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Previously on "Pretty much the end of steelmaking in the UK"
I've always been a strong supporter of seven figure salaries for techies. Just seems logical to me.
If you looked at the origins of any large and successful company today I'm pretty sure you would find that they were all founded by techies, rather than by MBA'ers, middle management and other highly paid hangers-on Today we outsource teckies and pride ourselves for our soft skills. Evolution in action.
If you have innovation, you can always succeed. Think of a service/application, design it with your skills and use the cheap coders to do the grunt work - Asian developers are not well-known for their design/architecture skills.
There are millions of Asian coders... probably enough for every skilled UK developer to have their own personal team IF they can think of something worthwhile.
A steel plant is not something you can easily mothball.
Tata have been stripping these plants of anything useful since they bought out Corus.
What does it matter? The Labour government stole them from the family years ago, it was only a question of time before they finally ran them into the ground. Recon they'll be celebrating on a job well done soonish: marches with double-speak banners 'Save our Steel'. LOL
They'll put a Tescos up on the site, and aclaim the wonders of their job creation strategy!
IIRC, it take years to cool down, re-line then fire up a single furnace
No, just about 6-8 weeks for a modern blast furnace, but currently it costs more than it's worth with the margins these steel producers are operating with.
I think they would probably just run the plant into the ground and then write it off.
Not surprising really. We had vast amounts of coal, used it up, and now have little left to show for it except a boomed population. Still, a major breakthrough in solar or nuclear technology could change things and we should be paying guys in those fields £millions/year instead of their antitheses in the form of the likes of (d)Ross.
I've always been a strong supporter of seven figure salaries for techies. Just seems logical to me.
First into the Industrial Revolution and first out.
Not surprising really. We had vast amounts of coal, used it up, and now have little left to show for it except a boomed population. Still, a major breakthrough in solar or nuclear technology could change things and we should be paying guys in those fields £millions/year instead of their antitheses in the form of the likes of (d)Ross.
Otherwise, I’d recommend reading an article from the Harvard business review in the beginning of the 80s where two professors outlined the reasons for the decline of American manufacturing and heavy industry in an article called ‘Managing our way to Economic Decline’. A lot of what they say applies just as well to British industry, and frighteningly, to the service businesses of today.
Unfortunately the whole article isn’t freely available on t’internet, but there are a few summaries.
‘managements' short-term, control oriented mentality has biased investments towards imitative rather than innovative product designs’
‘pseudoprofessionals. These are people who have no special expertise in any particular industry or technology, but run the company using financial controls, portfolio concepts and a market-driven, follow-the-leader strategy’
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