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Ask HN: Differences between Berlin tech/startup culture and NYC culture?

43 points by ritchiea ↗ HN
I had a bad freelance experience at a startup where we agreed on fulltime work & hourly rate. I worked normally, some days working late on features into the evening, some days wrapping up early. After a month I invoiced for ~38 hours per week & the founder who was also my manager literally threw a tantrum saying that my invoice was "immoral" and that I "should only bill for productive hours." I don't know what he means by that, as I was working full time, sometimes with him side-by-side or clearly committing code at 8pm, 9pm etc. I left that role because of the founder's lack of professionalism.

My next experience with a Berlin startup we agreed to a full time role. I got great feedback from them for 6 months, they said the app looks good & is fast, we didn't go live but they showed investors in meetings and we were in good shape. They said things were great and they were happy with my first hire to the dev team. Then just before my 6 month probation as "Director of Engineering" was up, they abruptly hired a CTO above me, kept me for an additional week of onboarding the new CTO while dodging my questions of "how does the new team hierarchy work?", and then fired me. All without ever giving me anything but glowing feedback (this is the short story, leaving out a few promises made by them and not lived up to). It felt like I was being used as a 6 month freelancer.

Before I moved to Berlin I heard that there's better work life balance here, more vacation, etc. Though lower pay. In my experience the people I've worked for have seen their employees as disposable. Or had a general lower level of respect for dev contributions to the team and less professionalism than I experienced in NYC.

In NYC I got accustomed to a culture where if a company has a developer that is productive and professional that person is a valuable asset to keep around.

Is that not true in Berlin? Is the culture different? Or have I had a couple weird bad luck experiences?

16 comments

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ThePhysicist
As someone who runs a small (bootstrapped) startup in Berlin I'd recommend you to avoid the smaller startups, as you will often be paid under par and might have bad experiences like the ones you described. I'd go for larger and well-funded ones. Also, if it's not a must to work at a startup you could have a look at all the digital labs / hubs etc. that established companies like BMW, Daimler, VW, BASF etc. are opening in Berlin. They offer somewhat of a startup experience but with big funding and the standing of a large corporate behind the scenes, so you might be able to get a better deal there. I worked for such a spinoff before founding a company again and I really enjoyed it, great pay, nice work-life balance and friendly and savvy colleagues. Just my 2c.
ritchiea
I commented on this in another reply here but I think in the first case it was a founder that was just unprofessional and had difficulty getting along with other developers. And in the 2nd case it was a company w/o any product or dev team and I thought the opportunity to build my own team and choose who I work with would be fun. I just never imagined if I was making progress, shipping features and hiring good people they would use that progress to hire someone with a fancier resume than mine above me rather than appreciate my work & continue in the direction we were going. Maybe I was naive.

Thanks for the advice.

redis_mlc
The US values software developers more than anywhere else.
taknil
Truly sorry to hear about your experiences. If you are not explicitly a founder, just do not work for companies that doesn't actually have at lease a couple of employees doing non-managerial IT work. Otherwise the founders may be inexperienced in managing IT teams and consider it okay to pile on forever more work to a stagnant IT staff and be down-right exploitative like in your first example.

When interviewing for a position, remember that you are also interviewing the company. You already know what doesn't work for you, so ask about it. Don't be shy, you're not desperate for that job, you're a developer in Berlin, people want you! What even are "productive hours"? Only the ones where you type symbols into your IDE? Revisit this article [1] from the hn front-page a few days ago then.

https://blog.feenk.com/developers-spend-most-of-their-time-f...

ritchiea
Thanks for the advice. I really was trying to find the right situation for me in both cases, I may just be bad at doing that. In the first case, I made sure that the company had been established for several years, and had actual clients and revenue (which were both very impressive tbh). It was a development team of 2, just the technical founder and one remove dev. I probably should have taken that as a red flag, as I discovered after working with them that the founder had cycled through many other devs on his team over the years and been unable to find people he works well with despite the business side growing. In other words, he was consistently finding/creating conflicts with his dev team & either firing them or like me they left.

The 2nd company was definitely more of a calculated risk, where I knew they had zero product & zero dev talent but thought it would be interesting to be the manager and put together a team of my own. I just didn't anticipate that after actually delivering, shipping and hiring a high performing team member (and unfortunately hiring one other team member we had to let go for performance reasons). I would then be let go rather than my contributions appreciated. Despite hearing from all sides we were on a great trajectory.

softwaredoug
As a former consultant, payment issues are rife everywhere. The startup issues you describe I’ve seen cross cultures. My last company decided to no longer do work for startups because of their shaky finances and sketchy practices.

The big companies have their own issues too. I once had a large client decide suddenly “we decided not to pay our bills in December” - all to make the CFOs numbers look good. Of course our direct customer, the group we worked with, was just as aghast as we were about our non payment. But it was pretty much “we dare you to try to sue us” from procurement. Our direct customer worked tirelessly to get us paid, to no avail. They did eventually pay in January, but it created a cash flow headache.

For this reason (and some other ones) I accepted I’d rather be an employee with reliable paycheck and benefits than the difficult conversation about late payment always looming.

Also I’m not sure it matters, but NYC has a specific law that protects freelancers specifically:

https://www1.nyc.gov/site/dca/about/freelance-isnt-free-act....

blackcats
Many European countries have some kind of “safety net”, so people can be seen as disposable.

First client was scamming you. Send invoices early and regularly. No pay, no work

ritchiea
Here non-EU foreigners aren't eligible to receive social benefits like unemployment income until after we've been here and paying into the social safety system for 2 years. So the 2nd company should have known they were letting me go without any government support coming. And it's not so much the money that's the issue, I have another freelance/consulting job lined up starting soon. It's just the frustration of investing myself in the work to only get in return broken promises and being replaced despite very positive feedback.

As for the first company, they paid the invoices, just were incredibly unprofessional about it. Including insulting me for "daring" to invoice them for full time work at the agreed up on rates. I got my money but they irreparably damaged the relationship.

seekingcharlie
You're a freelancer though.. why would you expect government support or benefits when you're not an employee? That's all part of risk in being self-employed and why you must charge a lot more to safeguard you. I would focus on the lessons from your experience - don't get so invested and make sure your rates are high enough.
ritchiea
I wasn't a freelancer at the 2nd company, I signed a full time employment contract with the expectation I would be employed indefinitely as long as I fulfilled my duties.
0xfaded
I worked in SF for 4 years and then founded a robotics startup in Denmark. (I'm originally Australian).

The biggest difference is where startups get their funding from.

I worked at 2 startups in the bay area, both raised low millions in seed and generally paid lowish market rates with decent equity.

In Europe, most financing comes from grants. Behind the scenes, it was likely your position was was subsidised over a fixed time period, and after six months the cost of firing you goes up significantly. My guess is that they got additional subsidies for the new person, and therefore let you go. It's easier to get subsidies for new positions, and there are rules on overlapping funding that make it difficult to keep someone under continuous subsidy during breaks between subsequent applications.

Having been on both sides of the Atlantic, if you have a choice, go to the US.

nextos
What were the pros and cons of starting up a company in Denmark?

Since you were doing robotics, did you choose to be based in Odense?

nextos
In my opinion, and I say this as a European, technical roles are usually seen as disposable and replaceable here.

It's a deep cultural problem, and it's compromising innovation. Obviously, there are many exceptions. And things are changing, albeit too slowly.

aprdm
I had a terrible experience in Berlin where a small start up pulled a job offer from me 2 days before the start date. I had already sold all my stuff in my current country and had the first month of rent paid...

At least they paid me 1/2 a month salary for the trouble after I mentioned suing them...

fab1an
Not a lawyer, but in German labor law an agreement to hire usually already constitutes a contract that you can't just cancel - they should have probably paid a lot more to get out of this!
rajacombinator
In Europe, you’re a code monkey. In the US, you’re still a code monkey. But the monkey market is more competitive. Europe is just not a serious place.