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I believe that a contributing factor to the pay gap in Europe is the fact that we have so many languages, that we are too segregated to create the same level of

I believe that a contributing factor to the pay gap in Europe is the fact that we have so many languages, that we are too segregated to create the same level of competitiveness as seen in the US. This means that each country is fairly protective of its people, and even though EU has free movement of labour, the language and culture barrier is strong, and internationals have a harder time to get hired, unless the speak the local language. So the end results is that talent is spread across, and no single country has ability to become the place to be.

Joeri 8y ago
It also means that despite being a single market you can’t realistically launch a product across the EU. A SV startup can immediately address the whole US (if they don’t have a physical presence), but an EU startup has to go country by country. That means growth is slower, and talent is less competed for. After brexit I’d like to see business & gov across the EU standardize on english as lingua franca to enable faster growth.
- Brakenshire 8y ago
  > After brexit I’d like to see business & gov across the EU standardize on english as lingua franca to enable faster growth. I wonder whether this will become easier now when the UK leaves, because the English language won't be tied to the competition between the major states. This is definitely a shame for London, which I think was emerging as the centre of English-speaking Europe, I expect that role now will be more spread across a number of northern European cities, like Stockholm, Copenhagen, Amsterdam etc.
  - calgoo 8y ago
    As someone living in a European country with several languages and internal political problems related to them, i can say that in my opinion this wont happen for a very long time and im not even sure its needed. Kids in these multi language countries are already growing up with english as a second or third language. They are growing up on the internet and are used to reading stuff in english, so the need to standardize on a language, in my opinion, is not even needed. In a generation or 2 the majority of people will speak it anyway.
    - adventured 8y ago
      The problem is that half of the EU has no common language (and that ratio is worse once you step outside the EU and broaden it to Europe as a whole). Certainly Scandinavia etc. have tremendous English adoption, that doesn't do much for the two dozen nations in Europe that don't. If you're Swedish or Danish and you are fluent in English, the problem is that still doesn't help you with the other half of the EU or Europe that doesn't understand English. France is near 40%, and Italy is near 35% on English speaking. Even Germany is just barely over 1/2. Spain, Portugal, Czech, Slovakia, Ukraine, Bulgaria are near or sub 25%. Russia is closer to 5%. France + Spain + Italy is about $6 trillion worth of GDP, and maybe 1/3 of their combined population is English speaking.
      - tasubotadas 8y ago
        Well, in CEE (EU bit) 80% people that are <35 y/o certainly speak solid English - I've been and spent some time in all of them. The older generation does struggle with English, though.
      - PeterisP 8y ago
        That's what the parent post was speaking about - for various reasons these percentages are increasing, especially among the younger people, and the expectation is that in a generation or two the situation would be quite different from the current one that you've described.
  - te_chris 8y ago
    London will still be the centre of English-speaking Europe. It's the biggest irony of brexit: London is vehemently opposed to it, but likely not going to be all that affected by it.
    - bitL 8y ago
      Dunno, most people I know are trying to escape London, miserable weather, low pay, massive increase in rent, uncertain future. Despite having most AI startups after US. At FB London as a SWEng you are capped at most at 110k; in the US you'd earn 4-5x more for the same job and on more interesting projects as well.
      - tigershark 8y ago
        110k$/year? I really find it difficult to believe it, even if it was 110k£/year.
        bertil 8y ago
        I worked for Facebook London office and the pay level compared to our US counterpart was something that my more talented peers were talking about. The idea of a ‘cap’ feels alien to Facebook in general, but I can confirm that to get more than that, you would probably have to be an exceptional developper -- think: get recognised at a conference, have your work #1 on HN for 24 hours, have regular conversations with iOS or Android core devs, etc.
        bitL 8y ago
        > have your work #1 on HN for 24 hours Done. Still didn't go there and they keep spamming me ;-) London is not attractive at all these days.
        bertil 8y ago
        I joined at the same time as one guy who was working remotely full time, officially based in London. But he was the co-founder and the lead developper of the most used technology at Facebook, so…
- saiya-jin 8y ago
  National egos will probably prevent that. I simply can't imagine French people speaking anything but french in their home country. Anytime I visit the place (which is almost every weekend), I see how much they don't like speaking english, although their level is OK and they are perfectly understandable. Italy might be the same, Spain too. Northern europe has much stronger usage of english and level is much higher (I recall old grannies responding in perfect english around Oslo, and that was almost 20 years ago).
  - simias 8y ago
    I think us French are generally pretty terrible for this, there's definitely a strong anti-English bias (although oddly splicing random English words in a terrible French accent in everyday discussions is seen as fashionable by what seems to be a growing portion of the population). On the other hand I've never had any issue speaking English in Germany or Portugal for instance, to the point where I kind of became lazy and expected people there to actually understand English and being surprised a couple of times to find somebody who didn't. But you're right, I can certainly imagine a significant portion of the French people and institutions fighting back hard if the EU ever decides to move towards English as official language.
  - hansoolo 8y ago
    It's true for the northern countries. I remember being in Stockholm once and everybody was speaking a decent English, from little kids to grannies. They said it's because they don't have dubbing on TV and learn it faster and better that way. :)
- madeofpalk 8y ago
  As someone from Australia, I actually take the opposite impression from that. These startups are faced to deal with being international by day one, making scaling out to more and more countries easier. For US startups, on the other hand, the US is a large enough market that they might get ‘stuck’ there and need to build up more ‘inertia’ to scale out internationally
  - sremani 8y ago
    Getting stuck in a market that is 23% of world GDP is not so bad.
  - icc97 8y ago
    Its certainly an advantage the European startups don't seem to take up on. For example Duolingo is headquartered in the US.
    - DoofusOfDeath 8y ago
      I would guess that the main reason Duolingo is based in the U.S. is that it originated at a U.S. university (Carnegie Mellon).
      - icc97 8y ago
        Duolingo is purely an example - but you could ask why the research occurred in an American University rather than an EU one. Google Translate is another. In theory there should be many more people willing to pay to learn another language / translate in Europe. Yet the US is far ahead.
  - jonathanyc 8y ago
    The fact of the massive advantage that the US gives to companies and researchers in the form of essentially a single regulatory zone and, importantly, a single language, is reflected in the fact that almost all of the technology you are using was designed in the US. Google, Apple, Facebook, Microsoft, Amazon, etc. for companies, C, Python, Lisp, etc. just in programming languages... You only have to write documentation once for more potential customers or research collaborators to be able to read it than if you wrote in both French and German. This is well studied. Note that in terms of developed countries the US is the largest by far.
- simias 8y ago
  >After brexit I’d like to see business & gov across the EU standardize on english as lingua franca to enable faster growth. Do you imply that brexit might make it easier for that to happen? That sounds counter-intuitive to me, once the UK leaves I believe that the only country in the EU who has English as an official language will be Ireland and even there it's cohabiting with Irish Gaelic. Beyond that I've always been torn on this issue, on one hand having a lingua franca across the EU would be amazing and English is probably closest to achieving that, on the other hand English is effectively the language of American imperialism and its cultural hegemony. In an ideal world I'd prefer something less politically loaded and tied to a foreign superpower, like Spanish, Swedish or Romanian for instance (I'm picking random European languages who cannot be suspected of having any kind of cultural overreach in present day Europe). Of course in this case maybe practicality trumps ideology and we should just accept our English speaking overlords for the sake of convenience.
  - FractalLP 8y ago
    Esperanto is surprisingly easy to learn and is meant to be a secondary language. Realistically, it's probably going to be English. Some say Mandarin in 20 years, but there are a lot of practical reasons why I find that hard to believe.
    - skriticos2 8y ago
      I grew up with Esperanto as one of my birth languages - yet I'm writing this reply in English. So yes, I agree - English is the more practical contemporary language as you can communicate with more people with.
    - mtgx 8y ago
      > Some say Mandarin in 20 years, but there are a lot of practical reasons why I find that hard to believe English has been taught in European schools for decades and most European citizens still don't use it much or know it that well (the biggest reason is that it's not the official language of the countries). Virtually nobody teaches Chinese in European schools now, so I find it very hard to believe that Mandarin will be anywhere close to the language of the internet in 20 years. It's really only the Asian countries (except India) where a larger percentage of their populations can speak or understand Mandarin, but that's always been the case anyway, so I don't think that's going to change much.
- bitL 8y ago
  > lingua franca Hmm, I seem to recall we already had such a language in Europe since middle ages, it started with L and ended with n. It's still dominant in medicine. It could be funny to use it in tech EU-wide as well with "proper German pronunciation" ;-)
  - pcnix 8y ago
    Does medicine still have universities teaching in Latin? I haven't come across significant latin usage beyond naming conventions in medicine.
    - Thimothy 8y ago
      In Italy still teach it in school, and it's not the first time I've heard of mayors (beside linguistics) that have some compulsory Latin thrown in. But that depends a lot on the university.
- erispoe 8y ago
  Depends, in regulated industries you might have to adapt to product state by state in the US much more that you would have in the EU, where a lot or regulations are now more uniform.
- rorykoehler 8y ago
  Definitely agree re English being adopted as the lingua franca (that really sounds weird haha). Been saying this for years however there are too many fragile egos in European politics that feel that adopting English is an attack on their identity. There was even talk of removing English from EU legal texts altogether after brexit
acct1771 8y ago
Is this not preferable to one country "buying all the best players" and exerting their will on others?
peoplewindow 8y ago
Is that really true? Everyone in science speaks English and DeepMind, based in the UK, is in fact one of the world's top AI research hubs. Their papers are consistently excellent and of course DeepMind's workforce comes from around the world. That's the European AI hub, right there. The issue here isn't the language barrier. The issue is one that goes largely unstated in the ELLIS letter (it's a call for action, not really a plan). Which is this ... remind me what's wrong with working with the Americans again? DeepMind was founded by a Brit - the guy who once worked on Theme Park and other much loved British games. He built up an absolutely top class research team out of nowhere, based purely on VC funding, then sold to Google not only because of money but because Google also built a world class AI research team out in California, and it made sense to join forces so they could work together on things like TPUs. And why shouldn't the European AI hub have joined forces with the US AI hub? What benefit could there be from preserving institutional and funding barriers between Google and DeepMind? The letter sort of dances around the edges of this question, but ultimately the answer is purely politics. It says things like "This weakens Europe" and "we want the best basic research to be performed in Europe, to enable Europe to shape how machine learning and modern AI change the world" and "many European companies whose future business crucially depends on AI are not perceived as competitive" These are all political goals, worse, they are not logical thinking at all - not a good look for a bunch of scientists. AI research is entirely open. Having a new academic research hub in the EU-that-isn't-the-UK won't change the access those European countries have to the underlying research papers or techniques. They can use AI just the same regardless of where the research is being done. Maybe China would try to close up their researchers, but America and the UK certainly won't. So if European companies are "perceived as uncompetitive" or are not "shaping the world" due to their poor use of AI (this is a dubious theory to begin with) then the solution is for more European companies to download TensorFlow and Torch and get cracking. It isn't for money to be poured into academics who will take it, write a few papers and then go straight into industry anyway.
- T-A 8y ago
  > remind me what's wrong with working with the Americans again? Make that American companies and the problem, from an academic perspective, is that they recruit away students and researchers from academia. That works for a few years, but longer term, the argument goes, it depletes academia to the point that new talent can no longer be trained... by academia. At that point, the companies wishing to keep recruiting will create their own training facilities and/or step up collaboration with academic institutions. That's where the American part comes in: if the existing talent has all gone to the US and those making the decisions have been there all along, they are likely to focus their training efforts on the US. On top of that, you have the well-publicized problems with data collection by foreign entities and local tax avoidance, which are indeed political.
kome 8y ago
No, language doesn't matter: EU has lower wages because it tax (and redistribute) more, and I like it this way.
deleted 8y ago
[deleted]
enriquto 8y ago
> and even though EU has free movement of labour, the language and culture barrier is strong, and internationals have a harder time to get hired, unless they speak the local language. Certainly not in all fields. In all the math labs that I know (from France, UK, Italy) more than half of the researchers are from other countries. Of course, if you want to teach, it is much easier to get hired if you already speak the language. (edit: format of the quote)
KKKKkkkk1 8y ago
A smaller labor supply implies that the supply and demand curves cross higher. Pay should be higher then.
- kitd 8y ago
  Though the segregated markets could also imply smaller demand.
segmondy 8y ago
From an outsider, I can tell you what. It's not the langauges. It's the culture, it's the work/life balance. It's things like working reasonable hours, spending time with family & friends. Having long holidays, take time off from work to care for a newborn. It's things like GDPR. America is brutal, America is a gladiator pit, winner take all. Money above all things, the religion is capitalism. Make money or die trying and roll over anyone in the way.
chrshawkes 8y ago
I'm not sure that's the case because the United States is also filled with people that speak different languages.

Joeri 8y ago

It also means that despite being a single market you can’t realistically launch a product across the EU. A SV startup can immediately address the whole US (if they don’t have a physical presence), but an EU startup has to go country by country. That means growth is slower, and talent is less competed for. After brexit I’d like to see business & gov across the EU standardize on english as lingua franca to enable faster growth.

Brakenshire 8y ago
> After brexit I’d like to see business & gov across the EU standardize on english as lingua franca to enable faster growth. I wonder whether this will become easier now when the UK leaves, because the English language won't be tied to the competition between the major states. This is definitely a shame for London, which I think was emerging as the centre of English-speaking Europe, I expect that role now will be more spread across a number of northern European cities, like Stockholm, Copenhagen, Amsterdam etc.
- calgoo 8y ago
  As someone living in a European country with several languages and internal political problems related to them, i can say that in my opinion this wont happen for a very long time and im not even sure its needed. Kids in these multi language countries are already growing up with english as a second or third language. They are growing up on the internet and are used to reading stuff in english, so the need to standardize on a language, in my opinion, is not even needed. In a generation or 2 the majority of people will speak it anyway.
  - adventured 8y ago
    The problem is that half of the EU has no common language (and that ratio is worse once you step outside the EU and broaden it to Europe as a whole). Certainly Scandinavia etc. have tremendous English adoption, that doesn't do much for the two dozen nations in Europe that don't. If you're Swedish or Danish and you are fluent in English, the problem is that still doesn't help you with the other half of the EU or Europe that doesn't understand English. France is near 40%, and Italy is near 35% on English speaking. Even Germany is just barely over 1/2. Spain, Portugal, Czech, Slovakia, Ukraine, Bulgaria are near or sub 25%. Russia is closer to 5%. France + Spain + Italy is about $6 trillion worth of GDP, and maybe 1/3 of their combined population is English speaking.
    - tasubotadas 8y ago
      Well, in CEE (EU bit) 80% people that are <35 y/o certainly speak solid English - I've been and spent some time in all of them. The older generation does struggle with English, though.
    - PeterisP 8y ago
      That's what the parent post was speaking about - for various reasons these percentages are increasing, especially among the younger people, and the expectation is that in a generation or two the situation would be quite different from the current one that you've described.
- te_chris 8y ago
  London will still be the centre of English-speaking Europe. It's the biggest irony of brexit: London is vehemently opposed to it, but likely not going to be all that affected by it.
  - bitL 8y ago
    Dunno, most people I know are trying to escape London, miserable weather, low pay, massive increase in rent, uncertain future. Despite having most AI startups after US. At FB London as a SWEng you are capped at most at 110k; in the US you'd earn 4-5x more for the same job and on more interesting projects as well.
    - tigershark 8y ago
      110k$/year? I really find it difficult to believe it, even if it was 110k£/year.
      - bertil 8y ago
        I worked for Facebook London office and the pay level compared to our US counterpart was something that my more talented peers were talking about. The idea of a ‘cap’ feels alien to Facebook in general, but I can confirm that to get more than that, you would probably have to be an exceptional developper -- think: get recognised at a conference, have your work #1 on HN for 24 hours, have regular conversations with iOS or Android core devs, etc.
        bitL 8y ago
        > have your work #1 on HN for 24 hours Done. Still didn't go there and they keep spamming me ;-) London is not attractive at all these days.
        bertil 8y ago
        I joined at the same time as one guy who was working remotely full time, officially based in London. But he was the co-founder and the lead developper of the most used technology at Facebook, so…
saiya-jin 8y ago
National egos will probably prevent that. I simply can't imagine French people speaking anything but french in their home country. Anytime I visit the place (which is almost every weekend), I see how much they don't like speaking english, although their level is OK and they are perfectly understandable. Italy might be the same, Spain too. Northern europe has much stronger usage of english and level is much higher (I recall old grannies responding in perfect english around Oslo, and that was almost 20 years ago).
- simias 8y ago
  I think us French are generally pretty terrible for this, there's definitely a strong anti-English bias (although oddly splicing random English words in a terrible French accent in everyday discussions is seen as fashionable by what seems to be a growing portion of the population). On the other hand I've never had any issue speaking English in Germany or Portugal for instance, to the point where I kind of became lazy and expected people there to actually understand English and being surprised a couple of times to find somebody who didn't. But you're right, I can certainly imagine a significant portion of the French people and institutions fighting back hard if the EU ever decides to move towards English as official language.
- hansoolo 8y ago
  It's true for the northern countries. I remember being in Stockholm once and everybody was speaking a decent English, from little kids to grannies. They said it's because they don't have dubbing on TV and learn it faster and better that way. :)
madeofpalk 8y ago
As someone from Australia, I actually take the opposite impression from that. These startups are faced to deal with being international by day one, making scaling out to more and more countries easier. For US startups, on the other hand, the US is a large enough market that they might get ‘stuck’ there and need to build up more ‘inertia’ to scale out internationally
- sremani 8y ago
  Getting stuck in a market that is 23% of world GDP is not so bad.
- icc97 8y ago
  Its certainly an advantage the European startups don't seem to take up on. For example Duolingo is headquartered in the US.
  - DoofusOfDeath 8y ago
    I would guess that the main reason Duolingo is based in the U.S. is that it originated at a U.S. university (Carnegie Mellon).
    - icc97 8y ago
      Duolingo is purely an example - but you could ask why the research occurred in an American University rather than an EU one. Google Translate is another. In theory there should be many more people willing to pay to learn another language / translate in Europe. Yet the US is far ahead.
- jonathanyc 8y ago
  The fact of the massive advantage that the US gives to companies and researchers in the form of essentially a single regulatory zone and, importantly, a single language, is reflected in the fact that almost all of the technology you are using was designed in the US. Google, Apple, Facebook, Microsoft, Amazon, etc. for companies, C, Python, Lisp, etc. just in programming languages... You only have to write documentation once for more potential customers or research collaborators to be able to read it than if you wrote in both French and German. This is well studied. Note that in terms of developed countries the US is the largest by far.
simias 8y ago
>After brexit I’d like to see business & gov across the EU standardize on english as lingua franca to enable faster growth. Do you imply that brexit might make it easier for that to happen? That sounds counter-intuitive to me, once the UK leaves I believe that the only country in the EU who has English as an official language will be Ireland and even there it's cohabiting with Irish Gaelic. Beyond that I've always been torn on this issue, on one hand having a lingua franca across the EU would be amazing and English is probably closest to achieving that, on the other hand English is effectively the language of American imperialism and its cultural hegemony. In an ideal world I'd prefer something less politically loaded and tied to a foreign superpower, like Spanish, Swedish or Romanian for instance (I'm picking random European languages who cannot be suspected of having any kind of cultural overreach in present day Europe). Of course in this case maybe practicality trumps ideology and we should just accept our English speaking overlords for the sake of convenience.
- FractalLP 8y ago
  Esperanto is surprisingly easy to learn and is meant to be a secondary language. Realistically, it's probably going to be English. Some say Mandarin in 20 years, but there are a lot of practical reasons why I find that hard to believe.
  - skriticos2 8y ago
    I grew up with Esperanto as one of my birth languages - yet I'm writing this reply in English. So yes, I agree - English is the more practical contemporary language as you can communicate with more people with.
  - mtgx 8y ago
    > Some say Mandarin in 20 years, but there are a lot of practical reasons why I find that hard to believe English has been taught in European schools for decades and most European citizens still don't use it much or know it that well (the biggest reason is that it's not the official language of the countries). Virtually nobody teaches Chinese in European schools now, so I find it very hard to believe that Mandarin will be anywhere close to the language of the internet in 20 years. It's really only the Asian countries (except India) where a larger percentage of their populations can speak or understand Mandarin, but that's always been the case anyway, so I don't think that's going to change much.
bitL 8y ago
> lingua franca Hmm, I seem to recall we already had such a language in Europe since middle ages, it started with L and ended with n. It's still dominant in medicine. It could be funny to use it in tech EU-wide as well with "proper German pronunciation" ;-)
- pcnix 8y ago
  Does medicine still have universities teaching in Latin? I haven't come across significant latin usage beyond naming conventions in medicine.
  - Thimothy 8y ago
    In Italy still teach it in school, and it's not the first time I've heard of mayors (beside linguistics) that have some compulsory Latin thrown in. But that depends a lot on the university.
erispoe 8y ago
Depends, in regulated industries you might have to adapt to product state by state in the US much more that you would have in the EU, where a lot or regulations are now more uniform.
rorykoehler 8y ago
Definitely agree re English being adopted as the lingua franca (that really sounds weird haha). Been saying this for years however there are too many fragile egos in European politics that feel that adopting English is an attack on their identity. There was even talk of removing English from EU legal texts altogether after brexit

acct1771 8y ago

Is this not preferable to one country "buying all the best players" and exerting their will on others?

peoplewindow 8y ago

Is that really true? Everyone in science speaks English and DeepMind, based in the UK, is in fact one of the world's top AI research hubs. Their papers are consistently excellent and of course DeepMind's workforce comes from around the world. That's the European AI hub, right there. The issue here isn't the language barrier. The issue is one that goes largely unstated in the ELLIS letter (it's a call for action, not really a plan). Which is this ... remind me what's wrong with working with the Americans again? DeepMind was founded by a Brit - the guy who once worked on Theme Park and other much loved British games. He built up an absolutely top class research team out of nowhere, based purely on VC funding, then sold to Google not only because of money but because Google also built a world class AI research team out in California, and it made sense to join forces so they could work together on things like TPUs. And why shouldn't the European AI hub have joined forces with the US AI hub? What benefit could there be from preserving institutional and funding barriers between Google and DeepMind? The letter sort of dances around the edges of this question, but ultimately the answer is purely politics. It says things like "This weakens Europe" and "we want the best basic research to be performed in Europe, to enable Europe to shape how machine learning and modern AI change the world" and "many European companies whose future business crucially depends on AI are not perceived as competitive" These are all political goals, worse, they are not logical thinking at all - not a good look for a bunch of scientists. AI research is entirely open. Having a new academic research hub in the EU-that-isn't-the-UK won't change the access those European countries have to the underlying research papers or techniques. They can use AI just the same regardless of where the research is being done. Maybe China would try to close up their researchers, but America and the UK certainly won't. So if European companies are "perceived as uncompetitive" or are not "shaping the world" due to their poor use of AI (this is a dubious theory to begin with) then the solution is for more European companies to download TensorFlow and Torch and get cracking. It isn't for money to be poured into academics who will take it, write a few papers and then go straight into industry anyway.

T-A 8y ago
> remind me what's wrong with working with the Americans again? Make that American companies and the problem, from an academic perspective, is that they recruit away students and researchers from academia. That works for a few years, but longer term, the argument goes, it depletes academia to the point that new talent can no longer be trained... by academia. At that point, the companies wishing to keep recruiting will create their own training facilities and/or step up collaboration with academic institutions. That's where the American part comes in: if the existing talent has all gone to the US and those making the decisions have been there all along, they are likely to focus their training efforts on the US. On top of that, you have the well-publicized problems with data collection by foreign entities and local tax avoidance, which are indeed political.

kome 8y ago

No, language doesn't matter: EU has lower wages because it tax (and redistribute) more, and I like it this way.

deleted 8y ago

[deleted]

enriquto 8y ago

> and even though EU has free movement of labour, the language and culture barrier is strong, and internationals have a harder time to get hired, unless they speak the local language. Certainly not in all fields. In all the math labs that I know (from France, UK, Italy) more than half of the researchers are from other countries. Of course, if you want to teach, it is much easier to get hired if you already speak the language. (edit: format of the quote)

KKKKkkkk1 8y ago

A smaller labor supply implies that the supply and demand curves cross higher. Pay should be higher then.

kitd 8y ago
Though the segregated markets could also imply smaller demand.

segmondy 8y ago

From an outsider, I can tell you what. It's not the langauges. It's the culture, it's the work/life balance. It's things like working reasonable hours, spending time with family & friends. Having long holidays, take time off from work to care for a newborn. It's things like GDPR. America is brutal, America is a gladiator pit, winner take all. Money above all things, the religion is capitalism. Make money or die trying and roll over anyone in the way.

chrshawkes 8y ago

I'm not sure that's the case because the United States is also filled with people that speak different languages.