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Dear Europe, please wake up

klinger.io

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Re: Dear Europe, please wake up

#241

Post by Dig1t »

whiplash451 wrote: post #161
Dig1t wrote: 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)

My current tax rate is 35% where I live in the US. I would be taxed at 45% if I lived in Paris.

Sales tax is 8% where I live in the US. VAT is 20% in Paris.

Re: Dear Europe, please wake up

#242

Post by 6510 »

guru4consulting wrote: post #224
mountainb wrote: post #145

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 o…

And make EU more like USA? let them be influenced by corrupted wall street, loose EPA regulations for pesticides, favor the rich in the name of capitalism? In spite of the flaws and messy bureaucracy, I still like EU for their policies towards environment, food, socialism, etc. And above all, EU is the single beacon of hope to keep a check on mega corps like Apple, Google, Meta, MS, etc.

Make it more EU like, more standardization. You want to learn how to start one business not learn everything all over again for each country.

Re: Dear Europe, please wake up

#243

Post by zeruch »

buzzert wrote: post #233
guru4consulting wrote: post #224

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And make EU more like USA? let them be influenced by corrupted wall street, loose EPA regulations for pesticides, favor the rich in the name of capitalism? In spite of the flaws and messy bureaucracy, I still like EU for their policies towards environment, food, socialism, etc. And above all, EU is the single beacon of hope to keep a check on mega corps like Apple, Google, Meta, MS, etc.

I take it that you're very pleased with the direction that Europe is going, and disagree with most of what the author of the post says then?

...or he doesn't believe in mutually exclusive binary options.

Re: Dear Europe, please wake up

#244

Post by anal_reactor »

Muromec wrote: post #85
alephnerd wrote: post #19

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…

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…

> 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.

Ah yes, the "work hard and the boss will notice" meme.

I have zero incentive to work hard.

1. My salary is mostly tied to the market as a whole and particular company's performance, personal performance is the smallest bit of the equation.

2. Changing a variable from true to false on the personal request of someone very important will give me far more visibility than spending nights doing some work that only one other person is vaguely aware of, even if that work is super important. And visibility means chances for promotion.

3. Most companies are inherently undemocratic and employees have no input on decision making, therefore why would they care.

4. Most companies have proven that they're not afraid of screwing over their employees given the opportunity, so why wouldn't it work the other way around too.

5. In most cases, the reward for completing work early is more work. The punishment for being lazy is having free time.

I'm sorry but that's the corporate reality. I'd love to be a part of a team that works hard together to achieve great things, but that's not how the world works.

Being able to come to the office three hours late and leave two hours early without anyone complaining loud enough to get me fired is a much bigger job perk than Pizza Fridays.

Re: Dear Europe, please wake up

#245

Post by alephnerd »

peoplefromibiza wrote: post #236
alephnerd wrote: post #230

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And how many of them are working in Italy's tech industry versus working as blue collar workers.

How many of them are working in Romanian tech industry? In EU the share of ICT workers is pretty much homogeneous among the different countries. It's their salary that varies a lot (but not as wildly as in the US) It's much easier to get a decent wage for a Romanian in Italy than for a Romanian tech worker in Romania It's the reason why a lot of Italians go to live abroad as well.

> In EU the share of ICT workers is pretty much homogeneous among the different countries.

Italy has a population of ~58m but an ICT service population of ~500k [0].

Romania has a population of 19m but an ICT service population of ~200k [1]

And this masks the large Romanian tech diaspora in Germany, the UK, and ofc a portion in Italy.

So the question is, why are so few Italians work in tech in comparison to a much poorer country?

> It's much easier to get a decent wage for a Romanian in Italy than for a Romanian tech worker in Romania

Just using levels.fyi (which imo is skewed) Romanian dev salaries are higher [2] than Italian ones [3] and as a former hiring manager for one of those MNCs Europeans keep trying to apply to, I can attest that salaries for the 50th percentile and above are comparable across Europe, which ofc means CEE based tech employees end up having less of an incentive to move out West (excluding UK and Switzerland) when factoring CoL.

There's a reason Big Tech employers like Amazon have a major developer presence in Tier 2 Romanian cities like Cluj or Iasi and not Tier 1 Italian cities like Milan or Rome.

[0] - https://www.statista.com/statistics/419569/number-of-employe...

[1] - https://www.statista.com/statistics/419587/number-of-employe...

[2] - https://www.levels.fyi/t/software-engineer/locations/romania

[3] - https://www.levels.fyi/t/software-engineer/locations/italy

Re: Dear Europe, please wake up

#246

Post by em-bee »

pvitz wrote: post #207
em-bee wrote: post #191

Earlier quoted context omitted.

they are talking about the americas: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Americas which is sometimes called america. (mostly in non english native countries i suspect)

No, certainly the USA ( 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.

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)

Re: Dear Europe, please wake up

#247

Post by kazen44 »

kwere wrote: post #225
lugu wrote: post #64

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…

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.

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.

Re: Dear Europe, please wake up

#248

Post by xhkkffbf »

braiamp wrote: post #127
darth_avocado wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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. Y…

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.

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.

Re: Dear Europe, please wake up

#249

Post by alephnerd »

photochemsyn wrote: post #103

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-ga... Apparently th…

> in which capital is more under state control than in private hands

That statist description only started post-2016 after the market crash.

From 1979-2015 Beijing was very hands off (excluding local level PLI subsidizes, but basically every country offers them - think Amazon HQ 2.0 back in the 2010s or Yozma in Israel back in the 1990s).

Re: Dear Europe, please wake up

#250

Post by kazen44 »

ffsm8 wrote: post #158

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.

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.

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