16 ms·

Dear Europe, please wake up

• nicbou 2y ago
  I know too little to have strong opinions about this. I worked for a few years in Canada, and for the rest of my career in Germany. In my opinion, bureaucracy is a growing problem, at least in Germany. There is just so much compliance work involved in running a business, and it keeps getting worse. As a sole proprietor running a very simple business, my first year felt like I was just working on compliance, and my actual business was just a side quest. I wish there was more effort at every layer to make bureaucracy easier to handle. We should consider the bureaucratic experience the same way we consider developer experience, because it affects adoption the same way. We need good architecture, good documentation, good utilities. It makes a big difference.
• timka 2y ago
  Dude has to wake up. Europe is done, it's a museum. He's thinking about tech but the real problem is lacking economical basis in Europe. Germany introduced spot natural gas prices and it skyrocketed. Next someone blew up the Nord Stream. Now Europe can't produce reasonably priced fertilizers. And all that green energy is a joke.
• danielvaughn 2y ago
  I have no idea whether Europeans work harder than Americans, but I do want to say that you can't extrapolate the overall work ethic of America by looking at the SF tech world. It's a very, very small (and very privileged) microcosm of the country.
  • tadfisher 2y ago
    Couched in the article: > US folks love talking about how hard they work. And honestly with service workers and blue collars I believe it. But not in tech.
    • darth_avocado 2y ago
      > In SF you frequently hear big tech people talking how hard they work, while they queue 30mins for a coffee at Blue Bottle and chitchatting there for another 20mins. Might be true for an established rest and vest company or position like sales or marketing, but the article seems to be wanting EU to be easier for startups. Not a single startup has that culture, especially when you’re building it from the ground up. You’re most definitely working 1.5-2x the hours as a regular job when it comes to starting a company and making it successful, even as an employee.
      • braiamp 2y ago
        Also couched in the article: > Americans love their hero-arcs so much that people manage to spin anything into a “coming from nothing story” – even if they got their first investments from their uncle and worked for free in the “garage” of their parents multi-million-dollar house in Palo Alto.
        • zkid18 2y ago
          It's hard to argue against the fact that access to opportunities is not evenly distributed across different states.
        • xhkkffbf 2y ago
          It's a bit unfair to talk about the garages in Palo Alto being attached to "multi-million-dollar" houses. When the people starting Apple, HP, Google and Facebook took over a garage, the places were solidly middle class. Even now, the price tags distort our perceptions. I've heard some venture capitalists say that most of their investments would go for salaries that would be turned over to the real estate world.
          • dukeyukey 2y ago
            I mean, I live in London in the biggest place I've ever lived in (700sqft!) since moving out of my parents home. Having a garage would add another £200/month easily. Having that amount of spare room in a tech hub is a massive advantage!
  • deleted 2y ago
    [deleted]
  • duxup 2y ago
    Heck you can't even generalize about American tech industry and only talk about SF tech world. Granted that generalization is done in America too. It's always a bit of a frustration running into constant comparisons, managers who want to emulate processes, and such when "Hey, you know what, we're not them... and we're doing well being ourselves." Not that you immediately dismiss new ideas because they seem to be from there, but don't just adopt them arbitrarily or operate like them too. I have a sneaky suspicion that "most" of the American tech industry is NOT at all like SF / valley tech world.
    • relaxing 2y ago
      It really isn’t! A lot of the SV stuff on here is frankly baffling to the rest of the country.
      • holtkam2 2y ago
        Agreed. I worked in tech in Chicago from 2017-2021 before moving to SF to take a new job in SF @ big tech. Feels like a different planet.
  • lookitsnicholas 2y ago
    am pretty sure that the post also acknowledged that w/ "I don’t disagree. SF is a unique place. We currently don’t try to get on the level of SF. We are trying not to fall behind China, India and random second- and third-degree hubs in the US."
  • jandrese 2y ago
    I have to admit I raised an eyebrow at Greece being near the top of the list. That's going against stereotype hard.
    • boringg 2y ago
      Thats because they refactored their economy during the debt crises.
    • NeutralForest 2y ago
      What is not mentioned in the article is that productivity is much more important than the number of hours worked. By productivity, I mean output per hour worked, which is usually an estimation made from the total output of the country (GDP) and the numbers of hours worked by the working population.
      • epolanski 2y ago
        Well, that's a very inadequate productivity metric imho. How can two people with exactly the same output (say two doctors working a shift with similar number of patience) lead one to be 20 times more productive because one bills $400 per hour and the other makes that number in a week (such as in say Turkey). That's a 40x difference in productivity.
        • NeutralForest 2y ago
          You would usually use Purchasing Power Parity (PPP) such that comparison between countries is possible, because as you pointed, comparisons in absolute values between countries are not useful.
    • jorvi 2y ago
      It is hours worked, not productivity. If a shopkeeper takes a three hour lunch and sits in the sun in front of his shop half the time but stays open from 08:00-20:00 according to the stats he’s working 12h days.
      • 2y ago
  • raverbashing 2y ago
    On this point, I suspect something: (Some) Europeans work more hours, but less efficiently Go to a supermarket in Germany, see how quick a cashier rings your order. (yes self-checkout does exist) And this is not only a North/South (or West) divide. Germans have their way of wasting "work energy" in some micro-bureaucracies in one way or another (and still they are more efficient than the average worker) Some other southern countries will waste more time doing some things while in some other areas they will be the fastest/least-bs players around. > But Americans definitely love talking about how hard they work; way more than we do. Can't disagree with this.
  • jandrewrogers 2y ago
    In my experience, American and European software developers work similarly "hard", that is not explanatory. There are noticeable cultural differences in how they spend their working time. American software developers have a tendency toward more ambitious and therefore risky solutions to problems, which have a higher variance in outcomes. European software development seems to gravitate toward what is seen as the safe conservative solution always. You may find yourself working more hours to deal with the risks that materialize as an American but sometimes that ambition pays off and you make a significant leap forward, and I suspect there is a higher sense of satisfaction with this result when it pans out. Particularly in the west coast tech cities, tolerance for both the risk of ambitious approaches and dealing with the consequences is dialed up anomalously high, that is just the water you swim in. With the higher risk tolerance, both cultural and what the business allows, comes a requirement to be willing to work extra hours when needed for when it blows up in your face. This is sporadic, most days they don't work any harder than Europeans. Many Americans value the freedom to take ambitious risks more than they hate the downsides of that risk-taking.
  • atmosx 2y ago
    To be fair, the author wrote about tech workers in SV specifically, not about the "overall work with of America" (which btw is a continent, not a country). The hero arc story is true and has to do with large Protestant population.
    • relaxing 2y ago
      There is no continent called America.
      • em-bee 2y ago
        they are talking about the americas: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Americas https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Americas which is sometimes called america. (mostly in non english native countries i suspect)
        • pvitz 2y ago
          No, certainly the USA (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States). The author is most likely Austrian or German and it is quite common to say "Amerika" for the USA there.
          • em-bee 2y ago
            it is also equally common there to have an argument about that, just like on HN ;-) i was referring to this btw: America" (which btw is a continent, not a country)
            • AlchemistCamp 2y ago
              アメリカ (the romanization of America) is also how the country is referred to in Japanese. There are many languages (including English) that use America as the common name for the United States of America. A notable exception, and where much of the disagreement comes from is Spanish. I generally try to follow the convention of the language I'm speaking.
• dangrossman 2y ago
  I can't scroll this webpage to read it unless I plug my laptop in. Scroll events have a lag time measured in whole seconds, then the page scrolls down by either a fraction of a line or by multiple paragraphs, so I can't keep track of where I was reading. Plugging in my laptop, which changes the power mode, makes the webpage barely usable, but my cooling fans are spun up to full speed now. This is using Chrome on a Dell XPS 13 with an 11th gen Core i7 and 16GB RAM.
  • ranger_danger 2y ago
    works on my machine
  • Squarex 2y ago
    same here on M2 macbook air
  • greenavocado 2y ago
    It works with Javascript disabled
  • kube-system 2y ago
    I get high GPU consumption with that tab open
  • steve_rambo 2y ago
    For what's it worth, the page is unreadable without JavaScript disabled on an overclocked desktop 7900X. I think it's the slowest one by far among all the crap I've seen in two decades of browsing the web.
  • Tagbert 2y ago
    I have visited the site in a Mac browser and on iOS Safari and scrolling is perfectly normal. Not sure what issue you are running into.
    • vundercind 2y ago
      iPhone safari here, the background had a weird distracting flicker, like my backlight was going bad.
• sjm 2y ago
  These e/acc types are insufferable and if anything "SF" has been ruined by them. I know I'll get downvoted or flagged given this is HN, but there's more to life than startups and private equity[0]. Let's leave Europe alone, huh? [0]: https://worldhappiness.report/ed/2023/world-happiness-trust-and-social-connections-in-times-of-crisis/#ranking-of-happiness-2020-2022 https://worldhappiness.report/ed/2023/world-happiness-trust-...
  • adamnemecek 2y ago
    Your need business activity for a society to function. Do you want Europe not to have a horse in the US/China race? SAP is not it.
  • asdasdsddd 2y ago
    Why are you on a startup forum then?
  • deleted 2y ago
    [deleted]
  • wbl 2y ago
    When you're rich you can have untouchable bombers and precision artillery destroy your genocidal enemies from hundreds of miles away. When you're poor you end up suffering from bombings and cruise missile attacks. When you're rich you have AC. When poor you die in heat waves. When rich you get to integrate immigrants to the point. When poor neo-Nazi politicians stir up trouble as they languish in poverty and squalor. When rich you get to crush pandemics. When poor you have to pretend they aren't happening. Europe was not poorer in the 2000's. This is just cope about the failure to handle the financial crisis and COVID properly.
• notfed 2y ago
  US here, I've never heard of those propaganda claims before.
  • anonzzzies 2y ago
    Like the author says; it’s the mentality on Musk’s X generally.
  • mindcandy 2y ago
    US here, and I've heard all of them from Americans and Europeans. Other one I've heard is that if you start a company and it fails, at least in Silicon Valley they ask "So, what are you making next?". But, in Europe they imply that you apparently are not the right kind of person to be starting companies.
  • dukeyukey 2y ago
    Pop on Twitter and you'll see plenty of it.
• WentFullRetard 2y ago
  [dead]
• adamnemecek 2y ago
  This of actually a much better article than I expected going into it.
• deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
• fullshark 2y ago
  > In SF you frequently hear big tech people talking how hard they work, while they queue 30mins for a coffee at Blue Bottle and chitchatting there for another 20mins. God people still haven't figured out how knowledge work and work ethic there is illustrated when you are giving your brain to your employer instead of your body. Some of these workers are thinking about work problems literally 24 hours a day, and come up with solutions in their dreams, but because they aren't literally chained to their desk writing lines of code every single second they are observed they are lazy slackers. Can't stand this crap and it's just gonna get worse. Unless executives see you in pain, or are forced to sacrifice something you value like attending your kids piano recital they don't beleive you are dedicated enough to the cause like they are.
  • xp84 2y ago
    I don't believe it's black and white. Sure, some workplaces are too demanding, but in other cases, people are taking advantage. My observations (in the USA) over the past few years suggest that most people who were hired around 2019-2021 when hiring technical staff was super difficult, have an absolutely bonkers level of entitlement. People are making 200k a year, and bristle at the implication that it's not acceptable for them to be completely absent (from their fully remote jobs) and unreachable all day without warning. None of the nearshore workers I've worked with exhibit this attitude -- it's only Americans, and only the engineers. They assume that the company wouldn't dare risk losing them by calling them out on this, and that if they did lose their job it's going to be trivial to get an equal or better one anyway, so why should they do anything that might cause any stress? Why should they have a sense of urgency? "I'll get on it when I get back from the beach, the waves are really good this morning." That's the work ethic. I'm not saying it's everyone, of course, but it's a common attitude. Oh, and all these people have incentive stock options, but don't seem to really believe they matter, so they are deeply disappointed with like a 4% raise, thinking a 10-20% annual raise makes sense. Overall the attitude isn't one of "i'm going to do everything I can to make us successful so my equity will make me rich" it's "I'm going to maximize my cash compensation and minimize my hours spent on work until it's not fun anymore, then on to the next." By the way, it is their right to act this way if they want, but I'm pretty sure the bottom 50% of US engineers (in terms of ambition) are going to find themselves replaced by nearshore talent that works harder than they do and doesn't even think hard work is an injustice.
• sturza 2y ago
  The author has a very specific twitter feed. I would not generalize based on that.
• grecy 2y ago
  Rich person wants employees to work harder and have a lower quality of life. Somehow I don’t think many people living in the EU want the work/life balance of the US with paltry benefits and no social safety net.
  • 1-more 2y ago
    > Rich person wants employees to work harder and have a lower quality of life. These are not in the article.
  • lucianbr 2y ago
    > “Europeans don’t work hard enough” > Eastern Europeans work harder than Americans. Even Italians work more hours than Americans. hours worked > And based on my experience in the US, I honestly think that the US numbers are overstated. Did you read the article?
  • 1234letshaveatw 2y ago
    Somehow I don't think many people living in the US want the paltry salaries of the EU and the burdensome and restrictive regulations that inhibit innovation
• alephnerd 2y ago
  A lot of the "Europe is bleh" rhetoric is about Western Europe - specifically France, Germany, and the UK (if they make it harder for European and Asian immigrants to come). The Eastern and Central European countries have always felt much more dynamic and open to work hard. There's a reason why the countries on the lefthand side of the graph provided are also the ones with some of the better innovation industries in Europe. There is still much work to be done in the CEE, but I'd be fairly confident that they'll become truly developed first world countries in the next 10-15 years, and some already have such as Czechia. Andreas is exactly right imo - his points about simplifying incorporation (there's a reason why CH does so well) and normalizing English (there's a reason why every developing Asian country from India to Vietnam to China is pushing English fluency, and lots of the CEE countries) will help. German, French, and British government officials are the worst to deal with imo - they will bend over the barrel for local conglomerates but ignore domestic challengers. Datadog could have been a fully French company, but the French ecosystem stifled them. Also, ime - Western Europeans seem to idolize Finance, Law, Management, and Civil Service careers more than innovation or entrepreneurship, unlike their CEE (Germany and Austria excluded) peers.
  • seydor 2y ago
    > The Eastern and Central European countries have always felt much more dynamic and open to work hard. Yet as soon as they try to take advantage of their position (via e.g. tax breaks) they'll get punished (eg 15% corporate tax rate, what happened to Ireland, Cyprus). Not being a single economy truly prevents competition for capital. So old money stays put where it is , new money is not allowed.
    • alephnerd 2y ago
      Well, Cyprus absolutely needed to be cracked down (lots of shady shit going on there), but Ireland's absolutely gotten the short end of the stick, and I won't be surprised if something similar happens to Poland or Romania in a couple years.
      • badpun 2y ago
• seydor 2y ago
  We need to form a committee that will discuss the format of the procedure to be used to formulate open proposals about how to wake her up. Urgently
  • Muromec 2y ago
    And draw a diagram. Always draw a diagram before submitting to the committee.
• marcinzm 2y ago
  This misses the big one: California bans non-competes, bans anti-moonlighting clauses and lets you quit with no notice. If you’re at an EU company and need to give 3+ months notice to quit that will discourage starting your own company on the side.
  • iamacyborg 2y ago
    The flipside is your company can't just fire you at will, which is rather nice in this day and age.
    • kldx 2y ago
      They could however do a restructuring, eliminating the exact role one's skillset matches. You get a couple of months of notice period which is no different from a severance package.
    • y-curious 2y ago
      I'm not trying to be obtuse, but at what point do the worker protections discourage employment? If I have to pay the huge employee fees associated with the EU, I may just go hire someone in Asia.
      • elevatedastalt 2y ago
        From almost the beginning itself. Whenever you hire, you have to consider how hard it would be to get rid of the employee for whatever reason (underperformance, changing business needs etc.)
        • pas 2y ago
          employees as contractors is very common. this is a solved problem. and firing people is also not a mystery, interestingly PIPs are a US invention (but if labor laws are so lax, why were they needed there? :))
    • lotsofpulp 2y ago
• voiceblue 2y ago
  Does the data presented here distinguish between full-time and part-time employment? Or hourly and salaried employment? I wasn’t able to find any information other than “hours worked per person employed”, which seems a rather vague statistic to be used to support any claim.
  • verteu 2y ago
    Good question -- I believe the source is here: https://www.bruegel.org/analysis/european-unions-remarkable-growth-performance-relative-united-states https://www.bruegel.org/analysis/european-unions-remarkable-... Reading between the lines, I do not think it distinguishes between full-time and part-time employment: "In Europe, employees tend to work fewer hours than in the US, partly because there are more paid holidays, the typical working week of a full-time employee is shorter and there is a larger share of part-time workers than in the US."
  • Muromec 2y ago
    A lot of people totally work 4 days a week here and it's considered full time contract. Standard language in a contract at the company I'm working for is 32 hours per week, so everybody doing full 5 days a week is having a coefficient applied already.
• jwagenet 2y ago
  Wake up from what? I couldn’t find the thesis in the first few paragraphs… I keep seeing more and more from business types in the EU salivating over US business conditions: weaker labor laws, weaker regulations, record profits, etc. From the US it seems like the EU is doing fine and enviable from an employee perspective (except wages).
  • ant6n 2y ago
    > From the US it seems like the EU is doing fine and enviable from an employee perspective (except wages). „Except the wages“ is kind of the problem. The source of that issue is the ability to raise capital, which is kind of addressed in the article, if you’d bothered to read before commenting.
    • jwagenet 2y ago
      I didn’t find that in the article, but that’s besides the point: wages across eu are lower for tech work and I don’t think it’s access to capital. It’s not like startups are the only high payers.
• Paianni 2y ago
  Teaching English will just reinforce Anglo-American hegemony.
  • seydor 2y ago
    With UK out, even the french may be OK with it. It might as well be like latin, it's not even Ireland's language
  • flumpcakes 2y ago
    I think that's the point of this article to be honest. If we lived in a fair and just world, the EU having the 4th largest economy doesn't seem like a bad thing. Going by numbers alone China (1.8bn) and India (1.5bn) are much more populace than the EU (450mln). However, I would would probably side with the author and personally much prefer a group of liberal democracies following the rule of law to always be on top. If the world needs to bow to autocracies then we will have a bad time, Russia is just the prelude.
  • juxtapose 2y ago
    I kind of agree with you, and (as a hobbyist linguist) I believe a diversity of languages is a beautiful thing, but it creates unnecessary friction for business and about everything. Europe really needs a unified language -- it could be English, French, German, or even Interlingua or Esperanto. Lingua franca really matters. China, for example, didn't have a unified spoken language until about 100 years ago. However, Mandarin is today universally understood and spoken in the country. And the result? You only to know one language, and you can have access to one of the largest markets in the world. Alas, the same could not be said for Europe. (In fact, Europe needs a unified language if people are serious about getting rid of English and the Anglo-American hegemony, because each smaller language really cannot fight English now.)
• ta1243 2y ago
  "If you go to the south of France – our hope and prayers in the global AI race – and order a coffee there is a chance that the waitress doesn’t understand the word “coffee”, can’t explain you what’s in the salad – happened to me twice." Oh they'll understand. They will just pretend not to. It's France.
  • lores 2y ago
    Oh no! Someone in a foreign country did not make any more effort than the author did to learn a foreign language! Not once, but twice! That's it, I'm never leaving San Francisco again. And as for your snark, no, many French people do not speak English, and a fair number resent Americans going around like they own the place without making even a cursory attempt at being polite.
    • ta1243 2y ago
      Best way for a native English speaker to get someone in France to speak English is to speak French to them. I speak French, German, and a small amount of Greek (enough to order a coffee and read a map). That's no use when I go to Italy or Spain or Poland or Latvia or Sweden of course, so we just speak English. The big difference between europe and america is the market. The US is a homogenous culture with a single language and single desires with 350 million people. You can launch a product in the US based on US culture and assumptions and reach a massive economy Launch it in Belgium and you've got a fragmented market. Not just the language, but also the culture -- expectations in Belgium, Romania and Norway are all very different.
    • dl9999 2y ago
      My wife and I are from the U.S. She's from Belarus, but has been in the country for 30 years. We went to France about 10 years ago. I was semi-expecting the stereotype (rude, arrogant), but everybody we met was nice. One guy at the hotel seemed standoff-ish at first, but he was very friendly by the time we left a week later. Pretty much everybody we interacted with was pleasant and helpful. We tried to use the few French words we knew (thank you, please, hello, goodbye type of thing), but for the most part we had to speak English. I think almost everybody we interacted with spoke English, at least a little. This was in Paris mostly, so maybe that's not representative. I was generally impressed with the people.
• skybrian 2y ago
  Evidence is lacking and the question is so vague that it isn’t worth arguing about. Both “Europe” and “the US” are too large and amorphous to usefully compare in an online discussion.
• devdao 2y ago
  A reasonable article that proposes 1 EU Corps 2 Standard English language schooling Seems wise enough. What will it take?
  • KronisLV 2y ago
    I'm surprised that most of the comments seem to focus on other comparisons of EU and US, there's very little on those two points. Personally, I think that English as the lingua franca makes sense in many contexts, since that's pretty much the case in IT already. For example, trying to translate various terms in any given language from English usually causes inconvenience and confusion (everyone needs to know the localized version and then translate it back into English to find literature etc.). Therefore, it makes sense to teach everyone English.
    • alephnerd 2y ago
      In CEE (excluding Germany and Austria) sure, but not as much in Western Europe (eg. France or Germany). I've had an easy time managing Eastern European employees in English, but Western European ones sucked at the language, and always had a bit of a complex surrounding English.
    • aleph_minus_one 2y ago
      > For example, trying to translate various terms in any given language from English usually causes inconvenience and confusion (everyone needs to know the localized version and then translate it back into English to find literature etc.). Therefore, it makes sense to teach everyone English. Similarly, translating a lot of terms from German or Russian to English often causes inconvenience and confusion. So better learn German and Russian. :-)
      • KronisLV 2y ago
        > Similarly, translating a lot of terms from German or Russian to English often causes inconvenience and confusion. So better learn German and Russian. :-) If the programming language key words that I needed to know used those languages, as did all of the documentation and forums, conference videos and literature, that's exactly what I'd do. But somehow those aren't the languages that everyone uses, nor is something like Chinese (and its dialects) which has a lot of users, but isn't as geographically widespread. Maybe people have also settled on English because it has a somewhat low barrier to entry as well. I guess it's the same as needing to know at least some latin in the natural sciences, because otherwise something like naming bones when talking to a foreign colleague would get awkward, fast.
• wskinner 2y ago
  There is a big difference between Europeans in Europe and Europeans in the US - Europeans in the US readily point this out. The idea that Europeans are somehow genetically less suited to building tech companies is an obvious strawman. The reality is that Europeans in America are, like all immigrants, heavily self-selected. The article also does not mention the huge difference in compensation for technology talent between the US and Europe. As long as that gap exists, top European talent will continue leaking across the Atlantic.
  • next_xibalba 2y ago
    > the huge difference in compensation for technology talent This isn't a single lever that can be pulled independently. You need highly fluid labor markets that force companies to pay competitive efficiency wages (i.e. fewer/weaker/no unions), competitive and innovative companies, lower regulation and government bureaucratic interference, ambitious and career focused labor force, etc. etc. It's a chicken-and-egg problem that, at its root, stems from culture (IMHO).
  • alephnerd 2y ago
    > the huge difference in compensation for technology talent between the US and Europe Poles and Czechs get paid relative peanuts compared to West Europeans, yet have fairly startup industries compared to France or Germany. Same with further afield in India or China.
• deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
• sandworm101 2y ago
  >> If every day is 1% harder for you than your competitor who will win? Your competitor. And in global markets where frequently 1-2 companies become the dominant player in a market this means you will not be a bit smaller. You will fight for scraps. Abandon all hope. The race to the bottom is over. Any country not bowing at the feet of ever tech founder will be relegated to third-world status by the end of the decade. Canada, Finland, Australia, the US east coast ... all are doomed unless they drop taxes and abandon all hope of regulating anything. But that just isn't how the world functions. All those countries that are "hard" on new tech surprisingly keep ticking along year after year despite the ire of tech founders. Think London/Paris/Berlin/Vancouver are too hard on business? Ok. Leave. Make room for all the people that are ready and happy to do business in those cities.
  • braiamp 2y ago
    I see it more as the paragraph after that explains: that EU sells itself as a single market, yet there are different rules depending where in that "single market" you sit. In the US you kinda have the same issue, except that since the US is bigger geographically, you can create hubs that mostly share the same rules.
  • greenavocado 2y ago
    Following this guy's logic, a country which the Western world has historically shunned, aggressively avoided investment in, and generally turned its back to for decades, Russia, should have completely folded and collapsed after being completely choked off from the world by sanctions imposed on it years ago.
    • alephnerd 2y ago
      > Western world has historically shunned, aggressively avoided investment in, and generally turned its back to for decades Before 2020-22, Russia was a major tech hub in Europe, and most of that was because Russian founders would incorporate in the UK or Netherlands, but operate with a subsidiary within Russia.
      • 2y ago
• whatshisface 2y ago
  It will be interesting to see what happens when the US loses the single market due to these state internet regulations, while the EU eventually figures it out.
  • GardenLetter27 2y ago
    Language is still an absolutely massive barrier though. To hire across the EU you need 27 tax offices and lawyers, following laws in every language, privacy policies, etc. in every language.
• NorwegianDude 2y ago
  > Failing in the EU has the same downside as in the US Not really. The safety net is much better in some EU countries.
• next_xibalba 2y ago
  > In SF you frequently hear big tech people talking how hard they work, while they queue 30mins for a coffee at Blue Bottle and chitchatting there for another 20mins. Gotta be the Googlers. Elon and Zuck have shown the light to most tech cos and they are emulating to one degree or another. But Google seems unwilling/unable to deal effectively with the WLB'ers. After all, how can they conduct all of their political activities if work is getting in the way?
• altdataseller 2y ago
  “The problem is not that regulation 1 or 100 is too much. The problem is that every country has different regulations, creating a mess of complexity if you want to act across a larger consumer market” If you’re building the next Uber sure, this might be a problem. But this is also a HUGE advantage if you’re not though. If you’re building the Workday for Estonia, or the LinkedIn for Germany (ie Xing) you have a huge advantage over any other big company that wants to steal your market share. Because there’s a bunch of local regulations, customs and ways of doing things that they simply can’t “port” over. So yes, it’s a barrier if you’re building the next huge consumer startup, but at the same time it creates all these long tail opportunities for a LOT more startups that want to conquer a local market. And that probably helps a LOT more European entrepeneurs
  • arp242 2y ago
    A lot of these local businesses have been taken over by large companies, though not all obviously. Turns out having a fucktillion monetary units does a lot to get through friction.
  • seydor 2y ago
    You re just building 27 different companies that are all reinventing the same wheel in their country, and they are all destined to never grow, until some US company localizes their offering and shuts them all down. Microsoft has done exactly that 100 times
    • altdataseller 2y ago
      That's a VC perspective. Sure they'll never be a massive 1B company, but they can be successful businesses for 2 to 5 people teams
      • deleted 2y ago
        [deleted]
      • seydor 2y ago
        No, they won't be successful, because the US company will offer a better product at a cheaper price. They 'll eventually shut down
• micromacrofoot 2y ago
  > And based on my experience in the US Based on this post that experience isn't much.
• dumpHero2 2y ago
  > I don’t want to do pure stats comparing Starts with stats comparing
• 29athrowaway 2y ago
  Europe needs its own tech megacorps. Their own OS, office suite, cloud provider, source control, social media, mobile devices, etc. The creates the abundance of data required to win at AI. Because Europe doesn't own its own data, they lack the data necessary to win in AI against others that do. Creating a EU startup ecosystem without the megacorps is just feeding the American megacorps more because those startups will get acquired by the highest bidder.
  • seydor 2y ago
    That would limit the scope and size of EU megacorps. How is it that amazon can dominate europe, but hetzner has not been able to ? Europe invented free markets and needs them. In fact it may be the competitive advantage of europe to reverse this stupid antiglobalization global campaign
  • rdm_blackhole 2y ago
    If you want people to start using EU cop instead of US corps, then the service provided needs to be matching what's offered by Amazon. Google and so on. The problem is that the EU does not put enough money for these systems to be started in the first place. Look at this snippet: The European Commission approved on Tuesday up to 1.2 billion euros ($1.30 billion) of state aid for a European cloud computing project to try to boost the involvement of EU business in a field dominated by U.S. companies. 1.2 B is nothing compared to what the US giants are investing each year in their services. How can EU corps expect to compete like this? it's like high-shool team competing against Olympians.
    • andersa 2y ago
      Lol, $1 billion. That's less than Meta spent on GPUs for fun for Zuck's pet project. Needs to be 100 times higher to be useful.
  • wrboyce 2y ago
    > Europe needs … their own OS Linux?
• Muromec 2y ago
  I'm not sure what I need to wake up from and what this even is about. The Europe is good, the Europe is bad? I totally don't want to live in another US, because if I wanted, I would have went to the one already there across the ocean. I specifically don't want to work with US-funded venture backed companies and their bullshit, it's not sustainable in the long term.
• skrebbel 2y ago
  I think this is a fantastic suggestion. Having an EU-wide “Inc” will indeed allow standardized investment vehicles such as SAFEs which in turn makes a lot of very-early-stage investment much cheaper = much more attractive. The EU doesn't need to standardize the SAFEs or stuff like that - the market will take care of that once all startuppy businesses are the same kind of legal entity.
  • whiplash451 2y ago
    Isn’t Malta close to that, btw?
• bradhe 2y ago
  Im an American currently living in Europe (Germany). I’ve founded a few companies in the US. I have a project that’s going well, could easily turn into a startup, but I’m not sure I’d found it here—genuinely struggling with it. The way companies fundraise here is a bit weird to me. Much smaller rounds. Also typically thinking smaller in general. Obviously, everything is very commercially focused. In Germany, the worker protections make operating really quite difficult and it changes the culture of the company, too. Don’t even get me started about on-call culture. I can’t really think of a distinct advantage to starting a company in EU vs US if you have a US passport outside some minor niceties. My current thinking is operating on both continents is likely best, with GTM in US and engineering in EU. But not sure…
  • nvy 2y ago
    >In Germany, the worker protections make operating really quite difficult and it changes the culture of the company, too. Don’t even get me started about on-call culture. Given how exploitative some US companies are, this sounds wonderful to be honest. The only way I can see this as a negative is if you view your employees as fungible commodities rather than valued team members.
    • davidjfelix 2y ago
      (I don't agree with this viewpoint) maybe the author views fungibility of employees as a feature because it lessens the risk of a founder sinking an investment over a personal or interpersonal issue.
  • Muromec 2y ago
    > Don’t even get me started about on-call culture. No, I don't want to answer to your pager robot at 3 am for things I have no control over and don't want to touch. Get another robot to answer that or hire an SRE. I want to write my CSS and my 1 hour lunch break and live a life.
    • bradhe 2y ago
      I dunno man the company pays you 10x your peers for a reason.
• lugu 2y ago
  European here. It normal that EU become the #4 economy in the world. There is nothing wrong with that. What wasn't normal was to see billions of people in poverty. I am happy to see India and China catch up. The best way to be #1 economy is to destroy others. We don't want to do that. Indian entrepreneurs are as ambitious as the growth of their economy. EU wants to focus on ecology and democracy and this impacts it's economy. There is nothing wrong with that.
  • lores 2y ago
    I've never been to China, but the US strikes me as palpably more dystopian every time I go - and that's from someone who loves the country and its people. As for India... well, hopefully everyone will benefit from the growing wealth. Europe has a very high quality of life. To the extent it's sustainable, I don't see what's wrong with a government and culture aiming to make people happy and comfortable rather than #1.
  • kwere 2y ago
    China has eaten European manufacturing, India will eat most of Europe Service jobs through remote positions. Europe will be saddled with debts, looking like a disfunctional Argentina squabbling about populist socialist /nationalist talking points.
    • kazen44 2y ago
      except that globalisation is on the downturns, especially in terms of the political will in europe. Exporting the manufacturing of to china is currently seen by many as a mistake (especially deindustrialization in regards to military hardware). I highly doubt service jobs will be exported, especially considering the many different languages and the fragmentation of those languages.
      • therealdrag0 2y ago
        Seeing exporting as a mistake and doing something about it are different things. Will be interesting to see what happens. Generative AI may help with the export or deprecation of service jobs.
• narag 2y ago
  When I'm writing this, there's not a single comment that engages with the actual proposals presented in the article. Most commenters are addressing points that the author didn't make or just insulting him. TL;DR: 1) simplify and uniformize company creation process 2) teach English to everyone. (I agree, BTW)
• mcluck 2y ago
  It's a tricky thing: my experience does mirror some of the "propaganda" despite coming to Europe with heavily rose-tinted glasses. I'm not going to pretend that my limited data is enough to extrapolate to the whole of the continent but it's still a data point. The work culture is very different. There's a clear attitude of working until the next holiday and the company never gets one minute more than what they pay me for. That's honestly not a _bad_ perspective to have but it's not ideal if you're trying to build a startup
  • Muromec 2y ago
    I'm pretty sure the attitude to work depends whether you are a startup or not, whom you hire and on what conditions. It makes sense to work 12 hours a day in your 20ies when you have no other things to do and get a piece of what you are building in return. Otherwise, it's just business -- company wants me to work more and pay less, I want the opposite, so I pay my union fees and don't touch work laptop after 6pm ever.
• jamesblonde 2y ago
  Our biggest problem in the EU is a lack of vc capital. Vc oney goes to consumer SaaS. Most data people are European. Most data companies American. Go figure.
• solaarphunk 2y ago
  “Europe” is not a thing I tell most people trying to expand. It’s just a bunch of countries. Yes, some things are unified but it really doesn’t matter. It’s fragmented, extra work, and it’s bullshit compared to just building for a unified market like US or China. Tall poppy syndrome is also very real in Europe. It’s a dream killer and is deeply ingrained in many societies here. You can work hard all you want but these are the true frictions for risking capital and time.
  • seydor 2y ago
    EU is not a disconnected market, it s theoretically easy to connect. However it is infested with middlemen, (local or Brussels-based) who all want a bite and as a whole create a mountain of useless bureaucracy that costs too much and ultimately makes EU too expensive
• next_xibalba 2y ago
  Why did this get flagged?
  • AnimalMuppet 2y ago
    Maybe because it led to a bunch of USA-is-great chest-beating, and a bunch of Europe-is-great chest-beating, and very little discussion of the actual content of the article. I was 80% of the way through the comments before I saw any mention of the article's point. (Though I did see two comments claiming that they didn't understand it, which seems hard to believe, given that it was both simple and stated about three times.) So: Flagged because it led to a lousy discussion, not because it was a lousy article. But that actually seems to be on HN rather than on the article, at least in my humble opinion...
• bedobi 2y ago
  Incorporation is already simple in the EU. Just pick the easiest jurisdiction, access the common market. Yes, local labor laws for employing people in different countries vary, but so does the states. The English language thing, meh. I used to think the same but no longer do. Diversity is a good thing, it's Anglos who could use learning to work in different languages and cultural contexts. Last but not least, just the tech bro-itis is so strong with this article. Like yeah if your identity and life is consumed by being a tech bro and you want the world to optimize for that and your startups, sure, let's make everywhere Delaware and the Bay Area. But that's not what most of the world wants or tries to do.
• deleted 2y ago
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• j7ake 2y ago
  Why should Europe care where they are amongst this myopic ranking of “best tech hub”? Western Europe is a great place to live, raise a family, and retire. None of the tech hub countries are even remotely comparable to Europe in this sense. If there are people in Europe who want to work in a high growth industry that desperately, they can move to USA or China.
  • seydor 2y ago
    Europeans live the way they do because of unbelievable amounts of wealth and innovation accumulated through centuries which is being spent. None of that is guaranteed in a failing , aging europe. It's not food-safe, nor energy-safe. Not thinking about a sustainable future is fatally myopic
    • pasabagi 2y ago
      Or because of unbelievable amounts of rights won through political struggle, which cannot be spent, only lost through getting complacent. Europe was a lot poorer in the 80's. China today has a higher GDP-per-capita then the EU did in the 80's. India has a higher GDP-per-capita than the EU had in the 70's. If you have a decent political culture, you don't need a lot of money to avoid the worst kinds of poverty.
    • snowpid 2y ago
      I disagree. Basically all Europe were in shambles 80 years ago, Communism was destroyed only 30 years ago. We still 4 wars in the last 30 years in Europe. The accumulated wealth is long gone.
      • EasyMark 2y ago
        And Putin is threatening another major war in Europe with NATO, it's pretty crazy to assume that Europe has not issues happening or has gotten complacent just because they don't want to work 50 hours a week.
        • 2y ago
• photochemsyn 2y ago
  Curiously China's very successful economic model - in which capital is more under state control than in private hands, but there's still a competetive market as industrial monopolies are discouraged - isn't brought up here - even though certain major European industrial sectors seem to be finding China more attractive these days, e.g. BASF; https://www.reuters.com/markets/deals/basf-agrees-15-year-gas-supply-deal-with-chinas-enn-2024-04-05/ https://www.reuters.com/markets/deals/basf-agrees-15-year-ga... Apparently the Chinese are working too hard and being too productive, hence Janet Yellen complaining about 'overcapacity' recently: > "I think the Chinese realise how concerned we are about the implications of their industrial strategy, for the United States, for the potential to flood our markets with exports that make it difficult for American firms to compete" Yellen said. "And then other countries have the same concern."
  • flumpcakes 2y ago
    I think China is the workhouse and that's the source of it's power. Ultimately it's a dictatorship with imperial ambitions. It's blatantly using this power already to weaken democracies through IP theft and "overcapacity". It seems like some countries are becoming wary of China and are now moving production to other asian countries. I've seen a few interviews lately of Chinese workers complaining they are no longer employed because the 'west' has moved production abroad and how that's a very bad thing for the world. It seems like people are realising that China has weaponised capitalism. I guess people assumed they would be as benign as Japan in their industrialisation in the 60s-90s.
    • juxtapose 2y ago
      It seems you are very ideology-driven, but no, corporations are not moving production out of China because "China bad". It's just because labor costs in China have risen due to its fast development.
  • starluz 2y ago
    Too productive by absolute terms yes- they are producing a shit ton of copied low quality junk including their cars. Not productive in value terms
• deleted 2y ago
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• Dig1t 2y ago
  My company offers relocation from the US to Paris. The Paris office is beautiful, right near the Eiffel Tower. If I take the relocation I get an automatic 50% salary cut, and my tax bill goes way up. Not to mention VAT and other expenses. Seems like Europe’s problem with innovation is maybe related.
  • b800h 2y ago
    In which direction?
  • Muromec 2y ago
    >If I take the relocation I get an automatic 50% salary cut It's obvious that cashflow will suffer. The question is whether you will like living in Paris on the money that's left. There is a good chance you would and will also discover where the hidden taxes of living in US were. Or not.
    • Dig1t 2y ago
      It’s vastly cheaper to live in the US, I talk to my Paris coworkers quite a lot and they pay more for just about everything except maybe childcare. My health insurance is free in the US, covered by my employer, my tax rate is 35% whereas I would be taxed at 45% in Paris. Gas costs more in Paris, car registration and taxes cost more, just buying a car in the first place costs way more, not to mention the car I own is not even legal there so I’d not even be allowed to do the same types of activities. Forget taking my truck to the lake with the kayaks and forget hauling materials to build my house. It just doesn’t make sense why any smart, capable person would choose to live in Europe unless they absolutely loved the culture.
      • Muromec 2y ago
        >Forget taking my truck to the lake with the kayaks and forget hauling materials to build my house. This is totally not how you move to Paris.
        • 2y ago
• whiplash451 2y ago
  « But India is one country » I am sorry but this argument cannot be dismissed. The reason why Europe struggles to implement changes is precisely because it is not a single country but a large group of countries represented by complex bodies where politics strive.
  • daseiner1 2y ago
    This is the entire thrust of the article....
• rdm_blackhole 2y ago
  The problem with the EU wide Inc, is who gets the tax revenue? Is it the country you live in or the country where most of your customers are based in? What if your customers all live outside the EU? France is never going to accept that you live in France but your business pays it's taxes in Germany or vice versa. Also I don't agree with the author's take that Europe is not risk averse. It is risk averse. I tried to open a bank account in USD at my local bank because I wanted my accountant to have access to all the deposits/invoices for my business. I had to answer a form with 50 questions as to why I needed this bank account. I was told the process would take months potentially. the result is that 6 months later I never received a response and now I am using Revolut as my bank. It's the small things really. About the lack of English, that is absolutely true but not because EU kids don't spend enough time learning English, it's because of the teaching style and the culture. In France all the movies/tv shows are dubbed in French. In Sweden it's not. Guess who speaks better English? In Sweden I hear kids as young as 11 or 12 talk in English with their friends because it's cool. In France, there is no way in hell that this would happen. Finally the way languages are taught in France is absolutely terrible. There is a lot of emphasis on reading and grammar rules but barely any talking. The result is that a high school graduate who has spent almost 8 years leaning English 2 hours per week at school can't hold a normal conversation in English for more than a few minutes.
  • samuelstros 2y ago
    > The problem with the EU wide Inc, is who gets the tax revenue? Every country proportional to the profit they generate and the tax rate they set? Companies overall EU profit $100M: - France $30M profit taxed at 20% = $6M - Germany $50M profit taxed at 25% = $12.5M - ... Seems like it "just" needs an accounting system that works across the EU.
    • rdm_blackhole 2y ago
      You can't have that because each EU country has different incentives. Some countries tax salaries more than capital, other let you reduce your capital gains or offer a flat tax in certain circumstances. I forgot to mention, but if this EU Inc gets then created who gets the capital gain tax? Should it be divided in 27 or should it prorated to where you lived or where your customers live? Don't get me wrong, I would love to see this happen but just like most of the things in the EU, it would become a nightmare to manage and add even more bureaucracy. It's like VAT collection. We have to rely on middle-man companies to do the proper collection because most countries have vastly different rules regarding VAT. As a business owner every minute I spend on paperwork is a minute less I spend on my business.
• haywirez 2y ago
  Why is this flagged? The real talk ratio in the article is notably high.
• brodo 2y ago
  My pet theory on why tech in Europe is worse than in the US is the lack of career opportunities for software devs. If I, as a developer, want to make more than 100k a year here in Germany, the easiest thing is to work remotely for a US company. There is no corporate ladder for devs. If there is one, it isn't very long. Hungry, young devs move into management or consulting. So, there is no incentive to get better as a developer. I’m, of course, talking generalities here; there will be exceptions.
  • whiplash451 2y ago
    Is it really that bad with the Datadog, Databricks, and the like plus the local bigtech offices?
  • andersa 2y ago
    I'm currently in Germany working remotely for a US company as you described. They pay around 200k pre tax. There are real growth options from there. I've never seen a single competing offer from a German company, not even at the highest level. A local career here as a developer is a dead end.
• seydor 2y ago
  There are multiple EU countries that offer that "pro-business legal framework" which speak english and even offer very low taxes (Ireland Estonia Cyprus Malta Bulgaria etc). The problem is, as soon as they become substantially big , politicians will reign them in, and the "single market" suddenly breaks to 26 pieces. There are many ideas about how to fix things. What is missing is political will . Politicians find it easier to leech off (european and US) entrepreneurship , in order to "give back" trinkets to their audience. Look at how EU subsidies and grants are given, and how little return europe gets from huge research projects like ERC grants. It's mainly a eu-wide jobs creation program for perpetual academics. Until you change that thinking, all ideas are not usable
• deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
• solatic 2y ago
  > Here is my Question: Why did we stop with “single market” efforts? Why is there no effort to unify legal entity in Europe? I'm not sure the author understands what he's asking for. While having California residency, you can start a Delaware company, open offices in California, pay taxes to the State of California. If the State of California sues your company for unpaid taxes, which court do you end up in? California. If the State of California sues your company for civil rights violations, which court do you end up in? California. The US doesn't have some magical system where just because you register in another state, you can resolve all legal disputes in that state, therefore you're not beholden to the laws and governments of the state you operate in, or that Delaware is legally bound to enforce the laws of the other states and localities you operate in. Indeed you are beholden to said laws and localities. And indeed, complying with 50 different states and all their localities can be so damn complicated that there are entire products built to help you figure out how much sales tax to charge when crossing state lines, as well as how to pay it correctly; not to mention how to offer health insurance to remote employees, since every state has its own insurers. At the end of the day, sure an "EU Inc", as the author puts it, may help make it easier to close deals. But it does not reduce the operational complication of operating across different localities. The rights of different localities to set their own laws and regulations for those who operate within their jurisdictions is unavoidable. You could have a single Brussels sovereign and a single English legal contract language and this would still be true, because it's already true in the US. The EU has a "single market", not a "single marketplace". The market is the customers, not the companies, not the banks, not the courts.
  • alephnerd 2y ago
    > may help make it easier to close deals This is the biggest factor why most European countries suck at innovation - dealflow is utter garbage in most of Western Europe because there are almost no VCs and most "VCs" are just family offices. As a Western European founder, it's better to shift to the UK, CH, or US in order to simplify fundraising. Look at Datadog, Databricks, Spotify, and others.
  • dukeyukey 2y ago
    To a point, the UK has taken that role. Lots of EU tech companies set up residence here, since our corporate law is extremely developed and understood. But ofc Brexit has made that trickier.
• mountainb 2y ago
  The EU does not have an equivalent of US commerce clause jurisprudence (which descends from Hamilton's original economic design to prevent exactly the kinds of problems that this author is complaining about). The EU does have an equivalent to the supremacy clause, but due to cultural and political forces it cannot have the same effect that it has in the US. Another major factor that makes the US more competitive is our different approach to intellectual property law that favors competition in comparison to the EU equivalents. Another big thing is less the Delaware effect that he attributes US simplicity to and more the existence of uniform model laws that transformed state business law through the 20th century. Then you have the fact that almost all (except parts of trademark) of the relevant IP laws to large scale enterprises are exclusively federal laws. This is not the case in the EU despite all the normalizing treaties. The EU does not and cannot perform the same role that the federal government does. I have a better proposal: incorporate the European states as self-governing US territories under the supervision of the federal government. They could have some carve-outs and immunities using an administrative structure similar to that of Native American law. This would also resolve the NATO controversies by just absorbing all of the individual ex-EU member state country militaries under the DoD. It would also eliminate a lot of the weird Article V ambiguity by just making it all American territory.
  • Muromec 2y ago
    The counter proposal is for sure more realistic compared to the expectation of not having 2 hour lunch break and closing laptop at 4 pm.
  • triceratops 2y ago
    I found myself nodding at the first 2 paragraphs, then got serious whiplash on paragraph 3. That was wild.
    • wrboyce 2y ago
      Yeah, what the hell haha. How someone can think “I propose that 27 countries are absorbed into the USA” is reasonable is beyond my comprehension.
• smarri 2y ago
  There is more to life than work. Disclaimer: European
• subsubzero 2y ago
  So many things here. Lets talk pay, US tech workers, lets just say Sr SWE and up, and lets look at SF as the author uses this as a focal point. Salary is roughly $300-400k a year(in SF FANGish company), in Europe or England its about half of that, and maybe even less. I know as I have family I married into that points out this fact, the best workers all go over to the US and make large salaries over there at US tech giants. Lets talk about taxes, especially in the northern European countries taxes are extremely high when you get into professional wage bands, ie. above 120-200K euros(50% tax rates in some countries compared to 37% top US tax rate) and capital gains which is a huge issue as some employees get a majority of their income through this - 30% cap gains tax rate and above for a decent amount of western/northern EU countries, compared to 20% top tax rates for US. Lastly lets talk about employees, you hire someone and they don't work. In Europe you cannot just term them and give them a severance package of a few weeks. In France you are not allowed to even layoff employees unless you are close to bankruptcy(I think this was changed a few years back). But in general it is very hard to fire employees who are underperforming in the EU. All of these facts really highlight why alot of top talent and founders from the EU come over to the US to make money and start companies. I am not saying one way is right or wrong but just want to pint out the points that both ICs/managers and founders have all told me(I am US based).
  • alephnerd 2y ago
    Then why does Czechia, Romania, Poland, and (before 2022) Russia punch above their weight in entrepreneurship? Or Switzerland and the UK?
    • peoplefromibiza 2y ago
      > Then why does Czechia, Romania, Poland And yet nobody would move there to find a job, not even from Italy, Greece or Portugal. Their salaries are simply too low and the ROI in terms of quality of life it's not remotely comparable. There's over one million Romanians in Italy, making them the largest foreign community in Italy.
      • alephnerd 2y ago
• ffsm8 2y ago
  As a fellow European that started skimming the article halfway through as I was facepalming too hard: did he never look at the raw numbers? If you target the US market the pie is basically 10x times what it would be if you targeted your country in Europe. Realistically speaking, Europe ain't got a chance unless we abolish our countries entirely, creating a single market. And that's not gonna happen. Ever.
  • kazen44 2y ago
    Also, abolishing your country into some superstate will not change the fact that people of europe consist of many different cultures with many different believes, practices, expectations etc, and have done so for many many thousands of years. you could try to change that for macroeconomic gain, but i highly doubt that will work if we look at history.
  • andersa 2y ago
    The alternative is slowly fading into irrelevance.
• sideway 2y ago
  Genuine question - could someone give some insight on why the post was flagged? I found the article interesting and it wasn't my intention to divide the audience. If anything, I believe lots of the comments here contribute positively in forming a more educated and all-round view on the matter.
  • alephnerd 2y ago
    Some people got butthurt or felt overly defensive.
• koonsolo 2y ago
  That hours worked chart is funny with Greece in 2nd place. Then you have the ones that work the least: Germany, Denmark, Netherlands, Luxembourg, etc. Maybe next time take a look at this table: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_labour_productivity https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_labour_pr... The countries at the back of "total hours worked" are at the top of "most productive per hour worked". These are also the countries that are doing very well economically.
• ghusto 2y ago
  Yup, in my experience Europeans value quality of life over making their boss's richer.
  • alephnerd 2y ago
    Read TFA.
    • ghusto 2y ago
      Read it, and that's my response. I get it, we could be more like the U.S.A. in the way we operate by removing / changing some of the obstacles we have for business. I don't want that.
      • alephnerd 2y ago
        English fluency and simplified incorporation are not major changes for Western Europe. Hell, Switzerland does this, as do countries like China and India.
• t0bia_s 2y ago
  As an EU citizen in middle of Europe (Czechia) I see two major problems. - Free market is crippled by EU economical politics. Basically, EU is trying to implement centrally planned economics and fund many useless things by grants. About half of grants (in my country) going to ideology driven nonprofit segment. Many EU citizens are very angry about wasting our money. Also, our government is not able to provide cheap energy. It has historically lowest trust since 90's. - We solve problems by creating new regulations. Instead of amendment of laws we adding bunch on new ones. In my country, its about 50 000 new legislative regulation every year. System is full of unnecessary bureaucracy. It costs many resources thus make it collapse in near future because of lack of resources (financial, personal, even mental). Those aspects affect motivation in business significantly. Many don't believe in reformation of EU. I expect EU exits of few member states in near future.
  • alephnerd 2y ago
    I've had great experiences for past employers managing our Czechia office (heck, you might have even applied to us) and I agree with ya. CEE (Germany+Austria excluded) has the right mix of regulation and ease of business for innovation to succeed, but French and German lobbying seems to be undermining it. Maybe an EEC membership like Denmark's might be helpful down the line.
  • throwaway11460 2y ago
    Tomorrow you will be paid to use energy if you're on the spot market.
  • badpun 2y ago
    I don't think those are the main issues. There's tons of money wasted as well as bullshit laws in the US (hell, their tax code is so complex that it famously practically requires software to fill out a tax return form), but it doesn't stop their economy from quickly growing.
  • omnimus 2y ago
    I am curious what are examples of “ideology driven nonprofit segment”?
• cherryteastain 2y ago
  Europeans always like to approach this issue from the perspective of Europe being uncompetitive vs the US. I'd say it's not Europe that is underperforming, rather the US has been over-performing since the 2008 GFC. If we look at other major developed countries (say Japan, S Korea, Canada, Austalia, New Zealand) they also lack the same innovation ecosystem the US has. Their economies have also been largely stagnating since the 2008 GFC in terms of metrics like nominal GDP per capita, labor prodictivity (GDP/hours worked), market cap of their national stock exchanges and diposable income. Canadian GDP per capita was $52k in 2011, and in 2021 it was still $52k. Meanwhile, these countries also saw their tech sectors decay. Blackberry was so big in late 2000s. Japan had the world's most advanced tech sector in the 80s and 90s. All of it gone, and the breaking point was 2008. You can see that in the productivity and GDP per capita charts of all developed economies except the US. Why did the US outperform everyone so much? The main dynamic change in 2008 was QE. In my opinion, because the USD is the global reserve currency, it meant that the printed money gave an outsized benefit to the US due to the seigniorage effect, and distorted the dynamics of capital formation greatly in the US' favor.
  • deleted 2y ago
    [deleted]
  • hollerith 2y ago
    Seigniorage is "profit made by a government by issuing currency" (according to Google). So the US government got all this money. And this led somehow to the US economy outperforming the rest of the developed world?
    • cherryteastain 2y ago
      Money is a representation of wealth. Underpinning that are real resources and labor, economists have realized this since Adam Smith. Debt is money creation. Deficit spending by the US govt is money creation; FED literally creates out of of thin air some money to buy T bills when it does QE. USD is the global reserve currency. Practically all trade deals are in USD, even when say a S Korean firm sells stuff to Indonesia. Only the US can print USD, all other countries must export goods or services to acquire the USD needed for their imports. Say an amount X USD represents all goods and services in the world. When the USG prints money, now X+dX dollars represent the same goods and services. USG spends the dX amount via salaries, purchase orders etc, and this amount reaches US companies and individuals. These individuals then purchase goods and services abroad. Essentially, without producing or selling anything in return, US gets to import dX dollars worth of goods and services. That's what seigniorage means in that context.
• davidelettieri 2y ago
  > Even Italians work more hours than Americans That's a bit gratuitous
• thefz 2y ago
  > So, what do we need to change > First, we need to stop believing the US meme about Europe. Never believed that for a second. First, twitter is not real life. Second, let the europeans speak about Europe, not those who live thousands of kilometers away.
• baudaux 2y ago
  When we see how the world is going, it is preferable to stay asleep
• juxtapose 2y ago
  The author isn't wrong. Europe is falling behind, and people should not pretend it's a good thing: the current European life style ("more to life than work") depends on excessive interests gained from technological advancements that are not yet replicated elsewhere. The life would be much worse if Europe couldn't keep up.
  • ramblerman 2y ago
    whoosh
• unstatusthequo 2y ago
  I'm glad this letter was sent now and not in August, or nobody would see it. :)
• 6510 2y ago
  I'm sure an insane number of companies in the EU operate only in one country. If you look over the border and see a tiny fraction of how different stuff works you run back home screaming. You cant send a box into Germany. I'm sure I'm butchering the refined details but something like: You need to register with some approved entity who will sign off on the packaging you use with different rates for different volumes of which the first is 100 times what I need.
• ranger_danger 2y ago
  > Have you seen the Californian taxes? The EU isn’t far off. I honestly don't think this is a fair comparison at all in the context of the entire US vs Europe.
• narrator 2y ago
  Does Europe have QSBS? I think that leads to the serial entrepreneur and angel thing.
• KBme 2y ago
  Taxes in California were very different when SV started. It's now running on intertia and fumes. People who compare salaries obviously have no idea about the difference in cost of living in the US especially in California and especially in SV. The productivity graph is obviously totally useless and not a representation of tech workers, but maybe fast food workers and diversity officers. The characterisation of taxes and ease to start a business is utterly false.
• mediumsmart 2y ago
  Dear Human, the 3 things that make life worth living are doing what you like for a living, having someone to love and something to hope for. You can learn that from me or the hard way. Happiness is so unassuming and easy to overlook, you have to pay attention.
• miki123211 2y ago
  I think there's one point the author missed, and that's payment method standardization. In the US, you put a credit card form on your website and you're done. That's how people pay online, period. In the EU, this is not the case. You have countries like Germany, where many people use EC, not Visa or Mastercard. You have countries like Poland, where (debit) card adoption and usage is very high, but online card usage is almost nonexistent. Except for the young and tech-savvy, there's a weird phobia here when it comes to anything that can take money from your account without your explicit consent. That complicates subscription payments for one, most major streaming services had to give in and allow bundling with cable and satellite TV plans (Netflix), phone plans (Spotify and Tidal) or payments by SMS (Storytel). There was a Storytel blog post once where they discovered that 90% of Polish people that cancelled at the "payment" step of the subscription flow did so because "credit card" was the only method available. And that's just two countries, I'm pretty sure the other 26 have their own nuances I'm not aware of.
• pimterry 2y ago
  Worth noting that the "EU GDP is stagnating terribly" narrative that motivates this post and quite a few of these comments is not true. If you look at cost-relative (PPP) & per-capita numbers, the EU economy has been growing at a very similar or faster rate than the US for decades. https://statisticstimes.com/economy/united-states-vs-eu-economy.php https://statisticstimes.com/economy/united-states-vs-eu-econ... has a good introduction to the top-line numbers. https://www.bruegel.org/analysis/european-unions-remarkable-growth-performance-relative-united-states https://www.bruegel.org/analysis/european-unions-remarkable-... has a more detailed analysis. The raw GDP differences come in very large part from exchange rate fluctuations and increasing costs & population in the US, not a meaningful increase in what the average American can buy with their earnings. PPP adjusts for these. In terms of "how much <basket of normal purchases> can people buy" numbers, the EU is closer to the US today than it has ever been. (That said, I fully agree with the post's conclusion regardless: a simple unified way to create an EU business & a universal language base would be a huge boost)