16 ms·

As a German who's been exclusively working in the US tech space for the past few years, there's so many anecdotes that come to mind to highlight how far behind

by heipei 6y ago

As a German who's been exclusively working in the US tech space for the past few years, there's so many anecdotes that come to mind to highlight how far behind the old world is, both in tech as in spirit: - Article about Gaia-X in major German newspaper FAZ explained that on AWS you can spin up your own infrastructure, "sometimes even without talking to anyone from sales", from your home! - When I tried to read or watch reviews about SaaS solutions for invoicing / bookkeeping for German companies, the first half of the review is usually spent trying to convince people that moving off paper-based invoices and folders to all-digital is a good idea in the first place. - University-educated people in my social circle are often woefully unaware of economic trends that have swept the US, be it the gig economy, X-as-a-service, the nature of Venture Capital, the idea of scaling a company aggressively, the value of information, mobility of labor and paying market rate for experts, the high profit margins of offering a software product vs. (for example) doing one-off consulting for a German industrial company, etc. None of these things bode well for the best talent in Europe working on anything remotely resembling an innovative European tech company. Not even saying we're worse off for it, but the reality is that any European who truly grasps the pace of the US tech industry would rather go there directly than work for a Franco-German government moonshot and hope to be paid maybe a 10% premium over their regular European salary.

mattlutze 6y ago
But we are super proud of coining Industrie 4.0, so, that's something. It would be wonderful to see more free and open innovation and investment in a couple of bleeding-edge tech centers in Germany. A lot of the big internationals are in Munich and Berlin is slowly growing steam for startups, but it's a disappointment to me that there's so many Germans with so much wealth prime for investment and creating a culture of exploration, but instead it sits in real estate or something.
- woodpanel 6y ago
  "But we are super proud of coining Industrie 4.0, so, that's something." Regarding Industrie 4.0: Currently at a client of mine, a "hidden champion" i.e. world market leader in industry XYZ (1.6B in revenue), I'm struggling to have them migrate from Cobol to Java. They are using their versioning system as a backup for their data, not for versioning the code. Deployments are done via dragging a zip file somewhere. Every new version means the whole system (handling invoices e.g.) is out of service for 10-14 days.
  - pmontra 6y ago
    I understand why everything else is suboptimal but why do you want them to migrate from Cobol to Java? What problem is that going to solve for them?
    - woodpanel 6y ago
      It's about human capital. Not that I favor Java, or even that I dislike Cobol. It is rather their existing human capital that makes anything more fancy than Java even harder to migrate to. At the same time, job postings looking for Cobol-Devs in 2020 are useless and even if they manage to find people capable and willing to work with Cobol per se, their existing code-base is an additional deterrant. This further fossilizes what ever ounce of agility their dev teams might have had.
      - zoomablemind 6y ago
        Isn't it the 'legacy' systems are supposed to be left operating as-is, almost like black boxes with defined properties? Some kind of a known seam in the process. Meanwhile, all extensions to process are to be handled by other means. Given the current capacities, there could be additional layers added to filter or enhance whatever comes out of the legacy processes. Sure, there needs to be a "keeper" for those legacy systems, but migrating off them may be asking for too much of a manager's beef to get an approval to accomplish.
  - mattlutze 6y ago
    There are many billions of Euro worth of renovation, modernization and simplification in the Mittlestand.
    - hef19898 6y ago
      There are, the moment the famous Mittelstand realizes the need for that. Until that happens, it is an uphill struggle.
      - 6y ago
gspr 6y ago
I think the two first points are more specific to Germany than to the old world as a whole. Up here in Scandinavia, we often laugh at how much Germans interact with humans, send letters and faxes, and make phonecalls in their business lives. They are woefully far behind. From what I understand the same is true for the south. While I agree with the basic premise of the last point too I think you maybe underestimate the value of quality of life over salary for many of those people.
- heipei 6y ago
  You're right, and I'm glad I started by saying that I'm German because lots of smaller European countries run circles around us in terms of tech adoption. I don't underestimate the value of quality of life, and I don't blame anyone who knowingly works for a stable, "boring", old-school German company which has been the world-leader in its niche for the past 100 years. But I think many people here are not aware that there even is a radically different approach to building up a business (the US/VC/growth model), and that this might be the only model to create modern tech companies to rival the US players. You won't compete with AWS by creating a family-owned business over a few decades where your primary objective is to provide stable and fair employment to people, often for their entire working lives. I'm not saying either one is better, just that I think that's the reality.
  - davedx 6y ago
    Yeah in the Netherlands here, and I’ve spent some time recently integrating a German fintech vendor. The cross of new and modern and old beurocratic way of doing things has been almost dystopian and really slowed everything down. Contrast to similar vendors in the UK is quite something.
    - dukeyukey 6y ago
      Can you go into more details on this? I've only worked closely with UK/USA companies and I'm really interested how they compare to German/French ways of doing things. Does the Netherlands more closely align to the Uk/USA on this?
thecleaner 6y ago
Tech salaries in Europe really are a joke. Even American companies don't pay well here because why would they, the market itself sucks. Combine that with easy immigration to US for Europeans and good affordable education it seems unlikely that talented people would choose to stay here. Part of the reason is the old money in this ecosystem. The problem with digitization in Germany specifically is that our paperwork is supposedly something to be proud of. "Germans love paperwork" says every article about German culture as if its a great thing. Its really sad to hear this. We should hate paperwork and seek to replace it wherever possible.
- panpanna 6y ago
  You can turn that around and say that companies get more for their money in EU. I mean, investor should like companies with reasonable burn rate...
  - thecleaner 6y ago
    That seems true. However it also needs to be considered that salaries shouldnt be so low that people just leave. For example consider Berlin, rapidly rising rent but not so much for salaries. So people just leave. In such a case you do get more bang for your buck as a company but theres a limit on how much.
    - jashmatthews 6y ago
      That’s happened for sure but companies like Amazon, Zalando, Fyber pay well enough for a seriously good lifestyle here.
  - Aeolun 6y ago
    Companies maybe, but there’s zero reason for me to move back to the Netherlands if they’re not going to pay me at least what I earn in Japan, and Japan isn’t even particularly high paying.
    - ChuckNorris89 6y ago
joelbluminator 6y ago
The talent is there, the money could be there if Europeans governments take it seriously, so why not? What's stopping EU from building an AWS equivalent? It's not rocket science. If Europe could come up with companies like ASML which are at the top of chip engineering, they can definitely build software infrastructure. Some of your points ring true but A) What used to be doesn't mean it will always be B) U.S has it's own problems as you can see
- viraptor 6y ago
  > What's stopping EU from building an AWS equivalent? Years of experience running their own massive platform before entering the market of renting those services to others? > they can definitely build software So can OVH and Rackspace. So why would this project take off better than those established companies? Don't get me wrong, I'll be cheering this to succeed, but how is this effort different?
  - sitkack 6y ago
    Cern has more than enough folks that have run systems that are harder to run cloud scale compute. Even if running a DC is rocket science (it isn't), it is no particle physics. The EU should absolutely have its own homegrown tech stack, from silicon to billing. I'd start with an EU run internet backbone and federated object storage in each member state.
    - viraptor 6y ago
      CERN still runs on openstack for the non-specialised projects, I believe. They do improve the project, but it's not their own solution. I can't see Gaia-x mentioning a ready solution anywhere and it seems very secret and proprietary for a project that's meant to be transparent, federated, and lunching end of this year. (Unless I missed something?)
  - guiriduro 6y ago
    If I rememberm AWS CTO is dutch. Throw €100bn in a tech fund and poach him or someone like him, give them free reign, done. Poverty of imagination and obsessive financial conservatism and control freakery from the euro investment community is the real problem, not lack of talent.
0x5002 6y ago
Not to mention the culture at work. I've never experienced a more stuffy, hierarchical, and old-fashioned IT "industry" as I have in Germany. I've been hosting my server with a German company for years. They have recently opened a data center in Missouri - which would be great for latency (I'm in the southeastern US). So, I send an email to the effect of "Hey folks, could you please let me know if it's possible to migrate server xxx.xxx to your MO DC? Thanks!" and that started an email-chain of mighty proportions. Every single email starts with "Dear Mr. XXX" (which is not common in the US, even with attorneys) and uses language that sounds like somebody fed a Markov chain with a fun mix between Nietzsche and the entirety of the German civil code. :) (In all fairness, the company is fantastic and the end-result works great and was done on time)
- dathinab 6y ago
  Dear Mr. ..., is the direct transition for a common formal getting in Germany. Furthermore formal greetings are used for anything business related in Germany. Through that's getting less common with the younger generation. So yes for a middle aged German speaker with non fluent English skills not using dear or omitting the "Mr" can seem that it maybe might be unprofessional or impolite so they will just add it.
  - gurkendoktor 6y ago
    "Dear Mr X" is already slightly informal ("Lieber Herr X"), formal letters should clearly use "Esteemed Mr X" ("Sehr geehrter Herr X") :)
4636760295 6y ago
As a counter point, I have seen technology adopted in the EU in ways that the US has lagged far, far behind. Probably the best example of this is chip & PIN for credit cards. In the US we finally have chips, but still no PIN.
- this_user 6y ago
  That is more the exception than the rule, though, even in the payment space. Here is a more typical example: A few years ago German banks realised that PayPal was eating their lunch, so they decided to start their own payment processor called "PayDirekt". In typical German fashion it was not only 15 years late, but also overly bureaucratic. As merchant you have to sign individual contracts with each bank whose cards you would like to accept. Naturally, it has largely failed to gain traction despite extensive marketing to end users. Another more recent example was Apple Pay launching in Germany. The German banks thought they could do their own mobile payment apps instead rather than work with Apple. Once again, it failed, and now, tail between their legs, they have begun signing up with Cupertino after they started losing customers to mobile-first banks like N26 who supported Apple Pay all along.
- mandevil 6y ago
  Isn't that because credit cards came later to the EU, so they had better standards because they didn't have to worry about supporting huge quantities of obsolete technology? I don't know the exact details on credit cards, but I know that's true for CDMA vs. GSM and NTSC vs PAL. In the US there were so many black and white TV's already out there that they couldn't abandon them, hence NTSC (which allowed the older black and white TV's to just read the Red channel). In Europe, with out those huge numbers of already existing TVs to support, they could go straight to a clearly better standard, PAL. This is a common problem, see _The Innovators Dilemma_ by Clayton Christensen.
  - ripdog 6y ago
    >Isn't that because credit cards came later to the EU, so they had better standards because they didn't have to worry about supporting huge quantities of obsolete technology? In New Zealand, credit card machines are basically required to be replaced every few years as security standards improve. Is this not the case in USA?
baryphonic 6y ago
> German newspaper FAZ explained that on AWS you can spin up your own infrastructure, "sometimes even without talking to anyone from sales", from your home! That quote is quite funny, but I have to wonder: Who speaks to sales before spinning up infrastructure on AWS? The only cases where I see it making sense are when either an entire large enterprise or a non-profit are switching over to AWS and want better rates. For most companies and individuals, not having to speak to sales is the norm.
- adambyrtek 6y ago
  That's the whole point, OP is saying that for German press this is still a new and baffling concept.
  - hef19898 6y ago
    Admittedly, the FAZ is not representing the most tech-savy demographic over here. regardless, the statement is kind of representative, so.
barrenko 6y ago
As a self-taught junior, my move from Croatia to Germany in attempt to get a "better IT job" at the end of last year was something between amusingly comical to amazingly absurd. Even before the Corona wave hit.
- foobarian 6y ago
  I wish Croatia became a go to place for remote work. Beautiful place and climate, sit at a cafe with a laptop sipping Radlers all day long. I'm guessing there are corruption/inefficiency problems opening remote offices or office parks.
  - mschuster91 6y ago
    As an EU expat you can easily move to Croatia thanks to EU freedom of movement, most people in the tourist areas speak decent English. I don't know anything about bureaucratic issues for non-EU expats though. Foreign companies however aren't really willing to open remote offices/parks there because most of the talent pool (not just in IT but across all industries!) heads off to Germany or other countries where there is real earning potential. The "brain drain" across the whole Balkan is immense.
- ChuckNorris89 6y ago
  Would you mind telling more details? Genuinely interested.
deathcakes 6y ago
"University-educated people in my social circle are often woefully unaware of economic trends that have swept the US, be it the gig economy, X-as-a-service, the nature of Venture Capital, the idea of scaling a company aggressively, the value of information, mobility of labor and paying market rate for experts, the high profit margins of offering a software product vs. (for example) doing one-off consulting for a German industrial company, etc." I know you caveat all this with the fact that we aren't necessarily worse off (I say we but am British - I will always think of myself as European though) but I would argue that the fact the Europe has been behind the curve on any of these "innovations" is because society is less obsessed with the quick buck and that this is good. None of these financial/technological innovations have provably made life better for anyone apart from VC's and founders, though I am willing to entertain counterpoints.
- stu2b50 6y ago
  I don't see how SaaS as a concept has made anyone's life particularly bad. For many B2B the consumer gets exactly what they want--constant support and updates--and the producer gets that sweet sweet high margin subscription payment. Same for "high profit margins of offering a software product vs. (for example) doing one-off consulting for a German industrial company". Honestly that's a lesson from all the way back to MSFT. I'm guessing by "paying market rate for experts", they're referring to the pretty large gap between US and European software salaries (even if you're not looking at the Bay). When that comes up, there's usually some people who say that Bay area engineers are overpaid, but rather I think everyone else is underpaid and should fight for better compensation in general. Evidently you can afford to pay these salaries as a business.
  - lis 6y ago
    I believe the reply was focussed towards the gig economy and the use of venture capital to scale aggressively. I agree with a lot of points op is making, but when it comes to e.g. the gig economy and using vc funds to scale b2c businesses by undercutting competitors, I'm very happy that we have a different situation in Germany.
- exolymph 6y ago
mschuster91 6y ago
> the first half of the review is usually spent trying to convince people that moving off paper-based invoices and folders to all-digital is a good idea in the first place. Paper based invoices are the easiest way to avoid issues with the tax office.
joyj2nd 6y ago
> As a German who's been exclusively working in the US tech space for the past few years, As a new immigrant your are still in the euphoria phase of your new live... > but the reality is that any European who truly grasps the pace of the US tech industry would rather go there directly.. Well, as a naturalized citizen with a PhD from the US and experience in technology I can assure you, that this is not the case for everybody. Neither me, nor my business partner with the same background - we both work now in China.
- heipei 6y ago
  Should have been more clear: I worked in the US tech space since ~ 2013 (CyberSecurity) but do so as a remote employee, working from Germany. Hence I got the sometimes surreal experience of working for a VC-backed crazy-growth US corporation while still hanging out with my German friends on weekends who work consulting gigs or at a parts supplier for the automotive industry. Salary-wise the difference was between 2x and 5x, depending on whether you count stock-based compensation. After a while I found it hard to talk to my German friends about my job since it was happening at such a different pace from their regular jobs yet none of them seemed even remotely interested in landing such a job themselves. I agree with you, I wouldn't move to the US for my job (and neither would any of my former colleagues), but we all appreciated the fact that when it comes to business, it's better to work for a US company which understands that sometimes you have to spend money in order to make money, which is not always the case in Germany.
Roritharr 6y ago
>- When I tried to read or watch reviews about SaaS solutions for invoicing / bookkeeping for German companies, the first half of the review is usually spent trying to convince people that moving off paper-based invoices and folders to all-digital is a good idea in the first place. As a CTO of a leading company in this space in Germany, I have to absolutely agree. The technology we can bring to the table is years if not decades ahead of the current state of the art and the growth of all contenders in our space is surprisingly slow compared to our US based counterparts. There are a lot of reasons to this from a culture and market pov, but in general I agree that Germany & Europe as a whole is in a bad spot technologically especially as engineering salaries are simply far below the US so the braindrain is rampant.
- tomonocle 6y ago
  I'm curious - do you target the small percentage of businesses that truly grok the benefits of a platform that advanced already, or do you try to convince laggards to catch up?
  - Roritharr 6y ago
    The early adopters have a lot of options, of which we believe to be the best for a certain segment and have been for nearly a decade now. SaaS Accounting in 2010 was a tough pitch in Germany and for some segments still is. The laggards have a large industry catering to them so that's where the most revenue is still concentrated. From the top of my head our last analysis showed that less than 5% of the TAM of SaaS Accounting Solutions in Germany is captured at the moment by any of the active players. So the strategy is to provide a meaningfully better replacement for existing solutions while not relying on the advantages of the SaaS model.
stakkur 6y ago
European startup tech companies with valuations >= $1 Billion: * Klarna (Sweden)(online payments) * N26 (Germany) (mobile banking) * BlaBlaCar (France) (Ride sharing) * Vinted (Lithuania) (ecommerce) * Acronis (Switzerland) (backup/recovery) * Glovo (Spain) (delivery) * Outsystems (Portugal) (enterprise app platform) * Bolt (Estonia) * Veeam Software (Switzerland)(acquired, I think) There are more. There's a trillion+ dollars in valuation in the European startup world, a deep and well-educated talent pool, and (in many countries) long experience in technology innovation. I think Europe's going to be just fine.
- perl4ever 6y ago
  An extremely disproportionate number of the smaller publicly traded companies in the world seem to be listed in or from Japan, the UK, or the US. I don't know why, or exactly what it means, but it's a really prominent feature of the global economy and shows that something is lacking in Europe outside the UK. I sometimes wonder if people are really unaware or just obstinately pretending.
- ChuckNorris89 6y ago
  Those companies are nice but their services are not available to all EU members whereas mist US tech companies operate in all states. Food for thought as to why EU companies can't grow.
  - dathinab 6y ago
    Maybe because some of the more successful VC companies grow based on moralicly questionable practices and circumvention or outright breaking of laws and regulations. Practices with which you can get away much less in the EU. But this also means that US companies have a somewhat unfair competitive advantage on the global marked. Combine that with the US having the first wave of big tech companies due to other circumstances and some other thinks and is not really surprising. I mean look at FAANG: - Facebook, repeatedly and frequently acted in bad fate wrt. to privacy, non us social issues and copyright protection. Lied to monopoly watchdogs. - Amazon, know for taking advantage of workers (through had gotten better), know to not talk effective actions against massive counterfite good, know to use unfair competitive advantage for their own Amazon branded products, questionable privacy practices for user facing products like the fire ebook reader, knows to enable (not cause) environmental problem through mainly throwing away returned products, probably missed some points - Apple, well less to say here except how it hinders/prevents repair shops while not returning thinks themselves (just replaced parts). Also there where repeatedly bag reports about the workers condition in the factories whey Apple products where produced, but that probably applies to most tech hardware companiesway. Still the way they undermine the marked with vertical expansion is dangerous, but I don't know if it had already caused damages. - Netflix, I don't know much about them tbh. Seems fine but I might be wrong. - Google, repeated acts in bad face for user privacy. Had been good for the first half of their lives but now turned bad and might very well try to literally take over the internet (or what users price at it). - YouTube (now part of Google) grew partially because of disregard for copyright and then forcing copyright holder into compromises with it. - Uber, disregard for regulations for commercial public transport and labor law. Had been banned multiple times in some EU countries, now tend to operate under different terms in some EU countries then I'm the US. Had the same problems as the Taxi industry but sidesteps responsibility by putting it into the customer and drivers. - AirBnb disregard for (the EU version of) zoning regulations and similar. Caused damages by implecitly constraint available and affordable apartment space in some EU cities. If heard estimates that a non small amount of AirBnb apartment providers are acting illigaley with the way they provide apartments in the EU, sadly non where reliable estimates. But here is the thing both Apple and Google come from a time where a lot of things where just different. But now Google turned bad and Apple is increasingly becoming a latent danger for a fair marked. Meanwhile both Facebook and Amazon had been moralicly pretty bad from the start. Only Netflix seems fine but I don't know anything about it so, duh.
KKKKkkkk1 6y ago
The venture capital stuff was good for a time when Moore's law was repeatedly erasing whole industries at a cadence of every two years. That's how stupid ideas like blitzscaling could work [0]. How much longer will it last? That remains to be seen. I find it instructive that a society that hasn't been exposed to VC practices has created some of the most valuable and innovative companies in the world. [0] Blitzscaling 14: Elizabeth Holmes on Managing Product Strategy, Regulation, and the Media https://youtu.be/juhATwufdbc https://youtu.be/juhATwufdbc
buboard 6y ago
What bugs me more about the EU "tech" sector is the reliance on public and EU sector money. Making "something people want" will still make you less money, you won't be able to scale it up properly, and pretty much anything risky is illegal. On the other hand, completely mediocre companies can survive and even thrive by applying for every kind of EU subsidy and getting money from overpriced bureaucratic contracts that they overpromised and underdelivered. Every EU endeavour, be it GDPR, research grants, or this one aims to primarily increase bureaucracy so more do-nothing jobs can be created.
mbrodersen 6y ago
> how far behind the old world is, both in tech as in spirit I always laugh out loud reading nonsense like that. It is only true if you extremely narrowly define "tech" as SaaS solutions. Just to mention a few examples: almost all Fortune 500 companies in the US run on "old world" (Germany7) SAP software. Almost all mobile phones run on "old world" (England) ARM designed chips. The worlds best Go player was beaten by "old world" (England) software. The largest airliner in the world (A380) was designed and built in the "old world". Do I really need to go on?
- Nimitz14 6y ago
  England is the most modern of the large European countries and is obviously not what OP was talking about. He's right, both the regulations and the culture make Germany not a pleasant place to do business.
  - mbrodersen 6y ago
    Having lived, worked and paid taxes in England for a number of years, I can tell you that England typically is 5 to 10 years behind Denmark/Norway/Sweden.
    - Nimitz14 6y ago
      Notice I used the word "large".

by heipei 6y ago

mattlutze 6y ago

But we are super proud of coining Industrie 4.0, so, that's something. It would be wonderful to see more free and open innovation and investment in a couple of bleeding-edge tech centers in Germany. A lot of the big internationals are in Munich and Berlin is slowly growing steam for startups, but it's a disappointment to me that there's so many Germans with so much wealth prime for investment and creating a culture of exploration, but instead it sits in real estate or something.

woodpanel 6y ago
"But we are super proud of coining Industrie 4.0, so, that's something." Regarding Industrie 4.0: Currently at a client of mine, a "hidden champion" i.e. world market leader in industry XYZ (1.6B in revenue), I'm struggling to have them migrate from Cobol to Java. They are using their versioning system as a backup for their data, not for versioning the code. Deployments are done via dragging a zip file somewhere. Every new version means the whole system (handling invoices e.g.) is out of service for 10-14 days.
- pmontra 6y ago
  I understand why everything else is suboptimal but why do you want them to migrate from Cobol to Java? What problem is that going to solve for them?
  - woodpanel 6y ago
    It's about human capital. Not that I favor Java, or even that I dislike Cobol. It is rather their existing human capital that makes anything more fancy than Java even harder to migrate to. At the same time, job postings looking for Cobol-Devs in 2020 are useless and even if they manage to find people capable and willing to work with Cobol per se, their existing code-base is an additional deterrant. This further fossilizes what ever ounce of agility their dev teams might have had.
    - zoomablemind 6y ago
      Isn't it the 'legacy' systems are supposed to be left operating as-is, almost like black boxes with defined properties? Some kind of a known seam in the process. Meanwhile, all extensions to process are to be handled by other means. Given the current capacities, there could be additional layers added to filter or enhance whatever comes out of the legacy processes. Sure, there needs to be a "keeper" for those legacy systems, but migrating off them may be asking for too much of a manager's beef to get an approval to accomplish.
- mattlutze 6y ago
  There are many billions of Euro worth of renovation, modernization and simplification in the Mittlestand.
  - hef19898 6y ago
    There are, the moment the famous Mittelstand realizes the need for that. Until that happens, it is an uphill struggle.
    - 6y ago

gspr 6y ago

I think the two first points are more specific to Germany than to the old world as a whole. Up here in Scandinavia, we often laugh at how much Germans interact with humans, send letters and faxes, and make phonecalls in their business lives. They are woefully far behind. From what I understand the same is true for the south. While I agree with the basic premise of the last point too I think you maybe underestimate the value of quality of life over salary for many of those people.

heipei 6y ago
You're right, and I'm glad I started by saying that I'm German because lots of smaller European countries run circles around us in terms of tech adoption. I don't underestimate the value of quality of life, and I don't blame anyone who knowingly works for a stable, "boring", old-school German company which has been the world-leader in its niche for the past 100 years. But I think many people here are not aware that there even is a radically different approach to building up a business (the US/VC/growth model), and that this might be the only model to create modern tech companies to rival the US players. You won't compete with AWS by creating a family-owned business over a few decades where your primary objective is to provide stable and fair employment to people, often for their entire working lives. I'm not saying either one is better, just that I think that's the reality.
- davedx 6y ago
  Yeah in the Netherlands here, and I’ve spent some time recently integrating a German fintech vendor. The cross of new and modern and old beurocratic way of doing things has been almost dystopian and really slowed everything down. Contrast to similar vendors in the UK is quite something.
  - dukeyukey 6y ago
    Can you go into more details on this? I've only worked closely with UK/USA companies and I'm really interested how they compare to German/French ways of doing things. Does the Netherlands more closely align to the Uk/USA on this?

thecleaner 6y ago

Tech salaries in Europe really are a joke. Even American companies don't pay well here because why would they, the market itself sucks. Combine that with easy immigration to US for Europeans and good affordable education it seems unlikely that talented people would choose to stay here. Part of the reason is the old money in this ecosystem. The problem with digitization in Germany specifically is that our paperwork is supposedly something to be proud of. "Germans love paperwork" says every article about German culture as if its a great thing. Its really sad to hear this. We should hate paperwork and seek to replace it wherever possible.

panpanna 6y ago
You can turn that around and say that companies get more for their money in EU. I mean, investor should like companies with reasonable burn rate...
- thecleaner 6y ago
  That seems true. However it also needs to be considered that salaries shouldnt be so low that people just leave. For example consider Berlin, rapidly rising rent but not so much for salaries. So people just leave. In such a case you do get more bang for your buck as a company but theres a limit on how much.
  - jashmatthews 6y ago
    That’s happened for sure but companies like Amazon, Zalando, Fyber pay well enough for a seriously good lifestyle here.
- Aeolun 6y ago
  Companies maybe, but there’s zero reason for me to move back to the Netherlands if they’re not going to pay me at least what I earn in Japan, and Japan isn’t even particularly high paying.
  - ChuckNorris89 6y ago

joelbluminator 6y ago

The talent is there, the money could be there if Europeans governments take it seriously, so why not? What's stopping EU from building an AWS equivalent? It's not rocket science. If Europe could come up with companies like ASML which are at the top of chip engineering, they can definitely build software infrastructure. Some of your points ring true but A) What used to be doesn't mean it will always be B) U.S has it's own problems as you can see

viraptor 6y ago
> What's stopping EU from building an AWS equivalent? Years of experience running their own massive platform before entering the market of renting those services to others? > they can definitely build software So can OVH and Rackspace. So why would this project take off better than those established companies? Don't get me wrong, I'll be cheering this to succeed, but how is this effort different?
- sitkack 6y ago
  Cern has more than enough folks that have run systems that are harder to run cloud scale compute. Even if running a DC is rocket science (it isn't), it is no particle physics. The EU should absolutely have its own homegrown tech stack, from silicon to billing. I'd start with an EU run internet backbone and federated object storage in each member state.
  - viraptor 6y ago
    CERN still runs on openstack for the non-specialised projects, I believe. They do improve the project, but it's not their own solution. I can't see Gaia-x mentioning a ready solution anywhere and it seems very secret and proprietary for a project that's meant to be transparent, federated, and lunching end of this year. (Unless I missed something?)
- guiriduro 6y ago
  If I rememberm AWS CTO is dutch. Throw €100bn in a tech fund and poach him or someone like him, give them free reign, done. Poverty of imagination and obsessive financial conservatism and control freakery from the euro investment community is the real problem, not lack of talent.

0x5002 6y ago

Not to mention the culture at work. I've never experienced a more stuffy, hierarchical, and old-fashioned IT "industry" as I have in Germany. I've been hosting my server with a German company for years. They have recently opened a data center in Missouri - which would be great for latency (I'm in the southeastern US). So, I send an email to the effect of "Hey folks, could you please let me know if it's possible to migrate server xxx.xxx to your MO DC? Thanks!" and that started an email-chain of mighty proportions. Every single email starts with "Dear Mr. XXX" (which is not common in the US, even with attorneys) and uses language that sounds like somebody fed a Markov chain with a fun mix between Nietzsche and the entirety of the German civil code. :) (In all fairness, the company is fantastic and the end-result works great and was done on time)

dathinab 6y ago
Dear Mr. ..., is the direct transition for a common formal getting in Germany. Furthermore formal greetings are used for anything business related in Germany. Through that's getting less common with the younger generation. So yes for a middle aged German speaker with non fluent English skills not using dear or omitting the "Mr" can seem that it maybe might be unprofessional or impolite so they will just add it.
- gurkendoktor 6y ago
  "Dear Mr X" is already slightly informal ("Lieber Herr X"), formal letters should clearly use "Esteemed Mr X" ("Sehr geehrter Herr X") :)

4636760295 6y ago

As a counter point, I have seen technology adopted in the EU in ways that the US has lagged far, far behind. Probably the best example of this is chip & PIN for credit cards. In the US we finally have chips, but still no PIN.

this_user 6y ago
That is more the exception than the rule, though, even in the payment space. Here is a more typical example: A few years ago German banks realised that PayPal was eating their lunch, so they decided to start their own payment processor called "PayDirekt". In typical German fashion it was not only 15 years late, but also overly bureaucratic. As merchant you have to sign individual contracts with each bank whose cards you would like to accept. Naturally, it has largely failed to gain traction despite extensive marketing to end users. Another more recent example was Apple Pay launching in Germany. The German banks thought they could do their own mobile payment apps instead rather than work with Apple. Once again, it failed, and now, tail between their legs, they have begun signing up with Cupertino after they started losing customers to mobile-first banks like N26 who supported Apple Pay all along.
mandevil 6y ago
Isn't that because credit cards came later to the EU, so they had better standards because they didn't have to worry about supporting huge quantities of obsolete technology? I don't know the exact details on credit cards, but I know that's true for CDMA vs. GSM and NTSC vs PAL. In the US there were so many black and white TV's already out there that they couldn't abandon them, hence NTSC (which allowed the older black and white TV's to just read the Red channel). In Europe, with out those huge numbers of already existing TVs to support, they could go straight to a clearly better standard, PAL. This is a common problem, see _The Innovators Dilemma_ by Clayton Christensen.
- ripdog 6y ago
  >Isn't that because credit cards came later to the EU, so they had better standards because they didn't have to worry about supporting huge quantities of obsolete technology? In New Zealand, credit card machines are basically required to be replaced every few years as security standards improve. Is this not the case in USA?

baryphonic 6y ago

> German newspaper FAZ explained that on AWS you can spin up your own infrastructure, "sometimes even without talking to anyone from sales", from your home! That quote is quite funny, but I have to wonder: Who speaks to sales before spinning up infrastructure on AWS? The only cases where I see it making sense are when either an entire large enterprise or a non-profit are switching over to AWS and want better rates. For most companies and individuals, not having to speak to sales is the norm.

adambyrtek 6y ago
That's the whole point, OP is saying that for German press this is still a new and baffling concept.
- hef19898 6y ago
  Admittedly, the FAZ is not representing the most tech-savy demographic over here. regardless, the statement is kind of representative, so.

barrenko 6y ago

As a self-taught junior, my move from Croatia to Germany in attempt to get a "better IT job" at the end of last year was something between amusingly comical to amazingly absurd. Even before the Corona wave hit.

foobarian 6y ago
I wish Croatia became a go to place for remote work. Beautiful place and climate, sit at a cafe with a laptop sipping Radlers all day long. I'm guessing there are corruption/inefficiency problems opening remote offices or office parks.
- mschuster91 6y ago
  As an EU expat you can easily move to Croatia thanks to EU freedom of movement, most people in the tourist areas speak decent English. I don't know anything about bureaucratic issues for non-EU expats though. Foreign companies however aren't really willing to open remote offices/parks there because most of the talent pool (not just in IT but across all industries!) heads off to Germany or other countries where there is real earning potential. The "brain drain" across the whole Balkan is immense.
ChuckNorris89 6y ago
Would you mind telling more details? Genuinely interested.

deathcakes 6y ago

"University-educated people in my social circle are often woefully unaware of economic trends that have swept the US, be it the gig economy, X-as-a-service, the nature of Venture Capital, the idea of scaling a company aggressively, the value of information, mobility of labor and paying market rate for experts, the high profit margins of offering a software product vs. (for example) doing one-off consulting for a German industrial company, etc." I know you caveat all this with the fact that we aren't necessarily worse off (I say we but am British - I will always think of myself as European though) but I would argue that the fact the Europe has been behind the curve on any of these "innovations" is because society is less obsessed with the quick buck and that this is good. None of these financial/technological innovations have provably made life better for anyone apart from VC's and founders, though I am willing to entertain counterpoints.

stu2b50 6y ago
I don't see how SaaS as a concept has made anyone's life particularly bad. For many B2B the consumer gets exactly what they want--constant support and updates--and the producer gets that sweet sweet high margin subscription payment. Same for "high profit margins of offering a software product vs. (for example) doing one-off consulting for a German industrial company". Honestly that's a lesson from all the way back to MSFT. I'm guessing by "paying market rate for experts", they're referring to the pretty large gap between US and European software salaries (even if you're not looking at the Bay). When that comes up, there's usually some people who say that Bay area engineers are overpaid, but rather I think everyone else is underpaid and should fight for better compensation in general. Evidently you can afford to pay these salaries as a business.
- lis 6y ago
  I believe the reply was focussed towards the gig economy and the use of venture capital to scale aggressively. I agree with a lot of points op is making, but when it comes to e.g. the gig economy and using vc funds to scale b2c businesses by undercutting competitors, I'm very happy that we have a different situation in Germany.
exolymph 6y ago

mschuster91 6y ago

> the first half of the review is usually spent trying to convince people that moving off paper-based invoices and folders to all-digital is a good idea in the first place. Paper based invoices are the easiest way to avoid issues with the tax office.

joyj2nd 6y ago

> As a German who's been exclusively working in the US tech space for the past few years, As a new immigrant your are still in the euphoria phase of your new live... > but the reality is that any European who truly grasps the pace of the US tech industry would rather go there directly.. Well, as a naturalized citizen with a PhD from the US and experience in technology I can assure you, that this is not the case for everybody. Neither me, nor my business partner with the same background - we both work now in China.

heipei 6y ago
Should have been more clear: I worked in the US tech space since ~ 2013 (CyberSecurity) but do so as a remote employee, working from Germany. Hence I got the sometimes surreal experience of working for a VC-backed crazy-growth US corporation while still hanging out with my German friends on weekends who work consulting gigs or at a parts supplier for the automotive industry. Salary-wise the difference was between 2x and 5x, depending on whether you count stock-based compensation. After a while I found it hard to talk to my German friends about my job since it was happening at such a different pace from their regular jobs yet none of them seemed even remotely interested in landing such a job themselves. I agree with you, I wouldn't move to the US for my job (and neither would any of my former colleagues), but we all appreciated the fact that when it comes to business, it's better to work for a US company which understands that sometimes you have to spend money in order to make money, which is not always the case in Germany.

Roritharr 6y ago

>- When I tried to read or watch reviews about SaaS solutions for invoicing / bookkeeping for German companies, the first half of the review is usually spent trying to convince people that moving off paper-based invoices and folders to all-digital is a good idea in the first place. As a CTO of a leading company in this space in Germany, I have to absolutely agree. The technology we can bring to the table is years if not decades ahead of the current state of the art and the growth of all contenders in our space is surprisingly slow compared to our US based counterparts. There are a lot of reasons to this from a culture and market pov, but in general I agree that Germany & Europe as a whole is in a bad spot technologically especially as engineering salaries are simply far below the US so the braindrain is rampant.

tomonocle 6y ago
I'm curious - do you target the small percentage of businesses that truly grok the benefits of a platform that advanced already, or do you try to convince laggards to catch up?
- Roritharr 6y ago
  The early adopters have a lot of options, of which we believe to be the best for a certain segment and have been for nearly a decade now. SaaS Accounting in 2010 was a tough pitch in Germany and for some segments still is. The laggards have a large industry catering to them so that's where the most revenue is still concentrated. From the top of my head our last analysis showed that less than 5% of the TAM of SaaS Accounting Solutions in Germany is captured at the moment by any of the active players. So the strategy is to provide a meaningfully better replacement for existing solutions while not relying on the advantages of the SaaS model.

stakkur 6y ago

European startup tech companies with valuations >= $1 Billion: * Klarna (Sweden)(online payments) * N26 (Germany) (mobile banking) * BlaBlaCar (France) (Ride sharing) * Vinted (Lithuania) (ecommerce) * Acronis (Switzerland) (backup/recovery) * Glovo (Spain) (delivery) * Outsystems (Portugal) (enterprise app platform) * Bolt (Estonia) * Veeam Software (Switzerland)(acquired, I think) There are more. There's a trillion+ dollars in valuation in the European startup world, a deep and well-educated talent pool, and (in many countries) long experience in technology innovation. I think Europe's going to be just fine.

perl4ever 6y ago
An extremely disproportionate number of the smaller publicly traded companies in the world seem to be listed in or from Japan, the UK, or the US. I don't know why, or exactly what it means, but it's a really prominent feature of the global economy and shows that something is lacking in Europe outside the UK. I sometimes wonder if people are really unaware or just obstinately pretending.
ChuckNorris89 6y ago
Those companies are nice but their services are not available to all EU members whereas mist US tech companies operate in all states. Food for thought as to why EU companies can't grow.
- dathinab 6y ago
  Maybe because some of the more successful VC companies grow based on moralicly questionable practices and circumvention or outright breaking of laws and regulations. Practices with which you can get away much less in the EU. But this also means that US companies have a somewhat unfair competitive advantage on the global marked. Combine that with the US having the first wave of big tech companies due to other circumstances and some other thinks and is not really surprising. I mean look at FAANG: - Facebook, repeatedly and frequently acted in bad fate wrt. to privacy, non us social issues and copyright protection. Lied to monopoly watchdogs. - Amazon, know for taking advantage of workers (through had gotten better), know to not talk effective actions against massive counterfite good, know to use unfair competitive advantage for their own Amazon branded products, questionable privacy practices for user facing products like the fire ebook reader, knows to enable (not cause) environmental problem through mainly throwing away returned products, probably missed some points - Apple, well less to say here except how it hinders/prevents repair shops while not returning thinks themselves (just replaced parts). Also there where repeatedly bag reports about the workers condition in the factories whey Apple products where produced, but that probably applies to most tech hardware companiesway. Still the way they undermine the marked with vertical expansion is dangerous, but I don't know if it had already caused damages. - Netflix, I don't know much about them tbh. Seems fine but I might be wrong. - Google, repeated acts in bad face for user privacy. Had been good for the first half of their lives but now turned bad and might very well try to literally take over the internet (or what users price at it). - YouTube (now part of Google) grew partially because of disregard for copyright and then forcing copyright holder into compromises with it. - Uber, disregard for regulations for commercial public transport and labor law. Had been banned multiple times in some EU countries, now tend to operate under different terms in some EU countries then I'm the US. Had the same problems as the Taxi industry but sidesteps responsibility by putting it into the customer and drivers. - AirBnb disregard for (the EU version of) zoning regulations and similar. Caused damages by implecitly constraint available and affordable apartment space in some EU cities. If heard estimates that a non small amount of AirBnb apartment providers are acting illigaley with the way they provide apartments in the EU, sadly non where reliable estimates. But here is the thing both Apple and Google come from a time where a lot of things where just different. But now Google turned bad and Apple is increasingly becoming a latent danger for a fair marked. Meanwhile both Facebook and Amazon had been moralicly pretty bad from the start. Only Netflix seems fine but I don't know anything about it so, duh.

KKKKkkkk1 6y ago

The venture capital stuff was good for a time when Moore's law was repeatedly erasing whole industries at a cadence of every two years. That's how stupid ideas like blitzscaling could work [0]. How much longer will it last? That remains to be seen. I find it instructive that a society that hasn't been exposed to VC practices has created some of the most valuable and innovative companies in the world. [0] Blitzscaling 14: Elizabeth Holmes on Managing Product Strategy, Regulation, and the Media https://youtu.be/juhATwufdbc https://youtu.be/juhATwufdbc

buboard 6y ago

What bugs me more about the EU "tech" sector is the reliance on public and EU sector money. Making "something people want" will still make you less money, you won't be able to scale it up properly, and pretty much anything risky is illegal. On the other hand, completely mediocre companies can survive and even thrive by applying for every kind of EU subsidy and getting money from overpriced bureaucratic contracts that they overpromised and underdelivered. Every EU endeavour, be it GDPR, research grants, or this one aims to primarily increase bureaucracy so more do-nothing jobs can be created.

mbrodersen 6y ago

> how far behind the old world is, both in tech as in spirit I always laugh out loud reading nonsense like that. It is only true if you extremely narrowly define "tech" as SaaS solutions. Just to mention a few examples: almost all Fortune 500 companies in the US run on "old world" (Germany7) SAP software. Almost all mobile phones run on "old world" (England) ARM designed chips. The worlds best Go player was beaten by "old world" (England) software. The largest airliner in the world (A380) was designed and built in the "old world". Do I really need to go on?

Nimitz14 6y ago
England is the most modern of the large European countries and is obviously not what OP was talking about. He's right, both the regulations and the culture make Germany not a pleasant place to do business.
- mbrodersen 6y ago
  Having lived, worked and paid taxes in England for a number of years, I can tell you that England typically is 5 to 10 years behind Denmark/Norway/Sweden.
  - Nimitz14 6y ago
    Notice I used the word "large".