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I am not hostile to tech, I actually like it a lot; in fact my day to day job is basically as a ML-esque programmer and if needs be with a bit of retooling I think I'd be able to transition to somewhere like Deepmind if push came to shove. Tech is basically my long term exit plan from finance and so I have a personal interest in seeing it do well in the UK/Europe beyond the general benefits to humanity that removing barriers to trade have. The people I'm talking about being overpaid are not OpenAI/Anthropic engineers (they are appropriately paid) but the ones who don't understand shit about computers but get paid $150k+ to stack frameworks on top of frameworks until hey presto the compiler shits out yet another CRUD/advertising app. Meanwhile my friends with PhDs in computational biology who went into biotech are earning like $60k in the UK and the lucky ones who managed to land a position in California are earning $90k-$130k.
Just because the rest of the developed world shoots itself in the foot with regards to overregulation which leads to US companies winning by default doesn't mean they deserve their excess profits any more than a monopoly that doesn't get challenged deserves its excess profits. They got lucky by being born on the correct piece of soil where the government in charge doesn't regularly commit self harm and now they wish to protect the fruits of this accident by birth even though it directly hurts Humanity if a US programming job (where the lack of overregulation leads to a higher force multiplier in how much good the worker is able to do for the world) goes to a mediocre American vs a talented Briton.
Quants are underpaid relative to the value we generate for the capital employing us but that's a discussion for another day. Plus the discrepancy between US vs UK quant pay is small enough that you can genuinely say that people choose to forgo a little bit of money for a better ambiance while the gap for tech is so high that it only makes sense if UK tech developers (amongst which group I count many friends) are artificially prevented from moving to greener pastures, which is exactly what is happening.
The ad apps, while simple and presumably beneath an intellect of your caliber, make value for the capital employing them. Yet you do not think that the people who make said apps should be paid based on the value they provide the capital employing them:
But you, the noble quant, should be judged by that same value. And in fact you are underpaid for your value to the capital employing you:
Have you considered that maybe its because all your really talented British developer friends aren't actually really talented? Maybe they are actually kind of dumb? Like there is this supposedly really lucrative thing they can do, its so easy they can "shit it out", they don't even need to know how computers work, they have the app store in the UK so they don't even need to be in California, but like... they don't actually do it?
There it is. Its you. Claiming to know who deserves what. That's what it always boils down to.
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