Yet another city
07 October 2024Last weekend I was visiting Manchester for only the third time, the other two being day visits related to degree applications, and the purpose is scouting out the city for an up-coming relocation away from London. While post-New Zealand involved turning up to a city for the first time and going straight to the office, this time round the intention is to have accommodation at least booked before starting work since mixing flat-hunting and starting a new job is a big strain which would be made worse by the dark evenings. So far my impressions of the city are favourable and it feels like it has bits of other small cities I have lived in.
But why yet another new city? While London has its advantages and disadvantages which is a subject for another time the fundamental problem is economic devastation of the greater London region. The country as a whole is in trouble but the surprise is the extent London is a big black-spot whereas Manchester appears to actually be growing. Part of me also feels that London has simply not worked out in the way I had hoped for a post-Covid life.
The job front
The startup I joined during Covid was always something of a stop-gap and in June I began a serious effort to get back into the type of work that was in line with my previous career trajectory of embedded firmware development and lower-level computer networking. The problem was soon became apparent that the London technology job market, especially for what I was interested in, is shrinking. A large portion of the London economy is as an international hub but two pillars of this have given way — the first was banking where I had been told that the institutions had an on-the-quiet London hiring freeze in place in favour of cities in other countries; and the second which is more relevant to me is the on-going mass head-count reductions by many of the big technology companies.- Stiff competition
- At a technology meetup someone told me that hiring managers were basically only even considering people for whom their CV is a “carbon copy of the job specification”. And in one screening call I had two weeks ago the interviewer just straight out say he was getting through a lot of people that day. And some of the rejection “feedback” I got was obvious excuse rather than reason. Classic approach of looking for faults rather than ability.
- Economy in trouble
- For me the turning point was after the technical interview for a job at RS Electronics being told I was a very strong candidate, but then informed that they had just been hit by a hiring freeze. While I had applied to their product development division it was clear to me that their core business of electronic component supply was having trouble. Two other companies would not long afterwards also inform me of positions being put on hold.
- Suppliers getting screwed
- Government suppliers were ‘asked’ to identify budget cuts but what really happened was contracts being unilaterally rescinded en-masse by civil servants leaving suppliers without income, and those who have got contracts back so far were subjected to rate cuts of 20% or so. A buyer as big as the government doing this inevitably filters down into the economy and this in itself might be enough to push the country into recession.
- Shrinking sector
- Back in 2019 when I was still working overseas I was told by one of those in charge of procurement that the usual way companies were doing risk planning for Brexit was to simply remove British-based companies from the supply chain. Existing products kept the British suppliers but the pipe-line of orders for future products was getting dry. This is why a hiring freeze for an electronics supplier like RS stuck out so much is because it fuelled my belief that embedded electronics in general, which is product-orientated rather than service-orientated like most of the technology sector, is disappearing.
Having to move
The hiring freeze at RS Electronics deeply affected me and this point is where I crossed an important bridge: I will have to relocate. Period. Doing 3-days a week hybrid somewhere vaguely “commutable” like Bracknell, Reading, or Cambridge, were off the cards — the competition coming out of London was simply too stiff. And given pessimism for the British economy as a whole considering relocation also meant considering emigration, since if there was a time I should lean on my EU citizenship it was now, and emigration is a process that I am well familiar with having done it three times already. However crossing the bridge of having to accept such an up-rooting is still mentally tough.
I get the distinct feeling I am ahead of the curve in preparedness to relocate, as the enthusiasm of those at my future company compared to the narkiness of those down south suggests that they actually have difficulty getting people of my experience. Having emigrated three times in 14 years is extremely credible willingness to “merely” relocate, but if as I expect things get worse in London and the country as a whole, many more will eventually hit their own thresholds. The only thing I am not sure of is how much I am ahead of the curve.
First impressions of Manchester
Trying to get driven to my first point-of-call in the city centre was a rookie mistake and I quickly decided to jump out and simply walk, but that aside quickly started to appreciate that Manchester is a compact city centre. After meeting an old friend near London Bridge on the previous Friday where both of us spent 45 minutes each on trains getting there, not having to use any form of transport at all felt so relaxing. London has a lot going on but unless one lives in a shoe-box within Zone 1 it is an absolute minimum of half an hour on public transport in order to get to anything, and if going out past midnight taking two hours to get home is not unusual. The rebuilding of my social life was derailed by all the train strikes in late-2022 and 2023 so not being hostage to a load of greedy unionised drivers is automatically a major plus point.
Parts of the city feel a little grimy but every city I have first-hand knowledge of has parts like this, and while I felt the city centre was rather quiet for a weekend it was far from dead. Whereas my visits to Bristol left me under no illusion that Bristol was a city that had become a shell in clear economic decline, to the extent that when I did a flying visit this summer the hotels in the city centre rather than on the outskirts were the dirt-cheap ones, Manchester felt like a happening place. Not as happening as London but a lot less stressful. The highlight was finding an arcade bar similar to the one in Bristol and although clearly faux-retro the four-player PacMan caught my eye.
