Blah blah. That's why almost all the tech companies in EU that (start to) get big, shifts to US.
eu has a shit software industry and it has only itself to blame for the insane amount of bureaucracy, cutthroat taxes, labor laws that promote stagnation, and the culture of extreme risk aversion.
It is a good place to live until the borrowed time elapses.
EU (software) industry is a dream for mediocre skilled people. Secure a job once, can't get fired, do bare minimum and never be proactive.
It is a hell for people who work hard and fast. The whole culture is geared towards dragging down anyone who is proactive and makes others look bad by being too good.
I agree with some reservations about this being completly generalised. There are still some successfull companies that rewards good players. But yes, there are very few and most of the rest are stuck coasting at a glacial pace, doing stuff that are not very competitive on so many levels it is impossible to describe succintly.
I would also argue that it is not just about the software industry. Many EU industries have become extremely uncompetitive on so many level.
Even when you are ready to pay more for EU made products, it is not easy to find something that is decently competitive and not just a pale copy of better offerings.
It is clear that the EU has become too collectivist but they are still stuck blaming capitalism (just like the soviets I guess).
In France, even old big players that were once at the top and/or were (semi)public organisation have fallen very hard or have been scandalously sold piecemeal to foreign actors.
The problem is not even that they are governement funded but it really is rooted in the collectivist organisation model that gives too much power to politics and very little lattitude to consumer/key actors choice.
Those systems become necessarily corrupted because they rely too much on human behaviors and most humans are fundamentally corrupt.
Yes, I completly agree with your point of view, which is exactly why I said that.
They are using capitalism as a boogeyman for everything, when in practice the system in place is so far removed from "real" capitalism that ones need to be either blind or ideologicaly corrupt to put the blame there.
Unregulated capitalism has many weakness, the most potent one being that there is pruning of useless actors and that results in poverty and some people being left behind.
But the remedy that is applied today isn't really much better, people are still left behind, just more slowly and that comes with massive oppotunity cost for those at the bottom, since they are the ones most likely to really benefit from the freedom that comes with capitalism.
This is just what the ideologues working in academia and politics (deeply linked) always come up with, even though their existence and ability to make such critics is fully funded by capitalism. There are just keeping the tradition of Marx that was completly funded by capitalists but came up with the argument that it was the worst system possible.
It is, at this point, an easily verifiable fact that software engineering jobs in Europe are en masse poorly paid relative to the equivalent positions in the US, and the majority of the EU companies that actually pay well are actually US based. This causes a lot of outflow of talent. That VC funding in Europe is atrocious is obvious to anyone who has had to go through it, and have fun letting a poor performer go from your 5 person startup.
Your polite wishful responses are frustrating to read to anyone who's had to go through this hell.
Yes that is what OP is saying and OP is correct. If you are young, talented and you have a crazy idea that might just work and if you are given the opportunity then you go to the US every-time.
Why? Because it makes sense. Why stay in Berlin or Paris where you can make 50K to 70K euros a year at most and pay close to 40% or 50% in taxes when you can make double or triple that in the US or better yet, start your own company there and then expand in Europe after building it knowing that if you eventually sell it, you get to keep a lot of the sale price.
Talented people don't work for nothing. Motivated and ambitious people don't work for nothing.
If Europe wants to see it's own tech giants emerge, then it's needs to compensate founders and employees well. That's as simple as it is.
Unfortunately it's just not the case at the moment and until that changes, the most ambitious Europeans will continue leaving and building companies on the other side of the Atlantic.
> Why stay in Berlin or Paris where you can make 50K to 70K euros a year at most and pay close to 40% or 50% in taxes when you can make double or triple that in the US
It always amazes me that there is a subset of EU people here on HN who are so detached from reality that it makes me wonder if these same people are sitting in Brussels board making decisions. According to the sh*thole in which EU ended up, it is not completely implausible. Can't agree more with what you're saying. My experience is the same.
It's frustrating really to have these conversations with people who will deny the reality this much.
Instead of using this opportunity to ask the questions that everyone should be asking, which are amongst others "how can we fix this mess?" , you end up with people who think you are simply attacking the EU for spite when it couldn't be further from the truth.
It's sad but not surprising and until that changes then nothing will change.
Europeans need to start being humble again and need to get to work otherwise then we shouldn't be surprised if the US squeezes us from one side while China out-innovates us from the other side. In the meantime the EU is debating if/when it should amend it's cookie law, I am not sure if I should laugh or cry at this point.
> you end up with people who think you are simply attacking the EU
That's not what I think. But you obviously lack the level of empathy you would need to accept that I may think differently. I accept that you think the way you think: you benefit from it as a business owner.
> Instead of using this opportunity to ask the questions
Yeah, because you are so superior to everybody else that people should ask you question, and their opinions are not worth your time.
"I am the best, I am so frustrated that so many people don't recognise it".
When one has no response it's easier to blame the messenger. A nice cop out if I may say so.
> Yeah, because you are so superior to everybody else that people should ask you question, and their opinions are not worth your time
You are putting words in my mouth and arguing in bad faith but that's easier than making a compelling case with facts and figures.
> "I am the best, I am so frustrated that so many people don't recognise it".
If I was the only one highlighting these problems then maybe you would have point but as I have demonstrated in my other comments, the EU commission disagrees with you, the Draghi report disagrees with you and a few people here also disagree with you.
Unfortunately instead of engaging in a healthy debate and addressing the points that have been raised, you have brushed aside all the arguments and refuse to respond with anything that supports your point of view.
You decided that you were right so you are right but you don't seem to have a problem calling out other people by telling then that their opinions are not facts, while yourself ignoring all the facts presented to you. That is a clear case of double standards if I have ever seen one.
> Unfortunately instead of engaging in a healthy debate
Take it from my point of view: I said that I don't believe that Europe has no software industry at all. And I said that I don't believe that regulations are the reason Europe's software industry stuggles against the US monopolies.
What the US monopolies have been doing to maintain their position is very well documented, and has nothing to do with regulations.
You claim that it's possible to compete with a monopoly if you are not regulated, and you call it a fact. I disagree. I believe that we as a society should prevent monopolies, and the way to do that is regulations. And of course, if you prevent monopolies in Europe but play against monopolies who are allowed in other countries, it's hard.
Not yet and I'm not sure I'm gonna receive it ever but one of the most important things I learned for myself is to understand my limits. I advise you to do the same.
Exactly. This sentence on its own is enough to explain your opinion, there is no need to explain anything else. Those who are against regulations are the ones who benefit from the lack of regulations.
And those who are in a dominant position generally think that they are there because they deserve it, because they are superior.
> And those who are in a dominant position generally think that they are there because they deserve it, because they are superior.
And this sentence explains your opinion. Business owner = superior = bad
You haven't responded to anything anyone has said despite the fact that a few of us seem to agree on these issues.
You basically brush aside anything that does not conform to your narrative and you also dismiss the entire report of Mario Draghi on European competitiveness: https://commission.europa.eu/topics/competitiveness/draghi-r... who agrees that there are many issues currently with the entire tech industry in Europe.
The facts are simple:
- the EU tech scene is minuscule compared to the US tech scene
- the average salary of a tech worker is higher in the US than in Europe
- there are many incredible challenges in Europe that stop Europe from competing properly with the US companies
- there is a clear lack of innovation and a very real risk aversion and less cash spent on R&D in Europe compared to the US
- European competitiveness is lacking and decreasing as time goes on compared to the US
> Those who are against regulations are the ones who benefit from the lack of regulations.
But you are right let's keep adding more rules and regulations, I am sure the next one will do the trick and help us expand our tech sector.
That would be a great narrative except that even the European commission disagrees with you since they are now exploring the option of scaling back some part of GDPR and even delaying the new AI laws because they suddenly realized that it was a major impediment to a healthy tech sector in Europe: https://iapp.org/news/a/european-commission-proposes-signifi...
In conclusion, you are arguing in bad faith, you believe what you believe because it's easier than to face the facts that Europe dropped the ball 20 years ago and missed the boat on many new technologies and that it is now trying to play catch up and unfortunately catching up will take many decades if that ever happens.
Nope. I said that business owners are generally in a dominant position, and those who are in a dominant position generally think that they deserve it because they are superior. I didn't say "bad", I explained the bias. Everyone is biased.
> you also dismiss the entire report of Mario Draghi on European competitiveness
Maybe we can do that: I will look into Mario Draghi's report, and on your end you could have a look at what Cory Doctorow has to say about the US monopolies and antitrust policies?
So that at least we would get some amount of open-mindness out of this not-so-constructive discussion :-).
> In conclusion, you are arguing in bad faith
Yeah, I too think that you can go ** yourself :-). But I will read about Mario Draghi's opinion, maybe you can get some perspective from Doctorow. Bye!
Did I use the word "all" anywhere in my comment? There are good developers in Europe. What I am saying is that there would have been even more of them had the incentives not been so lackluster. More talent seems to generally result in a greater competitive ability.
Fwiw, I have doubts that currently Europe can compete with the US at the startup level, let alone at the bigco one.
I am not trying to drag Europe down - it worries me that sophisticated complacency, overconfidence based on the achievements of previous generations, and addiction to comfort, will start eroding the very aspects that make it a great place to live at.
American public money funded most of the tech that the whole Europe is depending on and extracting trillions of dollars value. Your American using Italian uni stuff is nonsense.
30 years ago, one of the things we were all naively hoping for was that a globally connected network would help to reduce the tribalism, obsolete these "American money" and "European bits" and "Chinese protocols" ideas and stop all the cross-border fighting over what's mine and what's yours. When a piece of software has contributors from 50 countries, how could it "belong" to one country? Obviously we are in an even worse spot, global cooperation wise, now than we were in the 90s.
I've seen this work in certain situations, CERN and the LHC for example (I was on a data team for a detector). Everyone was driven by the science, where you came from didn't matter. With that said, and this part is going to be inflammatory potentially, people who are fear and tribal/in group driven are likely never going to be swayed (and building the mental model up via comments to properly contextualize this is beyond the scope of this thread). Tech doesn't fix people problems.
It might have been a bit naive, and very much reliant on a more open, more liberal, and less neo-liberal, international order than we have right now. Greed and power are not (<-edit: I had skipped that bit) conducive to such ideals.
Indeed, it appears they are upset that "the whole Europe is depending on and extracting trillions of dollars value" from American open source spend in some way.
That's addiction. You'll need time to get out of it.
Cutting off sugar will help you have more focus, not just during coding but the whole day. However, if you were on high amount of sugar before, at initial stage, your body will scream.
For me, it takes a few weeks to get settled in. After that, I don't miss sugar at all. Can focus just fine.
And that's why people think 5 times before hiring such. It's already super hard to fire people unless they make gross mistakes. It's nearly impossible to fire someone like that. It's stupid.
Its not stupid rather humane, just very ineffective from economical perspective.
You want society where its everybody for themselves, fuck the rest, be lucky with ie your health so you and your family can have a decent life and one problem big enough can wipe you out? The benefit is more money, economy works better, is more agile to ever-changing situation. Just those extra money often go to that healthcare (since we all end up with various issues over time, the only exception is early death), or university for kids, or cost of properties.
Or something glacial, without real pressure to improve, more poor, but with additional safety nets.
I keep saying it over and over - EU should take over system (and mindset, good luck there) of Swiss folks. They strike the best balance between predatory capitalism that often grinds unlucky individuals and various safety nets (free top notch public education, almost free public healthcare, very good but not ridiculous social system etc). Unsurprisingly, mix of European competency and a bit of proper capitalism creates one of best stable living standards in the world, and arguably still The most free nation in the world (TM).
Its a place that french or germans just can't swallow - neighbor showing them how much better a similar society can end up functioning with few rather minor tweaks.
Read my comment history if you care, you couldnt be further from the truth.
What I wrote is reality about EU, whether you like it or not is another topic. I dont mention russia at all, that medieval shithole has (hopefully) no say in how European future will look like.
it is stupid because it leaves the company holding the bag.
The state can take over for such cases but instead, once a company hires such a person, they can become permanent leeches. Even when the company is having trouble with market/financials, it is difficult to cut.
> You want society where its everybody for themselves
Never said that.
> be lucky with ie your health so you and your family can have a decent life and one problem big enough can wipe you out?
How about working hard and taking care of health? How about not drinking/smoking, not doing drugs, and eating healthy?
> fuck the rest
Yes, fuck the ones who don't take care of health (and I'm not talking about homeless people) and then overburden the healthcare system. Why should we have to carry the weight of the trash humans? Why should one have to pay €1000+ every month for insurance, get cigarette smoke on face (of infant) while walking around in public places, and then watch these people drain healthcare?
Which is the better option now. But the one he's talking about is the OG windows phone swipe keyboard which would predict next word almost like from a LLM these days. For that reason, you can swipe like a maniac but it'd still type the correct thing.
Apple keyboard is shit.
Swype (the one Microsoft bought) is better but still shit.
Gboard is ok.
But none of them are close to that windows phone keyboard. I still miss it.
Google's keyboard is okay for English. It's a complete tire fire for two other languages I use (both popular and with a very large training data set).
Suggests words that make no sense, preferring rare words to much more widely used and obvious matching picks. Has the vocabulary of a poorly educated five year old idiot savant — fails to complete many words you use fifty times a day, but sometimes surprises you by suggesting something you'd hear a couple times per decade. Doesn't know other forms of the same word, forcing you to correct it manually over and over again, often failing to remember the word until you type it in four or five times.
Yes, I've downloaded all the dictionaries, tried it on many phones, and my friends are of the same opinion: it really is just bad.
I write in English and Spanish on it, and it seems the shittiness gets multiplied when you use a bilingual instead on monolingual layout. I've tried switching languages manually, but that sucks even more when writing Spanish with English technical terms sprinkled.
This is a patent case where IA made a function worse instead of better, yet companies clinged to it for some reason.
Never used the Windows Phone keyboard but after Swype fixed its worst error ("me" was very often rendered as "nee", as in the term for a maiden name) it was fantastic. The last time I was able to use it was ca. 2016 when my Nexus 6P suffered the dreaded battery-goes-to-worthless-one-night-and-never-recovers problem. The editing keyboard allowing precise cursor placement, the Swype-X/C/V shortcuts, Swyping above the keyboard to indicate capitalization - WHY WHY WHY were they dropped?
The swiping keyboard from Apple simply refuses to do "and" for me. I get "abs" (I'm not a gym rat; I don't talk about that) or "Abbas" (the only one I know is the Palestinian president, and I don't talk about him either) almost every time. I hate the autocorrect-something-five-words-back problem, but not being able to recognize one of the most common words in the language is unacceptable crap.
reply