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Dear Europe, please wake up

klinger.io

161–170 of 323 posts

Re: Dear Europe, please wake up

#161
post #110

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.

Curious about why your tax bill goes way up.

Do you have data to back this up?

Marginal tax rates are very similar between the US and France.

France taxes more than the US is a myth that needs to go away (at least for individuals, might be true for corps)

Re: Dear Europe, please wake up

#162

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…

Then why does Czechia, Romania, Poland, and (before 2022) Russia punch above their weight in entrepreneurship?

Or Switzerland and the UK?

Re: Dear Europe, please wake up

#163
post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In all honesty, tech people in EE show up to the office at 11 and take a legit one hour plus lunch break to eat proper food at the restaurant together. To ensure team cohesion of course. I'm not sure if that counts as a hard work or the result is simply better because you hire smart people and can't micromanage from SF due to 10h time zone difference. >German, French, and British government officials are the worst to…

> tech people in EE show up to the office at 11 and take a legit one hour plus lunch break to eat proper food at the restaurant together Let's be honest, most techies do that from India to Israel to Poland to US. That said, Eastern Europeans are fine with occasionally partaking in crunchtime. Meanwhile, when I dealt with our Western European sales and engineering teams they would all ignore messages even if a Tier 1…

If you are not providing critical infrastructure and people will not die, it's just you losing money, because your business is structured in a wrong way. You did it to yourself and should not expect people on salary to bear the cost of your wrong decisions.

If you do provide critical infrastructure and people will die, it's also not my problem, because there will be a law requiring you to hire an SRE and a regulator to fine you to hell for not doing a good job too.

Being a founder is your 24h job and you made a gamble to make big money in a capitalistic game. I didn't, I'm fine with making 5 liters of borscht on weekend and eating it through most of the week. It's not even WLB, it's not what I have signed up in this life.

Re: Dear Europe, please wake up

#164

> 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 u…

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.

Re: Dear Europe, please wake up

#165

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> tech people in EE show up to the office at 11 and take a legit one hour plus lunch break to eat proper food at the restaurant together Let's be honest, most techies do that from India to Israel to Poland to US. That said, Eastern Europeans are fine with occasionally partaking in crunchtime. Meanwhile, when I dealt with our Western European sales and engineering teams they would all ignore messages even if a Tier 1…

If you are not providing critical infrastructure and people will not die, it's just you losing money, because your business is structured in a wrong way. You did it to yourself and should not expect people on salary to bear the cost of your wrong decisions. If you do provide critical infrastructure and people will die, it's also not my problem, because there will be a law requiring you to hire an SRE and a regulator…

You're entitled to your opinion, just like I am entitled not hire you and hire an Israeli, Czech, Pole, or Indian for the same salary (and I have).

Btw, I'm in the cybersecurity space, so a Tier 1 escalation generally means nation state attack or business stopping attack on a customer.

> You did it to yourself and should not expect people on salary to bear the cost of your wrong decisions.

Plenty of escalations are due to bugs. It's good to operate on a blameless model, but if I followed your model I'd gladly put the blame on engineers like you if the cause was found to be a dependency issue or a misconfiguration issue.

Ofc, in the real world peers and I operate on a blameless model. Shit happens, but we need to fix our mistakes asap if they are made.

Re: Dear Europe, please wake up

#166
post #80
post #62

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 work…

>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.

(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.

Re: Dear Europe, please wake up

#167
post #47

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.

I have never seen a 3+ month notice to quit in the country I live, curious which country this happens in? Sounds extremely ridiculous if true

I've had it in the UK and Sweden.

Re: Dear Europe, please wake up

#168

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.

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.

Re: Dear Europe, please wake up

#169
post #164

> 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 u…

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 acceptab…

Yes there are entitled children who will get a wake up call, a lot of people were openly rooting for a major recession in part because they WANTED that wakeup call to come very badly, not just executives but their co-workers who were driven crazy. I thought that was messed up but I get it, it seems unfair. They aren't doing their fair share, very common human emotion in social groups.

But that sentence I highlighted just illustrates the thinking at the executive level (writer of this post is a CTO/Founder) and it drives me mad, and I believe the primary desire for in-office work. Creating a sustainable working environment where you deal with business problems is not the goal, the goal is to squeeze every ounce of labor you can for the money you pay and with no real idea how much work goes into the job, what's actually hard v. not, the only thing they can do is observe and bristle at stupid metrics like "how long is that coffee break."

Re: Dear Europe, please wake up

#170

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).

> 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.

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