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Comment by simonh | Hacker News Reader

You can do innovation, the problem is scaling up to the mass market. The EU is supposed to be a massive single market at scale to rival the US and China, and in some ways it is, but it still has a fragments cultural and legal landscape. The gravitational pull of the US on European dev talent is really hard to ignore. Every year the cream of European IT graduates move to the US because that's where the big companies and top paying jobs are. It's a powerful self-reinforcing feedback loop.

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On what visa do these students move and work on in the US? The US visa process is extremely onerous

There are 65k H1-B visas issued every year. The FAANG all have offices in Europe so they can put grads to work there until the visa comes through. Of course some companies are ramping up their dev capacity in Europe due to the shortage of grads in the US, that's why Facebook announced thousands of the devs they're hiring for the Metaverse will be in Europe.

I believe it would be the H1-B.

Australia has the E-3 visa and Canada and Mexico have the TN visa.

Many people come over on an L1 visa. A U.S. company will higher a foreign worker, have them work in a foreign office for one year, and then they qualify for an L1 visa.

Shouldn't cheaper dev talent mean that it's easier to start a Google etc. competitor? Many of those smart IT graduates also stay in the EU for various reasons, and accept the lower pay.

The point about the market I agree, the EU market is way too fragmented still, but it's slowly getting there.

How do you break that circle?

> How do you break that circle?

I think it’s intrinsic to the models. The U.S. pays top performers better. But the average European has a more-stable lifestyle. The same regulations and labor protections that grant that stability slow down growth, so apart from an internal restructuring it’s tough to see the situation changing.

There is also a hub effect aside from pay. Shannen has all the electronics companies because it is a huge where you can buy anything. A hub can happen randomly outside of policy, like a crystal growing in solution (and it can also be triggered if there isnt one, like dipping a string into super saturated cooled solution).

Remote work is kind of in the process of dissolving the crystallization for software.

*Shenzen

You can't. If your people do not feel the need to live humbly and serve their country they are going to flock elsewhere to the highest bidder. If a German engineer finds $30k/y after tax to be an unacceptable salary what are you going to do about it? Brainwash him into sacrificing for their glorious Fatherland and just shutting up and doing the work?

Uh, you forget that those US companies make a profit off of those engineers! How you break the cycle is simple: you find a way to pay those engineers more, so they stay at home AND you put the profit in your pocket. There are plenty of large companies in the EU that could do this.

But they don't. They're too cheap, or perhaps EU style managers can't stand the idea that some people in the same company as them make half as much as they do.

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