Dear Europe, please wake up

You still need an NOC to shift to another employer, and if your boss is vindictive, they will make it hell.

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...

It's amusing that you used Uber as an example as Bolt is a direct competitor to Uber that is founded and operated in Estonia, but other than that, your purported advantage is pretty meager.

Assuming you build a product custom tailored to Estonia's unique regulatory requirements that is targeting primarily business users, then you are targeting a maximum market of 324,000 businesses. It's realistic to assume, given Estonia's population of 1.32M people, that most of those businesses are sole proprietorships or small businesses that will not have any IT or service department to support them. Building a successful, competitive product in this fashion requires protectionist policies that favor a local product, and those policies will often run afoul of public tendering rules. At least with Germany, you are dealing with a much larger scale (~84M people, and ~5.3M businesses).

It is certainly possible to build and operate a service that would target Estonian, or other small countries, specific regulatory requirements, but the size of the potential market is extremely small, and the path forward to build a competitive service is to abstract away Estonia specific regulations so that you can build country/regional specific versions.

All that said, assuming you are successful in building a business that accomplishes an "X" product for "Y" market model, the entire success of the business is predicated on a market that is created by differentiation in regulation, and your product benefits from lobbying for eliminating those differentiation.

Optimizing for small, local markets is definitely a path to success for some businesses but it's not an easy one, and it doesn't seem like a reasonable investment for growth oriented startups that seek to compete in a global marketplace.

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).

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