I see what you're getting at with the first point but what about the second? It seems to me the "quality of engineering culture" at a company doesn't need to correlate with company size.
This is something I've wondered about (along with potential applications of autograd outside of deep learning). Do you have a recommended starting point for someone who wants to learn more about this?
That may be true but at least to me it was more obvious in Vienna because it's someplace that was clearly once a lot more important than it is now. Cities like London or Paris are still growing and changing. In Vienna I had the sense that this was someplace that was once the centre of an empire, and whose heyday has clearly passed (for now, who knows?) but has still retained a lot of what made it such a great city during the time period described in the article.
Having worked in multiple German Blue Chips, my 5 cents:
- Brain-drain, likely (US vs German salaries is a joke) but also likely offset by brain-gain from other places (in my experience only Scandinavia, Netherlands and Switzerland beat German salaries, lately)
- safety-seeking culture draws the wrong people to the big corps. The more of them there are, the worse productivity and innovation gets.
- because of their appeal to masses of safety-seeking underperformers wages at German blue-chips are usually noticeably lower than at consultancies or Mittelstand, pushing away even those few talented they did recruit
- keeping talented and motivated people long-term is even harder because if enough of the wrong there are, you’ll often have strictly defined career-options, so that e.g. after 10 years you cannot possibly get another raise unless you stop engineering and do Inner-corporate bureaucracy work.
- I’ve seen niches in these companies where people shield their team / unit from that mess, pro-actively outsmarting the corporate machine (e.g. hacking the hiring process, securing backing from CEOs, pushing for technological visions...) Those units have a big draw on inner-company talent, but are limited in how much talent they can take into care. Working there is very pleasant. As maybe highlighted by the fact that these guys are more likely aware that their pay is an insult, but they stay regardless.
Not really. The difference in salary isn't enough incentive for people to leave Western Europe at scale. You'll still live very well as a STEM graduate in France/Benelux/Germany.
It's just a cultural thing. Germany has tons of family-owned businesses with a fairly conservative ethos that manage to do well in spite of complete technological illiteracy.
And on the other side so are the healthcare and public services. I don't think there is a big scale brain drain to the US.
I am doing the job for about 6-7 years and I don't know a single dev that went to the US. But I know many devs that came from other european countries and even the US.
This is very well put. Knowledge has a hierarchical (or perhaps even cyclical!) structure and it's unrealistic to think that a body of knowledge can be taught or learned sequentially.
> If a school is willing to accept sub-par students then they will see their own stats decline
I think you just answered your own question.