Why are European companies so unambitious? My whole civilian career I've had to work for North American companies because the European alternatives aren't even attempting to be competitive.
At some point being on vacation so much must hurt, I know projects are delayed when folks just can’t be expected to be there and will randomly disappear for 4+ weeks at a time. But that really doesn’t explain the extreme cultural conservatism towards effort/ambition more generally.
I feel like a Martian speaking an alien language when I try to get coworkers onboard with the idea of creating a competitive product or trying to be innovative at all. They just don’t want to do more than the bare minimum to compete. The concept of taking pride in the work and wanting to create something great is totally foreign. It seems like work is just a way to earn money for Europeans, which I sort of get, but I thought humans were supposed to be intrinsically motivated by pursuit of mastery/excellence?
I get that baguettes and wine and croissants and endless Mediterranean vacations are more enjoyable than work but ffs someone needs to put effort towards advancing society.
Fixed that for you. ;)
Bezos is doing blue original as a money sinking hobby. Ellison buys yachts and squeezes legacy companies (do new companies really choose to lock themselves into oracle?). Zuckerberg tries to control the worlds communication.
Geospatial intelligence is a severely underutilized technology (read: extreme growth potential).
Remember the John Hopkins coronavirus dashboard making the rounds last year? You’ve probably had a use for the software that powered that.
No.
I've seen good stuff from ft.com, ourworldindata, gov.uk -- all 3 are from the UK.
Ian Fleming wrote a new James Bond novel a year. He could do this because his job as an executive for a British newspaper let him take a month off every year. He'd go to his Jamaican estate[1], write the novel, and bring it home.
... Good god. According to Wikipedia <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ian_Fleming#Post-war>, his job let Fleming take three months off each year! Either way, I'm pretty sure the list of American non-owner executives who took a month or three off annually in the 1950s is very, very short.
[1] Goldeneye[2]
[2] Yes, that Goldeneye
Great food with friends, or a vacation with family provides so much more satisfaction to me than anything a job could provide. The only thing a job provides that those things can't is money.
I'm not so egotistical to think that I'm special and not easily replaceable. I'm no Steve Jobs or Isaac Newton or Albert Einstein. I'm just a programmer. If I stopped working, society would not care at all. I bet you are not much different.
It's all about trade-offs at the end of the day and what you choose to value.
What folks in the US value are clearly different and therefore result in different priorities.
https://data.oecd.org/lprdty/gdp-per-hour-worked.htm
GDP per hour worked for the US is $72/hour, same as Belgium. France is $68, Denmark $75, Germany $66.
Is 9% "far more productive"?
Japan FWIW is $47/hour.
https://www.minneapolisfed.org/article/2003/european-vacatio...
Anecdotally, it throws a wrench in the works when you can’t do any major projects over the winter or summer months because some portion of your team is going to be on a month-long vacation.
I’m frustrated in the lack of big picture thinking in this discussion generally. Imagine how much better off we’d all be if the people at Intel, Boeing, or Qualcomm took their jobs seriously. Imagine if there was (non-joke) US competition to DJI for drones. Imagine if there was an Android flagship CPU that wasn’t years behind last year’s the iPhone on day one. On the flip side, imagine if Google hadn’t gone out of their way to create street view, or the rest of the Maps system? The folks at Apple and Google aren’t Einstein or Newton, but they make a vigorous contribution to society nonetheless.
Everyone has to do their part, and when they don’t, we are all poorer for it. The European attitude towards work isn’t fully entrenched in the US but it seems to be growing to our detriment.
If Google Maps hadn't come someone else would do it. They didn't invent digital maps.
I don't think society in general would be very different. If we lost basic things like safety, food, and so on, then yes that matters. But if we're being honest, big tech in the big picture of our daily lives is really just candy.
The thing that is of much bigger import than all of those put together for most people is healthcare, housing, and eventually climate change.
Yes, you don’t care about processor performance. Fine. What I care about is the people in my life not wasting time because of shitty Android phones. I care about things like being able to give my parents my old phones, which have years of productive life on them; Qualcomm is the reason that doesn’t work on Android. I care about the people who can’t afford the flagship; they deserve a great experience just as much as I do.
Digital maps did exist before Google Maps. And they sucked. The industry was all about digital preparation of maps that would be printed. On paper. We don’t know that no one would have done it better; you could say electric cars would have happened anyway, except they didn’t happen until very recently. When a field technician can do a network trace to solve a power outage in minutes instead of hours, that matters.
Big tech is enabling things like replacing pesticides with robotics, targeting fertilizer application based on need, and reducing the environmental impact of the food you eat. Big tech is doing things like improving the safety of cars with automatic emergency braking, giving you early earthquake notifications (buying precious moments to duck, cover, and hold on), predicting and warning about dangerous weather with increasing accuracy, and improving medical diagnosis among many, many, many other achievements. So yes, of course, ‘just candy’.
People doing their jobs well, consistently, is how healthcare is delivered, housing is produced, and climate change will be solved. The US could implement a social safety net regardless of cultural issues and it very well should. 3 month vacations and slack work ethic will do absolutely nothing to solve healthcare, housing, or climate change, so I don’t really understand why those concerns are relevant.
Microsoft AutoRoute predated that by a decade - NextBase (A UK company) built it in 1988, I think Microsoft had bought it by the mid 90s.
The US is great at taking other peoples inventions, buying them, marketing them, and claiming them for itself. The rest of the world innovates, the US pumps it out in bulk.
3 months vacations and a relaxed work ethic are absolutely compatible with issues of housing, Healthcare, and climate change. VC funded start-up oriented solutions are not the only thing that can be done to fix this issue, not by a long shot.
Healthcare is a political decision, to begin with, and many EU countries with all of the things you decry basically solved it. Housing is the same way, it's a collective problem that has to be solved collectively.
Emergency earthquake notifications is 70s tech. Fancy machine learning approaches to earthquake prediction barely outperform basic linear regression techniques. Emergency notification systems are a solved pro le..
Automatic emergency braking was never developed by American big tech. It was first implemented commercially in Japanese cars. But even here, AEB is a case of small scale thinking - the best way of fixing the issues it targets is not tech but city design.
Qualcomm isn't the reason android phones are slow. Qualcomm processors are more than fast enough to do 95% of what you would want to do. The issue is devs who code for the iPhone. Making every processor as fast as the A14 will never happen, people will use lower end processors to save money then.
Again, it's just missing the forest for the trees again. The reason why we have the issues we have is, in most cases, not by a lack of tech, but because of other issues. Big tech is not the universal solution to the important problems.
By the way, your segment on Google Maps is simply wrong. Digital maps were already used for navigation by then. Google just bought a startup and won the market against Microsoft and OpenStreetMaps. If they lost we'd be using OSM or something from MS instead.
Current essential advances in civilisation that I'm sure you enjoy, such as healthcare, are fundamentally reliant on processor technology developed in the US after the war. If we'd left it to European countries our standards of living would be much reduced.
Reality is 60-80 hour work weeks, and for what? Work til you drop then die.
> Technology is opening a new world of leisure time. One government report projects that by the year 2000, the United States will have a 30-hour work week and month-long vacations as the rule.
> Those who hunger for time off from work may take heart from the forecast of political scientist Sebastian de Grazia that the average work week, by the year 2000, will average 31 hours, and perhaps as few as 21. Twenty years later, on-the-job hours may have dwindled to 26, or even 16.
> “The work week and the work day will be drastically reduced,” said Gillis. “The majority of the people will be working less than 30 hours a week.” He didn’t predict just how the populace will adjust to the increased free time.
> So tell your children not to be surprised if the year 2000 finds 35 or even a 20-hour work week fixed by law.
The American worker is 400% more productive than in the 1950s, but works longer than ever, hasn't seen the fruits of that productivity. A high school graduate can't raise a family in a single income household on a 10 hour week, which given the productivity increase should have been possible.
But a better job, with more money, more time off, more relaxed conditions, lets you get more of these things you say you want.
Also look at the current pandemic. Due to their work ethic and research power the US has been able to vaccinate their people so they can enjoy life again while much of the EU is still in lockdown.
If you look at vaccination percentages[0] you'll also see that US and Europe are very close in that regard. I'm in my twenties in Poland and already got my second vaccine (yes, also Pfizer).
As to the bigger discussion at hand, I don't see how taking vacations is contradictory to ambition and being driven to create something great. I don't like taking 4-week at a time vacations, but definitely want to have ~35 days off yearly, even though I really like my work and put a lot of effort into it.
Creativity and motivation go out the window when I'm overworked and burned out.
The US managed to independently produce a vaccine. No country in Europe managed that.
For example the French vaccine is only just being trialed now.
> you'll also see that US and Europe are very close in that regard
What data are you reading? US has fully vaccinated 42% - Europe 23%. Deaths also higher in Europe.
I guess all those long lunches were worth it though?
Sure, it's a true statement, still doesn't change the fact that for Pfizer the manpower was European, the capital was US. At least that's what I've been reading. You're obviously right about the other vaccines, not denying that.
> What data are you reading? US has fully vaccinated 42% - Europe 23%.
You're right, I was reading into first-dose percentages, the US has been much better at the fully-dosed percentage.
> Deaths also higher in Europe.
Here you're wrong (or we have diverging sources, or I'm still bad at reading graphs) as far as meaningful statistics go. Using worldometer[0] and quick Excel, looking at per capita deaths it's 1451 per million for Europe, 1641 for the EU and 1846 for the US.
> I guess all those long lunches were worth it though?
I actually prefer to go without lunch and finish earlier :) Isn't it the norm to take a 30-60 minute lunch break at the US too though?
Obviously some days I'll work longer hours due to operational needs, but I'm what I think the US calls a "Salaried" person who controls my own hours, rather than receiving an hourly wage.
Does this mean that Hungary and the UK have a better work ethic?
Looking at western vaccines
Pfizer–BioNTech -- developed in Germany
Oxford–AstraZeneca -- developed in the UK
Moderna -- developed in the US
Johnson & Johnson -- developed in the Netherlands
How does the "US Research Power" play into that?
https://ourworldindata.org/covid-deaths
Says that in the last 7 days there were 1.32 deaths/100k in the US and 1.37 in the EU, so even with all that money in buying up the vaccines it hasn't saved lives. In Hungary and the UK where vaccine rates are similar to the US, deaths/100k were 0.87 and 0.25 respectively.
Some Europeans will say that's actually a feature, not a bug. But look at what businesses are being started instead - neighborhood pubs and apartments for rent to tourists. Low-growth, low risk businesses with quick returns. What kind of jobs are these businesses going to create?
Do companies say "Right, I'm not going to make an extra billion this year because I'll be taxed at the EU average 20.7% tax rather than the US 21%"
No, but their owners might go: "Given the risk, the potential returns and the taxes that I'd need to pay on said returns I'm better off putting this money into real estate, finding a cushy low-stress job and enjoying life instead."
Cushy low strsss jobs and enjoying life are more likely in Europe thanks to social safety nets, which is great - means that 80% of the continent gets to have a nice life, rather than 1% hitting is big and 99% in wage slavery.
The taxes aren't stopping European companies from paying competitive salaries
As I increase my earnings, more and more is disposable income (beyond the costs of living for my social status).
Extra dollars go towards things you want, not the things you need, so there is quite an incentive to earn more even if it is highly taxed.
As you raise your income,
I don't even know how millionaires who can afford their incredible estates in the countryside do it. My first thought was tax havens but I don't know if that's true. It seems like the entire system is set up to disembowel such ambitions.