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Jimmy Wales: London Is Better For Tech Than "Dreadful" Silicon Valley
Mickeycaskill writes: Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales has praised London as a tech hub, saying its cultural assets make it an ideal place to do business and superior to Silicon Valley as a place to live. “I meet people around London and they ask ‘when do you go back to San Francisco?’ assuming I’m here for a few days, but I live in London,” he said at the launch of Tech.London. “There’s always this bit of British self-deprecation about ‘oh well, things are so great in Silicon Valley’. But I can tell you, things aren’t that great in Silicon Valley. London has all these incredible advantages of a tech scene, but it’s also a place people want to live. Nobody wants to live in Silicon Valley – it’s dreadful out there. London is this incredible cultural city, it’s at the crossroads of the world. In the US you have San Francisco for tech, Los Angeles for movies and Washington for politics. In London you have all these things. It’s a great place to do business.”
London's fantastic if you're rich, or at least well-off. If you're poor, or simply young, it's awful. Housing is totally unaffordable.
don't forget CCTV. mustn't forget the omnipresent CCTV (roads, streets and buildings). also, you aren't allowed to withhold your passwords from police, there's even less police/secret services transparency than in the US of A; your kids will probably be taken away if you discipline them in public or if you go to a doctor with any kind of genital problem (UK children are not allowed to have genital problems).
oh and the sweaty armpits on tube (mmmm yummy), yobs who'll knife you if you complain about their loud music at night (wo'd ya say to mee?) and among the highest rent and property prices in the world. however, it's a good place to live if you're a member of any oppressed minority (race, sexuality, religion) as with so many minorities present nobody gives a shit about that anymore.
and if you happen to speak the most common language of london - polish, your life will be much cheaper (plumbers, carpenters, builders, car servicing, etc). the first thing you should do when you move to london is get a polish friend. i kid you not, they're 100x more useful than your local "citizen's advice bureau".
Relatively difficult to get a work visa for the UK:
http://www.visabureau.com/uk/i...
You aren't going to get a Tier 1 unless you are an Olympic athlete, Linus Torvalds, or Craig Venter, etc.. Cap is 1,000/year.
You could *possibly* get a Tier 2, if you already had a job offer from a UK company. Cap is 20,700/year.
Intra-company transfers for an existing employer (e.g. IBM), limited to a year if you are making £40,000/year; call it $63,500 at todays exchange rate; this is generally not hard for someone employed by IBM, actually; I have a friend who went to the UK for IBM on one of those, and got her MBA at Oxford (IBM also paid for that, since it was business related).
If you have money (£200,000 for the business, plus your own living expenses), and can start a viable business, a Tier 1 (Entrepreneur) Visa is an option. It has to employ 2 EEA people, or you get kicked out after 2 years.
If you have *lots* of money (£1million), you can get an investment visa; you are not permitted to work any other job, other than managing your investments. I believe this means you can not do international consultancy or remote management of other assets. This is basically similar to the U.S. EB-5 "millionaires visa", by which you are able to (effectively) buy a U.S. green card if you are rich enough, and willing to pump a $750K or $800K house price up to $1M in the outer Sunset in SF (it's basically the reason real estate prices are so high in SF: 5,100 home sales in the Bay area this way each year, 1/3 go to 1,700 EB-5 visa winners, with the remaining 8,300 EB-5's going to other areas of the U.S. and inflating housing prices there, instead. Hint: it's not gentrification that's doing it.
Tier-3 you can't get (program is suspended); it's for things like swinging a hammer and other labor which is considered unskilled.
Tier-4 is a student visa; you aren't allowed to work more than 10 hours a week in most cases, generally granted for only one year, requires 15 hours/week study, you must agree to go home after, as a condition of the visa. This is probably not what you want.
Tier-5 is a temporary work visa with a sponsor; mostly, this is the artist/entertainer visa, but can also be for charity workers and things like Mormon missionaries. If you want one of these, your best bet is to run away and join the circus. :)
So basically: a heck of a lot less opportunity to go to the U.K. from the U.S. than the other way around.
Note to Americans:
The "City of London" is about a square mile. It's the most downtowney square mile anywhere, and is home to London's finance industry. What you think about when you think about London is called the "Greater London Authority." So this guy is talking about a British government initiative to create a Silicon Valley type space near the most expensive Real Estate on the continent.
There're actually places in the Greater London Area where rent is reasonable. They're not near the Square Mile.
Londoner here. I grew up in Zone 4, left for ages and I'm now loving in Zone 2/3 border. It's neither the greatest thing ever nor the worst place ever. I'd rather live someqhere quieter and smaller and closer to the outdoors, such as Sheffield (never lived there but I'd love to).
Cambridge is prefereable too (I lived there on and off for a number of years),unless you hate cycling into the wind in every direction you go in. Los Alamos, or Santa Fe is probably where I'd live given the chance though.
Either way, London isn't "incerdibly shit" unless you stick to the central bits norf ovva river. If you want "incredibly shit", try Swindon.
SJW n. One who posts facts.
The majority of CCTV is privately-owned and governed by the Data Protection Act of 1998. Disciplining your children by hitting them is illegal, as it's the last act of desperate, shitty parents. Kids can of course have genital problems - you are just making that up, obviously. It is a good place to live if you are a minority, as it's a very progressive place that doesn't give a shit about such petty bullshit. The Metropolitan Police and armed forces marching in the gay pride parade (in uniform, and officially sanctioned) is a good example of that.
The most common language of London is English (according to the 2011 census 77.9% speak it as their first language), but I guess that doesn't fit in to your "Polish invasion" narrative. Only ~1.9% of Londoners speak Polish as their first language, and many of those speak English.
But it seems you're not really interested in painting a more accurate picture of London...
London isn't cheaper than the Valley at all. Average house prices in central London are £5000 a square foot. Slightly further out they're around £1500 a square foot.
Compare that to the valley, where in the south bay they're around $1500 a square foot in central SF, and $1000 a square foot in the south bay. (note, different currencies, so the delta is bigger than it looks). London is both more expensive than the bay area, and they'll pay you less.
As far as urban sprawl goes... the Bay Area is far less sprawled than London. Even if you are in the centre of the largest spread of sprawl in the bay area (probably somewhere slightly west of the centre of San Jose), you're at most 20 minutes from open country side (by car). In London, in the centre, you're roughly 2 hours away, such is the size of the sprawl.
Even if you measure sprawl by the time it takes to commute, and assume a worst case in the bay area (living in Oakland, working at Apple is probably about the worst) - that's a 1 hour commute. That's a pretty short commute by London standards. More so, the commute in the bay area will have been done entirely on nice (not crowded) coaches, rather than over-crowded, not-air-conditioned trains and underground services.
Are there really people who love the urban sprawl that covers the entirety of Greater London?