401–410 of 442 posts
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Just FYI that’s not what right to work is. You’re talking about at will employment. Right to work means they can’t make you join the union.
Thanks. I mean the laws and precedent that made it clear my non compete is unenforceable based on the idea that I have a right to... work. Oh hey and there’s the name right there!
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Beauty is in the eye of the beholder though. Way too hot, hazardous weather, impossible to get around (crazy traffic congestions, no useful public transporation, bicycling being suicidal), have to go to Home Depot to get real Coca Cola. Overall quite "meh".
> no useful public transporation it's united states overall, so it doesn't really matter.
>> crazy traffic congestion
It matters. I once pulled out of the Sutter-Stockton garage and sat in traffic for a full hour without getting to the end of the block.
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> non-competes are illegal, stuff you do at home is yours For “stuff you do at home” is there any limit to that? Like if I’m on my own time and my own computer/internet, and I worked at say, a search engine company, and I made my own search engine in my free time (a huge project, but we’re talking in hypotheticals here) Would my current employer in this scenario be able to sue me? What if it’s “my own time” during th…
Short answer what does your employment contract say? I live in the southern U.S. Non compete clause are 100% enforceable here, and have a ton of case law backing them. I generally won't take a job if it requires me signing it. I have more than 20 years of experience, and I personally feel I am far more likely to bring knowledge to them rather than then providing it to me.
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A Mediterranean climate is actually pretty rare in the world. The only large areas with a Mediterranean climate are the actual Mediterranean, the US West Coast, and some parts of Australia. Apart from that there are only a few scattered spots with a Mediterranean climate. https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/7/72/Mediterr...
I don't think that's part of the reason either. Sure, weather might be a factor for employee comfort, but most certainly not for a startup friendly environment. Else why is Stockholm or Copenhagen a bigger startup hub than Barcelona or Rome? Why are all the French startups in Paris and not Marseille, or the German startups in Berlin and not Munich? From even a non-startup perspective: why is Milan a bigger hub for co…
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Italy literally invented universities, gets comparable climate and unpaid non competes are not enforceable. no silicon valley equivalent in sight tho so I strongly suspect the whole thread so far it's projection and wishful thinking.
That was in the context of the US. And Italy is a whole country, so the density is going to be different.
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Why can no one but the US pay developers well? The GDP per cap is there in many countries... but for some reason developers are only key employees in the US?
Or are developers paid a disproportionate wage in comparison to other jobs? Why should a software developer get paid hundreds of thousands of dollars a year, while those who weren't lucky enough to be born with the required intelligence (despite what coding bootcamps say, not everyone is cut out to write code) are doomed to work a low-wage job for their entire life? It's the height of privilege. And if you subscribe…
The issue here is that the work of a skilled electrician doesn't scale, unlike a software engineer. The classic example is process automation.
I would argue software, and engineering in general, is one of the few disciplines where that's possible.
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Right to work law is really good in Ontario. Heck I had a CEO who threw a tantrum because I took my skills to another company (that isn’t even a competitor) and demanded I quit with threats. My lawyer basically laughed at him and he went away. Ontario’s tech sector is growing a lot but hopefully the salary issues will improve.
Why can no one but the US pay developers well? The GDP per cap is there in many countries... but for some reason developers are only key employees in the US?
There's non-compete in most places that makes it hard for employees to switch jobs. Since there's none in California, the strategy to retain employees is to tie their income to equity in the company. That creates a moat around hiring engineers from a competitor (you'll have to match the equity if you want to hire!). There's also labor laws that makes it hard to fire someone; these incentivize the business owner to pay less so that a bad hire has less of an effect. There's also, in a lot of EU countries, so much taxes that it's helpful early one to hire specialized accountants just to claim all the possible subsidies for the business. It can be worth it for businesses with 5 employees. Adding that extra salary will leave less for the early employees.
There's also the fact that some companies simply don't see the value of software, at all. They have a software division but don't treat it as the core of their business. In their mind, it's simply a tool for the business (despite the whole business depending on it sometimes!). So they treat software as a cost center and that drives engineers to tech-focused companies that are clustered in the US. Prime example of that is banking, where no matter how much revenue is directly tied to software, it's still considered a cost center.
Finally, in some market there's simply a talent gap. Ontario, and Canada, strikes me as one since I've met a few Canadians who jumped the border to Silicon Valley but never actually met a Silicon Valley engineer moving up north.
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Exactly correct. I tried to explain this to a public official from an east cost town who was flying back from the Bay Area trying to "learn the secrets" of creating an innovation hub. When I explained this situation (non-competes are illegal, stuff you do at home is yours) to him he literally said "That's crazy! Why would anyone hire anyone if they knew they could walk out the door to a competitor, or even to start a…
Your comment reminds me of this tweet: https://mobile.twitter.com/zackkanter/status/130493861651941... The cognitive dissonance humans are capable of is amazing. To actually say “We would never allow that in our town.” in the pejorative while flying back from a trip specifically meant to learn how to be like another town . If you’re not going to act on an author’s central point, don’t try to do any of the other parts…
How is that not cargo-culting?
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I believe Europe can create its own SV by following the USA's route: the Europe's equivalent of DoD (which has access to unlimited funds, tens of trillions of euros), needs to come up with a grand multi-decade project and invest into companies that are going to work on related sub-projects. For USA it was the worldwide surveillance system, but for Europe it may be something else, like ITER (but on a bigger scale) or…
There are some science and technology investment projects like this in the EU. For example: > Horizon 2020 is the biggest EU Research and Innovation programme ever with nearly €80 billion of funding available over 7 years (2014 to 2020) – in addition to the private investment that this money will attract. It promises more breakthroughs, discoveries and world-firsts by taking great ideas from the lab to the market. Ho…
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An important piece of context for the renaissance, which is often lost in modern discussions, is that it was not a movement which was attempting to be "innovative" or conceptualised itself as such. Rather, it was fundamentally backwards-looking: an attempt to recapture the glory of antiquity. People were digging up the ruins of a conspicuously more advanced civilisation -- which could do mind-bending things like draw…
Afaik, the old civilizations were rather rudimentary in perspective? There are some traces of it, but no mind bending anything.