Moving the Evernote center of operations to Europe | Hacker News Reader

Moving the Evernote center of operations to Europe

evernote.com

51 pointssoheilpro122 comments

The passive voice around laying off employees is always so gross. It didn't magically require you lay off those employees. Someone in your C-suite decided. Own it.

Most of it's not technically in the passive voice (only 'be laid off' in the second paragraph).

> In most cases, this package includes 16 weeks of salary, up to one year of health insurance coverage, and a performance bonus, paid pro-rata as if the year-end performance targets have already been achieved.

Layoffs are amazing. Every layoff I’ve experienced has been a financial gain and reduction in my total workload. That’s the whole point of severance packages: to keep employees happy enough to not sue.

And let me tell you, getting laid off is one of my favorite things.

As long as my check clears, corporate PR can say whatever nonsense they want, nobody’s really listening to them anyway.

I've had zero severance or two weeks extra pay layoffs.

Those are a lot less fun.

Wow every layoff I’ve experience has felt like a betrayal and has taken real time to get over, both emotionally and financially. You lucked out.

My mother was a banker. She asked a hypothetical question of me, 30 years ago, that I've never been able to answer: "Name for me one company that was better, for the customer or the employees, after a merger."

Apple/NeXT

NeXT acquired Apple

I argued the same on here 12 years (and three days) ago, and got some hilariously snippy responses.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2732235

Airbus?

This was an acquisition, not a merger, but if we misquote your mother a bit to fit this situation: YouTube?

YouTube’s algorithm routinely drives people to more and more extreme content and is designed to be as addictive as possible so that users don’t leave. A lot of this is the result of Google’s acquiring them. I’m curious how you think it’s better.

Let me also be clear that it’s not like it was squeaky clean and friendly prior. But to say it has improved since the acquisition…I’m having a hard time seeing that.

The acquisition by Google happened 18 months into YouTubes existence. It's been 18 years since then. I don't know if you really recall what a site was like 18 years ago.

Besides that, what Google provided was hosting infrastructure and legal protection. Otherwise they would have been sued into nothing and couldn't have afforded to serve video.

Early on YouTube was basically a repository of commercial copyrighted material. Widespread home video was not really a big thing at the time.

Honestly I did not realize that acquisition happened so early in YT’s existence. That’s on me I suppose.

It's understandable. It was originally allowed to be its own thing. There were several iterations of it being brought into the Google fold, and it would be easy to mistake any of those for the acquisition event.

youtube is significantly worse other than maybe in stability/uptime.

remember google tried to force that weird google plus login instead?

and now it’s so corporatized/ad filled

When you consider the alternative is no youtube at all (remember, they were hemorrhaging money), everything you described doesn't seem so bad.

In no world would Youtube be even remotely profitable without advertising. Google ran it as a $B+/year loss for years before managing to making it profitable.

Tell me now a believable alternative growth story for Youtube where Google didn't buy it and the service isn't "corporatized" and not losing money.

You can't compare an unprofitable small-scale startup product to what the same product needs to be to make it 1) planet-scale and 2) profitable.

Yeah, without an acquisition, YouTube doesn't exist today. And most acquisitions would have turned out far worse than the Google one did. (See Evernote...)

It's full of residential trash burning videos.

They film themselves burning residential trash and teach others "how to save money at the dump" doing it.

Each one of them pollutes more than an entire city.

I've reported them, because those activities are illegal, and YouTube keeps the videos up.

The comment I'm responding to asked if either the customer or the company were better after the merger.

Google's (and YouTube's) customers are advertisers. Advertisers are certainly better off with the scale and reach that Google juiced YouTube with, and Google earns about $15B annually in revenue from it.

So, I'd say both conditions are met.

Sounds like the algorithm has learned that you get really fired up about residential trash videos.

Washington Mutual

Madrigal Electromotive GmbH.

Mercedes/Benz?

Why do you think this was a merger or an acquisition?

"Why do you think this was a merger or an acquisition?"

The reason I think it was a merger is, that it was a merger.

"The first Mercedes-Benz branded vehicles were produced in 1926, following the merger of Karl Benz and Gottlieb Daimler's companies into the Daimler-Benz company on 28 June of the same year."

Mercedes was a car name from the Daimlers side of the merger (from a car seller and racing team) - so it was Mercedes-Benz.

Why the downvote?

Didn't the Sprint/TMobile merger provide a real competition to the AT&T/Verizon duopoly?

Lamborghini?

Surely this supports the poster's statement - they went from the Miura and Countach to todays RGB gamer mouse mobile with a Volkswagen drivetrain - a true Shakespearean tragedy

I like the mainstream Lamborghinis today better than Countach. They’re just with the times and you like a classic Lamborghini.

Austria-Hungary

That wasn’t really a merger, more like a renaming

Martin-Marrieta?

I've been through several and in my case it's 0 for 4

There's a massive population of software developers that don't care about software, don't have a passion for the problem solving, don't feel accomplishment when they ship something. They just got into the business because of the money and the hype. These people will never amount to much and will cost companies lots of opportunity cost money. It makes sense to not pay Bay Area salaries for these people and to go pay people in Europe to have this attitude. But for the people who actually love shipping products to people, there will always be money and they will always be in demand. The only problem is you can't find them reliably through the front door application process - you have to get lucky or build a network to find them. They're worth their weight in gold

In my years as a junior dev I noticed this! The signs for me were seniors who had just aged through, but I knew more about the tech stack and problem domain or that could not just intuit a recursive function(I was flabbergasted as I watched one of them lookup how to write one).

In the years since all these devs have since moved on to management rather than more senior technical roles.

Your comment implies European tech workers are somehow less passionate or that passionate tech workers can't be found here. This is a harmful myth that perpetuates our depressed wages. We're not America's backwater for tech sourcing. We're just as capable and passionate.

> Your comment implies European tech workers are somehow less passionate or that passionate tech workers can't be found here.

No, it implies that there are Americans who don't care about their work and there are Europeans who don't care about their work. But the former are far more pricey.

The original comment was easy to misinterpret; I had the same thought until I reached the last few words.

I think the comment implies the opposite

I read this as since Evernote is not a cutting edge, hypey startup they don’t need to have as high a calibre/pay grade of staff as they currently do have by being based in California. Hence can halve labour costs by moving to Europe and still maintain a decent standard of technical employee.

> This is a harmful myth that perpetuates our depressed wages

In some European countries, conditions are more favorable to workers, and this can be reflected in the wages as well. For instance, an employee in France will enjoy 35 weeks of holiday per year (not including public holidays), and also stronger protections regarding layoffs. This is somewhat expected that wages are also lower.

EDIT: 35 days, not weeks.

You possibly meant 35 days per year.

Weeks

Given French stereotypes, I'm not sure, heh.

French side do weeks not days like Americans. That is why French can't compete with the rest of EU. If you think Americam boomers bad, ENTIRE France is a glorified boomers on steroid. To be fair their income tax rate is 70%. So work hard? Reagan once forgo the other half of the year of work once he max his marginal tax rate.

Income tax rate is far from 70% (not sure if this was second degree or not).

Up to €10,777 = 0% From €10,778 to €27,478 = 11% From €27,479 to €78,570 = 30% From €78,571 to €168,994 = 41% More than €168,994 = 45%

https://www.service-public.fr/particuliers/vosdroits/F1419?l...

You need to add "cotisations sociales" (not tax per se, social security and such), which is I believe a 22% flat tax. So that would make 67% for the last bracket. But there are other differences. For instance, if you're married or/and have kids, you can have important benefits. Also RSUs are taxed differently.

Overall, tax is high in France, but not that different from other countries. Even in the US, certain places like NYC are heavily taxed. And you also need to see what tax gives you. I don't mind to pay tax if that gives me (and everybody else living here) access to healthcare, security, education or a decent future pension. Now whether France still provide these things is up to debate.

35 days, that's correct!

but they are not just somewhat lower, they are massively lower. Is 1-2 extra week really worth $50-100k? Also many (most?) tech companies offer more than 2 weeks in the US

With all due respect, as a European myself, the ones who are passionate about tech do not stay out of the US for long. There are notable exceptions of course but the immigration statistics and subsequent brain drain is undeniable. The only notable tech company to come out of Europe in the last decade is Spotify.

I don't agree - moving to the US is about chasing the money.

> The only notable tech company to come out of Europe in the last decade is Spotify.

I think this is incredibly dismissive of a huge number of tech companies that are european. ASML are dutch, and ARM are a UK company. Neither are startups, but both are foundations of the bleeding edge of tech this decade.

The fintech space is brimming with startups in europe, and to the best of my knowledge this is far superior to the situation in the US.

> ASML are dutch, and ARM are a UK company

I guess it’s much easier for them to compete for workers since IIRC Intel (and I assume others in the sector) don’t pay that well compared to software companies

The protestant work ethic is becoming a thing of the past.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Protestant_work_ethic

The replacement now is the "hustler's work ethic", which takes away the virtues from the traditional work ethic.

Loyalty and hard work are a two-way street. Companies generally haven’t demonstrated loyalty; employees are forced to reciprocate lest they find themselves unemployed and unemployable.

Because we replaced good faith business people with the root of all societal decadence known as the "Masters of Business Administration".

Are you saying that those people are not living in Europe?

Oh the horror. Someone might work a job because they need money to eat even though they’re not deeply passionate about it.

There was a thread on Reddit yesterday asking what you would do if you didn’t have to think about money tomorrow. Like half the top posts were some version of “quit my job”.

This part of society is really broken. “I wish I didn’t have to deal with this thing taking up half of my life” isn’t a thing the majority of people should have to feel.

I don’t really have a point. Sorry.

I’m pretty sure that’s been true for as long as there have been jobs. At least at this point I wouldn’t be working for someone if I didn’t need to think about money.

I dislike the word “passionate” in this context too. You don’t have to be in love with programming, but there definitely are qualities of curiosity, tenacity and pride of workmanship that are very important to high performing software teams.

To some degree that’s probably true of most jobs though. There are some people that paint software as something unique where it isn’t some all consuming nights and weekends interest you’re not a “real” programmer.

Let me separate your two sentences, because the latter is an immature viewpoint that I wholeheartedly disagree with.

WRT what makes software unique is that it’s a rare combination of opaque, hard to evaluate, long-lived, mechanically unforgiving and path-dependent. In other words, incompetent developers can make a huge mess of things that future developers can find it impossible to dig out from. Other jobs have some of these aspects, but I can’t think of any that share all of them.

Ok... why do all the people that just want to clock in and get a paycheck get offended that people willing to pay a lot of money want to hire people that actually care?

Because you want to have your cake and eat it too?

I care more about the quality of work that people do than the degree to which they “care” in the abstract-which are only loosely correlated.

Putting effort and time into a craft is not “loosely” correlated to being good. People that work harder, put in more effort and are frankly obsessed with their craft are, with few exceptions, better than those that are not. This is one of those “my grandma could have told you that” moments…

I have met plenty of people who were really enthusiastic about filmmaking, writing, sports of various kinds, etc. who were simply not very good. It’s probably hard to excel at something you hate but enthusiasm doesn’t necessarily translate into skill.

I don’t understand your critique. Are you saying that European software developers don’t have a passion for shipping products?

I took it to mean: it's better to pay an EU salary than a Bay Area salary if the SWE is unenthusiastic / an average performer. i.e. "Both EU and Bay Area have SWE who will ship code. Only pay Bay Area salaries for those who go above and beyond shipping code"

I use plenty of paid software developed in the Bay Area that I wouldn't even use for free if I had a choice in the matter. The reason for a lot of successful software companies in the Bay Area has nothing to do with the people. It's disposable cash willing to throw money at an idea with a 1/500 chance of working out. As already seen, cash is running out for a lot of startups and they won't be getting another round of funding. That will lead to wages significantly dropping. We don't see the same in Europe where the wages were never hyperinflated. Wages continue to increase albeit at a slow pace.

> It makes sense to not pay Bay Area salaries for these people and to go pay people in Europe to have this attitude

This sentence implies that "this kind of people" exist in both places. I don't see any judgment in terms of where they are more prevalent.

It does imply that the opposite kind can't be found in Europe, otherwise you would also be better off paying a lower salary for them.

There is also an adjacent problem, where management cares very little about features which improve things for the users. And no matter how many great engineers they have, they don’t get used on things that people would care about.

That’s rich coming from a continent responsible for a handful of software breakthroughs.

> But for the people who actually love shipping products to people, there will always be money and they will always be in demand.

> The only problem is you can't find them reliably through the front door application process [...]

Do they get found reliably enough in any manner, that there will always be money for them?

Were hiring managers and interviewers onboard with this theory, would they able to recognize such a person (amidst all the people projecting that because it quickly becomes standard interview advice to project that).

Is the market really for them, if they're indistinguishable?

(I'm imagining "In STAR format, tell me about a time that you loved shipping product to people, totally speaking candidly and off-the-cuff, not a rehearsed ritual answer recommended by prep materials, I'm sure." Or "I had to dock you points on your Leetcoding assessment because you didn't smile while you capped the whiteboard marker, which our hiring data science team says predicts that you don't love shipping solutions.")

It’s fine to be passionate but can lead to unwise decisions. Getting taken advantage of is one, accepting lower pay than you should for nebulous benefits is another. If you are passionate, surely you crave the financial freedom to do your own thing on your own terms instead of wasting time at a company full of dispassionate people.

People have lives outside where they work. It's a job to pay the mortgage not some mission to change the world. If you think your value to a company makes you irreplaceable then you're not the first to sit in the chair of naivety.

What a ridiculous comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9090135

The title could have been “Our Chile and US based employees are laid off”.

I was't planning on leaving Evernote after many years of use. But I went to do a full export yesterday, just in case. It locked up mid way through four times in a row, 3x after fresh reboots. Now I'm planning on leaving Evernote.

Here's how to do it:

1. Download and install the legacy Evernote v.6.25.x.x. Evernote has removed it from their website but you can get it at FileHippo. Download this now - I downloaded 6.25.3.9348 and used it, but now it's gone from FileHippo... not sure why. https://filehippo.com/download_evernote/6.25.1.9091/ I installed on a separate computer, but probably you can run v10.x and v.6.25.x on the same one.

2. Follow the undocumented trick for downloading all notebooks at once. This will preserve tags as well. Archived here: https://archive.ph/XDnqN - scroll down to KoZz's comment posted on "Tuesday at 11:53 AM".

3. Then if you want to move to Obsidian, use YARLE but note the template that automatically loads doesn't work (it has spaces and breaks other rules). https://github.com/akosbalasko/yarle

4. Template block definitions here: https://github.com/akosbalasko/yarle/blob/master/Templates.m... FWIW, I used this as my template (paste in the "Set Template" window for YARLE):

    {content-block}{content}{end-content-block}
    {tags-block}
    Tag(s): {tags}
    {end-tags-block}

Correcting myself for anyone searching for this later... Evernote v6.25.3.9348 (version that's guaranteed to work) was not on FileHippo. It was shared several times on the Evernote discussion boards, recently here: https://discussion.evernote.com/forums/topic/146705-fatal-mi..., which I've archived here: https://archive.ph/G4hdq - scroll to PinkElephant's comment.

> [..] to make the most of the Bending Spoons employer brand, which is extremely strong in Europe.

What the fuck is Bending Spoons?

I think they are overestimating their reputation.

Basically an Italian app publisher with a weird over the top landing page: https://bendingspoons.com/

I read this as a “we are loved in Belgium” kind of statement.

No one knows bendingspoons. But they are European, so I guess they are slightly more known in Europe.

This, of course, seems stupid to me as it’s not like work location corresponds to brand awareness. And this could be a reason to increase brand awareness, not give up.

Just seems like stupid following more stupid. Or a decision is made for an unknown to us reason and they backed into an explanation.

I think it’s better to just say nothing.

I think for note taking apps there are only two ways to survive: enrich the offering and grow accordingly (e.g. Notion) or feature-freeze the app and stay small (e.g. Remember the milk).

What brought Evernote down is it being stuck between the two worlds: it grew its corporate footprint without growing its offering.

Notion makes money on team use & collaboration. I think notes apps that are laser focused on individual use are much harder to justify and pretty much have to stay small/lean/indie and they’re selling essentially a luxury product to a small user base.

Recent and related:

Tell HN: Nearly all of Evernote’s remaining staff has been laid off - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36609641 - July 2023 (604 comments)

I'm afraid that this is a trend that is only going to accelerate in the new remote-first world that is now the reality for software engineering. Sure, some companies mint money and will always pay a premium for top talent. But for a mature product not bringing in huge amounts of revenue, why pay someone to work remotely in the US (especially in the bay area) versus paying someone a third of that salary in Europe?

I'm afraid that "hell for some will be heaven for others." Haven't you stopped to think that many people in Europe will be glad about this? And it will bring development to places that would otherwise be unfeasible. Why is liberalism only good when it benefits us?

I’m not sure they’re saying it’s a bad thing? Just a thing that is happening.

Wages are sticky on the downside. But yes over time—assuming a lot of remote work—why would I want to pay someone a premium to live in a high cost area like the Bay or Manhattan any more than to live somewhere like Aspen.

Because you fire everyone who knows how the systems work. And while Evernote sounds like a weekend project to everyone on HN, I'm certain that over the decade-plus of its existence that it has accreted a lot of technical debt and 'FIXME: we should rewrite this spaghetti' all over the codebase. You've now replaced anyone who knows how the product actually works with people who don't understand the product and aren't going to be incentivized to /care/ about the product at all. The codebase probably needs a rewrite, but the people who understood all the issues of the codebase are gone, so any future rewrite is just about guaranteed to fail.

So what you're left with is a skeleton staff who just keeps it running, it won't grow it won't get new features, it'll stagnate and the profits will come from cutting staff even more aggressively. It is definitely a zombie product now.

And any remaining users should already have jumped ship. The staff remaining won't know how it all works, they'll have cut staff down to the bone, and there's a high likelihood of everything getting hacked or just constant service interruptions.

Evernote is not rocket science. Each new onboarding presumes the developer to make himself familiar with the project.

I don't get the "they won't know how it works", a senior developer should make himself familiar pretty quickly.

> Evernote is not rocket science.

I'd bet money that if you got to see the codebase they have to work with that it is at least 10x more of a clusterfuck than you currently think it is.

I am not overly optimistic, but if you are able to run the servers locally and run the frontends locally and have the list of all features the application has, then you should be able to execute them all locally and underatand how it works. It will not be fast, but if you are senior, and the technologies are known to you, it should not take extremely long.

Another product that only exists when cash is cheap and you can continually con VC. Not anymore. The underlying product simply doesn't provide enough value to justify $10!!! a month, and that's on sale.

> significant boost in operational efficiency that will come as a consequence of centralizing operations in Europe..

What about a "significant boost in operational efficiency that would have come as a consequence of leveraging remote workers in the bay area, in the US, in Europe and elsewhere"?

It feels like Evernote has not evolve for years, and they don't want to evolve their culture either.

> It feels like Evernote has not evolve for years, and they don't want to evolve their culture either.

Not defending Evernote but I think many folks are missing that they were bought by some EU company and folks in US and LATAM were all fired by new mgmt.

Our brilliant European plan seems to be coming together.

We're stagnating so hard that we rightfully have earned the slur Europoor. Even Indian expats are puzzled by the state of things. We can't even afford ACs.

Hence we will become the new underdeveloped region to develop (or operate) your less exciting software. Might become big as the age of free capital in SV is over, costs matter again.

I'm all for it. But not now, typing this from my 4 week holiday.

These comments are getting worse than reddit...

What does Evernote even need staff for, it's a super basic paid note platform, anything opensource is loads better

I'm always amazed when I find out a basic app is some corporation's flagship product. Ironically, it seems to be a mostly American phenomenon.

Super basic? It has 5 trillion features.

But they know that this isn't so easy in Europe:

"[...] Evernote will need to allow a human review of your notes, and that’s not the only reason an employee would look at your notes."

... from 2016 https://lifehacker.com/evernote-employees-can-read-your-note...

"Nobody who knows how Evernote runs is left with the company"

Humans are the most costly resource a business possesses. The new owners recognize this and have taken steps to minimize bleed.

Second step will be moving their digital assets to another region, that's not in the EU.

I imagine the third and final step will be to schlep the IP to someone else.

I can understand the Bay Area workforce being costly, but how much are they saving by closing down the Chilean office/division?

I guess it’s harder to say given that they never specified where in Europe the work is moving to.

They were bought by Bending Spoons which is located in Milan, Italy.

I suspect Chilean office problem was more related to timezones, if they are moving to Europe.

"We’re taking this step to boost operational efficiency and to make the most of the Bending Spoons employer brand, which is extremely strong in Europe."

Doesn't mean anything. Next time try with GPT.

Just a cost-cutting measurement - nothing to do with moving the Evernote center of operations. Business can be conducted globally.

Aaa Europe because it's cheaper to hire engineers is it?

And because that’s where those who bought Evernote have always been located. Why bother with maintaining a US office, and the associated admin work?

Timezones and wages make this a losing game and it actually prevents Evernote from growing imho

Wow. That sucks. "Happy 4th of July. Hope you had a nice holiday... because you're all laid off"

Turning Evernote into Nevernote.

Evernote is still around ?

Does anyone know how many employees were fired?

wake me up when they fix the bug where pasting in a code block adds an unwanted newline

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