I have no idea whether Europeans work harder than Americans, but I do want to say that you can't extrapolate the overall work ethic of America by looking at the SF tech world. It's a very, very small (and very privileged) microcosm of the country.
> In SF you frequently hear big tech people talking how hard they work, while they queue 30mins for a coffee at Blue Bottle and chitchatting there for another 20mins.
Might be true for an established rest and vest company or position like sales or marketing, but the article seems to be wanting EU to be easier for startups. Not a single startup has that culture, especially when you’re building it from the ground up. You’re most definitely working 1.5-2x the hours as a regular job when it comes to starting a company and making it successful, even as an employee.
> Americans love their hero-arcs so much that people manage to spin anything into a “coming from nothing story” – even if they got their first investments from their uncle and worked for free in the “garage” of their parents multi-million-dollar house in Palo Alto.
It's a bit unfair to talk about the garages in Palo Alto being attached to "multi-million-dollar" houses. When the people starting Apple, HP, Google and Facebook took over a garage, the places were solidly middle class.
Even now, the price tags distort our perceptions. I've heard some venture capitalists say that most of their investments would go for salaries that would be turned over to the real estate world.
I mean, I live in London in the biggest place I've ever lived in (700sqft!) since moving out of my parents home. Having a garage would add another £200/month easily. Having that amount of spare room in a tech hub is a massive advantage!
Apple didn't start in New York, which was a major hub and where space was at way too much of a premium for teenagers to have free reign to build things in a garage. It started in a middle class suburb. The area later became very expensive, largely due to the success of so many startups.
Move to a suburb of Birmingham or Manchester, an hour outside of the city (just as SV was from SF, and then there will be plenty of room for teenagers to build things in garages.
Heck you can't even generalize about American tech industry and only talk about SF tech world. Granted that generalization is done in America too.
It's always a bit of a frustration running into constant comparisons, managers who want to emulate processes, and such when "Hey, you know what, we're not them... and we're doing well being ourselves." Not that you immediately dismiss new ideas because they seem to be from there, but don't just adopt them arbitrarily or operate like them too.
I have a sneaky suspicion that "most" of the American tech industry is NOT at all like SF / valley tech world.
am pretty sure that the post also acknowledged that w/ "I don’t disagree. SF is a unique place. We currently don’t try to get on the level of SF. We are trying not to fall behind China, India and random second- and third-degree hubs in the US."
What is not mentioned in the article is that productivity is much more important than the number of hours worked. By productivity, I mean output per hour worked, which is usually an estimation made from the total output of the country (GDP) and the numbers of hours worked by the working population.
Well, that's a very inadequate productivity metric imho.
How can two people with exactly the same output (say two doctors working a shift with similar number of patience) lead one to be 20 times more productive because one bills $400 per hour and the other makes that number in a week (such as in say Turkey).
You would usually use Purchasing Power Parity (PPP) such that comparison between countries is possible, because as you pointed, comparisons in absolute values between countries are not useful.
It is hours worked, not productivity. If a shopkeeper takes a three hour lunch and sits in the sun in front of his shop half the time but stays open from 08:00-20:00 according to the stats he’s working 12h days.
Which is correct, in any case. If he isn't doing anything else but "tending the business" even when there's no business because there are no clients, then he is "working".
Stereotypes aren't necessarily true. There's for example a stereotype about Mexicans being lazy, but anyone who's actually taken the time to look at the statistics - and gotten to know any number of Mexicans, for that matter - knows that to be a complete fabrication.
I seem to remember that one issue was that warmer climates had higher infestations of hookworms which manifests in ways that reinforce a "lazy and stupid" sterotype.
Lotta tech offshoring to Mexico these days over India, PI, etc. Perception is that the Indians generally get their skills through diploma mills while the Mexicans were generally more reliable and qualified. Better overlap with timezones -- Mexico City is on Central Time, and it's not hard to open a shop in Baja for Pacific Time -- and you also have access to the NAFTA TN Visa if you want to bring people across the border; no H1B visas headaches.
(Some) Europeans work more hours, but less efficiently
Go to a supermarket in Germany, see how quick a cashier rings your order. (yes self-checkout does exist)
And this is not only a North/South (or West) divide. Germans have their way of wasting "work energy" in some micro-bureaucracies in one way or another (and still they are more efficient than the average worker)
Some other southern countries will waste more time doing some things while in some other areas they will be the fastest/least-bs players around.
> But Americans definitely love talking about how hard they work; way more than we do.
In my experience, American and European software developers work similarly "hard", that is not explanatory. There are noticeable cultural differences in how they spend their working time.
American software developers have a tendency toward more ambitious and therefore risky solutions to problems, which have a higher variance in outcomes. European software development seems to gravitate toward what is seen as the safe conservative solution always. You may find yourself working more hours to deal with the risks that materialize as an American but sometimes that ambition pays off and you make a significant leap forward, and I suspect there is a higher sense of satisfaction with this result when it pans out. Particularly in the west coast tech cities, tolerance for both the risk of ambitious approaches and dealing with the consequences is dialed up anomalously high, that is just the water you swim in.
With the higher risk tolerance, both cultural and what the business allows, comes a requirement to be willing to work extra hours when needed for when it blows up in your face. This is sporadic, most days they don't work any harder than Europeans. Many Americans value the freedom to take ambitious risks more than they hate the downsides of that risk-taking.
To be fair, the author wrote about tech workers in SV specifically, not about the "overall work with of America" (which btw is a continent, not a country).
The hero arc story is true and has to do with large Protestant population.
they are talking about the americas: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Americas which is sometimes called america. (mostly in non english native countries i suspect)
アメリカ (the romanization of America) is also how the country is referred to in Japanese. There are many languages (including English) that use America as the common name for the United States of America.
A notable exception, and where much of the disagreement comes from is Spanish. I generally try to follow the convention of the language I'm speaking.
No. In English, "America" refers to the country, "North America" and "South America" each refer to a continent and "the Americas" refers to the two continents.
I can't scroll this webpage to read it unless I plug my laptop in. Scroll events have a lag time measured in whole seconds, then the page scrolls down by either a fraction of a line or by multiple paragraphs, so I can't keep track of where I was reading. Plugging in my laptop, which changes the power mode, makes the webpage barely usable, but my cooling fans are spun up to full speed now. This is using Chrome on a Dell XPS 13 with an 11th gen Core i7 and 16GB RAM.
For what's it worth, the page is unreadable without JavaScript disabled on an overclocked desktop 7900X. I think it's the slowest one by far among all the crap I've seen in two decades of browsing the web.
It worked without issue on Firefox 125.0.2 on Windows 10, but I have uMatrix installed and didn't allow anything beyond the defaults on the page.
Edit: Went back and tried allowing the firebaseio script, which added some blur to the top and the bottom of the page as well as some light blue elements to the background, but didn't otherwise noticeably affect performance. But it is possible those elements were added via some normally 3D accelerated operation that may not work on all browsers and be painfully slow when not accelerated.
These e/acc types are insufferable and if anything "SF" has been ruined by them. I know I'll get downvoted or flagged given this is HN, but there's more to life than startups and private equity[0]. Let's leave Europe alone, huh?
When you're rich you can have untouchable bombers and precision artillery destroy your genocidal enemies from hundreds of miles away. When you're poor you end up suffering from bombings and cruise missile attacks.
When you're rich you have AC. When poor you die in heat waves. When rich you get to integrate immigrants to the point. When poor neo-Nazi politicians stir up trouble as they languish in poverty and squalor.
When rich you get to crush pandemics. When poor you have to pretend they aren't happening.
Europe was not poorer in the 2000's. This is just cope about the failure to handle the financial crisis and COVID properly.
US here, and I've heard all of them from Americans and Europeans.
Other one I've heard is that if you start a company and it fails, at least in Silicon Valley they ask "So, what are you making next?". But, in Europe they imply that you apparently are not the right kind of person to be starting companies.
> In SF you frequently hear big tech people talking how hard they work, while they queue 30mins for a coffee at Blue Bottle and chitchatting there for another 20mins.
God people still haven't figured out how knowledge work and work ethic there is illustrated when you are giving your brain to your employer instead of your body. Some of these workers are thinking about work problems literally 24 hours a day, and come up with solutions in their dreams, but because they aren't literally chained to their desk writing lines of code every single second they are observed they are lazy slackers.
Can't stand this crap and it's just gonna get worse. Unless executives see you in pain, or are forced to sacrifice something you value like attending your kids piano recital they don't beleive you are dedicated enough to the cause like they are.
I don't believe it's black and white. Sure, some workplaces are too demanding, but in other cases, people are taking advantage.
My observations (in the USA) over the past few years suggest that most people who were hired around 2019-2021 when hiring technical staff was super difficult, have an absolutely bonkers level of entitlement. People are making 200k a year, and bristle at the implication that it's not acceptable for them to be completely absent (from their fully remote jobs) and unreachable all day without warning. None of the nearshore workers I've worked with exhibit this attitude -- it's only Americans, and only the engineers. They assume that the company wouldn't dare risk losing them by calling them out on this, and that if they did lose their job it's going to be trivial to get an equal or better one anyway, so why should they do anything that might cause any stress? Why should they have a sense of urgency? "I'll get on it when I get back from the beach, the waves are really good this morning." That's the work ethic. I'm not saying it's everyone, of course, but it's a common attitude. Oh, and all these people have incentive stock options, but don't seem to really believe they matter, so they are deeply disappointed with like a 4% raise, thinking a 10-20% annual raise makes sense. Overall the attitude isn't one of "i'm going to do everything I can to make us successful so my equity will make me rich" it's "I'm going to maximize my cash compensation and minimize my hours spent on work until it's not fun anymore, then on to the next."
By the way, it is their right to act this way if they want, but I'm pretty sure the bottom 50% of US engineers (in terms of ambition) are going to find themselves replaced by nearshore talent that works harder than they do and doesn't even think hard work is an injustice.
Yes there are entitled children who will get a wake up call, a lot of people were openly rooting for a major recession in part because they WANTED that wakeup call to come very badly, not just executives but their co-workers who were driven crazy. I thought that was messed up but I get it, it seems unfair. They aren't doing their fair share, very common human emotion in social groups.
But that sentence I highlighted just illustrates the thinking at the executive level (writer of this post is a CTO/Founder) and it drives me mad, and I believe the primary desire for in-office work. Creating a sustainable working environment where you deal with business problems is not the goal, the goal is to squeeze every ounce of labor you can for the money you pay and with no real idea how much work goes into the job, what's actually hard v. not, the only thing they can do is observe and bristle at stupid metrics like "how long is that coffee break."
>That's the work ethic. I'm not saying it's everyone, of course, but it's a common attitude
So, why are those people not being fired? Because it sounds like they are judging their contribution to their employer and their own bargaining power exactly right if they are not being fired.
Somehow I don't think many people living in the US want the paltry salaries of the EU and the burdensome and restrictive regulations that inhibit innovation
A lot of the "Europe is bleh" rhetoric is about Western Europe - specifically France, Germany, and the UK (if they make it harder for European and Asian immigrants to come).
The Eastern and Central European countries have always felt much more dynamic and open to work hard.
There's a reason why the countries on the lefthand side of the graph provided are also the ones with some of the better innovation industries in Europe.
There is still much work to be done in the CEE, but I'd be fairly confident that they'll become truly developed first world countries in the next 10-15 years, and some already have such as Czechia.
Andreas is exactly right imo - his points about simplifying incorporation (there's a reason why CH does so well) and normalizing English (there's a reason why every developing Asian country from India to Vietnam to China is pushing English fluency, and lots of the CEE countries) will help.
German, French, and British government officials are the worst to deal with imo - they will bend over the barrel for local conglomerates but ignore domestic challengers. Datadog could have been a fully French company, but the French ecosystem stifled them.
Also, ime - Western Europeans seem to idolize Finance, Law, Management, and Civil Service careers more than innovation or entrepreneurship, unlike their CEE (Germany and Austria excluded) peers.
> The Eastern and Central European countries have always felt much more dynamic and open to work hard.
Yet as soon as they try to take advantage of their position (via e.g. tax breaks) they'll get punished (eg 15% corporate tax rate, what happened to Ireland, Cyprus). Not being a single economy truly prevents competition for capital. So old money stays put where it is , new money is not allowed.
Well, Cyprus absolutely needed to be cracked down (lots of shady shit going on there), but Ireland's absolutely gotten the short end of the stick, and I won't be surprised if something similar happens to Poland or Romania in a couple years.
I am in the US, but I work with a lot of people out places like Romania, Moldova, Serbia, etc. and I agree those folks as a rule work hard, and also have a very high capacity for technical work.
Their salaries are no where near those of Western Europe or the US, and not because of lack of ability but rather more macroeconomic issues in the regions. But a lot of technology solutions utilized by the world quietly get built out of there.
In all honesty, tech people in EE show up to the office at 11 and take a legit one hour plus lunch break to eat proper food at the restaurant together. To ensure team cohesion of course. I'm not sure if that counts as a hard work or the result is simply better because you hire smart people and can't micromanage from SF due to 10h time zone difference.
>German, French, and British government officials are the worst to deal with imo
I would dread dealing with my countries government anything if I have time pressure. The result could be anything. In Western Europe I know that things will be done even if slow (ish).
> tech people in EE show up to the office at 11 and take a legit one hour plus lunch break to eat proper food at the restaurant together
Let's be honest, most techies do that from India to Israel to Poland to US.
That said, Eastern Europeans are fine with occasionally partaking in crunchtime.
Meanwhile, when I dealt with our Western European sales and engineering teams they would all ignore messages even if a Tier 1 critical customer's shit hit the fan.
WLB is critical, but there are occasional exceptions that need to be made.
Why should I pay the same amount that I would in Eastern Europe, Israel, or India for someone who won't help firefight.
If you are not providing critical infrastructure and people will not die, it's just you losing money, because your business is structured in a wrong way. You did it to yourself and should not expect people on salary to bear the cost of your wrong decisions.
If you do provide critical infrastructure and people will die, it's also not my problem, because there will be a law requiring you to hire an SRE and a regulator to fine you to hell for not doing a good job too.
Being a founder is your 24h job and you made a gamble to make big money in a capitalistic game. I didn't, I'm fine with making 5 liters of borscht on weekend and eating it through most of the week. It's not even WLB, it's not what I have signed up in this life.
You're entitled to your opinion, just like I am entitled not hire you and hire an Israeli, Czech, Pole, or Indian for the same salary (and I have).
Btw, I'm in the cybersecurity space, so a Tier 1 escalation generally means nation state attack or business stopping attack on a customer.
> You did it to yourself and should not expect people on salary to bear the cost of your wrong decisions.
Plenty of escalations are due to bugs. It's good to operate on a blameless model, but if I followed your model I'd gladly put the blame on engineers like you if the cause was found to be a dependency issue or a misconfiguration issue.
Ofc, in the real world peers and I operate on a blameless model. Shit happens, but we need to fix our mistakes asap if they are made.
Sure, escalations are result of mistakes people make. This is why businesses exists -- they have processes, quality control and all that stuff that ensures reliable outcome while consisting of individually unreliable things. That's the whole point and that's what you are supposed to get right. There are different strategies, and hiring people from exploitable jurisdictions is one. As all obvious strategies it has downsides and it will also stop working at some point in future which may be irrelevant for you.
> In all honesty, tech people in EE show up to the office at 11 and take a legit one hour plus lunch break to eat proper food at the restaurant together.
Ah yes, the "work hard and the boss will notice" meme.
I have zero incentive to work hard.
1. My salary is mostly tied to the market as a whole and particular company's performance, personal performance is the smallest bit of the equation.
2. Changing a variable from true to false on the personal request of someone very important will give me far more visibility than spending nights doing some work that only one other person is vaguely aware of, even if that work is super important. And visibility means chances for promotion.
3. Most companies are inherently undemocratic and employees have no input on decision making, therefore why would they care.
4. Most companies have proven that they're not afraid of screwing over their employees given the opportunity, so why wouldn't it work the other way around too.
5. In most cases, the reward for completing work early is more work. The punishment for being lazy is having free time.
I'm sorry but that's the corporate reality. I'd love to be a part of a team that works hard together to achieve great things, but that's not how the world works.
Being able to come to the office three hours late and leave two hours early without anyone complaining loud enough to get me fired is a much bigger job perk than Pizza Fridays.
You still need English fluency as a dev, at least in my sector (Enterprise/Infra/Cyber SaaS). Much of the Chinese tech scene is still active in transnational organizations like the CNCF and make some very cool additions (eg. Karmada)
This misses the big one: California bans non-competes, bans anti-moonlighting clauses and lets you quit with no notice. If you’re at an EU company and need to give 3+ months notice to quit that will discourage starting your own company on the side.
They could however do a restructuring, eliminating the exact role one's skillset matches. You get a couple of months of notice period which is no different from a severance package.
I'm not trying to be obtuse, but at what point do the worker protections discourage employment? If I have to pay the huge employee fees associated with the EU, I may just go hire someone in Asia.
From almost the beginning itself. Whenever you hire, you have to consider how hard it would be to get rid of the employee for whatever reason (underperformance, changing business needs etc.)
The solution to people’s income instability is government subsidy. Levying the costs of this risk on individual businesses both entrenches existing large players and disincentivizes new businesses.
The problem is that it doesn't matter who pays the cost. Let's say I live in the US where the social safety net isn't large and companies can fire me at will. Let's say I'm also competent and driven. Logically I focus on money because having a large bank account is the only safety net I can ever get. Since everyone understands the lack of a safety net trying to get large amounts of money is socially acceptable. Now lets' say I got lucky and never had to use that safety net but until one day I decide to start a business which means I will make 0 income for a year. Now I have money to cover my expenses as I try my hand at running a business. But given a strong safety net it'd be illogical to keep that much money around unless you're paranoid. You enjoy life, go on vacations, etc.
Granted, the hoarding of money and drive to greater wealth eventually leads to a capitalistic dystopias with massive wealth inequality. But you get lots of startups!
People always bring this up but in my 15 years of working in tech I've never seen anyone fired on the spot unless they really fuck up. Like cause the company serious financial or legal harm kind of fuck up. The tech layoffs get a lot of attention, but that's a tiny, tiny fraction of the US's tech labor pool and full of some of the most privileged employees of an already salary privileged set of workers.
In reality what happens is you get 3 months notice of a firing in the form of PIP. Perhaps if you work at Walmart you can get fired on the spot, but honestly in industries where this is a common occupance, it's also well known that the employees also just don't give any notice at all either. They just stop showing up, maybe won't even give a 1 second of notice.
Personally, I'm happy for at will as someone who has had a shitty. Shitty job that ate at my mental health. I just had to say "today is my last day" and I fucking left and that was that. Got a final pay check and paperwork for continuing my benefits if I wanted them and this was at a random company in a labor hostile state. In some place like California, they would have been required to pay my last paycheck that moment instead of when the never payment day was.
I've seen employees work contacts that mandate notices by punishing you with legally enforced fines and whatnot and I just cannot see the benefit of being forced to give notice. It's just encourages your employer to make your life hell in that period if you're on bad terms and you had a good reason for leaving.
Right to work laws can get bent though. That's active underminement of unions for no benefit at all for an employee.
India is very different than Europe. It would be difficult to attribute outcomes between the 2 countries to just this single difference without considering the many other differences.
Absolutely true, but I'm just pointing out that non-competes are not a major precursor for Europe's laggardness in innovation.
If all of the EU's innovation system is sclerotic compared to Illinois or MA or India where non-competes are vindictively enforced, then there is a major issue.
India’s where offshoring from the us is. That maintains demand. India is also still industrializing. Expect India to look more like China - with similar economic pitfalls - in the next few decades. Some companies have already begun pulling from India because of costs and poor performance negating the labor savings. Some companies have figured this out and the non competes create a captive workforce but others are just wasting money trying to emulate.
> Expect India to look more like China - with similar economic pitfalls - in the next few decades
Pretty much this. The best way to operate in India is to use a mixed Chinese and Israeli mindset tbh.
> India’s where offshoring from the us is
True, but there is a massive change now from the 2000s where it's just BPO. Literally the crown jewels of enterprise and deep tech and increasingly innovated and designed by the India teams directly (eg. the cybersecurity backbone of a major 5G telco in the US, the Apple mobile chips, Google Pay, etc).
Indians are argumentative and sales driven like Israelis, but you still need to operate the same way you did in China in the 2000s, with local contacts and recognize that you might get scammed if you don't do your due diligence correctly, but if you make good friends with local partners or parties you will get the red carpet and PLIs.
Cadre-driven parties like the BJP, DMK, BJD, BRS/TRS, etc are organizationally similar to the CCP but other parties are more loose and disorganized, so having a local partner act as your firewall helps massively by pointing you where to invest, just like in China, where most western companies invested in Guangdong, Zhejiang, etc but ignored Hubei or Guangxi.
There's a reason why Israeli, Chinese, Japanese, and Korean companies tend to be fairly successful with their India ventures, because they're used to this kind of an operating model, and most American companies tend to have a first-gen Indian American or Indian educated in America managing operations with India.
It's pretty common in Germany. Three months is standard; longer is possible. I worked as a researcher for a German university and had a six-month notice period. You can imagine how productive most people are during that time.
I had it in two last jobs in Germany (and had to wait them and also when we hire and do roadmaps we know that the person will not start before the next or the quarter after the next) as all of my coworkers, except few. These were executive and had 6 months notice periods.
Not that I complain, six months of rest and vest life wasn’t bad :-)
The notice period in Germany works both ways. Your employer must meet the notice period, and so do you.
You can ask your employer to let you go sooner if you want to leave, and they may ask you to leave sooner if they want you to leave (and pay you as an incentive). But it has to be by mutual agreement.
Usually they’d let you go sooner rather than later because they know you’ve already left mentally and they don’t want to pay for that. But they might also not, not necessarily out of spite but because they have a deadline and they think they still need your warm body.
It's reasonably common in the UK for senior staff (although 1 month is standard), but it's often negotiable. It's not law though, it's just the standard work contract.
3 months notice tends to apply to people who have been there a hell of a long time. At least in the UK.
My notice period is 3 months. I've also got 2 months of long service leave built up so in effect it's 1 month (as I can just take the 2 months notice)
On the flip side if they make me redundant I get the best part of 18 months salary after paying taxes, and at least 5 months pay after they say its happening where I can look for another job.
But OK, UK shot itself in the head with Brexit. Ireland speaks english natively, has low taxes (especially corporate ones), is easy to incorporate there, so how does notice apply?
> Employees who have been in continuous employment for at least 13 weeks are obliged to provide their employer with one week’s notice of termination of employment. If a greater amount of notice is specified in the employee’s contract of employment, then this notice must be given.
Oh no, a whole week!
> Ten to fifteen years: Six weeks
Of course your contract may be different, but there's no real legal impediment here.
> 3 months notice tends to apply to people who have been there a hell of a long time. At least in the UK.
Increasingly not the case. I'm seeing an awful lot of "One month in the first three months, three months thereafter". It used to be pretty universally one month.
> If you’re at an EU company and need to give 3+ months notice to quit that will discourage starting your own company on the side.
Notice to quit given by the employee is often the same time period as notice for termination given by the employer: what's good for the goose is good for the gander.
Does the data presented here distinguish between full-time and part-time employment? Or hourly and salaried employment? I wasn’t able to find any information other than “hours worked per person employed”, which seems a rather vague statistic to be used to support any claim.
Reading between the lines, I do not think it distinguishes between full-time and part-time employment: "In Europe, employees tend to work fewer hours than in the US, partly because there are more paid holidays, the typical working week of a full-time employee is shorter and there is a larger share of part-time workers than in the US."
A lot of people totally work 4 days a week here and it's considered full time contract. Standard language in a contract at the company I'm working for is 32 hours per week, so everybody doing full 5 days a week is having a coefficient applied already.
Wake up from what? I couldn’t find the thesis in the first few paragraphs…
I keep seeing more and more from business types in the EU salivating over US business conditions: weaker labor laws, weaker regulations, record profits, etc. From the US it seems like the EU is doing fine and enviable from an employee perspective (except wages).
> From the US it seems like the EU is doing fine and enviable from an employee perspective (except wages).
„Except the wages“ is kind of the problem. The source of that issue is the ability to raise capital, which is kind of addressed in the article, if you’d bothered to read before commenting.
I didn’t find that in the article, but that’s besides the point: wages across eu are lower for tech work and I don’t think it’s access to capital. It’s not like startups are the only high payers.
I think that's the point of this article to be honest.
If we lived in a fair and just world, the EU having the 4th largest economy doesn't seem like a bad thing. Going by numbers alone China (1.8bn) and India (1.5bn) are much more populace than the EU (450mln).
However, I would would probably side with the author and personally much prefer a group of liberal democracies following the rule of law to always be on top. If the world needs to bow to autocracies then we will have a bad time, Russia is just the prelude.
I kind of agree with you, and (as a hobbyist linguist) I believe a diversity of languages is a beautiful thing, but it creates unnecessary friction for business and about everything. Europe really needs a unified language -- it could be English, French, German, or even Interlingua or Esperanto.
Lingua franca really matters. China, for example, didn't have a unified spoken language until about 100 years ago. However, Mandarin is today universally understood and spoken in the country. And the result? You only to know one language, and you can have access to one of the largest markets in the world. Alas, the same could not be said for Europe.
(In fact, Europe needs a unified language if people are serious about getting rid of English and the Anglo-American hegemony, because each smaller language really cannot fight English now.)
"If you go to the south of France – our hope and prayers in the global AI race – and order a coffee there is a chance that the waitress doesn’t understand the word “coffee”, can’t explain you what’s in the salad – happened to me twice."
Oh they'll understand. They will just pretend not to. It's France.
Oh no! Someone in a foreign country did not make any more effort than the author did to learn a foreign language! Not once, but twice! That's it, I'm never leaving San Francisco again.
And as for your snark, no, many French people do not speak English, and a fair number resent Americans going around like they own the place without making even a cursory attempt at being polite.
Best way for a native English speaker to get someone in France to speak English is to speak French to them.
I speak French, German, and a small amount of Greek (enough to order a coffee and read a map). That's no use when I go to Italy or Spain or Poland or Latvia or Sweden of course, so we just speak English.
The big difference between europe and america is the market. The US is a homogenous culture with a single language and single desires with 350 million people. You can launch a product in the US based on US culture and assumptions and reach a massive economy
Launch it in Belgium and you've got a fragmented market. Not just the language, but also the culture -- expectations in Belgium, Romania and Norway are all very different.
My wife and I are from the U.S. She's from Belarus, but has been in the country for 30 years. We went to France about 10 years ago. I was semi-expecting the stereotype (rude, arrogant), but everybody we met was nice. One guy at the hotel seemed standoff-ish at first, but he was very friendly by the time we left a week later. Pretty much everybody we interacted with was pleasant and helpful. We tried to use the few French words we knew (thank you, please, hello, goodbye type of thing), but for the most part we had to speak English. I think almost everybody we interacted with spoke English, at least a little. This was in Paris mostly, so maybe that's not representative. I was generally impressed with the people.
Evidence is lacking and the question is so vague that it isn’t worth arguing about. Both “Europe” and “the US” are too large and amorphous to usefully compare in an online discussion.
I'm surprised that most of the comments seem to focus on other comparisons of EU and US, there's very little on those two points.
Personally, I think that English as the lingua franca makes sense in many contexts, since that's pretty much the case in IT already.
For example, trying to translate various terms in any given language from English usually causes inconvenience and confusion (everyone needs to know the localized version and then translate it back into English to find literature etc.). Therefore, it makes sense to teach everyone English.
In CEE (excluding Germany and Austria) sure, but not as much in Western Europe (eg. France or Germany).
I've had an easy time managing Eastern European employees in English, but Western European ones sucked at the language, and always had a bit of a complex surrounding English.
> For example, trying to translate various terms in any given language from English usually causes inconvenience and confusion (everyone needs to know the localized version and then translate it back into English to find literature etc.). Therefore, it makes sense to teach everyone English.
Similarly, translating a lot of terms from German or Russian to English often causes inconvenience and confusion. So better learn German and Russian. :-)
> Similarly, translating a lot of terms from German or Russian to English often causes inconvenience and confusion. So better learn German and Russian. :-)
If the programming language key words that I needed to know used those languages, as did all of the documentation and forums, conference videos and literature, that's exactly what I'd do. But somehow those aren't the languages that everyone uses, nor is something like Chinese (and its dialects) which has a lot of users, but isn't as geographically widespread. Maybe people have also settled on English because it has a somewhat low barrier to entry as well.
I guess it's the same as needing to know at least some latin in the natural sciences, because otherwise something like naming bones when talking to a foreign colleague would get awkward, fast.
There is a big difference between Europeans in Europe and Europeans in the US - Europeans in the US readily point this out. The idea that Europeans are somehow genetically less suited to building tech companies is an obvious strawman. The reality is that Europeans in America are, like all immigrants, heavily self-selected.
The article also does not mention the huge difference in compensation for technology talent between the US and Europe. As long as that gap exists, top European talent will continue leaking across the Atlantic.
> the huge difference in compensation for technology talent
This isn't a single lever that can be pulled independently. You need highly fluid labor markets that force companies to pay competitive efficiency wages (i.e. fewer/weaker/no unions), competitive and innovative companies, lower regulation and government bureaucratic interference, ambitious and career focused labor force, etc. etc.
It's a chicken-and-egg problem that, at its root, stems from culture (IMHO).
>> If every day is 1% harder for you than your competitor who will win? Your competitor. And in global markets where frequently 1-2 companies become the dominant player in a market this means you will not be a bit smaller. You will fight for scraps.
Abandon all hope. The race to the bottom is over. Any country not bowing at the feet of ever tech founder will be relegated to third-world status by the end of the decade. Canada, Finland, Australia, the US east coast ... all are doomed unless they drop taxes and abandon all hope of regulating anything. But that just isn't how the world functions. All those countries that are "hard" on new tech surprisingly keep ticking along year after year despite the ire of tech founders. Think London/Paris/Berlin/Vancouver are too hard on business? Ok. Leave. Make room for all the people that are ready and happy to do business in those cities.
I see it more as the paragraph after that explains: that EU sells itself as a single market, yet there are different rules depending where in that "single market" you sit. In the US you kinda have the same issue, except that since the US is bigger geographically, you can create hubs that mostly share the same rules.
Following this guy's logic, a country which the Western world has historically shunned, aggressively avoided investment in, and generally turned its back to for decades, Russia, should have completely folded and collapsed after being completely choked off from the world by sanctions imposed on it years ago.
> Western world has historically shunned, aggressively avoided investment in, and generally turned its back to for decades
Before 2020-22, Russia was a major tech hub in Europe, and most of that was because Russian founders would incorporate in the UK or Netherlands, but operate with a subsidiary within Russia.
As a startup founder in Germany, I am very unhappy about all the friction. „Just Fuck off“ is very unhelpful as an advice, or even as a basis for discussion, and mostly unrelated to the article posted.
Marginal tax rate of 45% before 5.5% solidarity tax and 8%-9% church tax is why my HNW friends in Germany moved to Switzerland. There is also an exit tax if you try to leave the plantation.
And the 45% is at a high threshold (much higher than Ireland for example) though 42% will kick in at a lower % (and the 5.5% is a % on tax, not on the full income, which is a non-obvious aspect of it)
It will be interesting to see what happens when the US loses the single market due to these state internet regulations, while the EU eventually figures it out.
> In SF you frequently hear big tech people talking how hard they work, while they queue 30mins for a coffee at Blue Bottle and chitchatting there for another 20mins.
Gotta be the Googlers. Elon and Zuck have shown the light to most tech cos and they are emulating to one degree or another. But Google seems unwilling/unable to deal effectively with the WLB'ers. After all, how can they conduct all of their political activities if work is getting in the way?
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[ 6.3 ms ] story [ 248 ms ] thread> US folks love talking about how hard they work. And honestly with service workers and blue collars I believe it. But not in tech.
Might be true for an established rest and vest company or position like sales or marketing, but the article seems to be wanting EU to be easier for startups. Not a single startup has that culture, especially when you’re building it from the ground up. You’re most definitely working 1.5-2x the hours as a regular job when it comes to starting a company and making it successful, even as an employee.
> Americans love their hero-arcs so much that people manage to spin anything into a “coming from nothing story” – even if they got their first investments from their uncle and worked for free in the “garage” of their parents multi-million-dollar house in Palo Alto.
Even now, the price tags distort our perceptions. I've heard some venture capitalists say that most of their investments would go for salaries that would be turned over to the real estate world.
Move to a suburb of Birmingham or Manchester, an hour outside of the city (just as SV was from SF, and then there will be plenty of room for teenagers to build things in garages.
It's always a bit of a frustration running into constant comparisons, managers who want to emulate processes, and such when "Hey, you know what, we're not them... and we're doing well being ourselves." Not that you immediately dismiss new ideas because they seem to be from there, but don't just adopt them arbitrarily or operate like them too.
I have a sneaky suspicion that "most" of the American tech industry is NOT at all like SF / valley tech world.
How can two people with exactly the same output (say two doctors working a shift with similar number of patience) lead one to be 20 times more productive because one bills $400 per hour and the other makes that number in a week (such as in say Turkey).
That's a 40x difference in productivity.
Stereotypes are just stupid and lazy thinking.
(Some) Europeans work more hours, but less efficiently
Go to a supermarket in Germany, see how quick a cashier rings your order. (yes self-checkout does exist)
And this is not only a North/South (or West) divide. Germans have their way of wasting "work energy" in some micro-bureaucracies in one way or another (and still they are more efficient than the average worker)
Some other southern countries will waste more time doing some things while in some other areas they will be the fastest/least-bs players around.
> But Americans definitely love talking about how hard they work; way more than we do.
Can't disagree with this.
American software developers have a tendency toward more ambitious and therefore risky solutions to problems, which have a higher variance in outcomes. European software development seems to gravitate toward what is seen as the safe conservative solution always. You may find yourself working more hours to deal with the risks that materialize as an American but sometimes that ambition pays off and you make a significant leap forward, and I suspect there is a higher sense of satisfaction with this result when it pans out. Particularly in the west coast tech cities, tolerance for both the risk of ambitious approaches and dealing with the consequences is dialed up anomalously high, that is just the water you swim in.
With the higher risk tolerance, both cultural and what the business allows, comes a requirement to be willing to work extra hours when needed for when it blows up in your face. This is sporadic, most days they don't work any harder than Europeans. Many Americans value the freedom to take ambitious risks more than they hate the downsides of that risk-taking.
The hero arc story is true and has to do with large Protestant population.
i was referring to this btw: America" (which btw is a continent, not a country)
A notable exception, and where much of the disagreement comes from is Spanish. I generally try to follow the convention of the language I'm speaking.
North America is a continent. America is absolutely a country. What do you mean?
Edit: Went back and tried allowing the firebaseio script, which added some blur to the top and the bottom of the page as well as some light blue elements to the background, but didn't otherwise noticeably affect performance. But it is possible those elements were added via some normally 3D accelerated operation that may not work on all browsers and be painfully slow when not accelerated.
[0]: https://worldhappiness.report/ed/2023/world-happiness-trust-...
When you're rich you have AC. When poor you die in heat waves. When rich you get to integrate immigrants to the point. When poor neo-Nazi politicians stir up trouble as they languish in poverty and squalor.
When rich you get to crush pandemics. When poor you have to pretend they aren't happening.
Europe was not poorer in the 2000's. This is just cope about the failure to handle the financial crisis and COVID properly.
Other one I've heard is that if you start a company and it fails, at least in Silicon Valley they ask "So, what are you making next?". But, in Europe they imply that you apparently are not the right kind of person to be starting companies.
God people still haven't figured out how knowledge work and work ethic there is illustrated when you are giving your brain to your employer instead of your body. Some of these workers are thinking about work problems literally 24 hours a day, and come up with solutions in their dreams, but because they aren't literally chained to their desk writing lines of code every single second they are observed they are lazy slackers.
Can't stand this crap and it's just gonna get worse. Unless executives see you in pain, or are forced to sacrifice something you value like attending your kids piano recital they don't beleive you are dedicated enough to the cause like they are.
My observations (in the USA) over the past few years suggest that most people who were hired around 2019-2021 when hiring technical staff was super difficult, have an absolutely bonkers level of entitlement. People are making 200k a year, and bristle at the implication that it's not acceptable for them to be completely absent (from their fully remote jobs) and unreachable all day without warning. None of the nearshore workers I've worked with exhibit this attitude -- it's only Americans, and only the engineers. They assume that the company wouldn't dare risk losing them by calling them out on this, and that if they did lose their job it's going to be trivial to get an equal or better one anyway, so why should they do anything that might cause any stress? Why should they have a sense of urgency? "I'll get on it when I get back from the beach, the waves are really good this morning." That's the work ethic. I'm not saying it's everyone, of course, but it's a common attitude. Oh, and all these people have incentive stock options, but don't seem to really believe they matter, so they are deeply disappointed with like a 4% raise, thinking a 10-20% annual raise makes sense. Overall the attitude isn't one of "i'm going to do everything I can to make us successful so my equity will make me rich" it's "I'm going to maximize my cash compensation and minimize my hours spent on work until it's not fun anymore, then on to the next."
By the way, it is their right to act this way if they want, but I'm pretty sure the bottom 50% of US engineers (in terms of ambition) are going to find themselves replaced by nearshore talent that works harder than they do and doesn't even think hard work is an injustice.
But that sentence I highlighted just illustrates the thinking at the executive level (writer of this post is a CTO/Founder) and it drives me mad, and I believe the primary desire for in-office work. Creating a sustainable working environment where you deal with business problems is not the goal, the goal is to squeeze every ounce of labor you can for the money you pay and with no real idea how much work goes into the job, what's actually hard v. not, the only thing they can do is observe and bristle at stupid metrics like "how long is that coffee break."
So, why are those people not being fired? Because it sounds like they are judging their contribution to their employer and their own bargaining power exactly right if they are not being fired.
Somehow I don’t think many people living in the EU want the work/life balance of the US with paltry benefits and no social safety net.
These are not in the article.
> Eastern Europeans work harder than Americans. Even Italians work more hours than Americans. hours worked
> And based on my experience in the US, I honestly think that the US numbers are overstated.
Did you read the article?
The Eastern and Central European countries have always felt much more dynamic and open to work hard.
There's a reason why the countries on the lefthand side of the graph provided are also the ones with some of the better innovation industries in Europe.
There is still much work to be done in the CEE, but I'd be fairly confident that they'll become truly developed first world countries in the next 10-15 years, and some already have such as Czechia.
Andreas is exactly right imo - his points about simplifying incorporation (there's a reason why CH does so well) and normalizing English (there's a reason why every developing Asian country from India to Vietnam to China is pushing English fluency, and lots of the CEE countries) will help.
German, French, and British government officials are the worst to deal with imo - they will bend over the barrel for local conglomerates but ignore domestic challengers. Datadog could have been a fully French company, but the French ecosystem stifled them.
Also, ime - Western Europeans seem to idolize Finance, Law, Management, and Civil Service careers more than innovation or entrepreneurship, unlike their CEE (Germany and Austria excluded) peers.
Yet as soon as they try to take advantage of their position (via e.g. tax breaks) they'll get punished (eg 15% corporate tax rate, what happened to Ireland, Cyprus). Not being a single economy truly prevents competition for capital. So old money stays put where it is , new money is not allowed.
Their salaries are no where near those of Western Europe or the US, and not because of lack of ability but rather more macroeconomic issues in the regions. But a lot of technology solutions utilized by the world quietly get built out of there.
>German, French, and British government officials are the worst to deal with imo
I would dread dealing with my countries government anything if I have time pressure. The result could be anything. In Western Europe I know that things will be done even if slow (ish).
Let's be honest, most techies do that from India to Israel to Poland to US.
That said, Eastern Europeans are fine with occasionally partaking in crunchtime.
Meanwhile, when I dealt with our Western European sales and engineering teams they would all ignore messages even if a Tier 1 critical customer's shit hit the fan.
WLB is critical, but there are occasional exceptions that need to be made.
Why should I pay the same amount that I would in Eastern Europe, Israel, or India for someone who won't help firefight.
If you do provide critical infrastructure and people will die, it's also not my problem, because there will be a law requiring you to hire an SRE and a regulator to fine you to hell for not doing a good job too.
Being a founder is your 24h job and you made a gamble to make big money in a capitalistic game. I didn't, I'm fine with making 5 liters of borscht on weekend and eating it through most of the week. It's not even WLB, it's not what I have signed up in this life.
Btw, I'm in the cybersecurity space, so a Tier 1 escalation generally means nation state attack or business stopping attack on a customer.
> You did it to yourself and should not expect people on salary to bear the cost of your wrong decisions.
Plenty of escalations are due to bugs. It's good to operate on a blameless model, but if I followed your model I'd gladly put the blame on engineers like you if the cause was found to be a dependency issue or a misconfiguration issue.
Ofc, in the real world peers and I operate on a blameless model. Shit happens, but we need to fix our mistakes asap if they are made.
Ah yes, the "work hard and the boss will notice" meme.
I have zero incentive to work hard.
1. My salary is mostly tied to the market as a whole and particular company's performance, personal performance is the smallest bit of the equation.
2. Changing a variable from true to false on the personal request of someone very important will give me far more visibility than spending nights doing some work that only one other person is vaguely aware of, even if that work is super important. And visibility means chances for promotion.
3. Most companies are inherently undemocratic and employees have no input on decision making, therefore why would they care.
4. Most companies have proven that they're not afraid of screwing over their employees given the opportunity, so why wouldn't it work the other way around too.
5. In most cases, the reward for completing work early is more work. The punishment for being lazy is having free time.
I'm sorry but that's the corporate reality. I'd love to be a part of a team that works hard together to achieve great things, but that's not how the world works.
Being able to come to the office three hours late and leave two hours early without anyone complaining loud enough to get me fired is a much bigger job perk than Pizza Fridays.
Is that still true of China? Several top universities have removed English tests from their graduation requirements afaik.
and firing people is also not a mystery, interestingly PIPs are a US invention (but if labor laws are so lax, why were they needed there? :))
Granted, the hoarding of money and drive to greater wealth eventually leads to a capitalistic dystopias with massive wealth inequality. But you get lots of startups!
In reality what happens is you get 3 months notice of a firing in the form of PIP. Perhaps if you work at Walmart you can get fired on the spot, but honestly in industries where this is a common occupance, it's also well known that the employees also just don't give any notice at all either. They just stop showing up, maybe won't even give a 1 second of notice.
Personally, I'm happy for at will as someone who has had a shitty. Shitty job that ate at my mental health. I just had to say "today is my last day" and I fucking left and that was that. Got a final pay check and paperwork for continuing my benefits if I wanted them and this was at a random company in a labor hostile state. In some place like California, they would have been required to pay my last paycheck that moment instead of when the never payment day was.
I've seen employees work contacts that mandate notices by punishing you with legally enforced fines and whatnot and I just cannot see the benefit of being forced to give notice. It's just encourages your employer to make your life hell in that period if you're on bad terms and you had a good reason for leaving.
Right to work laws can get bent though. That's active underminement of unions for no benefit at all for an employee.
India has similar non-competes to Western Europe, but is able to maintain an innovation ecosystem.
If all of the EU's innovation system is sclerotic compared to Illinois or MA or India where non-competes are vindictively enforced, then there is a major issue.
Pretty much this. The best way to operate in India is to use a mixed Chinese and Israeli mindset tbh.
> India’s where offshoring from the us is
True, but there is a massive change now from the 2000s where it's just BPO. Literally the crown jewels of enterprise and deep tech and increasingly innovated and designed by the India teams directly (eg. the cybersecurity backbone of a major 5G telco in the US, the Apple mobile chips, Google Pay, etc).
What do you mean by that?
Cadre-driven parties like the BJP, DMK, BJD, BRS/TRS, etc are organizationally similar to the CCP but other parties are more loose and disorganized, so having a local partner act as your firewall helps massively by pointing you where to invest, just like in China, where most western companies invested in Guangdong, Zhejiang, etc but ignored Hubei or Guangxi.
There's a reason why Israeli, Chinese, Japanese, and Korean companies tend to be fairly successful with their India ventures, because they're used to this kind of an operating model, and most American companies tend to have a first-gen Indian American or Indian educated in America managing operations with India.
[1] https://m.economictimes.com/jobs/fresher/it-freshers-beware-...
[2] https://www.business-standard.com/amp/industry/news/non-comp...
[3] https://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/city/bengaluru/cant-enfo...
Not that I complain, six months of rest and vest life wasn’t bad :-)
You can ask your employer to let you go sooner if you want to leave, and they may ask you to leave sooner if they want you to leave (and pay you as an incentive). But it has to be by mutual agreement.
Usually they’d let you go sooner rather than later because they know you’ve already left mentally and they don’t want to pay for that. But they might also not, not necessarily out of spite but because they have a deadline and they think they still need your warm body.
My notice period is 3 months. I've also got 2 months of long service leave built up so in effect it's 1 month (as I can just take the 2 months notice)
On the flip side if they make me redundant I get the best part of 18 months salary after paying taxes, and at least 5 months pay after they say its happening where I can look for another job.
But OK, UK shot itself in the head with Brexit. Ireland speaks english natively, has low taxes (especially corporate ones), is easy to incorporate there, so how does notice apply?
https://www.workplacerelations.ie/en/what_you_should_know/en...
> Employees who have been in continuous employment for at least 13 weeks are obliged to provide their employer with one week’s notice of termination of employment. If a greater amount of notice is specified in the employee’s contract of employment, then this notice must be given.
Oh no, a whole week!
> Ten to fifteen years: Six weeks
Of course your contract may be different, but there's no real legal impediment here.
Increasingly not the case. I'm seeing an awful lot of "One month in the first three months, three months thereafter". It used to be pretty universally one month.
Notice to quit given by the employee is often the same time period as notice for termination given by the employer: what's good for the goose is good for the gander.
* https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/what%27s_good_for_the_goose_i...
it's perfect for starting a company, working on your startup on the side.
Reading between the lines, I do not think it distinguishes between full-time and part-time employment: "In Europe, employees tend to work fewer hours than in the US, partly because there are more paid holidays, the typical working week of a full-time employee is shorter and there is a larger share of part-time workers than in the US."
I keep seeing more and more from business types in the EU salivating over US business conditions: weaker labor laws, weaker regulations, record profits, etc. From the US it seems like the EU is doing fine and enviable from an employee perspective (except wages).
„Except the wages“ is kind of the problem. The source of that issue is the ability to raise capital, which is kind of addressed in the article, if you’d bothered to read before commenting.
If we lived in a fair and just world, the EU having the 4th largest economy doesn't seem like a bad thing. Going by numbers alone China (1.8bn) and India (1.5bn) are much more populace than the EU (450mln).
However, I would would probably side with the author and personally much prefer a group of liberal democracies following the rule of law to always be on top. If the world needs to bow to autocracies then we will have a bad time, Russia is just the prelude.
Lingua franca really matters. China, for example, didn't have a unified spoken language until about 100 years ago. However, Mandarin is today universally understood and spoken in the country. And the result? You only to know one language, and you can have access to one of the largest markets in the world. Alas, the same could not be said for Europe.
(In fact, Europe needs a unified language if people are serious about getting rid of English and the Anglo-American hegemony, because each smaller language really cannot fight English now.)
Oh they'll understand. They will just pretend not to. It's France.
And as for your snark, no, many French people do not speak English, and a fair number resent Americans going around like they own the place without making even a cursory attempt at being polite.
I speak French, German, and a small amount of Greek (enough to order a coffee and read a map). That's no use when I go to Italy or Spain or Poland or Latvia or Sweden of course, so we just speak English.
The big difference between europe and america is the market. The US is a homogenous culture with a single language and single desires with 350 million people. You can launch a product in the US based on US culture and assumptions and reach a massive economy
Launch it in Belgium and you've got a fragmented market. Not just the language, but also the culture -- expectations in Belgium, Romania and Norway are all very different.
On the other hand, as a foreigner, I have been to tiny villages in Sweden where even 70 year old grandmas know enough English to communicate.
1 EU Corps
2 Standard English language schooling
Seems wise enough. What will it take?
Personally, I think that English as the lingua franca makes sense in many contexts, since that's pretty much the case in IT already.
For example, trying to translate various terms in any given language from English usually causes inconvenience and confusion (everyone needs to know the localized version and then translate it back into English to find literature etc.). Therefore, it makes sense to teach everyone English.
I've had an easy time managing Eastern European employees in English, but Western European ones sucked at the language, and always had a bit of a complex surrounding English.
Similarly, translating a lot of terms from German or Russian to English often causes inconvenience and confusion. So better learn German and Russian. :-)
If the programming language key words that I needed to know used those languages, as did all of the documentation and forums, conference videos and literature, that's exactly what I'd do. But somehow those aren't the languages that everyone uses, nor is something like Chinese (and its dialects) which has a lot of users, but isn't as geographically widespread. Maybe people have also settled on English because it has a somewhat low barrier to entry as well.
I guess it's the same as needing to know at least some latin in the natural sciences, because otherwise something like naming bones when talking to a foreign colleague would get awkward, fast.
The article also does not mention the huge difference in compensation for technology talent between the US and Europe. As long as that gap exists, top European talent will continue leaking across the Atlantic.
This isn't a single lever that can be pulled independently. You need highly fluid labor markets that force companies to pay competitive efficiency wages (i.e. fewer/weaker/no unions), competitive and innovative companies, lower regulation and government bureaucratic interference, ambitious and career focused labor force, etc. etc.
It's a chicken-and-egg problem that, at its root, stems from culture (IMHO).
Poles and Czechs get paid relative peanuts compared to West Europeans, yet have fairly startup industries compared to France or Germany.
Same with further afield in India or China.
Abandon all hope. The race to the bottom is over. Any country not bowing at the feet of ever tech founder will be relegated to third-world status by the end of the decade. Canada, Finland, Australia, the US east coast ... all are doomed unless they drop taxes and abandon all hope of regulating anything. But that just isn't how the world functions. All those countries that are "hard" on new tech surprisingly keep ticking along year after year despite the ire of tech founders. Think London/Paris/Berlin/Vancouver are too hard on business? Ok. Leave. Make room for all the people that are ready and happy to do business in those cities.
Before 2020-22, Russia was a major tech hub in Europe, and most of that was because Russian founders would incorporate in the UK or Netherlands, but operate with a subsidiary within Russia.
And the 45% is at a high threshold (much higher than Ireland for example) though 42% will kick in at a lower % (and the 5.5% is a % on tax, not on the full income, which is a non-obvious aspect of it)
To hire across the EU you need 27 tax offices and lawyers, following laws in every language, privacy policies, etc. in every language.
Not really. The safety net is much better in some EU countries.
Gotta be the Googlers. Elon and Zuck have shown the light to most tech cos and they are emulating to one degree or another. But Google seems unwilling/unable to deal effectively with the WLB'ers. After all, how can they conduct all of their political activities if work is getting in the way?