This problem will never get fixed. The author forgot to mention in depth the main reason why EU isn't even in the game: culture.
In order to be innovative and compete, we need very flexible working laws, people with a big growth mindset, a less relaxing lifestyle and AMBITIOUS people.
A lot of third world countries are years ahead of the whole EU continent in that aspect. I say this because I live in Europe for the quality of life, come from a third world country, and I see how kids and adults are spoiled here. Much of what they have was just given to them. At least for the strong countries in west EU, lifestyle is very relaxed and any ambitious is frowned upon, it is extremely demotivating, not to mention bureaucracy. Corporations and regulations will just drive your small company out of the market no matter what.
I find for me more likely to save some money, move to my country and create my own business and sell in Europe. People here are too lazy to compete in the fast world we live in, there in my country there is so many skilled people, so little capital, here is the reverse. Good amount of capital and foreigners working in tech. For instance, I live in Berlin and almost all the "working people" from tech companies here are foreigners. Germans are generally the executives and/or management. It is quite rare to find a german software developer on Startups.
I personally think(my opinion, not the ultimate truth)... that Europe is definitely a very interesting market for companies to come here and sell their stuff, but not to make it.
Instead I think Europe should focus on its strengths, which is healthy market regulations, creating a good playing field for companies from above, rather on its weaknesses. It should also figure out a way to keep part of the profits inside the continent to benefits its inhabitants.
More important than competing is to know where and when to compete.
> In order to be innovative and compete, we need very flexible working laws, people with a big growth mindset, a less relaxing lifestyle and AMBITIOUS people.
The US has those things and it's turning into a "third world country with a Gucci belt" (as someone put it) for everyone except the 1% and the indispensable knowledge worker class that can't be automated away or juiced dry for all the productivity they are capable of.
"Flexible working laws" and "less relaxing lifestyle" to me translates as "light a fire under their ass until they are forced to innovate", while "big growth mindset" and "ambitious people" translate as "hustle culture", which I consider toxic in its very nature.
As a European, I can only hope that our culture doesn't degrade itself to that degree.
> The US has those things and it's turning into a "third world country with a Gucci belt"
I get the distinct impression that people who liken the US to a third world country are from one particular spot on the political spectrum. This seems like political rhetoric, not a summary of some level-headed analysis. Inequality, crime, etc in the US are certainly problems, but that seems like a low bar for the "third world country" label (with or without the 'gucci belt' modifier). At best it's unhelpful, but I think it's probably just inaccurate considering how many people from actual second and third world countries are risking their very lives to get in, not to mention divisive.
Generally I define a 3rd world country as a place that has a lot of inequality, corruption across the board, poor to no worker protection, failing and antiquated infrastructure, no free access to health care, high incarceration rate, persecution of journalists, a large working poor population with no ability to move up the social ladder, etc.
The US has worker protections and social mobility, so you're flat-out wrong on two of your points. And actually the US has free access to health care via a variety of programs, it's just not universal, but I'll concede that's being pedantic.
Every country is going to have inequality, corruption, antiquated infrastructure, and persecution of journalists, so those are meaningless unless you provide some sort of comparison point.
"High" incarceration is at least attempting to articulate a comparison but only because I actually know the numbers there.
Comparing all of these points against Western Europe, the US is objectively behind. There's your point of comparison. Western Europe has far more expansive worker protections (just look at "right-to-work" states, you can get fired for any reason whatsoever), far more encompassing free healthcare (not just for the poor and older individuals, Medicare and Medicaid is what you're referring to I presume right? There are no other programs for free healthcare in the US), far freer press (according to the World Press Freedom Index, the US is 44th, most Western European states are higher), infrastructure is not crumbling in Western Europe in the same way it is in the US, far lower inequality (this is obvious, check any inequality index), less corruption, on what point exactly of these is the US better than Western Europe?
a) how are these regards cherry-picked?
b) it doesn't no, you are right. However the "third world country with a gucci belt" phrase is intentionally tongue-in-cheek and used to call attention to the fact that the US is behind other first-world countries in many different important ways, which it is. Personally I consider healthcare, worker rights, and infrastructure pretty key issues of extremely high importance, and I'm not sure how it's possible to see it otherwise.
They are important, but ignoring every contrary indicator (per capita GDP, life expectancy, quality of life, etc) in order to exaggerate the extent to which the US lags other nations is the very definition of cherry picking. The US is squarely a first-world country even if it lags various countries other first world countries in certain regards. No doubt this “third world country” business is hyperbole for many people who invoke it (although I think there are many who invoke it who sincerely believe it or just have no moral scruples whatsoever), I’m just saying such rhetoric is unhelpful at best and probably divisive and misleading.
Out of those three examples you gave, Western Europe still wins on 2/3 (higher life expectancy, higher quality of life). Granted the second is subjective somewhat, but I believe most would agree. The first is objectively lower in the US compared to Western Europe, you can check the statistics. Per capita GDP is only high in the US due to massive wealth inequality and a ridiculous concentration of billionaires. It's not "ignoring every contrary indicator", it's that most of the indicators that are used to support the idea that the US is "better" (e.g. per capita GDP) are fundamentally flawed in different ways, and don't amount to a proper comparison of the quality of life.
For the third time now, being behind (some parts of) Europe doesn’t make a country “third world”. Also, I agree that GDP is imperfect—no one is claiming any indicator is perfect. However, the median US adult also has more wealth than the median European adult, and that figure isn’t skewed by billionaires. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_wealth_...
The US does not have much corruption. It is present, obviously, but you probably don't realize what corruption is like in "real" 3rd world countries.
About the infrastructure, the one in the US is comparable to that of most rich countries. If you cherry-pick, sure you are going to find something.
Health care in the US is problematic but I think the best indicator of quality is life expectancy, and the US is high tier.
And you think journalists are persecuted? The US is one of the most free country in that regard, more than Europe and much more than in Asia. In "real" 3rd world countries, they get killed, tortured, and all sorts of fun things if they disagree with the local ruler.
Climbing the social ladder is far from impossible in the US. It is hard, but it is hard everywhere, the ones on top of the ladder never want to let go, but at least, in the US, there is no rule officially preventing it like castes in India.
Worker protection could be better but it is no nonexistent either. At least, there are contracts that mean something, safety standards, etc...
Incarceration rate is not necessarily the sign of a third world country. In the worst places, there are no prisons to keep criminals locked in, and they are out to get you.
This is absolutely correct. I strongly suspect the people who say things about the US being a third world country have no experience in second world countries, much less third world.
People that say US is a third world country are mostly illinformed, my guess is due to political affiliation as you said, but also the city dynamics, arm chair media consumption (NYT exclusively reports vocal minority issues day in day out) and uninformed about what actual third-world countries are like.
their empirical data does not account for factors like wealth distribution, and a lot of the subjective indicators do not correlate strongly with the "objective" measures, with the exception of housing satisfaction.
Data and science doesn't make something objective. For something that claims to measure the quality of life of entire countries and compare them, I'd expect at least 70% of the world to be sampled in a thorough way.
Also, I don't think I've ever met anybody that genuinely believed the US was a third world country. They usually bring up its flaws in response to claims of "USA #1" or something along those lines which are slogans they grew up around their whole life. Now that they are looking into things, traveling, and experiencing more of life, they realize that that blanket statement holds no truth. The arm chair media consumption is definitely an issue but in the same way, I remember only reading good things about the US for almost the entirety of the 90s (consuming news from the BBC, Reuters, and local Japanese/Indian news orgs).
> Data and science doesn't make something objective
Well the “US is a third world country” take is based on no evidence whatsoever and defies all common sense, experience, etc, so I guess I’ll take the significant but imperfect evidence.
The idea of the US "turning into a third world country with a Gucci belt" is just a caricature; you are taking it extremely literally and I'm not sure why. But assuming large amounts of the population believed this to be a fact, this evidence from the website is not significant whatsoever. It's imperfect and insignificant. Any meaning you extract from it would be the equivalent of obtaining a desired trend from a plot full of randomly placed dots.
> The idea of the US "turning into a third world country with a Gucci belt" is just a caricature; you are taking it extremely literally and I'm not sure why.
Some people are intending it as a caricature and others are intending it literally (for example: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27520754). The literal case is obviously factually incorrect and the caricature case is unhelpful and divisive. Take your pick.
America's problems are numerous and have been discussed elsewhere at length. Suffice to say that sometime between 9/11 and the 2008 financial crisis, America has not been keeping up with other economies in terms of what makes a first world country worth living in. Biden may change that, or he may not. In any case, America has a lot of catching up to do if they want to overtake Europe (and some other places) in anything besides profit.
> America's problems are numerous and have been discussed elsewhere at length. Suffice to say that sometime between 9/11 and the 2008 financial crisis, America has not been keeping up with other economies in terms of what makes a first world country worth living in.
Maybe. Or maybe the media is just peddling negativity such that we are overexposed. I moved to Europe a decade ago and have since returned, and plan to go back occasionally. When I went, I definitely had the impression that Europeans had it together and that Europe was some kind of liberal Utopia. And it was neat and European countries have political ideas worth borrowing, but it turns out that Europeans are also just people with their own distinct problems. They aren't more enlightened as American liberal media would have you believe. Europe has some really cool cultures, but they aren't "better" than American culture(s). IMO what Europe does have that America lacks is a deep, vibrant history (pre-Columbian American history is relatively impoverished for a variety of reasons).
A black friend of mine who's a travel writer (hence has lived in a bunch of different countries) says that she often finds more problems in terms of racism in Europe, relative to the US.
Also, a few years back some Indian extraction friends of mine were complaining about casual racism in the Western European country they were living in.
So, it's probably not as great as some US media portrays, but it's definitely not as bad as the other US media portrays.
I’ve traveled Europe a lot as well and was similarly surprised at first (because the media’s portrayal of reality is severely warped). People say things like “America is a literal ethnostate” and other such nonsense but they don’t realize that America is one of the most egalitarian places in the history of the planet. That isn’t contradicted by the bad things that happen or have happened here; it’s just a testament to how bad things are and have been everywhere for all time.
Poverty has been increasing rapidly here in the states and people just keep ignoring it. My employer isn't, we're gearing up to make tons of money on the next crash.
>As a European, I can only hope that our culture doesn't degrade itself to that degree.
The question is whether Europe will be able to maintain its wealth - which is the main thing that makes possible the luxury of having a more relaxed lifestyle - in the long term while falling behind economically. Most of Europe's wealth is based around old world economy.
We already see a wealth gap between the North and South and the West and East. Also between the old and young. Not sure what that means for the future.
Europes wealth is based, to a large extent, on hardware and a huge number of wealthy citizens. As long as hardware is a thing (not talking electronics but stuff like cars and so on), and we manage to not cut of the poorer 20-30% of society, Europe should do fine.
> We already see a wealth gap between the North and South and the West and East.
This has always existed; or at least has in modern history. It's hardly a new development, although the EU and Euro has brought this more to the forefront.
These kind of things ebb and flow anyway; if you look at the last few hundred years then concentrations of wealth have shifted all over the place. Some locations have gone from very wealthy to very poor and back to very wealthy again.
I think in general the European model works well for midsize, highly specialized hardware companies, mostly doing B2B. From what I can see, European companies are competitive in that space still, and it's not such a bad niche to be in. It's this middle ground between commodities and one-off custom products.
European economies are very diverse and I‘m not concerned with wealth as the most successful countries with high living standards also have relatively low debt in comparison to gdp.
Not going to comment on anything else since "flexible working laws" and "less relaxing lifestyle" can mean anything, but "light a fire under their ass until they are forced to innovate" is unironically and unapologetically good.
If there's one thing that consistently fosters innovation and progress it's competition. That's something that holds true everywhere. Software, industry, education, games, sports, you name it.
I've had the best ideas and the sharpest intellect once I had _plenty_ of money to be comfortable such that I could just sit on my ass thinking about whatever I wanted without worrying whether I needed to make ends meet.
Innovation for innovation’s sake is meaningless. Innovation to improve quality of life is reasonable, so decreasing quality of life to increase innovation is like shooting yourself in the foot for faster access to healthcare.
And competition is not the only thing that breeds innovation. Just think back to all the HN articles about needing to make time for curious people to innovate.
> If there's one thing that consistently fosters innovation and progress it's competition.
That statement is a bit of a truism, isn't it? If you squint hard enough, you can call most things a competition. If all else fails, in the sexual marketplace because financial success is an indicator of romantic success for males, who happen to have driven a lot of the innovation up to this point.
It also ignores the nuance to be found in whether and where to focus on public investment versus private investment, for one. I don't think you can really sensibly frame all public investment as competition, unless you're stretching it to the amorphous "international competition", in which case the principle is dangerously close to being unfalsifiable.
I'm not saying competition has no role to play, but where are inspiration, the joy of creation, altruism and wanting to abolish frustration and greater problems? We don't just have selfish genes.
The most impactful and important innovations typically come from people who are intrinsically motivated.
Also, competition skews innovation towards solving problems that arrive from competition. You might just be hiring lawyers to bully a competitor instead of fostering sustainable progress. Or if your market is unregulated you can decide to use more severe methods.
People who are intrinsically motivated are going to do their thing regardless of the boundary conditions. There's no way to give someone intrinsic motivation and there's no way to take it away from them. You would have had to physically handicap Michelangelo to prevent him from sculpting or Maradona from kicking balls and so on.
Incentives definitely aren't everything, but they do work, and when you talk about systemic problems you have to think statistically.
> You might just be hiring lawyers to bully a competitor instead of fostering sustainable progress. Or if your market is unregulated you can decide to use more severe methods.
I'm talking about competition, not laissez-faire. If you're saying that competitive markets have to be fostered and don't just magically happen, then we are just vehemently agreeing.
Its weird really. Europeans do pretty well in sports so its not like they lack drive. Speaking having just watched Djokovic, Nadal et al battling it out.
It’s just blatant overgeneralization by grandparent comment. You can’t really describe a whole continent like that, especially on a very variable human attribute like drivenness.
As another European, I'd rather say the problem is in execution. On the flip side, having too much importance on a permanent contract creates incentives for other overheated markets to require a permanent contract before being able to continue the transaction (under the guise of "risk reduction"). See renting in the Netherlands. Additionally, employers have absolutely no qualms using this status to their advantage anyway. It just means playing the market a little differently, like making a 2 month leave notice mandatory. This doesn't consider the fact many people in markets much worse for employees than IT, these employees end up in situations where they cycle between companies since none of them will give a permanent contract anyway, or these companies try their worst to circumvent the law.
Ultimately, it still comes down to execution, laws, the state of a market and personal preferences. Both forms can be toxic.
While also spending more money on various things, or having to spend them on privatised health care etc. It's not directly comparable. My point also discussed things like infrastructure and public services, which are often very neglected compared to their European counterparts.
Yeah, that statement made zero sense by the other person. Sure, on paper, us Americans at the median have more money. But after you pay for a single visit to the ER or urgent care, or after you have a kid, or any expenses, Western Europeans are far better off. I know, I've been near that income level before. It's not a fun experience over here.
That said, now that I've moved into a job that pays at least $225K per year, you know, life in the USA is amazing for me. And everything everywhere else in the world is so cheap! Why can't my fellow country men just pull themselves up their bootstraps and get a high income earner job? It's so easy! You just go to the job tree and get one /s.
But more seriously, we need to completely restructure our society in the USA before the poor and middle class violently rise up against the government and make us into what Mexico was 120 years ago.
Most Americans pay a shit ton of money before their insurance kicks in to pay for the majority of their non-preventative care. I personally need to spend $3,000 before I only pay 10% of the bills that insurance receives until I hit $6,000 in a calendar year after which I pay nothing else.
Statements like this are ambiguous, because "European" can mean many different things. Over 40% of Europeans live in former communist states, so the median European in the literal sense does not tell much about the standard of living in the traditional first-world European countries.
I did a comparison between Finland and the US some time ago. My conclusion was that the median households were about as wealthy in both countries, but the average household was 3x wealthier in the US. The biggest caveat was that household wealth includes retirement savings but not pensions, making the median Finn wealthier than the median American. I estimated that the crossover point for the standard of living was somewhere around the 80th percentile, depending on things such as local costs of living and whether you have kids or not.
After a few years in America, nominal salaries seem low in Finland. On the other hand, Finns have fewer major expenses. Their out-of-pocket costs for education, childcare, and healthcare are much lower. The concept of an emergency fund does not really exist in Finland, largely thanks to income-dependent benefits. Pension contributions are mostly paid by the employer on top of the nominal salary, making saving for retirement much less important.
As an American with over 10k in their emergency fund, it would be really nice if it didn't have to be that high! That's 3 months for both my wife and I to not work at all if needed, or one trip to the ER for a "major" accident.
I would love to only need to keep a few thousand bucks in the case that my car breaks, and even then, that's likely overkill for the actual repair costs relative to the value of the car.
I don't own a house, I don't have any debt. I'm 8 years into my career and I've just now getting to building a positive net worth. I've put off so much medical/dental maintenance because of the cost and now it'll take half of my savings to fix all of it.
I know I'm doing a lot better than many folks my age. Top 10% for my age, but it sucks knowing that elsewhere in the world, they're doing some things so much better. It's one "benefit" of the internet connected world; we can see what everyone else is doing and how others solve hard social problems. Fixing those social problems in the US though, is continuing to be extremely difficult and we're still likely decades away from catching up to parts of Europe, and by then, we'll still be decades behind what they'd be doing then.
Sometimes I wonder if my life would feel better if I didn't know the term egalitarianism.
On a continent,-wide level it is, and US incomes are significantly higher. But US wealth levels are below most of Western Europe, including France, the UK, Ireland, even Italy and Spain. Plus Canada/Australia/New Zealand for good measure.
GP's phrasing is wrong but there is a point there - it is much easier to achieve success and then regulate and distribute its benefits than to go the other way round.
I am not a fan of unbridled capitalism a la the USA and fully agree that more countries should strive to reach European levels of worker and civil rights... however, there is validity to the statement that Europe is currently coasting along on the spoils of centuries of loot and plunder. A lavish, comfortable lifestyle was handed to the citizens of western europe and many of their older firms have struggled to innovate as technology has spread across the globe. There is a good reason why a fast moving industry like tech has taken root in the US while Europe as a whole is playing catch up.
The US will solve its problems, i have full faith in that country's ability to rise to the challenge as they have done numerous times in the past. Europe's problems with tech innovation run deep and go beyond simply vacation days and worker rights. Look no further than the current spree of tech regulation. I wish more countries did that but there is a fundamental problem - the EU is trying to legislate without having a good alternative.
My prediction - If the US resolves its immigration system and allows more talent to flow in without having to worry about a visa, European skilled immigration is toast.
> Europe is currently coasting along on the spoils of centuries of loot and plunder. A lavish, comfortable lifestyle was handed to the citizens of western europe
Well, apart from the whole WW2 business.
This is the trouble with generalisations across the continent, the closer you look the less well they fit. And if you look across a continent and back in time, the situation varies even further. Germany used to be "the sick man of Europe": https://www.aeaweb.org/articles?id=10.1257/jep.28.1.167
The overhang of colonial benefit is present in Britain; I'm not really sure about France (the disasters of trying to hold on to Vietnam and Algeria?). It's not present in Germany or Italy which had it taken off them. It may well be an issue to Portugal and Spain, which were dictatorships well after the war.
Spain was razed to the ground during the Civil War (1936-1939) and people were literally eating cats and rats off the streets so I doubt that any of our current wealth is inherited from our former Imperial glory, aside from maybe some intangible, indirect and minuscule effects such as “historic capital”.
To your point, same goes for Germany indeed… Have you guys seen the pics of what cities like Berlin, Nuremberg or Frankfurt looked like after the war?
There is a lot of old money in Europe, as some families managed to shield it from these crises, then compound interest did the rest, but I’d really like to see some proof about the sentiment being repeated ITT that Europe’s current wealth is inherited or handed down, because the idea sounds contrary to everything I know about the continent’s history.
To some extent I think the social structures produced by inherited wealth are anti-conduicive to innovation. Where's the innovation in the US? Most would say it's concentrated out west, in a state that didn't exist until 1850. The social structures of concentrated wealth in the South from the slavery era make it less innovative. And the northeast centers on money-making-money and property ownership.
The real sweet spot, of course, is cashing out: finding how to get the old money and oil money to invest in your new innovation. The success of WeWork, for example.
There is an old saying in Spain meaning "they scammed you": Te han dado gato por libre (They gave you cat -meal- as hare).
So, yes. after the civil war and Francoist repression Spain was utterly crushed down.
- taught a huge number of people enough electronics to do field maintenance of radio and radar
- had a further more theoretical education for radar operators
- at the end of the war, sold off a huge amount of kit cheaply; some of this is still kicking around the ham community in California. See e.g. https://mightyohm.com/wiki/resources:surplus and the geographic distribution
There's all sorts of odd little path dependencies. Shockley and Fairchild semiconductors were in California because Shockley himself wanted to live near his mother and managed to recruit people to move across the country.
How so? It's pretty axiomatic that destruction and rebuilding cycle that follows a continental-scale war lead to widespread investment and an economic boom.
That's not what "axiomatic" means. Maybe you meant "self-evident"? But that's not true either: Not every country ravaged by war goes on to become an economic powerhouse.
* And random effects over nature also, some negative, but other beneficial. The war submarines acting as a new top predator and the deploy of sea mines were a bless for fisheries, for example.
Let's be clear. By the time the last bullet was fired in WW2, Europe was basically destroyed, rumble, from the North Sea cross to Moscow. Brittan, although not occupied, was also hopelessly broke after the war. This weakness in Europe was one of the prime reasons why the colonies could break away from their European overlords. Europe was in no condition to do much about it either. They had more important things to worry about like food, and hoping that the Americans would come through with their Marshall Plan.
That's just counting the western half of Europe which wasn't under new (communist) management.
the destruction of world war two was absolutely insane, especially on the eastern front.
for instance: Belarus lost a quarter of it's population
many villages and cities where utterly destroyed.
also, don't forget world war 1 (and the other conflicts sparked after, like Russian civil war, breakup of Austria Hungary, Greco Turkish war etc) was only 25 years prior..
People will take my phrasing to their preferred way, I was aware of it when I wrote it. It's the internet.
I'd need to be a great philosopher and writer, to write a boring book with the same opinion that wouldn't hurt them. Unfortunately, I am none of those two. Those who want to take it in the wrong way will and I'm ok with that.
> At least for the strong countries in west EU, lifestyle is very relaxed and any ambitious is frowned upon, it is extremely demotivating, not to mention bureaucracy. Corporations and regulations will just drive your small company out of the market no matter what.
My brother works long hours for a company that recently raised 20 millions, all of that in France. Europe is composed of many people, and many of them have a big growth mindset and ambitions. Ambition is not frowned upon, at least not in my circles. Bureaucracy is surprisingly easy to deal with.
The other thing is that people from Europe already know that if they want to work hard and earn lots of money, they can just go to the USA. But things are changing and now people build things in Europe. I think you have a very reductive vision of European people. I'll also add that "Europe" doesn't have a culture as a whole. I'm French, I'm surprised by how Italians do things, same with Germans. We are composed of different countries with rich histories and culture. Grouping everything as "European" is the same as saying "African", it hides most of the reality and complexity of the world.
>In order to be innovative and compete, we need very flexible working laws, people with a big growth mindset, a less relaxing lifestyle and AMBITIOUS people.
False. Sweden is in the top 10 competitive nations in the world. And it is because it has a relaxing lifestyle, support for children and parents, etc.
If desperate people was more innovative or productive, the list of successful USA entrepreneurs would not be filled with upper-class or rich businessman.
Easy of mind, education and time creates opportunity. Desperation only leads to bad decisions.
Late years Sweden in going down because it is moving towards more neo-liberal policies, thou.
I think it is very hard to say if it is because if or in spite of its policies that Sweden has been somewhat successful.
And I would say that going from the world's highest tax rates (% of GDP) to the world's fourth highest rate does not make Sweden neo-liberal. We have also had a Social Democrat prime minister since 2014 and a government that relies on support from the former Communist party, so we are not quite a neo-liberal utopia yet.
Software development and other tech jobs were low-status professions in Europe (the UK being a partial exception) up until a few years ago. Once a friend told me some thing like "it is not fair that you make more money than I do, I have a degree in literature and, with all due respect, you are just a guy that works with computers". This was not an absurd conversation to hear anywhere in continental Europe in the early 2000s.
For a brilliant 20 year old German in 2005 becoming a primary school teacher or a pencil pusher in a random government office would have been a better option than working in tech. With "better option" I mean double salary, double pension, better healthcare, more holidays. So it shouldn't surprise anybody if foreigners are overrepresented in tech jobs in Germany, and it has nothing to do with European lazyness (had you said risk-aversion I could have agreed).
This is something I’ve noticed working with European people and also traveling.
I think there is a cycle here where because working with software is considered low status, many good software people leave, and lots of smart people probably do not go into the field at all unless they truly love software. This would tend to drive the talent pool down, IMO, which keeps away good software jobs, keeping it low status.
In the US for example writing software is usually considered wholly different from “IT” whereas in Europe IT encompasses both. That’s probably another thing bringing its status down. You are grouping software engineers with people plugging in printers and solving Karen’s support ticket (no offense IT people).
> In the US for example writing software is usually considered wholly different from “IT” whereas in Europe IT encompasses both. That’s probably another thing bringing its status down. You are grouping software engineers with people plugging in printers and solving Karen’s support ticket (no offense IT people).
oh boy, if you think IT is just pluggin in printers and fixing easy support tickets you are easily mistaken.
What about network and system engineers? Those who keep the cloud and global internet running? Those are considered IT (atleast in europe) and are definitely not low quality, easy to learn jobs.
How do you define "low status"? Is elderly care "low status" according to your definition? It's not according to mine. I consider myself a proud member of a "normal status profession" where my skills can be adequately utilized.
I don’t, I can’t manipulate the public perceptions of professions. In Europe software developers don’t enjoy the same social standing of high-school teachers, so a rational 20 year old will prefer to be a high school teacher than a software developer.
The average IT guy is still more productive and less replaceable than somebody with a degree in literature doing unpaid internships in coffee shops. But for some reason the former used to enjoy less social recognition, at least in continental Europe.
You just broadly painted all of Europe as lazy. Maybe you should reconsider your attitude?
> Corporations and regulations will just drive your small company out of the market no matter what
Has this happened to you?
Plenty of small business where I stand, and this lifestyle fits them perfectly, there is no desperation to survive. Not every business has to be about growth.
I think what you’re seeing is the result of policies that increase quality of life. So Germany has to import someone like you, from a third world country, that will accept the pay and have “ambition”. It goes both ways.
> In order to be innovative and compete, we need very flexible working laws, people with a big growth mindset, a less relaxing lifestyle and AMBITIOUS people.
SV has a momentum due to a number of factors. One of the ways they have been able to maintain the momentum has been the fact that CA allows employees freely move to a competitor and work there.
Yes, but how you interpret "employee friendly" matters. Case in point, California is an "at will" employer, which depending on how you want to leverage it, can be seen as employee friendly or employer friendly.
from a social democratic perspective, it just means your employer has eroted your rights of a stable living and extracted even more value from you through pressure.
In addition, people now tend to equal consumer services in tech to “innovation”, but if you look closely a disproportionate amount of the real innovation in energy, industry, food production, finance and “real word tech” happens in Europe - because a lot of people have the freedom to do things that matter with their lives and not spend their time being a growth hacker.
also, many small companies which are world market leader in a very tiny and specific thing.
For instance, there is a company in germany which is able to produce very high quality lead sheeting to a unusual size, which allowed mythbusters to create a lead balloon.
I have a similar perspective mostly (we live in the same city and both are foreigners so we are seeing from a similar lense,fwiw). What i disagree with is that people here are not ambitious. I think its more like the regulation and laws and red tape in general that makes starting a business a non attractive endeavor compared to being an employee considering all the benefits employees get in most of EU. In the US, i would imagine the difference in terms of risk of quitting your job to start a business is not as wide as in EU.
I spoke with many French who moved to Canada (there are many in the last decade or so). And 99% mention that North American culture is much less rigid than French culture and there are much more opportunities over here.
They mention it's very hard to change careers in their country with a more 'hierarchical' and rigid culture and mobility is limited.
Totally different when they move and appreciate the mobility, freedom and opportunities.
When i see this kind of discussion here and in HN i think it mostly miss the primary point..
You would be more to the point if we were talking about the industrial era which can automate even the experience into machinery.
But things like software are heavily based on knowledge retention.
Knowledge retention is about attracting talent, and make sure they evolve their knowledge and keep that knowledge there.
So you need a good quality of life, career and financial possibilities, good universities, a good culture with individual freedoms.
Its all about the "human gold". And the countries that will retain this sort of talents are cannot be optimized to also be industrial powerhouses, because the balances are different.
Anyway remote labor will change things a lot also, and we will see how things will turn out. But work and quality of life balance will become really important, and industrial sweat shops wont be as attractive in my opinion.
I hope that talent get more spread out instead of concentrated as is now, giving we are going more remote..
Anyway, i guess a lot of parts of EU will become more palatable as the physical place where you are at become less important.
I predict that small towns in Italy, Portugal or France with mostly old people will get more trendy giving the houses will be more affordable and people will be able to create their kids in a more healthy environment.
Pandemic will change faster the assumptions we had about how we should live our lives, and i think loneliness will hurt us more as the value of money compared to what is lost by pursuing it will become less appealing.
The industrial era wisdom will get reviewed and some things wont make any sense anymore. (For instance, packing too many people in gigantic towns, lowering the quality of life, country life will get more trendy with time in my opinion, people living in small communities of 20 families in rural areas)
The question needs to be asked here is: Why there is a shortage of developers in Germany, while people having access to free education?
One reason is that I can be paid three times more in the US, and with the extra disposable income, I can live a better life, even without the legal protections.
Second reason is that, why should the kids even bother studying computer science for 4-6 years to earn 3k per month? A plumber here can charge 100 per hour and does not require any formal educational training.
A plumber needs formal education, at least in Germany. Three years of it, to be exact. And then some more to run his own shop.
Also, 100 an hour sounds great. That is without taken taxes, social security, operational costs, fix costs an so into account. Those plumbers getting wealthy are running their own shops, small legit enterprises.
Final note: Any decent developer job I know of pays at least 3k, net, after taxes, social and medical insurance,... Enough to live a comfortable live. One without student debt, I might add.
3K net is not that much. The whole point of working in IT in the US is that you shoot into the upper middle class levels of compensation. You are no longer a peer of a shopkeeper or a public official, you are now next to doctors and lawyers. You no longer have to balance your monthly budget, you manage your savings.
> A plumber needs formal education, at least in Germany. Three years of it, to be exact. And then some more to run his own shop.
Here's Europe's problem.
The same way you don't need 5+ years university education to put together whatever piece of hardware / software together, the same way I don't need studying hydraulic to put together hydraulic implements.
mind you the german education system is very different from the US/English one.
Germany (and many other european countries) has the idea of a trade school, in which one learns a trade. Usually these are combined with working experience in the form of apprenticeships. In my experience, continental europe has far more emphasis on early work experience compared to ango-saxon countries. An internship usually lasts a couple of years, people get payed a wage for the work they do and it is combined with schooling.
A plumber would be a prime example of the vocation which is using this kind of system.
people finish secondary education at an earlier age then in the US (16 or even 15 in some cases), then they transfer into tertiary education in a fachschule.
> A plumber would be a prime example of the vocation which is using this kind of system.
> people finish secondary education at an earlier age then in the US (16 or even 15 in some cases), then they transfer into tertiary education in a fachschule.
Who the fuck know what they want to do for the rest of their lives at 15 or 16, most likely without having the possibility to re-invest 3+ years to change branch ?
> Germany (and many other european countries) has the idea of a trade school, in which one learns a trade.
And that is a problem. Want to be a plumber? 3 years education. Want to open a bakery? 3 years education. Want to work at a bank? 3 years education. Want to be a hairdresser? You guessed it right - 3 years education. Handwerker? No luck, 3 years education. Car mechanic? Forget it. It’s ridiculous.
Yeah, so rediculous that having that kind of vocational training basically gets immigration visas on its own in Canada and Australia. Having proper training apparently increases quality.
Why did I have to scroll so far to find this? Tech jobs pay almost an order of magnitude more in the US. Cost of living is of course higher and you likely still won't be able to but a house any time soon, but still the difference is stark. Europe severely underpays its tech workers, so the US is able to attract all the smartest people.
I have met many ambitious European people in the US. Europe has ambitious people, they just don’t make it easy for them to do their thing; it’s better for ambitious people to just go to the US than to take on the monumental task of changing the culture in Europe or to swim upstream and try to start a business anyway.
You should move to south Germany - people are very much ambitious there, work is often their main goal. Also, burnout numbers and other mental health statistics are really up, and that for years before COVID. Many people are working a lot just to buy a house. Far from everyone has inherited, actually Germany started a lot from scratch after the war. Most wealthy people I know built their wealth with lots of work, including weekends. Many colleagues work in the evening. It’s true few build a company though. But many decide to travel the world, or get ambitious with sports, art or charities. There’s a lot of things to be accomplished especially when you experienced first hand that the parents career didn’t make them much happy and satisfied in life.
Developing countries are ahead of Europe and even the US in some very, very narrow things. In some places mobile and online banking penetration.
But to lift up the nation, you need regulations, competence at all levels.
'Google' is a tiny project relative to America. Most countries are 99% about the basic things: roads, bridges, hospitals, carpenters, governance, food etc..
There are enough groups of ambitious people to form networks of that. In Paris and London people move, it's the same in most countries.
I am born EU and work here and would not want to leave. But you are corrct in the sense that there is little respect for software developers and the hard work they have to cope with.
> In order to be innovative and compete, we need very flexible working laws, people with a big growth mindset, a less relaxing lifestyle and AMBITIOUS people.
Necessity is the mother of invention. But that doesn't need that the must humane way up induce invention is to purposefully create the necessity in the first place.
> In order to be innovative and compete, we need very flexible working laws, people with a big growth mindset, a less relaxing lifestyle and AMBITIOUS people.
This doesn't really make sense to me. The EU is a clear leader in other industries compared to the US, just not in the tech industry. In terms of national security and stability, I'd say any of these companies are much more important than any tech company. If the market here for innovation is so bad, why are these companies leaders in their industry?
A few examples I can think of off the top of my head:
- automotive (Volkswagen, Daimler, Bosch)
- industrial equipment (Siemens, ABB)
- railroad (Siemens, Alstom)
- telecoms (Ericson, Nokia)
- chemicals (BSAF, Ineos)
- food and drink (anything from France, Italy or Spain :D)
In order to be innovative and compete, we need very flexible working laws, people with a big growth mindset, a less relaxing lifestyle and AMBITIOUS people.
A lot of third world countries are years ahead of the whole EU continent in that aspect. I say this because I live in Europe for the quality of life, come from a third world country, and I see how kids and adults are spoiled here. Much of what they have was just given to them. At least for the strong countries in west EU, lifestyle is very relaxed and any ambitious is frowned upon, it is extremely demotivating, not to mention bureaucracy. Corporations and regulations will just drive your small company out of the market no matter what.
I find for me more likely to save some money, move to my country and create my own business and sell in Europe. People here are too lazy to compete in the fast world we live in, there in my country there is so many skilled people, so little capital, here is the reverse. Good amount of capital and foreigners working in tech. For instance, I live in Berlin and almost all the "working people" from tech companies here are foreigners. Germans are generally the executives and/or management. It is quite rare to find a german software developer on Startups.
I personally think(my opinion, not the ultimate truth)... that Europe is definitely a very interesting market for companies to come here and sell their stuff, but not to make it.
Instead I think Europe should focus on its strengths, which is healthy market regulations, creating a good playing field for companies from above, rather on its weaknesses. It should also figure out a way to keep part of the profits inside the continent to benefits its inhabitants.
More important than competing is to know where and when to compete.