software dev that has been in London for ~11 years now after working in Silicon Valley for years. The lower dev salaries are definitely a thing here. But I personally don't see much evidence of US jobs coming here to get filled on the cheap. Certainly not from A-list/exciting companies any way. Maybe it's a growing trend, but it's not something that many people here are taking note of.

  • by causi on 4/4/24, 11:45 AM

    The British Are Coming for Your White-Collar Job

    staff shortages in the U.S.

    You mean the white-collar jobs Americans can't find anyone to do?

  • by seanhunter on 4/4/24, 11:53 AM

    As someone who lives in the UK it's pretty depressing that we somehow seem to have succeeded in mismanaging ourselves into being a low-wage economy. The 20% or so depreciation in the pound as a result of brexit, and the subsequent futher devaluation as a result of the chaos of Boris -> Liz Truss -> Rishi Sunak definitely played a part in making the UK relatively attractive for firms from the US say, but there are also structural considerations such as years of real earnings decline and underinvestment in infrastructure, especially in the North of England, Wales and much of Scotland.