How Manchester became a leading tech hub: insights from Hyperact’s engineering director
Jacob Clark, Director of Engineering at Hyperact recently sat down with Michael Collins from IO Associates to discuss how Manchester became a leading tech hub.
Table of Contents
- Introduction and current role at Hyperact
- Jake's unconventional entry into tech
- Progression from developer to leadership
- Career reflections and advice
- Leadership challenges and hiring
- Advice for aspiring engineering directors
- Manchester tech scene evolution
- What makes Manchester special
- Future of Manchester tech and industry predictions
Here are six quick things about Jake:
- Jake is the Engineering Director at Hyperact, a product engineering consultancy based in Manchester and Leeds, where he's building their northern engineering practice.
- Over his 15 years in the engineering industry, he has progressed from individual contributor to leadership roles across multiple government bodies, always focusing on user-centric design and delivery.
- He is completely self-taught, having started as a childhood hobby manually typing HTML on a disconnected Windows 3.1 machine, later dropping out of university to join the Department of Work and Pensions as a senior engineer.
- His leadership philosophy centers on the belief that people and systems are harder than technology, leading him to focus on socio-technical aspects of software delivery rather than just technical solutions.
- He is a Manchester native who has witnessed the city's tech scene evolve from predominantly marketing agencies to a diverse ecosystem of startups, scale-ups, and major institutions like the BBC and Booking.com.
- He advocates for staying broad and T-shaped in technical skills, believing that building networks and understanding the 'people side' of software delivery are just as crucial as coding abilities.
The discussion covers Jake's unconventional path into tech leadership, his role in growing Hyperact's engineering capabilities, and his insights on Manchester's collaborative tech community.
In this podcast, you'll discover:
- Jake's self-taught journey from hobby coder to engineering director The challenges and opportunities of building a startup consultancy in today's AI-driven market
- Why Jake believes focusing on human-centered delivery beats AI-first approaches
- The evolution of Manchester's tech scene and what makes it special
- Practical advice Jake offers for aspiring engineering leaders on balancing technical depth with people skills
- Jake's predictions for the future of software engineering and Manchester's growing tech ecosystem
Introduction and current role at Hyperact
Hyperact is a full stack, full spectrum, modern product development partner focusing on everything from product strategy to service design, user design, user research, all the way through to the build and engineering side. Startup challenges in current tech landscape
There's a lot of AI slop out there. If organisations focus instead on how they can enable delivery with more of a human touch, they can get to better outcomes.
Jake's unconventional entry into tech
Jake recalls sitting on his parents' living room floor and manually typing out HTML on a completely disconnected Windows 3.1 machine to learn how to code.
And is self-taught, building what he knows through doing things and building, as opposed to gaining a computer science degree.
Progression from developer to leadership
The hardest part of building stuff is not the architecture, nor the technology. The hardest thing is people and the system that you're operating in.
One of the things Jake has observed over the years is this specialism of engineering roles: staff engineers, principal engineers, software engineering team leads - giving people different paths instead of forcing everyone into traditional management.
Career reflections and advice
Don’t underestimate the value of having a network of people. Get out there and attend meetups. There's only so much you can take away from a podcast or conference keynote compared to real-world conversations.
For the first four or five years, Jake spent the majority of his time just being a good engineer, but he reflects on whether he should have balanced that with understanding what agile software delivery actually meant and what problems it solves.
The most growth came from pair-programming or doing ensemble programming with a group of people. There's nothing like sitting with the same keyboard, same screen, and problem-solving together.
Leadership challenges and hiring
One of the biggest challenges is shifting organisations from thinking about outputs to outcomes. It's easy to be a feature factory, but it's hard to focus on and figure out what the right things are.
The hiring process never seems to be efficient or effective for example a lot of organisations are still really focused on the technical test.
Getting the people-proposition right is more important than salary and bonuses.
Advice for aspiring engineering directors
Jake has always been very broad, very T-shaped. He has never been one to pigeonhole himself into a single tech because technology changes too quickly to get success out of that.
Talk to your boss about progression paths, but also challenge it. Ask yourself: am I going to get the growth that I need, or do I need to look elsewhere for different opportunities?
If you're more interested in predictable and steady work, pick a technology stack with longevity.
Make sure it's not going to disappear in the next five years like Haskell and COBOL.
Manchester tech scene evolution
Thinking back 14-15 years ago it was predominantly agencies: marketing agencies & web agencies. Now the city has huge institutions like the BBC and Booking.com, plus a lot of startups and investors.
It has become more diverse in terms of sector. Manchester now has fintech, travel, e-commerce, government agencies like GCHQ, DWP, and the Home Office.
What makes Manchester special?
If you go and speak to anybody in tech in Manchester, they could point to three or four grassroots communities and bootcamps. The universities also do community outreach to figure out what they should be teaching.
That inclusivity and welcoming community springs to mind for him.
According to Jake, northerners bring something different. He describes them as a super friendly bunch who all know each other, and if you need help, support, guidance, or mentorship, it's there.
There are a lot of grassroots approaches into tech with boot camps, and universities doing community outreach to figure out what they should be teaching.
Future of Manchester tech and industry predictions
We'll see more startups and scale-ups emerging from Manchester, with AI playing a part, plus hopefully more diversity in industries and sectors.
There'll be more of a resurgence around best practice software engineering.
Organisations will get their fill of AI productivity but focus more on what they're trying to build and who they're building it for.
A lot of organisations are going full-in on AI right now, but we'll see that investment paring back when they realise quality goes down even if productivity increases.
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