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Evernote has laid off most of its US staff and will move operations to Europe
- chaosite 3y agodupe: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36609641 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36609641
- Simon_O_Rourke 3y agoThey would find a reciprocal move, say from France back to the US, a whole lot more difficult to legally execute.
- gberger 3y agoWhy is that?
- raulgalera 3y agoLabor laws are much tougher in EU than in the US, especially when it comes to big layoffs
- rvense 3y agoCan you elaborate on where the problems would be? I'm from Denmark (which, admittedly, I understand is on the lax side of things as far as Europe goes), but I can't see what would stop you. If you want to close your company or office for strategic purposes, you just say so and fire the people as per the terms of their contract, which'll mean three months notice in most cases. Same with cutbacks, you can just do it. You can't fire someone without notice or for no reason, but "we don't need this work to be done here anymore" is of course a perfectly valid reason. At least that's my impression.
- norwegian99 3y agoYeah, it's the same in Norway. You need justification to fire an individual employee, but it's not hard to close down your entire business, do cutbacks etc. for business reasons. It doesn't seem unlikely that it's much harder to do this in southern europe though.
- messe 3y ago> fire the people as per the terms of their contract That's not possible in much of Europe. For example, in Ireland, you can't fire someone without cause, regardless of notice period. If the position is being made redundant (and you can prove it, which in this case, where you're moving the role to a different country would be easy to do), then you can let them go, but you have to pay them a statutory severance payment (as well as anything else specified in their contract). EDIT: There might also be a language barrier going on with the terminology here: when I read the word "fire" in this case, I generally take it to mean "to be dismissed from the role for cause".
- Symbiote 3y agoYou've said it's "not possible", and then explained exactly how it is possible.
- messe 3y agoSee my edit, I think this is just a confusion of terminology. I wouldn't really refer to someone whose position being made redundant as "getting fired", there's very different procedures to be followed and it has very different implications.
- _the_inflator 3y agoBendong Spoons is based in Milan, Italy. Evernote's business faded away, so maybe that's why BS consolidates EN in Europe. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bending_Spoons https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bending_Spoons
- zeruch 3y agoIt won't help them. Their long term outlook...isn't.
- coffeebeqn 3y agoI’m not sure what moat they have left. Probably just the friction of people moving their notes to a new platform.
- stareatgoats 3y agoUSD 100 million in recurring revenue and 250 million locked in customers [0] is not all that bad an outlook. It would likely rather take exceptional mismanagement to squander it. [0] https://evernote.com/blog/bending-spoons-to-acquire-evernote/ https://evernote.com/blog/bending-spoons-to-acquire-evernote...
- isaacfrond 3y agoI'm a paying user of Evernote and have a lot of notes in it. I vaguely fear the moment that Evernote will throw the towel. I tried to orient what would be an affordable, future-safe alternative, but I haven't found any. The fact that I can create notes from mobile and desktop, with integration into the browser are my main requirements. Who has a suggestion?
- besil 3y agoObsidian app + sync
- RayVR 3y agoInkdrop is quite good but I don't know if there is a browser view.
- Traubenfuchs 3y agoI have never used Evernote, but it sounds a little bit like... Google Docs?
- pacifika 3y agoOneNote, Apple Notes, BookStack, a private blog from various providers, NextCloud Notes, GitHub Wiki or Issues list on an empty repo, Dropbox Paper. I suspect you’ll have more requirements.
- murrayb 3y agoJoplin has served me well as an Evernote replacement. If by integration with the browser you mean snipping content then I think it meets your requirements.
- JenrHywy 3y agoPlus you can self-host Joplin server and be completely I'm control of your data.
- pantulis 3y ago> I tried to orient what would be an affordable, future-safe alternative, but I haven't found any. I think it would be OneNote. But if you really wand to future proof your data, I think nothing beats using Obsidian on top of a bunch of folders in a cloud drive. I am all-in on Apple and I replaced Evernote with iCloud Drive, Notebooks.app, Obsidian and EagleFiler all pointing to the same "vault" folder. While on mobile I just use the regular Files app to browse the iCloud Drive. It's much less convenient than just using Evernote, and that's exactly Evernote's greatness.
- porker 3y agoWith the salary difference between US and Europe, no surprise.
- coffeebeqn 3y agoDepending on the country. The extra taxes will certainly dampen some of that effect
- kvgr 3y agoEven with taxes you can be around 100k, middle/eastern europe has a lot of good developers. And if you pay EU contractors, it can be pretty tax efficient for company
- srg0 3y agoBending Spoons is an Italian company. Most of their job postings are Milan, Italy, or fully remote, with the preference for those in between GMT-2 and GMT+3 time zones. Assuming they want to continue Evernote as a product, I wonder if they laid off US and Chile stuff, because it was difficult to manage two teams in different time zones, or just it is cheaper to gather an equivalent EU-only team (Their entry-level positions are approx €50k/year, though the cost for the employer is higher).
- saiya-jin 3y agoI can't imagine a similar position would cost 50k in Chile. Also, offering remote in EU gives you access to places like Romania, Slovakia or Bulgaria, where you can get good enough talent for half of that. It can also be 100% of the sum and just use them as contractors (with benefit of quick & easy firing if needed, no lengthy HR dances).
- that_guy_iain 3y agoI wouldn't be surprised if entry-level positions are lower than 50k a year. Especially in Italy.
- mmkos 3y agoNot sure what currency you have in mind, but I'm in Europe and I know it is. In fact, I just checked and it is a meagre €26k according to Glassdoor (median). I don't know why that is. First thought would be that European countries' economies are still mostly based on old industries and so the value of software isn't as big here? I'd like to know.
- that_guy_iain 3y agoSalaries just aren't as a large by default the average dev salary for an experienced in the US is 100k. In the UK for example it's about 35k GBP. Germany about 50k EUR. Entry-level in Germany is 35-40k for a developer. I hear that italy has lower salaries. France might have higher.
- Animats 3y agoTheir building on US 101 near Redwood City lost the Evernote elephant sign some time back.
- saagarjha 3y agoMaybe another hospital is in order.
- nubinetwork 3y agohttps://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36609641 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36609641 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36642339 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36642339 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36650656 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36650656 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36654067 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36654067 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36661240 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36661240
- jzl 3y agoI've never used any of the fancy features of Evernote (web clipping, OCR, etc), but I have a lot of notes still left in it. I'm gradually moving them all over to google docs finally. The main advances in recent years for google docs that now make this viable: - Checkbox lists - Pageless view - Offline editing in the mobile app I'll miss the lack of some organizational features in Evernote, but I don't want to ever move the notes again and google is the only service I feel like I don't have to question its longevity. (Apple notes aren't a good solution for me because I'm in Windows too much.) I also plan on doing occasional archive downloads via Google Takeout.
- ReDeiPirati 3y ago"The company says the step is intended to “boost operational efficiency and to make the most of the Bending Spoons employer brand, which is extremely strong in Europe.” I do find surprisingly that they said that their brand is strong in Europe. Personally, I discovered Bending Spoons during the pandemic because they gifted the italian government of a Contact Tracing app, that ultimately never worked. I guess that from their point of view it was mainly a marketing initiative. However I don't see their brand as something to be considered strong in Europe in my perspective and by looking at their website the first thing that comes into mind is a glorified sort of software agency.
- mrweasel 3y agoI wonder if it's one of these cases where a company believes themselves to be bigger and more important than they really are. Evernote probably have a stronger brand in Europe, Bending Spoons brand is that they are the company that bought Evernote.
- ReDeiPirati 3y ago> I wonder if it's one of these cases where a company believes themselves to be bigger and more important than they really are. I think that it's quite sure one of those cases. From their messaging it seems like they are committed to solve big hairy problems (that in my minds are things like AGI, nuclear fusion, stopping world's hunger, etc...), but when you look at their product portfolio the expectations they set certainly don't match the reality given that you'll find mobile apps for video and image editing, fitness, etc... BTW with the exception of Evernote (that it's not something they created) I've never heard of any of those apps.
- malermeister 3y agoYup, at least I've never heard of bending spoons before (I'm European). I'm familiar with Evernote though!
- ljm 3y agoCan't say I've ever heard the name in the UK, but also Evernote itself might as well have faded into total obscurity a long time ago.
- Varqu 3y agoIsn't it the 3rd time when the same news make it to the HN main page?
- adulion 3y agoi remember phil libin saying he wanted to build a 100 year company
- midoridensha 3y agoThey should offer to relocate employees to Italy (or wherever they have offices). They might get a few takers.
- resolutebat 3y agoSimultaneously on the HN front page: Evernote acquirer Bending Spoons laying off people, and a story about the original spoon-bender Uri Geller and his impact on the world. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36657100 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36657100
- michh 3y agoSeeing a lot of comments say (in one way or another) 'well duh, wages are lower in the EU' than they are in Silicon Valley. But I don't know, if they'd laid off their EU staff instead this thread would be full of people saying it's just too expensive to be EU-based due to all the regulations and 'unnecessary' worker protection. In fact, there are many such threads on this brightly-colored website. Maybe, if you feel inclined to post something like that, consider if you'd used pretty much the same reasoning if it were the other way round and reflect on that.
- vineyardmike 3y agoOr there’s more nuance. Yes, California salaries are more expensive than Europe. Yes Europe has more laws. There are trade offs. If your business is boom/bust (lots of hire/fire) then Europe is expensive due to worker protections and smaller talent pool. If your business has anything data based, or other high-regulation topics, Europe is expensive due to their regulations. If your business just needs warm bodies to iterate on some codebase, Silicon Valley is expensive. Or, in the case of Evernote, if you’re a Silicon Valley based company that doesn’t push the cutting edge and you lay off most employees AND you’re purchased by a European company that has European employees, maybe stay in Europe.
- Arnt 3y agoEuropean regulations are expensive? Do you have data or a solid source for that? I ask because I worked for European a company that set up a subsidiary in the US; the costs of US regulations was higher than we were used to. The biggest factor was some sort of insurance that we absolutely needed to cover things that might happen. I didn't even want to know the details, I wanted to write code, but I did notice that the total budget for lawyer stuff was high. Back home we had clear regulations and low uncertainty, in the US the uncertainty was higher and we needed insurance.
- somsak2 3y agoyou ask for a solid source but provide among the shakiest of sources yourself
- T3RMINATED 3y ago[dead]
- ChrisArchitect 3y ago[dupe] Official blog post discussion here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36650656 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36650656 And a ton of earlier discussion over here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36609641 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36609641