slgeorge

London's basically great for:

  1. Startups
  2. Scaling/Growth
  3. Existing company expanding from USA->Europe or Europe->USA

It's not as good as Silicon Valley for any of these, but no-where is. It's also not that good if you're trying to IPO, again no-where is compared to the USA.

For start-ups/high-growth you get a pretty good business environment (legal/corporate and day-to-day running a company is reasonably straightforward), employees with skills and the employment law is pretty flexible, there's plenty of finance around.

For Growth and USA companies that are expanding into Europe then London/UK is somewhat easier to understand than other European geo's. There's an aligned language and there's more cultural touchpoints - it's kind of a mid-point culturally/institutionally between Europe/USA.

For funding/driving to late-stage and IPO there just isn't anywhere like the USA. But everyone has to expand to North America eventually, so it can be fixed at that point. Also, PE funding has changed a lot in the last 10 years, so if you're not on the 1-in-1000 rocketships there's a more steady 'good' path which is totally viable.

As a Brit when I started doing deals in North America one of the things I picked up was that I had to be explicit about disagreement OR where a decision was not being made yet. In the UK during a negotiation a 'silence' is not equal to agreement or disagreement, it's a NO-OP. If I didn't do this then prospective customers/suppliers in the USA would believe that I'd agreed to their request when from my perspective I had merely noted that they'd asked for something. Has anyone else run into this?

The other one that's confusing is that "tabling" something means the complete opposite.

I would separate 'politeness' and 'indirectness' a bit. I generally agree about 'politeness', there are plenty social forms that Brits still follow. For example I found the language/manner of New York attorneys pretty 'aggressive' the first few times.

Indirectness, is definitely a thing - Brits speak to each other or signal disagreement in ways that's clear to another Brit, but maybe not others. The use of silence, but also some words that depending on tone can mean different things which I think is difficult for North American's to interpret.

Do you have an experience working in Europe or the UK?

> I couldn't even hope to get employment in tech in the UK or Europe without a degree

Maybe this is how it looks from the outside, but it's not how it works in reality.

My evidence is I've been working in 'tech' for 25 years and having hired people across the UK, Europe and North America. Tech is one of the most accessible career paths, particularly for areas that are novel and expanding rapidly - consequently direct experience of an area is the important currency.

Often roles will advertise a 'degree' or equivalent industry experience. The only roles I can think of where this could be an issue is trying to join a large corporate organisation in their 'graduate' programme (e.g. a major bank), but that's the same situation in the USA as well.

Guix is gathering feedback from users and contributors on their experiences; what they love and what they've found challenging. Whether you're new or a veteran we'd love to have your opinion and comments!

As the projects never done this before it should be super interesting. So submitted this for anyone that's a current user, or tried it in the past.

For those that don't know Guix is like Nix, but uses a single language (Guile Scheme) to define and configure the system. It's has four elements:

- a package manager that can runs on top of any Linux distribution (e.g. like homebrew)

- a dotfiles and home environment manager

- a complete GNU/Linux distribution

- a way to create isolated development environments

"Modern" seems to be used a loose adjective these days for "I rewrote $thing [in Rust]". Minecraft was created in 2011, and is Wikipedia says the last version of the 'classic' edition was released in 2017. So anything after 2017 is now defunct.

I don't mind people rewriting things in <insert-name-of-tech-I-like> but "modern" as a value seems pretty loose, and it's often at least arguable whether it's objectively better!

Yes, I wasn't throwing shade on Nix, I was drawing a specific comparison about Linux distributions.

My opinion is that Guix/Nix move the state of the art for Linux distributions forward. So Guix<->Nix are both similar Linux distributions, and different from previous approaches (e.g. Debian, Ubuntu, Redhat etc).

Transactional package management and declarative system configuration solve a whole host of problems. Guix (and Nix?) directly integrates configuration management into the OS, rather than as some adjunct piece of tooling (Ansible, Terraform etc). We define the packages, the system, the configuration using the same DSL. Transactions and a declarative approach improve maintainability, reproduciblity and might limit the amount of time I spend messing with different tooling ;-)

FFS - talk about missing the point.

Sorry that annoyed you.

One thing to bear in mind is that at Weaveworks we made massive contributions and did our best to be part of the community in the right way:

* Flux * Flagger * Cortex * Ignite * Weave Net * and a whole host more

Oh and there's a load of people without jobs tonight - wondering about their futures - hopefully people will see the talent and the contributions and find roles for them.