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What makes it even more egregious is that some of the absolute best engineers on the planet are in Europe. It is a powerhouse of design talent, the birthplace o

by p4wnc6 11y ago

What makes it even more egregious is that some of the absolute best engineers on the planet are in Europe. It is a powerhouse of design talent, the birthplace of tons of pivotal scientific ideas, has many bastions of functional programming, and so on. Some of those people choose to move to the US, but surely many great engineers choose to remain there for cultural or family reasons. As someone interested in the efficient allocation of talent across the whole planet to help for the overall betterment of the world, it's upsetting to me that their random family associations or random cultural ties means they get paid significantly less money than lesser skilled people who just so happen to be near a lucky geographic spot. European salaries are low, and it is unreasonable that they are low. It would be great if more American companies began hiring remote workers from Europe to arbitrage away this silly wage differential and put pressure on European capital to grow up a little and start being competitive.

charlesdm 11y ago
Agreed, there is a lot of talent in Europe. Most European companies don’t realise they can put together an amazing team if you pay engineers $100-150k a year. They think having more people at lower salaries is better than fewer people at higher salaries. Second to that is that a lot of established, larger companies don’t realise this either. I’ve happen to have had talks with the CEO of a €1bn revenue apparel company, and they have trouble hiring talent. I told them to start with a small team of highly skilled people (+ paying them really well) and build their digital capabilities around that. The CTO, who was in charge of this, basically laughed my idea out of the room and said they needed to hire 150+ new technical people to become a digital leader. In the next year. Why? ‘Cause more developers will solve the problem.. :) Realistically, they needed 15-20 great people to support the digital side of that entire business, at most.
- p4wnc6 11y ago
  That sounds tragic, especially since it has been well-known even since the time of Brooks' The Mythical Man-Month that small teams are often much better than large teams, and that team productivity does not scale at all linearly with team size, probably more like the log of team size, so there are major diminishing returns. I wonder how much of this is related to status effects. I used to work in a quant finance shop that cared desperately about the way their tech team looked on paper. The credentials and degrees each hire possessed were often much more important than practical skill -- even though technical problems were hugely business critical to the firm, and it wound up that a small number of competent engineers handled the majority of important work. But, whenever the firm was entertaining new prospective clients and they could walk them through a big cubicle bank full of fancy Ivy grads furiously typing, the status effect translated into real money for the firm's higher level management and senior executives. I can't say they were being irrational -- I guess the burden falls to the customers being irrational in their impressions of what engineering is supposed to look like?
  - charlesdm 11y ago
    It was. Especially since it means they’ll be throwing €10-30m down the drain over the next few years with this strategy. I expect the CTO to be long gone before they realise that. In general, in BigCo, the more people you have under you in the org. chart, the more power you wield. It's ridiculous though. In defence of the CEO, in most cases, more people means faster and/or better production. He was extremely capable (I was impressed, he really knew his stuff), and he knew what he wanted to achieve when it came to the company’s digital presence. With proper BigCo resources, not all that hard to achieve I think. Second, it also probably had to do with the fact that the CTO was just unable to agree with me. It’s a family business (I’m friends with someone of the family), and if he agreed with what I said, he would’ve basically been admitting he couldn’t do the job. So in that regard he probably thought I was posing a significant risk to his continued employment. The CEO was someone of the family + a significant shareholder.
  - stillsut 11y ago
    Kensho?

by p4wnc6 11y ago

charlesdm 11y ago

Agreed, there is a lot of talent in Europe. Most European companies don’t realise they can put together an amazing team if you pay engineers $100-150k a year. They think having more people at lower salaries is better than fewer people at higher salaries. Second to that is that a lot of established, larger companies don’t realise this either. I’ve happen to have had talks with the CEO of a €1bn revenue apparel company, and they have trouble hiring talent. I told them to start with a small team of highly skilled people (+ paying them really well) and build their digital capabilities around that. The CTO, who was in charge of this, basically laughed my idea out of the room and said they needed to hire 150+ new technical people to become a digital leader. In the next year. Why? ‘Cause more developers will solve the problem.. :) Realistically, they needed 15-20 great people to support the digital side of that entire business, at most.

p4wnc6 11y ago
That sounds tragic, especially since it has been well-known even since the time of Brooks' The Mythical Man-Month that small teams are often much better than large teams, and that team productivity does not scale at all linearly with team size, probably more like the log of team size, so there are major diminishing returns. I wonder how much of this is related to status effects. I used to work in a quant finance shop that cared desperately about the way their tech team looked on paper. The credentials and degrees each hire possessed were often much more important than practical skill -- even though technical problems were hugely business critical to the firm, and it wound up that a small number of competent engineers handled the majority of important work. But, whenever the firm was entertaining new prospective clients and they could walk them through a big cubicle bank full of fancy Ivy grads furiously typing, the status effect translated into real money for the firm's higher level management and senior executives. I can't say they were being irrational -- I guess the burden falls to the customers being irrational in their impressions of what engineering is supposed to look like?
- charlesdm 11y ago
  It was. Especially since it means they’ll be throwing €10-30m down the drain over the next few years with this strategy. I expect the CTO to be long gone before they realise that. In general, in BigCo, the more people you have under you in the org. chart, the more power you wield. It's ridiculous though. In defence of the CEO, in most cases, more people means faster and/or better production. He was extremely capable (I was impressed, he really knew his stuff), and he knew what he wanted to achieve when it came to the company’s digital presence. With proper BigCo resources, not all that hard to achieve I think. Second, it also probably had to do with the fact that the CTO was just unable to agree with me. It’s a family business (I’m friends with someone of the family), and if he agreed with what I said, he would’ve basically been admitting he couldn’t do the job. So in that regard he probably thought I was posing a significant risk to his continued employment. The CEO was someone of the family + a significant shareholder.
- stillsut 11y ago
  Kensho?