I would say that banking in Europe is much better developed than in the US. In the US, we still have checks and you need to pay for wire transfers (what???). Doing taxes in the US is 10 times more complicated than it is in Europe, and CPAs are only interested to doing them for you if you are a cookie cutter case and easy to make money off. Otherwise, good luck getting a call back. That doesn't happen in Europe. You hire an accountant, he does his job.
Entrepreneurship in the US is not easier than it is in Europe, IMHO. Raising money or scaling might be easier.
In my experience, I've been dealing with constant discrimination in the US. It is claimed that where you are from or what your social status is, doesn't matter, in silicon valley (or California in general). People are nice, they smile, but it's mostly fake. You remain a foreigner, who should still work for less pay than those who grew up locally and went to an ivy league school, even though you have the same credentials and graduated at a top school in Europe (in my case, I have an ivy league degree on top of that).
Raising money in the US? No different than in Europe, at least in my experience. Again, no network = no raise. And you will need to overcome the above discrimination or at least the idea that you might "go back" any time, even if you are a permanent resident.
All this sounds brutal, and maybe hard to take, but I just say it like it is, and I prefer to be honest and straightforward and share my first hand experience.
Bingo. There's a set of something like ten schools from which Silicon Valley companies hire.
If you're not from one of those, you will be cordially invited to eat shit.
To be fair, we aren't a SV startup, but we've always had an equal engineering presence there (probably 120 engineers there now vs maybe 30 in 2018).
It completely blew my mind, to be honest (and I do see similar weirdnesses in the way US colleagues review CV's, so I don't think it's only a FAANG thing).
I responded to GP's comment about hiring. Ivy-like pedigree surely helps for any career path, but that's no different for SV or anywhere else.
If there's any lesson to learn from this thread I guess it's that no amount or level of credentials can overcome cultural biases, racism, and discrimination.
This.
I am European but live and work in US. Simply put, US wins hands down because they:
- have resources, read $$$$
- take risk
- have the right entrepreneurial mindset
Europe? let's just say they are not even close.
Generally speaking, in Europe, the technical career track simply don't exist. You are eventually forced to take the management career path. Eng are seen as the ones scrapping the floors.
In US, at big tech companies, you can stay on the tech career path and get to Principal, Architect, Distinguished Eng etc. At these levels, your voice is heard as much, if not more, as managers.
IC contributors and managers job titles are mapped to an internal company level. For instance, a Principal Eng usually map to a Director. You can easily tell where you are in the career ladder, regardless on the specific track you are on.
In Sweden it is the opposite because
1) more responsibilities
2) salary increase too small (and taxes too high, you can end up in the wrong bracket)
3) flat hierarchy (Du reform)And previous year 2020 was the first tax year without värnskatt, an extra 5%, ie 25% total, for everything above 703 000 SEK. It was abolished 2019.
For each 2£ you earn above 100K, your income tax allowance is reduced by 1£. At 125K, your allowance reaches 0. The result is that between 100K and 125K your marginal tax rate is 60%. At 125K it goes back to 40%.
After the Bay Area, NYC and Beijing, London has the most startup funding of any city in the world, and the UK as a whole has the 3rd highest number of unicorns, after the US and China.
Parts of Europe are doing badly, others are doing ok (but could do better!).
But the systems are built differently, usually turned specifically to succeed fast and loud at the cost of individual comfort. For instance, where I come from in France, you would keep a useless, even toxic, employee for months for fear of the firing trial, but where I am now we can all be dismissed arbitrarily with a month notice, and that makes the hiring very different: people have a strict behavior feedback loop, where they need to change to stay somewhere, companies have no pressure on lowering hiring because of legal issues, employees can always always find better.
This turns a population of mild puppies into a fastly rotating workforce cross pollinating at light speed and I admit I think Europe can never win against people who built such systems. It's just not the same game anymore.
Particularly, Atmel made the last 8-bit microprocessor which was just a bit more carefully thought out than everything else on the market and carefully positioned to give a lot of bang per buck.
Atmel got bought by Microchip (San Jose, USA)
Today when I think of Europe I think of those annoying popups which (I think) were a "normalization of deviance" for annoying and harassing UI elements on web sites... I mean, this one is required, virtuous, etc. so it is OK to nag people to get their email address, open a new window every time you click on a search result (Bing) so you'll accidentally click on an ad when handling way too many tabs
There was something anti-user about the GDPR popup that "broke the dam" for other bad practices, as well meaning as it is. It might pour sand into the wheels of the data economy, but it made it impossible to be an advocate of the user in most organizations. (e.g. if you can't reject that one, what can you reject?)
> In 1996, Atmel formed a design team in Trondheim, Norway to develop the Atmel AVR line of RISC microcontrollers. This team combined technology of former students at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology with Atmel's expertise in flash memory. ..The AVR chip is the basis of most Arduino open-source development boards.
*sigh, this is the the magic of Branding...
Unfortunately, law enforcement has been asleep at the wheel.
There are explainers, compliance checklists, whatever you want to implement it. It was three years before it went in effect, and it's been 3 years since it went into effect. If you don't understand it by now, you definitely don't deserve to be handling personal data.
The cost of implementing it was in the billions. The human time cost paid for all those damn cookie popups we keep having to click on is probably already in the thousands of life-times wasted, and it keeps on growing.
Cry me a river. If you was careless with users' data, who cares?
> The human time cost paid for all those damn cookie popups we keep having to click on is probably already in the thousands of life-times wasted, and it keeps on growing.
Ah yes, and the problem is the law that protects users' data, and not the companies who couldn't care less about privacy.
When everybody breaks a law, including its creators, it's the law that is broken.
The one on https://gdpr.eu/ is very well done. It does not break the law.
It's an example of excellence others should follow. Unintrusive. As easy to opt out as to opt in. Clear buttons, simple language. Clear text. If you prefer to ignore the banner that's fine too. On desktop it's unintrusive and you can just ignore it. I tried scrolling, it just stays out of the way. Each button is clear: "Ok", "No", "Privacy policy". Perfect. (It could be better on mobile for size, but it's still easy to click away.)
No dark patterns, dirty tricks, misleading controls, no "yes means no" controls, no "visit our 1000 partner sites to opt out" insanity, no other dirty tricks. You will not "accidentally" end up tracked when you didn't want to be. You will not be misled into believing a 70% screen size, deliberately slow panel is required.
Panels on other sites are deliberately slow and harder to opt out of. They want you to be annoyed. That's because they want you to believe the GDPR requires stupid, slow, large, intrusive, complicated banners. So that you will tell everyone how bad the GDPR is. But the GDPR doesn't require those things. In fact, when you see a banner that says "due to the GDPR we must..." it is often a straight up lie, and parts of the banner are against the law, not required by it.
https://gdpr.eu/ - thanks for highlighting that great example. I will take that as inspiration next time I need a good quality, sleek, fast, easy, compliant and user-friendly banner.
Such banners are not required, though. My sites don't have cookie banners and that's fine. They don't track users against the expectations of the users. My sites do have optional logins, user identification, and use cookies for those things, but logins don't require cookie banners because people expect their identity to be tracked by the act of logging in. And, importantly, their identity used only for what users would expect. My sites do have basic request logging and monitoring too, as you would expect for security and ops, but again those don't require cookie banners if they are done respectfully.
Check out https://ico.org.uk/ for a correct implementation. And cry...
Cookie banners ARE required for something as simple as logs analytics. That is the spirit of the GDPR and it is what makes it a broken law.
Then again, I am not running shady websites and selling user data
It is enforceable, and there have already been fines.
> A law that requires some agency in Europe to police all of the websites
No, they are not going to police every website in the world.
Once again, if it 6 years later you still couldn't read and understand a rather reasonably written law with multiple explanations and examples, you are a part of the problem.
It’s not reasonable if it’s written in a way that’s so easy to misinterpret.
People still don’t understand - shit law.
OR
People do understand and implement bad pop-ups and EU doesn’t enforce - shit law.
A law that is not enforced or has been written in a way that isn’t reasonable to enforce is absolutely a shitty law. Pie in the sky laws that have no teeth are worse than no law at all. It just gives room for lots of selective enforcement which is a great way to encourage corruption and shakedown schemes.
The problem is the law. It's a crappy law.
Because Google is in the business of dark patterns and wholesale data collection. They couldn't care less about user privacy.
Besides, their entire system is built on the premise of wholesale data collection. Their own engineers admit that they don't know how and where the data is collected and de-google their phones. [1]
> The problem is the law. It's a crappy law.
As I'm saying, you are a part of the problem.
[1] https://twitter.com/jason_kint/status/1398353211220807682
Are they gonna sue every single website who had to put up a cookie popup just because they run analytics?
For over a decade there have been laws in each country protecting people's private data. Companies kept on ignoring those laws. The countries came together and created a single law for the entirety of the EU.
The essence of the law:
- if you need some data for the functionality of your service, you can collect it
- if you don't need some data for the functionality of your service, you can't collect it unless you explicitly ask the person. And "opt out" has to be the default option, and cannot stop the person from using the service
How is that a problem?
Those popups? Yes, they are annoying, but they also show how every single website sells the data they don't need to hundreds of companies without your consent. And they keep trying to trick you into providing that data. Now this is a problem.
However, you think that it's all fine, everyone should just hoover up all the data they can possibly get their hands on.
> Are they gonna sue every single website who had to put up a cookie popup just because they run analytics?
Yes, theoretically they have the authority to do that. However, no, they are not going to do that. And no, that doesn't mean that the law is bad.
Look at the bottom of the page. It's a cookie banner. It was their law. They had 6 years to implement it on their own website. This is the result. The law is broken.
Sorry, but I don't agree. I consider them a scourge on today's Internet. And I find them a horribly steep price for the "privacy" (really just a lousy IP address obfuscation) you gain in their stead.
The choice can be perfectly well saved in a cookie because it's a cookie necessary for site operations. They don't even need approval. Only unnecessary ones do.
The GDPR spells out when you're allowed to collect data; asking for consent is basically its emergency escape hatch. You only need to do that if there is absolutely no (functional) reason to get that data, but you want it anyway.
6 years later there is no consensus on simple questions like website analytics which is probably the most common usage scenario for the kind of data GDPR covers.
This law is beyond bad.
There are both definitions and guidelines. You just didn't even care to read it.
For example, cookies: https://gdpr.eu/cookies/
Popups: https://gdpr.eu/recital-32-conditions-for-consent/
=== start quote ===
Consent should be given by a clear affirmative act establishing a freely given, specific, informed and unambiguous indication of the data subject’s agreement to the processing of personal data
...
Silence, pre-ticked boxes or inactivity should not therefore constitute consent.
=== end quote ===
> there is no consensus on simple questions like website analytics which is probably the most common usage scenario for the kind of data GDPR covers.
The consensus is there. And it's spelled clearly in the law.
Please tell me the consensus and guideline on how to store the rejection for using cookies so I don't ask the website visitor every time he visits.
Please tell me the consensus and guideline on what "legitimate purposes" are. With examples per industry please.
And most of all, please tell me the consensus and guideline for cookie banners and popups, considering they are used on the EU's websites themselves.
Literally described in one of the links.
> Please tell me the consensus and guideline on how to store the rejection for using cookies
You can use a cookie for that. If it's for a logged-in user, you can store that in the user profile.
> Please tell me the consensus and guideline on what "legitimate purposes" are.
Text in one of the links literally contains a link to further reading on legitimate interest.
> And most of all, please tell me the consensus and guideline for cookie banners and popups
Literally described in both links.
Once again. It's painfully clear that you never bothered to read and understand anything about the law in the past 6 years. Your clueless questions about "why does gdpr and europa sites have cookie banners" only serve as further proof.
The https://gdpr.eu/ website is not official. Its description of "analytics cookies" cannot be found anywhere in the actual GDPR & Co regulations.
> You can use a cookie for that.
Use a cookie to store the literal "No cookies" preference? Great example of the contradictory and irrational text of the GDPR.
> Text in one of the links literally contains a link to further reading on legitimate interest.
More vague and contradictory BS.
> Literally described in both links.
Too bad that description is not actually valid and if you'll actually check the GDPR text (not the non-official gdpr.eu website) you'll find no such descriptions.
Moreover, the cookie banner on both websites is actually illegal under GDPR. Check out https://ico.org.uk/ for a correct (but horrifying) implementation.
You are correct, I am not an every-day GDPR expert. I only encounter it when implementing on various websites and there only for analytics - no ads or anything more.
But its requirements were always for the worse. Because of its vague and contradictory definitions everybody (including me) adopted the safest implementation and thus the current web of cookie banners and popups was born. I hope you are happy with it, it solves nothing but it makes everybody's life worse.
There are multiple guides and explanations for the law. You complain that those are not official.
One thing is definitely clear: 6 years later it's not a problem with the law. It's the problem with you and other people like you who diss GDPR without taking a single step to understand it.
So maybe Israel is doing quite well, but I know from experience that it would also do massively better if it had the size of the USA.
1. The culture is risk taking, with failure an opportunity to try something else. There is no (or little) negative social or professional connotation with failure, unlike say Europe.
2. Thinking is global market first rather than local or regional market. The local market is tiny and there is no regional market.
3. Out-of-the box thinking is the norm and excellent. It’s in-the-box thinking that is problematic in Israel. In Europe the reverse is generally the case.
Also, Israel has a large jewish community in the US involved with the financial sector that wields quite a bit of political power. And Israel uses English as a second language inside Israel, and is culturally closely aligned with the US.
Perhaps not in developers, but it is where it matters: most upper and middle managers. There's an incredibly conservative, risk-averse attitude. If you're risk-averse, all you see are cost centres, not investment opportunities, pivots and new revenue sources. This has a knock-on effect on the requirements for SaaS vendors.
You have a point about a heterogeneous markets and legal systems. What you're possibly also missing is Europe has a huge public sector compared to the US. That sector doesn't tend to focus on innovation at all, unless it's part of the war machine.
A second reason is simply that the US as a big homogeneous market is a nice one to tackle for European companies as well. And often that means having a (big) presence in the US. The EU is basically many markets unified by really complex rules, bureaucracy, etc. There is free traffic of people but companies have a harder time dealing with local variations in legislation, hurdles for billing and taxation (e.g. VAT), banking, bureaucracy, etc.
We couldn't just set up a PO box and get an org. number, apparently that wasn't enough.
So far one of our customers have been kind enough to lend us their credentials for testing, but yeah would have been nice to have our own.
In Sweden we spent almost two years after being done getting our software released there, as the officials required that the main UI was approved by them and it involved a ton of back-and-forth.
Not just that, but each major version change that altered the main UI would also have to be approved...
The Finnish are quite decent at spending money on their government IT systems it seems, so they're more up to date. However not all documentation is in English and while your average Norwegian can read Danish and Swedish just fine, Finnish is something else entirely.
And of course all the Scandinavian governments have completely different systems for this, even though the forms are essentially the same across the countries, so zero code sharing there. Heck the Danish even have two completely different systems depending on which form you send.
We're just dealing with the Scandinavian countries, I'm sure it's similar in the other EU countries.
There are people who specialize in sales between EU states, but for a small team without capital it was hard. That said most of the 100+ tech companies I know of have offices around EU to get talent from other countries.
Bank payments are easy yes, but credit cards are not ubiquitous, online payments are different in all countries, direct debit is not always supported across countries.
So for businesses expanding into new EU countries it's not as onerous as needing a local presence would be.
(Disclaimer: I'm not an accountant and may be wrong. I'll take it on the chin if so. This is just my understanding, having needed to look this stuff up occasionally.)
[1] https://europa.eu/youreurope/business/taxation/vat/cross-bor...
[2] https://europa.eu/youreurope/business/taxation/vat/cross-bor...
[3] https://europa.eu/youreurope/business/taxation/vat/vat-digit...
[4] https://europa.eu/youreurope/business/taxation/vat/cross-bor...
Alza (CZ) is slightly bigger than a medium sized online shop and they are using CZ VAT ID intentionally for intracomunitary B2B sales, even though they do have physical presence in other countries.
No you don't need that. You can have your German speaking people move to Italy and work from there. That's the whole point of the EU.
The same for VAT, you can register in one country and have that sent to multiple countries according to your sales. No presence needed
That's just rude and why would you want to socialise with such people. I had some great experiences and even when I was the only person not speaking the local language, everyone spoke English in my presence. There is plenty of people that have standards and if you cannot find them at a given time, just focus on something else.
It could be rude but not necessarily. Context matters
Well, tough luck. Welcome to Germany. Living and working in Germany? Learn German. This is the treatment I’ve got and frankly, that’s okay!
That's kinda rude if non-English speaking people join the conversation.
(though it's good to have them study a bit before. But with Youtube, Duolingo, etc it's not that hard)
It's a combination of requirements specific to markets (EU mandates like GDPR are easier train a support team on and build an escalation process), cultural expectations around handholding, not wanting to hear no for an answer unless it is delivered by an exec (and EU support teams inconsistently delivering the same message that a US would because they fear the response), and general language barriers.
In some ways, it is better to deliver arguably lower-quality support via the US with special treatment for a few key customers just to avoid having to setup support in Europe. Once you invest, you have to go all-in.
> It's a combination of requirements specific to markets (EU mandates like GDPR are easier train a support team on and build an escalation process), cultural expectations around handholding, not wanting to hear no for an answer unless it is delivered by an exec.
in my opinion, very little european teams (mostly italian, czech and german teams) care about hearing the answer from an executive. Also, what do you mean about handholding?
But that’s just a rephrasing of the same problem. If all of the top creative talent is leaving then Europe has a talent problem.
Europe needs to make it attractive to innovate there. It will let the locals stay and, if it’s working well, attract people from all over the world.
The language barriers are a lame excuse. It’s 100% all of the bureaucracy and anti-business experimenting mindset.
And if so, what priority should be given to "ease of rapid growth for startups" vs many other issues that determine economic growth and a population's well being?
Also, how much of the problem is due to the issues you raise vs other factors such amount of money spent in R&D? The US has a huge amount of "defense spending" but in fact a lot of that is dedicated to funding research in Universities and direct job creation. Maybe Europe just needs more research Universities, more labs and more state investment into technology. The recent Moderna breakthrough was in part due to a $25 million DARPA investment into the RNA vaccine idea.
As for the issues you mention; solving bureaucratic issues would make things more efficient, and it is definitely desirable. However, I would argue that a heterogeneous market (in terms of language and culture) is more of an advantage than a liability.
Having many cultures and languages could be akin to having biodiversity. Different outlooks in life, different ways of expressing ideas, different ways of thinking can contribute to the development of culture and technology. Look at the Galapago effect that languages had in early computing. The Japanese were able to develop their own vision of "computing" and came up with their own innovations due in part that early western computers couldn't handle Japanese.
Languages and cultures can serve as natural protectionist barriers that allow for each region to develop their own home industries, allowing them to catch up to the world while retaining significant chunks of new wealth creation for their own. Yes, wealth creation is good, but its also important to look at how wealth is distributed. Very unequal societies can break down and lose their cohesion. Cohesion and trust are important features of rich countries. Perhaps many of the issues the US dealing with is because of the huge level of inequalities it has.
Finally, is translation and localization really that hard? Is it that expensive to hire some sales & marketing staff in new markets where you could be making tons of money? I bet translation costs and such are less than a percentage of what Google spent expanding its search engine.
Generally, successful technology businesses have low marginal cost to serve new customers. You pay some amount X, to setup in a market and then can scale out relatively cheaply.
The US is great because you pay X once, and then scale quite a lot. Each European country requires that you pay X (or maybe X/4), but it essentially acts as a tax which reduces margins.
Languages/cultures are hard, yo.
Isn’t that the point? Europeans individually are creative but there’s not a reward system in place for them, thus they flee to the US.
Sort of like European basketballers coming to the US or the opposite with soccer players.
Europe does have a few issues that make it unnecessarily hard to build successful startups here. People do start companies here but more often than not success is followed by US investment and before you know it the company is headquartered in the US. There are many reasons for that but a big one has to be that raising similar amounts of money in Europe is super hard. Investors drag their heels, founders have to take on more risk, etc.
A second reason is simply that the US as a big homogeneous market is a nice one to tackle for European companies as well. And often that means having a (big) presence in the US. The EU is basically many markets unified by really complex rules, bureaucracy, etc. There is free traffic of people but companies have a harder time dealing with local variations in legislation, hurdles for billing and taxation (e.g. VAT), banking, bureaucracy, etc.
That's much less of a thing in the US (though it is a bit of a thing there too between states). And that's before you consider language and cultural differences. Simply put, the same company in the EU will have a very hard time growing compared to doing that in the US. Being successful in the US market, means having the deep pockets to go international. Doing the same from a small country means you barely have enough to expand to another small country. Going international is hard work. Not something you do with your MVP. It's not very scalable either: you need to worry about cultural differences, bureaucracy, localization, understanding the local market, ramping up sales, marketing, etc. Especially with SAAS companies this is super expensive.