While I agree with the basic premise of the last point too I think you maybe underestimate the value of quality of life over salary for many of those people.

I don't underestimate the value of quality of life, and I don't blame anyone who knowingly works for a stable, "boring", old-school German company which has been the world-leader in its niche for the past 100 years. But I think many people here are not aware that there even is a radically different approach to building up a business (the US/VC/growth model), and that this might be the only model to create modern tech companies to rival the US players. You won't compete with AWS by creating a family-owned business over a few decades where your primary objective is to provide stable and fair employment to people, often for their entire working lives. I'm not saying either one is better, just that I think that's the reality.

Maybe that was the case in the '50s to '80s but I recently worked at two small family owned German companies that were leaders in their niche and their primary objective was to make their owners rich, not their employees happy(Kununu employee reviews reflected that). After that, I learned my lesson and moved to $BIG_CORP where at least I know it's all about the profits and they don't pretend to be your family as an excuse to pay you peanuts.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23416169

Except instead of a lotto board paying out it is growth of a successful company.

The second desire? Prepare for disappointment as it isn't a goal. A goal implies a workable path even if it is far fetched like "try to research a way to become immortal". Providing an economic floor is not only not a strategy for advancement (let alone a workable one) it would fail even if you had a magical no knowledge or possession prerequisite requirement provider of infinite "basics" to be unscarce like air or file bit combinations. Economics deal with the scarce - while rendering things irrelevant would be good a floor implies an actual use to build upon into the scarce.

[1] https://books.google.nl/books?id=9aamDwAAQBAJ&pg=PT142&dq=%E...

[2] https://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/jun/06/us-tech-giants...

[3] https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2020/feb/11/crypto-ag-ci...

Same with US corporations. I recently tried to sign up for Microsoft's partner network because that's required for an Office 365 integration I was interested in. But I wasn't able to complete their byzantine signup process because there's a bug in the user interface that prevents me from confirming the tax status of my company. It's a simple bug, completely unrelated to the specifics of our company.

I wrote to them asking them to fix the bug so I can proceed. Predictably, they want to talk on the phone. They left some unintelligible message on my voicemail. Then they sent me an email saying they needed additional information from me without saying what that information was. They just want me to reply to arrange a time for a phone call.

I lost interest.

When I lived in the UK things like online banking, internet speeds (even in London) and 4G/5G coverage all felt a few years behind as well.

A few years behind whom, though? Consumer banking in the UK is eons ahead of America, and the UK has had a very dynamic and competitive consumer phone sector for years.

Dito here, the solution is to validate your domain in Business Intelligence. No I am not joking. My email is in profile, I'll send you the process.

/s

Some allow you to sign the papers online and only require you to authenticate yourself to make the contract binding. This authentication can be done by letter as you said, it in person in the post office or with a video call in which you show your Ausweis.

Your bank just might not support these options, but some do.

I wouldn't necessarily call it "being ahead" to embrace increased isolation from other human beings.

Yeah, sorry, I wasn't clear. I was referring to stuff like this in GP's comment:

> Article about Gaia-X in major German newspaper FAZ explained that on AWS you can spin up your own infrastructure, "sometimes even without talking to anyone from sales", from your home!

I personally love human interactions, but the idea that I'd have to call Joe in sales to spin up a VM for a few hours is ludicrous. Likewise for a lot of routine mundane stuff that is easily automatable. I think the world will be poorer if we move humans out of our daily interactions, but that doesn't mean there isn't a lot to gain by moving the humans to where they can what they do best - namely be human!

Edit: They do have a technical section but that is 70% cars and the rest are other physical tech thinks like kitchen utensils and vacuum robots.

/me snorts...

I know you caveat all this with the fact that we aren't necessarily worse off (I say we but am British - I will always think of myself as European though) but I would argue that the fact the Europe has been behind the curve on any of these "innovations" is because society is less obsessed with the quick buck and that this is good. None of these financial/technological innovations have provably made life better for anyone apart from VC's and founders, though I am willing to entertain counterpoints.

Same for "high profit margins of offering a software product vs. (for example) doing one-off consulting for a German industrial company". Honestly that's a lesson from all the way back to MSFT.

I'm guessing by "paying market rate for experts", they're referring to the pretty large gap between US and European software salaries (even if you're not looking at the Bay).

When that comes up, there's usually some people who say that Bay area engineers are overpaid, but rather I think everyone else is underpaid and should fight for better compensation in general. Evidently you can afford to pay these salaries as a business.

I agree with a lot of points op is making, but when it comes to e.g. the gig economy and using vc funds to scale b2c businesses by undercutting competitors, I'm very happy that we have a different situation in Germany.

Until then, feel free to keep that niche cornered.

I've been hosting my server with a German company for years. They have recently opened a data center in Missouri - which would be great for latency (I'm in the southeastern US).

So, I send an email to the effect of "Hey folks, could you please let me know if it's possible to migrate server xxx.xxx to your MO DC? Thanks!" and that started an email-chain of mighty proportions. Every single email starts with "Dear Mr. XXX" (which is not common in the US, even with attorneys) and uses language that sounds like somebody fed a Markov chain with a fun mix between Nietzsche and the entirety of the German civil code. :)

(In all fairness, the company is fantastic and the end-result works great and was done on time)

So yes for a middle aged German speaker with non fluent English skills not using dear or omitting the "Mr" can seem that it maybe might be unprofessional or impolite so they will just add it.

As a CTO of a leading company in this space in Germany, I have to absolutely agree. The technology we can bring to the table is years if not decades ahead of the current state of the art and the growth of all contenders in our space is surprisingly slow compared to our US based counterparts.

There are a lot of reasons to this from a culture and market pov, but in general I agree that Germany & Europe as a whole is in a bad spot technologically especially as engineering salaries are simply far below the US so the braindrain is rampant.

SaaS Accounting in 2010 was a tough pitch in Germany and for some segments still is.

The laggards have a large industry catering to them so that's where the most revenue is still concentrated.

From the top of my head our last analysis showed that less than 5% of the TAM of SaaS Accounting Solutions in Germany is captured at the moment by any of the active players.

So the strategy is to provide a meaningfully better replacement for existing solutions while not relying on the advantages of the SaaS model.

Foreign companies however aren't really willing to open remote offices/parks there because most of the talent pool (not just in IT but across all industries!) heads off to Germany or other countries where there is real earning potential. The "brain drain" across the whole Balkan is immense.

The code that is used to dispatch high-school graduates according to their choice was recently audited by the Court of Auditors[0], and the StopCOVID application's source code was released[1].

The problem is that innovation is just a buzzword. They still hand out millions to private actors like Atos, Accenture, etc, while managers are patting themselves on the back and produce the shittiest software possible to get a 10 years maintenance contract that will cost hundreds of millions.

I'm not saying it's better in other countries, I'm just saying that people must realise that the French state should not be trusted to produce high-quality software.

[0]: https://translate.google.com/translate?hl=en&sl=fr&tl=en&u=h... [1]: https://gitlab.inria.fr/stopcovid19/stopcovid-android

States should neither be trusted nor simply be involved in producing anything.

That's not what they're for and they are therefore profoundly incapable of doing it.

The simple fact that they are not subjected to competitive pressure is argument enough to prove my point, but it's far from the only one.

Years of experience running their own massive platform before entering the market of renting those services to others?

> they can definitely build software

So can OVH and Rackspace. So why would this project take off better than those established companies?

Don't get me wrong, I'll be cheering this to succeed, but how is this effort different?

Even if running a DC is rocket science (it isn't), it is no particle physics.

The EU should absolutely have its own homegrown tech stack, from silicon to billing. I'd start with an EU run internet backbone and federated object storage in each member state.

I can't see Gaia-x mentioning a ready solution anywhere and it seems very secret and proprietary for a project that's meant to be transparent, federated, and lunching end of this year. (Unless I missed something?)

1. Culture, tradition, apathy, risk-averseness

2. Regulations

Are you an EE? Or a Physicist? I’m wondering why you’ve shrouded ASML in such a golden halo? They’re a company doing basic research in solid state physics, but there are a lot of companies like that.

And the issue here isn’t EU vs US - it’s private vs public industry. ASML is a private company that was spun off of Siemens. Building any kind of a successful venture that actual produces real value is hard - private and public. But public ventures have more money and can’t weed out failures as aggressively as the tough justice of the market.

We’ll have to see how this Gaia-X turns out, but I’m not optimistic.

As for the government vs private venture, I cannot say it's set in stone. China is developing crazy ass infrastructure and companies, all very techy, and none of it is free market. So we've had bad precedents like USSR but also contradicting successful examples like China.

Also - Europe doesn't have to make Gaia-X BETTER than AWS. It doesn't have to become a 1T dollar market cap company. It just needs to do it's job and reduce reliance on China and U.S , that is the whole goal.

Whoa - sorry but that just isn’t true. Other than Huawei which is a Trojan horse for Chinese intelligence services, none of the dynamism in the Chinese economy is happening in state owned companies. NONE! Look at Tencent or Alibaba or Xiaomi or DJI or any of the big Chinese tech leaders. Or look at SMIC - they guys ASML we’re going to make that big sale to! NONE of these are state owned firms. If you seriously think that any of what’s happening now in China is any kind of a counterpoint to the abject failure of the planned economy, I can’t help you.

Maybe Gaia-X will be a success - but it is as I said - making a successful venture is always against the odds. But private industry will realize that sooner and waste less capital on failures. Public funding takes years past clear failure to turn off the money spigot. Good luck!

They are also the _one_ exception where a European company produces tech that's number one worldwide and near impossible to match.

And quite funnily, the first public AWS service wasn't S3 or EC2, it was: SQS (according to Wikipedia) in 2004

I would add a number 0. to your list: Vision, and then they would be in order of importance

It would be wonderful to see more free and open innovation and investment in a couple of bleeding-edge tech centers in Germany. A lot of the big internationals are in Munich and Berlin is slowly growing steam for startups, but it's a disappointment to me that there's so many Germans with so much wealth prime for investment and creating a culture of exploration, but instead it sits in real estate or something.

Regarding Industrie 4.0:

Currently at a client of mine, a "hidden champion" i.e. world market leader in industry XYZ (1.6B in revenue), I'm struggling to have them migrate from Cobol to Java. They are using their versioning system as a backup for their data, not for versioning the code. Deployments are done via dragging a zip file somewhere. Every new version means the whole system (handling invoices e.g.) is out of service for 10-14 days.

Not that I favor Java, or even that I dislike Cobol.

It is rather their existing human capital that makes anything more fancy than Java even harder to migrate to. At the same time, job postings looking for Cobol-Devs in 2020 are useless and even if they manage to find people capable and willing to work with Cobol per se, their existing code-base is an additional deterrant. This further fossilizes what ever ounce of agility their dev teams might have had.

Given the current capacities, there could be additional layers added to filter or enhance whatever comes out of the legacy processes.

Sure, there needs to be a "keeper" for those legacy systems, but migrating off them may be asking for too much of a manager's beef to get an approval to accomplish.

* Klarna (Sweden)(online payments)

* N26 (Germany) (mobile banking)

* BlaBlaCar (France) (Ride sharing)

* Vinted (Lithuania) (ecommerce)

* Acronis (Switzerland) (backup/recovery)

* Glovo (Spain) (delivery)

* Outsystems (Portugal) (enterprise app platform)

* Bolt (Estonia)

* Veeam Software (Switzerland)(acquired, I think)

There are more. There's a trillion+ dollars in valuation in the European startup world, a deep and well-educated talent pool, and (in many countries) long experience in technology innovation. I think Europe's going to be just fine.

Food for thought as to why EU companies can't grow.

Practices with which you can get away much less in the EU.

But this also means that US companies have a somewhat unfair competitive advantage on the global marked.

Combine that with the US having the first wave of big tech companies due to other circumstances and some other thinks and is not really surprising.

I mean look at FAANG:

- Facebook, repeatedly and frequently acted in bad fate wrt. to privacy, non us social issues and copyright protection. Lied to monopoly watchdogs.

- Amazon, know for taking advantage of workers (through had gotten better), know to not talk effective actions against massive counterfite good, know to use unfair competitive advantage for their own Amazon branded products, questionable privacy practices for user facing products like the fire ebook reader, knows to enable (not cause) environmental problem through mainly throwing away returned products, probably missed some points

- Apple, well less to say here except how it hinders/prevents repair shops while not returning thinks themselves (just replaced parts). Also there where repeatedly bag reports about the workers condition in the factories whey Apple products where produced, but that probably applies to most tech hardware companiesway. Still the way they undermine the marked with vertical expansion is dangerous, but I don't know if it had already caused damages.

- Netflix, I don't know much about them tbh. Seems fine but I might be wrong.

- Google, repeated acts in bad face for user privacy. Had been good for the first half of their lives but now turned bad and might very well try to literally take over the internet (or what users price at it).

- YouTube (now part of Google) grew partially because of disregard for copyright and then forcing copyright holder into compromises with it.

- Uber, disregard for regulations for commercial public transport and labor law. Had been banned multiple times in some EU countries, now tend to operate under different terms in some EU countries then I'm the US. Had the same problems as the Taxi industry but sidesteps responsibility by putting it into the customer and drivers.

- AirBnb disregard for (the EU version of) zoning regulations and similar. Caused damages by implecitly constraint available and affordable apartment space in some EU cities. If heard estimates that a non small amount of AirBnb apartment providers are acting illigaley with the way they provide apartments in the EU, sadly non where reliable estimates.

But here is the thing both Apple and Google come from a time where a lot of things where just different. But now Google turned bad and Apple is increasingly becoming a latent danger for a fair marked. Meanwhile both Facebook and Amazon had been moralicly pretty bad from the start. Only Netflix seems fine but I don't know anything about it so, duh.

That quote is quite funny, but I have to wonder: Who speaks to sales before spinning up infrastructure on AWS? The only cases where I see it making sense are when either an entire large enterprise or a non-profit are switching over to AWS and want better rates. For most companies and individuals, not having to speak to sales is the norm.

I find it instructive that a society that hasn't been exposed to VC practices has created some of the most valuable and innovative companies in the world.

[0] Blitzscaling 14: Elizabeth Holmes on Managing Product Strategy, Regulation, and the Media https://youtu.be/juhATwufdbc

As a new immigrant your are still in the euphoria phase of your new live...

> but the reality is that any European who truly grasps the pace of the US tech industry would rather go there directly..

Well, as a naturalized citizen with a PhD from the US and experience in technology I can assure you, that this is not the case for everybody. Neither me, nor my business partner with the same background - we both work now in China.

I agree with you, I wouldn't move to the US for my job (and neither would any of my former colleagues), but we all appreciated the fact that when it comes to business, it's better to work for a US company which understands that sometimes you have to spend money in order to make money, which is not always the case in Germany.

I always laugh out loud reading nonsense like that. It is only true if you extremely narrowly define "tech" as SaaS solutions. Just to mention a few examples: almost all Fortune 500 companies in the US run on "old world" (Germany7) SAP software. Almost all mobile phones run on "old world" (England) ARM designed chips. The worlds best Go player was beaten by "old world" (England) software. The largest airliner in the world (A380) was designed and built in the "old world". Do I really need to go on?

On the other hand, completely mediocre companies can survive and even thrive by applying for every kind of EU subsidy and getting money from overpriced bureaucratic contracts that they overpromised and underdelivered.

Every EU endeavour, be it GDPR, research grants, or this one aims to primarily increase bureaucracy so more do-nothing jobs can be created.

Don't look at just the number. Once you consider the cost of living, health coverage, days off, sick days, long service leave, parental leave, and lots of other benefits, it's actually not that impressive.

> easy immigration to US for Europeans

"Europeans" don't exist. UK has drastically different immigration rules than Poland for example.

> good affordable education

Some EU countries provide University education for free, while the US is famously in debt... Are you sure about this one?

Finally, some people just aren't excited about life in the US. I'd take a lower salary to live somewhere else and I know a few people with the same opinion.

A Silicon Valley total compensation can easily be double that in the UK. That pays for a lot of cost of living, healthcare, time off, etc. It actually is an impressive difference.

Sure, but that's comparing one specific area known for tech, including many big players with a whole country. SV is not the US, like Canary Wharf is not the UK.

You don't think that tech workers in the US get most of that? Software engineering in the US is a pretty cushy gig. A lot of the problems you hear about for regular middle class Americans don't really happen if you're working in tech. It's not fair, but it's the current reality.

But even if you do currently, there's a lot of peace that comes with: it's not company's goodwill, it's a requirement and company's goodwill goes on top of that.

The only real deal-breaker, for me, is the risk of health insurance - I'm sure I'd be getting top-notch health insurance for myself and my family, but will it be useful when I need it? Will I know which provider to go to, is "in network", will bill me correctly, insurance company won't reject the claims, ... (but I guess these things are solvable, otherwise top-paid US employees would complain a lot, or emigrate). And of course the fact that I'm paid EU-style (well, better than EU-style as I work in finance with shittier quality of life, but still below US salaries) so I'm guessing US employees would either try to underpay me.

Can't speak for Japan, but the tech salaries in the big cities in Australia and Canada are far more competitive than those in Europe.

The European tech industry is an absolute joke overall, and I say this as a European. It would take an utterly massive overhaul to correct without relying on outright Chinese-style protectionism, and as more companies move remote and snatch top talent in timezone-friendly countries, time is running out faster than ever.

Good luck to European leaders in responding to the question of "Why would I, as a European in Europe, work for a European 'tech' company for terrible pay, when I can work for a US or Canadian tech company remotely for far better pay, on stronger teams, while retaining the same benefits of living in Europe?".

That particular knife cuts both ways.

What seems to work: Geographically distributed but autonomous product-dev centers, with remote workers aligned within a certain timezone.

What doesn't seem to work: Outsourcing pure dev work to timezones with no overlap.

I don't believe the above will change even if things become more remote-friendly. Perhaps we'll see more dev centers pop up to service the needs / wants / cultural or language asynchronicity of a given region, but that would lend more toward expansion than cost reduction. This also resonates with the approaches being discussed that I've read and heard first hand from company leaders during COVID.

If there is no benefit for paying a premium why not go with the commodity? Why go with an outmoded restriction to only hire blacksmiths in bounds of the south side of the original city limits? (Because they didn't want to smell the smoke in the posh north side while requiring the smiths live within the innermost set of city walls so they were available during a siege).

Also important to realise that 50k£ is 2x the national average wage. So for more than half of the population it's nothing to scoff at.

The UK is also in a bit of a funny place when it comes to immigrating to the US - due to a lot of American businesses having satillite offices here and a lack of specific visas for Britons, you're going to have a hard time finding a company that will be willing to sponser and relocate you.

Another really important factor when looking at the UK labour market, specifically in London (because my experience with it is there, but this could be true for the other major UK cities), is that contract roles are much much much more lucrative that FTE (or at least, they have been prior to IR35). If you're a mid/senior contracting at a bulge bracket bank you could expect a ~500£ day rate. 500£ * 282 (working days - some holidays/sick/national holidays) = 141000£. If you run that into your contracting LLC, rather than take it through PAYE, you can cut your effective tax rate by a big margin depending on how you spend your money - so even more cash that you would be FTE on the same wage.

I think you might have done your subtraction the wrong way round. Or do contractors really work an average of 5.4 days a week?

That’s a not uncommon rate outside of banking too in London.

Transfer becomes easy then.

Solid experience and skills will get you offers around 100k GBP from bigger, well funded startups and if you want to sell your soul to the finance industry you can get like 300k GBP total comp. Those are both real offers I’ve had in London.

What do you mean when you say the finance industry? It's a pretty big field. Is an online bank the same as some real time trading platform? Also, why is it selling your soul? Is Google / Facebook "better" (that is - more moral) than a fintech company ?

We need less money because life accidents don't make us go bankrupt.

I mean, investor should like companies with reasonable burn rate...

How that compares to the US depends on your life choices, etc. I am aware I could "easily" earn 2x in SV, but I hate living in suburbs while I can cycle to work in Tokyo and live in one of the most vibrant city in the world.

It's precisely the same reason that salaries in certain US markets are so high: FAANG don't pay high salaries because they have fundamentally decided that engineers should be paid X amount, nor because someone has read Marx and wants to give engineers more of the value they create. It's because demand has exceeded supply for engineers in those markets, and that has driven up the equilibrium price. I should also point out that the median salary for engineers outside the NY and the Bay Area is something like $100k, not the stratospheric packages often discussed here as though they were normal rather than exceptional.

(I've not noticed too much of a love of paperwork here in Germany, but I could certainly see how the stereotype was formed)

However, that also means software engineers don't create that much value. I've been hiring developers myself, it takes half a year to get a senior engineer, even with extremely relaxed immigration laws like in Germany, just due to shortage. It's a weird paradox. If companies had enough money, I'd imagine SV engineers jumping on a plane to Berlin right away.

I accept that the Berlin expat market is also a little bit different, where 3 month notice periods aren't insisted upon, and companies know how to move fast. The situation in the Mittelstand software industry could be very different for all I know.

[1] The exception to this, for me, was DevOps, which took so long to hire for that we ended up developing a strong enough in-house capacity that we no longer needed them. Engineering management was also difficult to find.

How many SV developers speak German? Germany isn't quite as English-friendly as other places in the EU (Netherlands, etc.), and if you don't speak the language you aren't going to enjoy yourself in the town very much

$100k is €88k. As an engineer in Europe I'd consider that very high. Not sure I'll earn that much even at end of career.

I worked for a multi-national in Berlin; heading a team of 40 internals and another 40 externals, the latter mostly in Ukraine.

As a director I saw the salaries of everyone working under other directors under the same VP. Including the teams in Chicago and San Diego. Salaries were maybe 10-15% lower in Berlin.

We regularly swapped developers around. Usually for six months. People from both CA & IL that came to live in Berlin with their families were always overwhelmed about quality of life in here. Particularly the food. Well, then they fly to Italy over the weekend (affordable, with their spouse & kids, mind you) and they are completely blown away.

If you look at net salary and what it buys you, quality of life, quality of food, healthcare, rent, 20 days/y of paid holidays (+12 paid public holidays in Berlin, more if you live in a state with a Catholic majority ofc.), 6 months (unpaid) unconditional sabbatical after you complete five years with that company, job security because of German laws. The list goes on.

On these measures the US sucks compared to most of Europe. Compared to Germany for sure.

I pay 1,250 EUR/month for a bright, 1075 sqft apartment in the very center of Berlin. The city surely is one of the cheapest capitals in Europe but still.

From my friends in SF or Boston who work in tech, earn more (gross) than me and who visit me from time to time I always hear they're jealous about the quality of life we have here.

I was an expat for 15 years working in India, Australia, Asia and the UK. During the last five years I was on business trips to the US every 2-3 months. Affordable food sucks, good food will cost you $$$ and you can't get it just in any supermarket like here.

I have only one body. What do I care if I make 30% more and live 10 years less to enjoy it?

Being back on the continent for another decade now I know I made the right decision. The only country I lived in with comparable quality of life in many aspects (and even better health care) is Japan.

Finally, in software location is a non issue when you want to start a business. You can shop for money anywhere and you can set up the business where it is convenient, e.g. for tax reasons or access to investors.

I had a software company in Hong Kong seven years ago. I was in Europe most of the time. The team was from all over the planet.

My experience is that if investors want to meet f2f they actually love if you're in Europe as they have an excuse to fly there and meet you.

One of my best friends who's Mexican co-heads a big home delivery SaaS that is growing at crazy pace. He bought a flat here. His workplace is a modest desk in a rather mediocre co-working space in the center of Berlin.

He also bought a flat in Austin, TX. But he only goes there maybe for one month/year. Because ... quality of life. It trumps salaries every time ... if you have understood what it truly means to be human.

That's the law being broken. Not the tech.

We don't see laws today for unimagined hypotheticals like if governments if carrying a box with a stable frame of reference anchored wormhole inside that leads to a remote island with 1 ton of heroin is drug smuggling or not.

Customer send's fax printed out to paper, that paper got copied to 'real' paper for manual signature, that 'real' paper was then scanned and send digital (email) to a archive, where the printed out that digital contract to 'real' paper again (for the archive)

Germany nailed that process in 1983.

Paper based invoices are the easiest way to avoid issues with the tax office.

Another more recent example was Apple Pay launching in Germany. The German banks thought they could do their own mobile payment apps instead rather than work with Apple. Once again, it failed, and now, tail between their legs, they have begun signing up with Cupertino after they started losing customers to mobile-first banks like N26 who supported Apple Pay all along.

This is a common problem, see _The Innovators Dilemma_ by Clayton Christensen.

Black and white televisions just displayed the luma component of the signal. The luma component was not just the "red" signal but a measure of total brightness.

In New Zealand, credit card machines are basically required to be replaced every few years as security standards improve. Is this not the case in USA?