Good hiring managers can find the hidden gems. These are typically people who don't have the resume to join FAANG immediately, due to lacking the pedigree, but who have lots of potential. Also these same people typically don't last long because they do eventually move on.
Also it helps that Europe is so behind in tech that if you want to do some cutting edge tech you are almost forced to join a public institution because private ones are not doing anything exciting.
> Also it helps that Europe is so behind in tech that if you want to do some cutting edge tech you are almost forced to join a public institution because private ones are not doing anything exciting.
This is genuinely cringeworthy. Do you think that companies in the EU all use COBOL on mainframes and nothing newer than 10 years old is allowed? Airlines and banks here(!) are rewriting their apps to be Kubernetes native... And have been doing so for years. Amadeus (top 2 airline booking software in the world) were a top Kubernetes contributor already a decade ago.
The tech problems being solved at Criteo, Revolut, Thales, BackMarket, Airbus, Amadeus (to name a few fun ones off the top of my head) are no less challenging and bleeding edge than... "the Uber of X" app number 831813 in the US. Or fucking Juicero or Theranos or any of the other scams.
One wonders if things win because they really are better, or because there's sufficient financial momentum behind them. I have worked in the public sector for some years, and I don't think Europe is behind, just that the budgets are a lot smaller. If you want to capture a lot of people in an ecosystem or walled garden, you're going to need money, and lots of it. For all that's good and bad about it, most of that excess is concentrated in the US, in a few hotspots. No need to get distracted and put a flag on somebody like a Zuckerberg or Jobs or Gates though.
> and I don't think Europe is behind, just that the budgets are a lot smaller. If you want to capture a lot of people in an ecosystem or walled garden, you're going to need money, and lots of it
And the initial market you have is quite a bit smaller. Germany is the biggest EU country by population at 84 million, compared to 333 million in the US. Moving into another EU country means translating into a different language, verifying what laws apply to you, how taxes work, etc. Sometimes it's easy (just a translation), sometimes you might have to redo everything almost from scratch (e.g. Doctolib which schedule healthcare appointments, do meetings online with doctors, can be used to share test results, prescriptions - each new country they enter will have a lot of regulations on healthcare data that will need to be applied).
> You can sell everywhere without figuring out how taxes work.
You have to figure out VAT for each country. And any local regulations and laws that apply to your business.
> You think in USA healthcare is unified
Irrelevant. There isn't an entirely separate set of laws and rules that govern healthcare and related data applying to each different hospital or locale. HIPAA is the big thing that applies to everyone. In the EU, you can't even read the related laws for a different country without bilingual lawyers to translate it to you.
Also it helps that Europe is so behind in tech that if you want to do some cutting edge tech you are almost forced to join a public institution because private ones are not doing anything exciting.