8 ms·

Bizarre to me that "not having tech giants" is seen as a weakness, where I would think that "allowing giant (tech) monopolies" is the bad thing.

voidbert 2y ago
From an ethical perspective, tech monopolies aren't a very good idea. However, from a purely economics standpoint, tech giants make up a not insignificant part of the US's GDP.
- tokai 2y ago
  But most of the US tech giants don't produce anything of value. They just suck out adverting money from companies that actually produce wealth. Its the same as the Germans 1944 GDP or Russians current. The numbers go high when you burn a tremendous amount of money.
  - Rinzler89 2y ago
    >But most of the US tech giants don't produce anything of value. That doesn't really matter at the end of the day when you're discussing finances. All that matters for people, countries and governments in capitalism is that they have more money in their pockets than the rest, not how ethically that value gets generated or if their work produces much social value to society.
  - Longhanks 2y ago
    There's lots of value in being able to influence huge portions of the population. The fact that you consider it morally wrong does not make it invaluable to others.
    - hackeman300 2y ago
      Agreed. Also just so you know, invaluable is one of those weird words that is intensified with in-, not negated. It means even more valuable, not worthless
      - denton-scratch 2y ago
        > It means even more valuable, not worthless The "in-" actually is negation; the word means something like "NOT susceptible to valuation", i.e. beyond value.
      - Longhanks 2y ago
        Hah, you're right - sorry for the confusion and thanks for the note, I'm not a native English speaker :)
    - ajuc 2y ago
      The funny thing is that it's the same tradeoff that slavery was, just to a lesser degree :)
    - jijijijij 2y ago
      Semantics. The problem is economic value is not causally linked to human prosperity. Money is a shit metric.
  - kibwen 2y ago
    Ad companies like Google actually produce negative economic value, because advertising is a Red Queen's Race with no upper bound and every dollar wasted on advertising is a dollar that the company must recoup by increasing the price of the product, at absolutely no benefit to the consumer.
  - raverbashing 2y ago
    - Android, React, several other Google libraries - GMail, Google Maps, etc Saying there's no value in those (even if ad sponsored) is a bit naive
    - jijijijij 2y ago
      Don't be so literal, it's a weak contribution. I think OP's sentiment is clearly along the lines of "disproportionate little value to humanity in regard to their economic power".
- IanCal 2y ago
  The classic argument for laws regulating monopolies/abuse of power is that overall this worsens what consumers and countries care about. Both that it lowers quality for consumers (lack of true competition) and slows growth by eliminating the push for new things/efficiencies. > However, from a purely economics standpoint, tech giants make up a not insignificant part of the US's GDP. Yes. It would surely be better to have a large field of non-giants competing for customers taking up the same proportion of GDP though right?
  - bluGill 2y ago
    Large scale - in some things - allows for higher quality at lower prices since you divide the costs of designing and building between more people. For many complex things you have to be a large enterprise to build it. Building a reliable engine that meets modern emissions standards isn't possible for a single human, or even a small group - a large (monopoly) can make that investment and divide those costs between many customers and so the price is cheaper than a small company that would have to divide the costs between many less customers. Tech tends to be similarly complex and so needs are large investment in R&D to be acceptable, which in turn means that they need to be large to make the costs divided between all customers acceptable. The real question is where do those competing considerations meet up. A monopoly is bad, but you can go too far in the other direction as well. I don't know how to decide what the best answer is (I'm not even aware of anyone who has made a useful argument for any particular compromise)
    - IanCal 2y ago
      > a large (monopoly) Those things are not linked. Large and monopoly are very different. Your example of engines is good, there isn't afaik a monopoly on building engines. Even a small number of huge auto makers are still competing against each other. > A monopoly is bad, but you can go too far in the other direction as well. I don't know how to decide what the best answer is (I'm not even aware of anyone who has made a useful argument for any particular compromise) I agree, I think the general aim with the EU makes sense which is about use of power in one field to control another. So google are good at search but that doesn't mean they get to make their own shopping attempt rank higher than others. If they have 90% of the search market then fine if that came from being better than everyone else but their shopping offering has to be better than others.
- denton-scratch 2y ago
  > tech giants make up a not insignificant part of the US's GDP. Indeed. So could the US reliance on these monopolies and tax-avoiders have anything to do with the US's relatively unimpressive growth compared with the EU?
- xLaszlo 2y ago
  It's a question of "What is the economy for?" Disruptive tech monopolies upset entire existing industries for the sake of their owners/shareholders/employees, which is usually tiny compared to the said industries. (Think of FB/Google advertisement centralisation as the end of other media providers.)
  - jlangenauer 2y ago
    And have significant externalities which democratic societies must bear, but allow for the tech monopoly shareholders to reap more profits.
  - SubmarineClub 2y ago
    And textile mills completely decimated the "putting-out" system of production.
- troyvit 2y ago
  From an economics standpoint, does that make tech giants good, or does it make the US's GDP weaker since so much wealth is concentrated among so few players? I keep wanting to push back on whether GDP is the best way to measure an economy, but most of the articles I find bring in concepts like "[GDP] doesn’t meaningfully account for successful management of priorities like public health, economic equity, climate action, or racial justice."[1] But you're making it clear you're talking from a purely economics standpoint. So pushing back on the ethics of applying GDP doesn't even apply. [1] https://hbr.org/2021/02/a-better-way-to-measure-gdp https://hbr.org/2021/02/a-better-way-to-measure-gdp
- eddd-ddde 2y ago
  You can have the same GDP splat over multiple companies. From a economical standpoint is even better. More diversification, more innovation.
Dalewyn 2y ago
It depends on whether you want to have a part in writing the rules, because guess what: The rules are always written by those in power, which in this case are mostly American tech megacorps. If exerting tech leadership is among your goals, not having your own tech megacorps is a weakness.
- robertlagrant 2y ago
  I think it is true that if you do the work you write some of the rules. But that's through value added to people who use your stuff. It's not by unearned fiat.
Bostonian 2y ago
There are often complaints here that American programmers earn more than their counterparts in Europe and other continents. American tech giants pay well in the U.S.
- alephnerd 2y ago
  Most white collar jobs pay better in the US than Europe, be it in Power Engineering, Automotive Engineering, Pharma, Finance, etc (and all these jobs come with insurance provided). If you're a skilled professional, you always end up earning more in the US than most other countries. This is not to say Europe is bad - hell Europe is a continent so broad brush stereotypes are stupid, as my argument with an Italian yesterday about ICT market dynamics in Romania vs Italy proved. You'll earn a higher salary in Amsterdam as a SWE than you would as a SWE in Jackson MI, just like a MechE in Minsk will earn a pittance compared to a MechE in Munich. All this chest thumping on HN is so stupid.
  - mercutio2 2y ago
    Do you have actual comps for Jackson vs Amsterdam? Those happen to be two places my best friend has lived and worked and… 20 years ago at least Jackson paid much better than Amsterdam. Europe just really has a low ceiling on pay, across the board.
    - alephnerd 2y ago
      I actually meant Jackson MS, not MI, but using levels.fyi there is a difference pre-tax [0][1]. The main difference would probably be income tax, which means post-tax salaries in NL can be lower than MS [0] - https://www.levels.fyi/t/software-engineer/locations/jackson-ms-area https://www.levels.fyi/t/software-engineer/locations/jackson... [1] - https://www.levels.fyi/t/software-engineer/locations/greater-amsterdam-area https://www.levels.fyi/t/software-engineer/locations/greater...
      - seanmcdirmid 2y ago
        That’s a huge difference $30k, I don’t think taxes in Amsterdam are that high. You really should be comparing the greater Jackson area also, I’m sure salaries in Clinton for a SWE is going to be higher, Jackson is limited to state jobs. My dad was pulling $100k in port Gibson as a systems engineer and that was a couple of decades ago.
Longhanks 2y ago
Apple was nowhere near a tech giant when the iPhone was introduced. Facebook was a student's project. Consumer tech innovation just doesn't happen in Europe, I think that's the real issue Europe should be tackling, given how influential consumer tech is.
- pornel 2y ago
  European countries used to have their local Facebooks and Twitters, but they got wiped out once the US companies got better at localizing their services.
  - Longhanks 2y ago
    Which is not in itself a natural phenomenon - Spotify for example did not get wiped out by Apple Music or Google Play/YouTube Music. Europe's local Facebooks and Twitters just weren't that good.
    - pornel 2y ago
      With social networks the size of the network is the killer feature.
WanderPanda 2y ago
Tech giants, while getting worse in terms of lobbying etc. are still much more benign than the old-school industry giants we have in europe. The European Roundtable for Industry [1] is particularly disgusting. The bigcorp lawyers are essentially writing EU law… [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/European_Round_Table_for_Industry https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/European_Round_Table_for_Indus...
- User23 2y ago
  The so-called legislators and “lawmakers” in the USA also don’t write laws. The process is complicated, but at an overview level the real lawmakers hire lobbyists to go find an office holder to rubber stamp a bill they have written and want enacted. The lobbyists are just bagmen of course.
nyokodo 2y ago
> "not having tech giants" is seen as a weakness It’s a second order weakness. The first order weakness is the relative lack of capital availability vs the United States which made it less likely to spawn EU native tech giants. The lack of tech giants means that there is a brain drain effect to the US or US tech giants functioning in Europe.
- eldaisfish 2y ago
  capital is a stumbling block but even if that were solved in the EU, the bigger problem of language still remains. The true power of the US is that it operates in the global lingua franca and has access to the world's biggest capital markets. Machine translation may one day be a solution but we are far from that day.
  - Rinzler89 2y ago
    > the bigger problem of language still remains Also culture and regulations. For example Austria and Germany, Netherlands and Belgium, might share borders and the same languages between the pairs but having different regulations in certain areas, meaning that starting a company in one country might be difficult to expand in the other due to a difference in regulations which is usually by design born out of local protectionism. Contrary to the US, EU is not a united country, but a collaboration of fiefdoms with often diverging interests, where every one of them wants to be king and won't hesitate to sabotage other members for their own gain, even if it holds everyone back. This high level of internal squabbling and fragmentation is ultimately what keeps EU unable to scale businesses of any kind, not just tech, as easily and as fast as in the US. What many founders do, if you're developing a SW product in the EU, is forget the EU market altogether and launch directly to customers in the US, and only when you succeeded there and made your money, you can afford to break into the EU fragmentation and expand locally. Sounds counter-intuitive but that's the reality for many product based EU start-ups that want to succeed, like Spotify for example. Why do you think Apple only launched the VP in the US and nowhere else?
  - nyokodo 2y ago
    > the bigger problem of language still remains > the true power of the US is that it operates in the global lingua franca It is true that language is a problem but I suspect not as much as you say. ~51% of the EU population speaks english as a 1st or 2nd language, but a larger percentage in the wealthier western nations (e.g. ~57% in France) and an even larger percentage in the major metros (e.g. ~60% in Paris). [1] I couldn't find figures but I suspect an even larger percentage of university graduates in the wealthier EU nations speak english. Tech Giants disproportionately emerge from and draw from the University Graduate population. If they had the capital availability and culture/regulatory regime (as acknowledged elsewhere in the thread) amenable to the emergence of Tech Giants then they wouldn't need a big boost to English proficiency to get by language-wise. 1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_English-speaking_population https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_English-s...
petermcneeley 2y ago
Your perspective makes sense to me if you live in Sweden's capital.
mrtksn 2y ago
Some tech giants of the US are legitimate technology giants, others are just land grabbers that do something simple at scale(i.e. sharing status updates with peers). EU lacks on the second one, also its the one that has all the controversy. Yet, I wouldn't downplay the USA's hard tech capabilities and talent pool. IMHO the US is special, as it doesn't have the baggage from the history that spans thousands of years on the record. EU is the old neighbourhood that once had all the cool new stuff but now is focused on preserving what they accumulated, life is good there but not much is happening. The USA is the newly built neighbourhood that got hip and trendy and has all the new cool stuff. China is this neighbourhood that once was great, lost its lure but lately it is up and coming with some of the coolest new stuff being there.
- denton-scratch 2y ago
  > IMHO the US is special, as it doesn't have the baggage from the history that spans thousands of years on the record. Interestingly, there were civilizations in America thousands of years ago, as there were in Europe. The USA was founded a coupla hundred years before the EU.
  - dukeyukey 2y ago
    Sure, the the EU has _massive_ cultural baggage because it's comprised of civilisation whic, by-and-large, have thousands of years of history with each other, on the same (limited) land. The US is vastly more culturally homogenous, with more land, and a unified government.
    - denton-scratch 2y ago
      > have thousands of years of history with each other Not really. In many parts of what is now Germany, people spoke dialects that were incomprehensible even to people in the next valley; this was as recently as the 19thC. In the 20thC, a British leader could speak of Czeckoslovakia as "a faraway country of which we know little". Modern Frenchmen would regard their countrymen from 2K years ago as completely alien. Modern Greeks speak a language that is recognizably derived from ancient Greek, but in other cultural respects, modern and ancient Greeks are very different. Those ancient societies regarded their neighbours as barbarian enemies, not as neighbours they shared a culture with. It's only since (say) the 5thC AD that European culture began to become more homogenous. BTW, the idea that the US government is "unified" looks like a sick joke, from my perspective.
afavour 2y ago
I feel like this will be an enternal debate on HN. I also think there’s no need to come up with a definitive answer. The EU and US have fundamentally different perspectives on a bunch of things that results in a very similar but mildly different society. Trying out different ideas is good. Variation is good.
- bluGill 2y ago
  Don't forget that while we have competing interests and disagree strongly on many things - overall we are friends. When someone does something that works we all benefit. Sometimes we decide what "they" did is better can switch, other times we decide what "they" did is worth overall but they did develop something that we didn't that we can use. Even if "they" are clearly worse, "we" cannot do it all and so both of us specializing in something different results in both of us getting the benefits of both to at least some extent.
- jowea 2y ago
  I'm not sure this is just a matter of priorities. Isn't political leadership in the EU disappointed with the lack of tech industry in the EU?
  - Arnt 2y ago
    Yes, but afaict not with the lack of giants. It's more "we want to have lots of successful startups like in silicon valley". Some become giants, most not.
    - Arnt 2y ago
      Come to think of it... don't politicians in Alaska, Washington, Colorado, Nebraska, Arkansas, Florida and so on also want startups like in silicon valley?
      - AlchemistCamp 2y ago
        Boulder, Colorado is where Tech Stars (the 2nd most successful incubator after YC for most of the past 2 decades) started and despite having a population of ~100k people, Boulder is where many of Tech Stars biggest successes happened. Washington is home to Microsoft and Amazon, so it's doing okay, too.
Al-Khwarizmi 2y ago
The problem is that we are at the whim of tech giants anyway, they're just not ours. I.e. not having an European Google doesn't mean my phone is running an OS from some European non-giant, it's running Android. How is this not a weakness with respect to at least having a local alternative?
- bluGill 2y ago
  > How is this not a weakness with respect to at least having a local alternative? Scale - it is a lot of work to create a local alternative. While you could develop that local alternative, to make it a useful competitor to Android would take a lot of resources - mostly trained programmers. Those programmers in making your android alternative would then not be doing whatever it is they are doing right now and so less total output is done. Is it worth the loss of those other things? There are a lot of different things going on in any country. Perhaps some of them are not worth doing. However even if you stop doing those things is there something else it would be better to spend that effort on?
nonethewiser 2y ago
> where I would think that "allowing giant (tech) monopolies" is the bad thing For what? Certainly not GDP.
rayiner 2y ago
Even putting monopolies aside: tech isn’t a great industry to have in your community. Our former au pair went back to Germany and now has a great office job in logistics at a Dannon factory that makes baby formula. She lives in a small German town and there’s no highly paid engineers driving up the cost of everything. She never went to university but lots of career paths are open to her. At a tech company, you’d be a second class citizen without a degree (unless you were a genius programmer).
- Rinzler89 2y ago
  > there’s no highly paid engineers driving up the cost of everything. Pretty sure there must be affordable small towns in the US without SW engineers to drive up the cost of everything. But your point is rather poor. Those US SW engineers might cause local gentrification, but they also contribute a huge amount in state and government taxes, taxes that I'm sure the likes of Germany would also like to collect if they could, to fund their welfare, education, army, healthcare, etc. And it's not like many large German cities aren't already gentrified and overpriced despite wages being lower than the US. Try moving to Münich, Stuttgart, Frankfurt, Hamburg or Berlin, look at real estate market then at the local wages. It's the same disease everywhere.
  - visarga 2y ago
    It's not a disease, just that you have limited space at the center, and everyone wants near good jobs.
    - Rinzler89 2y ago
      >everyone wants near good jobs How dare they want a better life? /s You can always build up or denser but NIMBY's don't allow that so here we are.
      - Clubber 2y ago
        How do you make NYC denser?
creer 2y ago
Much of Europe sees businesses only as employment programs. They see the economy as managed or run by the state - it's the state that (believes it) drives the economy through employment law, tax rates, subsidies, "development programs", etc. Businesses are not there for serving the public, or making money, or advancing technology, or as free enterprise - but convenient as docile employment programs. And for that purpose it makes sense to prefer giant corporations. It's easier to steer them, talk to them, model them, regulate them (you can talk bureaucrat to bureaucrat), twist their arm, occasionally get services or equipment from them. And from that point of view, it's useless to try and favor startups: it will be years before just a tiny fraction of these are relevant in number of salaried people.
- rini17 2y ago
  Isn't it reasonable considering the excesses and inequality of economy ran by private enterprises with scarcely any oversight?
  - creer 2y ago
    It depends whether your priority is a dynamic, lively, resilient economy which delivers technology advances including healthcare, internet and handheld super-computing. Or if it's levelling things by cutting heads. It's a policy choice, of course. And one set of features doesn't prevent the other of course, but you still can choose priorities and get the corresponding result. For Europe, the priority is overwhelmingly "employment of the masses". Nothing else comes close. And anyway, European corporations are not exactly run by middle income families!
    - rini17 2y ago
      Yes that's exactly how the script goes, meanwhile the life expectation in the "dynamic, lively, resilient economy which delivers technology advances including healthcare" goes... down somehow and basically everyone runs on paracetamol if not worse.
bwb 2y ago
That is well said, but there is a difference between good regulation on monopolies preventing tech giants versus structural problems preventing competitive high-scale companies from emerging. The USA is going to have to deal with its monopoly problem, but the EU has to deal with the problems making them uncompetitive in the tech scene.
jowea 2y ago
If Europe had 50 small companies doing what big tech does I don't think there would be a problem, but the problem is that Europe doesn't. So it gets a smaller slice of the economy and has to "import" social media, operating systems, mobile phones, etc.
ThrowawayR2 2y ago
Lacking some domestic equivalent, "not having tech giants" means that hundreds of billions of euros annually are flowing out of the region to benefit someone else instead of the citizens of that region. Forever. Add to that the political and cultural soft power accrued and also brain drain that both come with that and, yeah, that does seem to be a pretty big weakness.
Aerroon 2y ago
I think "no tech giants" is really a shorthand for "all the tech we use is non-European". All the websites, operating systems, devices, device components etc. Another effect of this is that the workforce doesn't grow to gain (the tech) skills to build such products.

voidbert 2y ago

From an ethical perspective, tech monopolies aren't a very good idea. However, from a purely economics standpoint, tech giants make up a not insignificant part of the US's GDP.

tokai 2y ago
But most of the US tech giants don't produce anything of value. They just suck out adverting money from companies that actually produce wealth. Its the same as the Germans 1944 GDP or Russians current. The numbers go high when you burn a tremendous amount of money.
- Rinzler89 2y ago
  >But most of the US tech giants don't produce anything of value. That doesn't really matter at the end of the day when you're discussing finances. All that matters for people, countries and governments in capitalism is that they have more money in their pockets than the rest, not how ethically that value gets generated or if their work produces much social value to society.
- Longhanks 2y ago
  There's lots of value in being able to influence huge portions of the population. The fact that you consider it morally wrong does not make it invaluable to others.
  - hackeman300 2y ago
    Agreed. Also just so you know, invaluable is one of those weird words that is intensified with in-, not negated. It means even more valuable, not worthless
    - denton-scratch 2y ago
      > It means even more valuable, not worthless The "in-" actually is negation; the word means something like "NOT susceptible to valuation", i.e. beyond value.
    - Longhanks 2y ago
      Hah, you're right - sorry for the confusion and thanks for the note, I'm not a native English speaker :)
  - ajuc 2y ago
    The funny thing is that it's the same tradeoff that slavery was, just to a lesser degree :)
  - jijijijij 2y ago
    Semantics. The problem is economic value is not causally linked to human prosperity. Money is a shit metric.
- kibwen 2y ago
  Ad companies like Google actually produce negative economic value, because advertising is a Red Queen's Race with no upper bound and every dollar wasted on advertising is a dollar that the company must recoup by increasing the price of the product, at absolutely no benefit to the consumer.
- raverbashing 2y ago
  - Android, React, several other Google libraries - GMail, Google Maps, etc Saying there's no value in those (even if ad sponsored) is a bit naive
  - jijijijij 2y ago
    Don't be so literal, it's a weak contribution. I think OP's sentiment is clearly along the lines of "disproportionate little value to humanity in regard to their economic power".
IanCal 2y ago
The classic argument for laws regulating monopolies/abuse of power is that overall this worsens what consumers and countries care about. Both that it lowers quality for consumers (lack of true competition) and slows growth by eliminating the push for new things/efficiencies. > However, from a purely economics standpoint, tech giants make up a not insignificant part of the US's GDP. Yes. It would surely be better to have a large field of non-giants competing for customers taking up the same proportion of GDP though right?
- bluGill 2y ago
  Large scale - in some things - allows for higher quality at lower prices since you divide the costs of designing and building between more people. For many complex things you have to be a large enterprise to build it. Building a reliable engine that meets modern emissions standards isn't possible for a single human, or even a small group - a large (monopoly) can make that investment and divide those costs between many customers and so the price is cheaper than a small company that would have to divide the costs between many less customers. Tech tends to be similarly complex and so needs are large investment in R&D to be acceptable, which in turn means that they need to be large to make the costs divided between all customers acceptable. The real question is where do those competing considerations meet up. A monopoly is bad, but you can go too far in the other direction as well. I don't know how to decide what the best answer is (I'm not even aware of anyone who has made a useful argument for any particular compromise)
  - IanCal 2y ago
    > a large (monopoly) Those things are not linked. Large and monopoly are very different. Your example of engines is good, there isn't afaik a monopoly on building engines. Even a small number of huge auto makers are still competing against each other. > A monopoly is bad, but you can go too far in the other direction as well. I don't know how to decide what the best answer is (I'm not even aware of anyone who has made a useful argument for any particular compromise) I agree, I think the general aim with the EU makes sense which is about use of power in one field to control another. So google are good at search but that doesn't mean they get to make their own shopping attempt rank higher than others. If they have 90% of the search market then fine if that came from being better than everyone else but their shopping offering has to be better than others.
denton-scratch 2y ago
> tech giants make up a not insignificant part of the US's GDP. Indeed. So could the US reliance on these monopolies and tax-avoiders have anything to do with the US's relatively unimpressive growth compared with the EU?
xLaszlo 2y ago
It's a question of "What is the economy for?" Disruptive tech monopolies upset entire existing industries for the sake of their owners/shareholders/employees, which is usually tiny compared to the said industries. (Think of FB/Google advertisement centralisation as the end of other media providers.)
- jlangenauer 2y ago
  And have significant externalities which democratic societies must bear, but allow for the tech monopoly shareholders to reap more profits.
- SubmarineClub 2y ago
  And textile mills completely decimated the "putting-out" system of production.
troyvit 2y ago
From an economics standpoint, does that make tech giants good, or does it make the US's GDP weaker since so much wealth is concentrated among so few players? I keep wanting to push back on whether GDP is the best way to measure an economy, but most of the articles I find bring in concepts like "[GDP] doesn’t meaningfully account for successful management of priorities like public health, economic equity, climate action, or racial justice."[1] But you're making it clear you're talking from a purely economics standpoint. So pushing back on the ethics of applying GDP doesn't even apply. [1] https://hbr.org/2021/02/a-better-way-to-measure-gdp https://hbr.org/2021/02/a-better-way-to-measure-gdp
eddd-ddde 2y ago
You can have the same GDP splat over multiple companies. From a economical standpoint is even better. More diversification, more innovation.

Dalewyn 2y ago

It depends on whether you want to have a part in writing the rules, because guess what: The rules are always written by those in power, which in this case are mostly American tech megacorps. If exerting tech leadership is among your goals, not having your own tech megacorps is a weakness.

robertlagrant 2y ago
I think it is true that if you do the work you write some of the rules. But that's through value added to people who use your stuff. It's not by unearned fiat.

Bostonian 2y ago

There are often complaints here that American programmers earn more than their counterparts in Europe and other continents. American tech giants pay well in the U.S.

alephnerd 2y ago
Most white collar jobs pay better in the US than Europe, be it in Power Engineering, Automotive Engineering, Pharma, Finance, etc (and all these jobs come with insurance provided). If you're a skilled professional, you always end up earning more in the US than most other countries. This is not to say Europe is bad - hell Europe is a continent so broad brush stereotypes are stupid, as my argument with an Italian yesterday about ICT market dynamics in Romania vs Italy proved. You'll earn a higher salary in Amsterdam as a SWE than you would as a SWE in Jackson MI, just like a MechE in Minsk will earn a pittance compared to a MechE in Munich. All this chest thumping on HN is so stupid.
- mercutio2 2y ago
  Do you have actual comps for Jackson vs Amsterdam? Those happen to be two places my best friend has lived and worked and… 20 years ago at least Jackson paid much better than Amsterdam. Europe just really has a low ceiling on pay, across the board.
  - alephnerd 2y ago
    I actually meant Jackson MS, not MI, but using levels.fyi there is a difference pre-tax [0][1]. The main difference would probably be income tax, which means post-tax salaries in NL can be lower than MS [0] - https://www.levels.fyi/t/software-engineer/locations/jackson-ms-area https://www.levels.fyi/t/software-engineer/locations/jackson... [1] - https://www.levels.fyi/t/software-engineer/locations/greater-amsterdam-area https://www.levels.fyi/t/software-engineer/locations/greater...
    - seanmcdirmid 2y ago
      That’s a huge difference $30k, I don’t think taxes in Amsterdam are that high. You really should be comparing the greater Jackson area also, I’m sure salaries in Clinton for a SWE is going to be higher, Jackson is limited to state jobs. My dad was pulling $100k in port Gibson as a systems engineer and that was a couple of decades ago.

Longhanks 2y ago

Apple was nowhere near a tech giant when the iPhone was introduced. Facebook was a student's project. Consumer tech innovation just doesn't happen in Europe, I think that's the real issue Europe should be tackling, given how influential consumer tech is.

pornel 2y ago
European countries used to have their local Facebooks and Twitters, but they got wiped out once the US companies got better at localizing their services.
- Longhanks 2y ago
  Which is not in itself a natural phenomenon - Spotify for example did not get wiped out by Apple Music or Google Play/YouTube Music. Europe's local Facebooks and Twitters just weren't that good.
  - pornel 2y ago
    With social networks the size of the network is the killer feature.

WanderPanda 2y ago

Tech giants, while getting worse in terms of lobbying etc. are still much more benign than the old-school industry giants we have in europe. The European Roundtable for Industry [1] is particularly disgusting. The bigcorp lawyers are essentially writing EU law… [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/European_Round_Table_for_Industry https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/European_Round_Table_for_Indus...

User23 2y ago
The so-called legislators and “lawmakers” in the USA also don’t write laws. The process is complicated, but at an overview level the real lawmakers hire lobbyists to go find an office holder to rubber stamp a bill they have written and want enacted. The lobbyists are just bagmen of course.

nyokodo 2y ago

> "not having tech giants" is seen as a weakness It’s a second order weakness. The first order weakness is the relative lack of capital availability vs the United States which made it less likely to spawn EU native tech giants. The lack of tech giants means that there is a brain drain effect to the US or US tech giants functioning in Europe.

eldaisfish 2y ago
capital is a stumbling block but even if that were solved in the EU, the bigger problem of language still remains. The true power of the US is that it operates in the global lingua franca and has access to the world's biggest capital markets. Machine translation may one day be a solution but we are far from that day.
- Rinzler89 2y ago
  > the bigger problem of language still remains Also culture and regulations. For example Austria and Germany, Netherlands and Belgium, might share borders and the same languages between the pairs but having different regulations in certain areas, meaning that starting a company in one country might be difficult to expand in the other due to a difference in regulations which is usually by design born out of local protectionism. Contrary to the US, EU is not a united country, but a collaboration of fiefdoms with often diverging interests, where every one of them wants to be king and won't hesitate to sabotage other members for their own gain, even if it holds everyone back. This high level of internal squabbling and fragmentation is ultimately what keeps EU unable to scale businesses of any kind, not just tech, as easily and as fast as in the US. What many founders do, if you're developing a SW product in the EU, is forget the EU market altogether and launch directly to customers in the US, and only when you succeeded there and made your money, you can afford to break into the EU fragmentation and expand locally. Sounds counter-intuitive but that's the reality for many product based EU start-ups that want to succeed, like Spotify for example. Why do you think Apple only launched the VP in the US and nowhere else?
- nyokodo 2y ago
  > the bigger problem of language still remains > the true power of the US is that it operates in the global lingua franca It is true that language is a problem but I suspect not as much as you say. ~51% of the EU population speaks english as a 1st or 2nd language, but a larger percentage in the wealthier western nations (e.g. ~57% in France) and an even larger percentage in the major metros (e.g. ~60% in Paris). [1] I couldn't find figures but I suspect an even larger percentage of university graduates in the wealthier EU nations speak english. Tech Giants disproportionately emerge from and draw from the University Graduate population. If they had the capital availability and culture/regulatory regime (as acknowledged elsewhere in the thread) amenable to the emergence of Tech Giants then they wouldn't need a big boost to English proficiency to get by language-wise. 1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_English-speaking_population https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_English-s...

petermcneeley 2y ago

Your perspective makes sense to me if you live in Sweden's capital.

mrtksn 2y ago

Some tech giants of the US are legitimate technology giants, others are just land grabbers that do something simple at scale(i.e. sharing status updates with peers). EU lacks on the second one, also its the one that has all the controversy. Yet, I wouldn't downplay the USA's hard tech capabilities and talent pool. IMHO the US is special, as it doesn't have the baggage from the history that spans thousands of years on the record. EU is the old neighbourhood that once had all the cool new stuff but now is focused on preserving what they accumulated, life is good there but not much is happening. The USA is the newly built neighbourhood that got hip and trendy and has all the new cool stuff. China is this neighbourhood that once was great, lost its lure but lately it is up and coming with some of the coolest new stuff being there.

denton-scratch 2y ago
> IMHO the US is special, as it doesn't have the baggage from the history that spans thousands of years on the record. Interestingly, there were civilizations in America thousands of years ago, as there were in Europe. The USA was founded a coupla hundred years before the EU.
- dukeyukey 2y ago
  Sure, the the EU has _massive_ cultural baggage because it's comprised of civilisation whic, by-and-large, have thousands of years of history with each other, on the same (limited) land. The US is vastly more culturally homogenous, with more land, and a unified government.
  - denton-scratch 2y ago
    > have thousands of years of history with each other Not really. In many parts of what is now Germany, people spoke dialects that were incomprehensible even to people in the next valley; this was as recently as the 19thC. In the 20thC, a British leader could speak of Czeckoslovakia as "a faraway country of which we know little". Modern Frenchmen would regard their countrymen from 2K years ago as completely alien. Modern Greeks speak a language that is recognizably derived from ancient Greek, but in other cultural respects, modern and ancient Greeks are very different. Those ancient societies regarded their neighbours as barbarian enemies, not as neighbours they shared a culture with. It's only since (say) the 5thC AD that European culture began to become more homogenous. BTW, the idea that the US government is "unified" looks like a sick joke, from my perspective.

afavour 2y ago

I feel like this will be an enternal debate on HN. I also think there’s no need to come up with a definitive answer. The EU and US have fundamentally different perspectives on a bunch of things that results in a very similar but mildly different society. Trying out different ideas is good. Variation is good.

bluGill 2y ago
Don't forget that while we have competing interests and disagree strongly on many things - overall we are friends. When someone does something that works we all benefit. Sometimes we decide what "they" did is better can switch, other times we decide what "they" did is worth overall but they did develop something that we didn't that we can use. Even if "they" are clearly worse, "we" cannot do it all and so both of us specializing in something different results in both of us getting the benefits of both to at least some extent.
jowea 2y ago
I'm not sure this is just a matter of priorities. Isn't political leadership in the EU disappointed with the lack of tech industry in the EU?
- Arnt 2y ago
  Yes, but afaict not with the lack of giants. It's more "we want to have lots of successful startups like in silicon valley". Some become giants, most not.
  - Arnt 2y ago
    Come to think of it... don't politicians in Alaska, Washington, Colorado, Nebraska, Arkansas, Florida and so on also want startups like in silicon valley?
    - AlchemistCamp 2y ago
      Boulder, Colorado is where Tech Stars (the 2nd most successful incubator after YC for most of the past 2 decades) started and despite having a population of ~100k people, Boulder is where many of Tech Stars biggest successes happened. Washington is home to Microsoft and Amazon, so it's doing okay, too.

Al-Khwarizmi 2y ago

The problem is that we are at the whim of tech giants anyway, they're just not ours. I.e. not having an European Google doesn't mean my phone is running an OS from some European non-giant, it's running Android. How is this not a weakness with respect to at least having a local alternative?

bluGill 2y ago
> How is this not a weakness with respect to at least having a local alternative? Scale - it is a lot of work to create a local alternative. While you could develop that local alternative, to make it a useful competitor to Android would take a lot of resources - mostly trained programmers. Those programmers in making your android alternative would then not be doing whatever it is they are doing right now and so less total output is done. Is it worth the loss of those other things? There are a lot of different things going on in any country. Perhaps some of them are not worth doing. However even if you stop doing those things is there something else it would be better to spend that effort on?

nonethewiser 2y ago

> where I would think that "allowing giant (tech) monopolies" is the bad thing For what? Certainly not GDP.

rayiner 2y ago

Even putting monopolies aside: tech isn’t a great industry to have in your community. Our former au pair went back to Germany and now has a great office job in logistics at a Dannon factory that makes baby formula. She lives in a small German town and there’s no highly paid engineers driving up the cost of everything. She never went to university but lots of career paths are open to her. At a tech company, you’d be a second class citizen without a degree (unless you were a genius programmer).

Rinzler89 2y ago
> there’s no highly paid engineers driving up the cost of everything. Pretty sure there must be affordable small towns in the US without SW engineers to drive up the cost of everything. But your point is rather poor. Those US SW engineers might cause local gentrification, but they also contribute a huge amount in state and government taxes, taxes that I'm sure the likes of Germany would also like to collect if they could, to fund their welfare, education, army, healthcare, etc. And it's not like many large German cities aren't already gentrified and overpriced despite wages being lower than the US. Try moving to Münich, Stuttgart, Frankfurt, Hamburg or Berlin, look at real estate market then at the local wages. It's the same disease everywhere.
- visarga 2y ago
  It's not a disease, just that you have limited space at the center, and everyone wants near good jobs.
  - Rinzler89 2y ago
    >everyone wants near good jobs How dare they want a better life? /s You can always build up or denser but NIMBY's don't allow that so here we are.
    - Clubber 2y ago
      How do you make NYC denser?

creer 2y ago

Much of Europe sees businesses only as employment programs. They see the economy as managed or run by the state - it's the state that (believes it) drives the economy through employment law, tax rates, subsidies, "development programs", etc. Businesses are not there for serving the public, or making money, or advancing technology, or as free enterprise - but convenient as docile employment programs. And for that purpose it makes sense to prefer giant corporations. It's easier to steer them, talk to them, model them, regulate them (you can talk bureaucrat to bureaucrat), twist their arm, occasionally get services or equipment from them. And from that point of view, it's useless to try and favor startups: it will be years before just a tiny fraction of these are relevant in number of salaried people.

rini17 2y ago
Isn't it reasonable considering the excesses and inequality of economy ran by private enterprises with scarcely any oversight?
- creer 2y ago
  It depends whether your priority is a dynamic, lively, resilient economy which delivers technology advances including healthcare, internet and handheld super-computing. Or if it's levelling things by cutting heads. It's a policy choice, of course. And one set of features doesn't prevent the other of course, but you still can choose priorities and get the corresponding result. For Europe, the priority is overwhelmingly "employment of the masses". Nothing else comes close. And anyway, European corporations are not exactly run by middle income families!
  - rini17 2y ago
    Yes that's exactly how the script goes, meanwhile the life expectation in the "dynamic, lively, resilient economy which delivers technology advances including healthcare" goes... down somehow and basically everyone runs on paracetamol if not worse.

bwb 2y ago

That is well said, but there is a difference between good regulation on monopolies preventing tech giants versus structural problems preventing competitive high-scale companies from emerging. The USA is going to have to deal with its monopoly problem, but the EU has to deal with the problems making them uncompetitive in the tech scene.

jowea 2y ago

If Europe had 50 small companies doing what big tech does I don't think there would be a problem, but the problem is that Europe doesn't. So it gets a smaller slice of the economy and has to "import" social media, operating systems, mobile phones, etc.

ThrowawayR2 2y ago

Lacking some domestic equivalent, "not having tech giants" means that hundreds of billions of euros annually are flowing out of the region to benefit someone else instead of the citizens of that region. Forever. Add to that the political and cultural soft power accrued and also brain drain that both come with that and, yeah, that does seem to be a pretty big weakness.

Aerroon 2y ago

I think "no tech giants" is really a shorthand for "all the tech we use is non-European". All the websites, operating systems, devices, device components etc. Another effect of this is that the workforce doesn't grow to gain (the tech) skills to build such products.