UK industrial design rate

Perhaps you can help me...

see the post "Looking for a solidworks help." Posted immediately after this one.

Cheers Dave.

Hi, you could email me... I'm sure I could help, although your email doesn't seem to work.

Tough one to answer - I suppose it is what you can get away with :-) !

When pitching for jobs - often the rate does not come into the equation but if you want to have a comfortable figure - go for £20/hr and don't go below £15 or above £50.

The whole issue of design rates is getting very clouded by the global market , where basic drafting and modeling is now available in the far East at a fraction of the cost it is here in the UK! so we have to major on ideas and problem solving and making the design process as painless as possible :-)

TTFN

Jonathan

Jonathan

Those figures sound about right to me - it depends what the client wants - draughting and detailing jobs usually pay towards the lower end of the scale and the more challenging jobs towards the upper end of the scale.

It's not unusual for clients to outsource both the mind numbing jobs and the b@stard jobs that no one else wants!

However, location also plays a part - usually if your London based for example the rate is usually higher than say Yorkshire.

It peeves me though that people will pay Plumbers, car mechanics etc =A350-=A3100 per hour but complain about paying =A325 per hour for a designer!

Kev

Kev

Reminds me - once I offered to design a new set of products for one company at £5 per hour less than they paid for the mechanics to service their nice fleet of Beemers parked at the front. Needless to say they did not see the joke !! Wwhen I went by a year latter they were going out of business !! Probably would have been given a rubber cheque anyway ;-)

TTFN

Jonathan

Yep, know what you mean - at one company I worked for the MD would not sanction =A330K for 1 seat each of SWX and a PC to run it on for 4 engineers - but he had no problem sanctioning around =A325K each for the BMW's the dozen or so salesmen drove around in.

Funnily enough the same things happend to them!

Kev

Just curious as to what it costs to live there? 8GBP amounts to about $14 which whould be high end at a retail store or quite common for a manufacturing job around the midwest.

Litre of petrol $0.65 Average size of fillup 55 litres, frequency; once or twice a week Loaf of bread $1.50 Litre of milk $0.65 Kg of beef $3.93 to $22.00 (hamburger to prime steak) Lunch at a decent restaurant for two $22.00 Lunch at McDonalds for one $6.00 Monthly payment on a new car $250 to $600 Monthly rent on a two bedroom apt. $600 Monthly payment on a house $1,000 to $2,000 (for 30 years) Sales tax nil to 7.25% depending on state. Food is usually exempt. Here it is 6%. Yearly tax on a house $3,000 to $7,000 Yearly tax on an engineer's salary ($50,000) $5,000 to $7,000 Insurance for the car $600 to $1,000 per year Insurance for the house $500 to $1,000 per year

And the average credit card debt carried by the average American household: $8,562

My numbers are approximate - In general UK is expensive for housing, cars, petrol and good food - in fact I think it is expensive for everything !!. However you have to factor in, like most of EU, - free health care and generous (?) state benefits for unemployed, low incomes etc which are I believe not possible in USA. So we pay nothing for health and education. University fees are small compared to US and in Scotland they are still free. Signed up for St Andrews already !! for my kids .

The cost of housing in UK should not be under estimated - we live in small , badly build shoe boxes compared to US and Europe. However the UK is infatuated by property and the average Brit will sell his shoe box for a small fortune to move to the countryside at the first opportunity, and preferably in France, Spain, Italy etc where the weather and wine is good and the locals just don't seem to want the the hassle of a house in the middle of nowhere :-) ( this used to be a particularly English thing but I go to Scotland regularly to visit the outlaws and Scots are now just as smitten with the property bug - you can't buy a Scotish paper without the home and international 'property section' falling out and breaking your toe.)

Minimum statutory pay in UK is 5.25pounds sterling per hour - so this is what you get working in Macdonalds - Graduate engineers fare a little better and start on about £25k pa in graduate engineering jobs if they can find them !! :-)

once a week although my Morris Minor is not as frugal as my US built Honda Accord !

more than that ! - meat is expensive unlike Australia where it seemed to be free !!.

Pie and chips maybe -- Bar meal possibly but bank on £15 per head at a restaurant - Tip is optional.

Big mac meal is £3.50 I think - but this is not the supersize version

same

depends where - the above is not possible in London

No way - average house in UK is now touching £150,000 and that is for something very very small. - 2 adults and small child if you can stop it growing !! - so a mortage of £150000 is approx £1200 per month. - but most families would need a £250,000 house to live in.

VAT ( or sales tax) - 17.5% on all except cold food.

Council Tax - £1000 approx ( depends on house value) + water and sewage can add another £500

You can budget 25% of salary on all Taxes upto £40K when it goes to

same

I think that is about the same here in the UK.

Americans need a wheelbarrow of cash when visiting London. The dollar rate is not good and London is just a fortune - full stop. I've just come back from a weeks holiday in London taking my small kids around the Museums etc - my God - the cost of a coffee - its outragous at £3!! - but I was lucky to make one last trip on a Routemaster Bus from Tower of London to Picadilly. Conductor said it was the last trip for the bus and it was empty! There goes 50 years of heritage :-( to be replaced by bendy busses which my 5yr son thought were fantastic !!.

The UK is following Ireland and going non - smoking so that will save people money ? perhaps.

Drugs - don't know the street price but I believe it is falling or so my 7 yr old tells me !!

Running through this list - I cannot think of one thing that that is cheaper in Britain than else where except a proper warm ale, which of course you can't get elsewhere anyway so it is not a fair comparison.

TTFN

Jonathan

Drugs are cheap in the UK as Amsterdam and Belgium are close, but the fall in price is due to the added impurities. We pay National Health and then have to wait 3 years in pain for a operation (as I did which is not a good situation to be in at 22 years old). We pay council tax, but the fee's dont seem to add up for what you recieve. When your parents die you have to pay 40% of the total cost of their estate in Inheritance Tax which means that I have to sell all their property that they have worked hard to build/buy/develop just to fund immoral situations/activities which relate to the structure/operation of the country and government. I'd also just like to add that a train fare from my local station to London before 10am is =A389. The journey takes

I wouldn't exactly count street drugs in my cost of living. I did just run across a court case in which the state attempted to levy a tax of $750,000 on an individual for possesion of a controled substance (9 pound of Mary Jane from Mexico). Taxing criminal activities is a particularly American activity and is done because, among other things, taxes are settled in civil court where the burden of proof is not as high as a criminal case.

Ah, the Routemaster. Fit them with snorkels and an upper floor drivers position and sell them to New Orleans.

The costs I gave were for the Midwest and not in a major city. When I started working I made it a point to stay away from California, Washington D.C., NewYork, Chicago, etc. simply because of the high cost of housing, commuting and crime. You will find engineer's salaries typically follow the cost of housing so that California or Washington D.C. will be in the $90k range while away from these areas will be down to 40k - 50k.

If you have decent health insurance, which most engineer's have, you will pay very little for health care and you get it when you need it. The trend now is to health savings plans and then catastrophic insurance for the rest. You can then balance the pain with the need to see the doctor, but if you have a heart attack or cancer you are covered.

Now if you go to Starbucks you can pay anywhere from $2 -$6 for a coffee, but I'll take the McDonalds coffee for 50 cents.

I think you are saying you pay some kind of income tax in addtion to VAT? We have a lot more hidden taxes, but everyone complains about income tax forgetting to add up all the little ones. King George would be jealous of the job Clinton did on us in that area.

The property tax we pay goes towards education, fire, police, roads, local government, parks, water and sewer and boondogles. Education gets the biggest share of that.

Tax on inheritance can be avoided legally for the most part and is limited in cases of small estates (like most of us would have).

I could probably take a 2,000 mile train trip here for 89 quid but probably not before 10am. The low fare and luxurious seating would be courtesy of tax subsidies. The breakdowns and lack of punctuality courtesy of not enough tax subsidies. :)

Our train system is a joke... I would love to right a book about it. The trains themselves are one of the purist examples of bad design/engineering in our country. Not sure about the tracks, maybe Brunel's genius did not account for their heavy use. If you have time to spare whilst on a UK train (which you will do because it will probably be stationary and waiting for another delayed train to exit the station) have a look at the mouldings of the seating and main structure of the body. It will be bodged together. If you look closely at the points where the doors open you will see areas where they have cut pieces off the panels to make them fit and allow for the door to open).

I love the fact that a lamp is put on the table in first class and then the price of that seating area doubles. I love the fact that when a train is over 15 minutes late the friendly station speaker says "I am extremely sorry for the delay to this service" instead of "I am very sorry for the delay to this service"... and who is this single person (I might try and track them down for the book). I like the way the amount of delay increases gradually like the download timer on a computer. I love the 'refreshments' trolley and the way it kneecaps you if you are taller than 6 foot and the cleaners that wander round with black bin liners, smelling worse than the toilets and collecting your drinks before you have time to finish them. Train psychology is whole subject on its own... leaving Kemble station you have the aristocracy, very high paid London business men and mere factory workers all competing for status. The factory workers will intimidate physically, the business men by silently (eyes shifting to the side) comparing laptop use/software and the aristocracy by mentioning land ownership and polo. Occasionally these intimidation techniques cross these 'class' boundaries a whole new interesting situation arises. I could bore you for hours on the subject of train journeys... but I wont... dont even get me started on the automatic sliding doors which you can isolate and the ligting system (for the entire train) by the door which you can shut off with the flick of a switch to create the perfect terrorist environment... or the safety instructions that take 1 hour to read and understand... or the 'on' button for the water which is positioned on the floor under the sink. I could even give you a 200 page instruction manual on dodging fares. There are so many possibilities, inventions/gadgets to use etc etc. In fact I am going to start writing now and then my next projects will be books based on the NHS and education system.

I think maybe I should work on my spelling and grammar before 'writing' a book though. How do you edit a post in Groups?

Immensely interesting, but quite a bit off topic. Deserves its own discussion group or perhaps it's own TV show along the lines of Keeping up Appearances.

I live just outside Oxford and from my local station (Haddenham) it takes about 50min to get to Marylebone and costs about 20 quid return per day.

Kev

is this before 10 though? I live at Kemble in Gloucestershire.

Yep, my price is before 9.30

Kev

Interesting Beemer comment, and there are a lot of anecdotes I could recite from SoCal, including the recent driver of his Beemer, of middle-eastern ethnic orgins, doing rally driving in through a parking lot and killing someone.

I simply will not consider a Beemer, because of the absolutely regal air that is maintained in the California Beemer Dealers who seem to like to look down on potential new customers, as in "You know this BMW is VERY expensive.", meaning "As a BMW superstar, you don't look like you can afford such a vehicle".

Needless to say, my wife said no more and left.

Bo

Thats unfare. I think its because very rich Londoners are moving out to the Gloucestershire countryside.

probably, I did the commute to London for 2 years - the cost of my mortgage plus travel costs were still less than the guys who lived there and my 1 hour commute was not much longer than their tube journey

Kev