Evernote is relocating to Europe after laying off most of its US workforce | Hacker News Reader

Evernote is relocating to Europe after laying off most of its US workforce

engadget.com

21 pointsjshprentz11 comments

People still use Evernote? Didnt they have all their business taken by better products like Notion?

I think "laying off most of their workforce" would answer your question.

I wonder why don’t more companies do that considering you can get people in the EU who will work for peanuts compared to the salaries in the US.

Salary is like 15-20% of costs. Best case you reduce that to 7-10% but also more taxes and other business costs. I'd imagine most businesses would save under 5% of costs all things considered but then is that 5% worth losing access to US gov contracts, access to US investors and other contacts and other opportunities? Maybe, depends on the business.

IMHO, the US is best for your HQ but you should stratrgically outsource labour like that if the salary savings make sense. Profit margin of 5% vs 30% is a big deal too.

Everyone wonders why healthcare sucks and labor laws are horrible in the US. This is why. Cali alone is the 4th biggest economy, and it's not exactly like silicon valley doesn't outsource to China and India, import h1b or farmers don't use cheap illegal immigrant labour either.

Can't have your cake and eat too. Can't make the working class happy and the wealthy class happy enough to stay, at least not at the national scale.

> Salary is like 15-20% of costs

That really, really depends on your business model. For most software companies it’s much higher than that (especially if you factor in stock based comp)

> Everyone wonders why healthcare sucks and labor laws are horrible in the US.

I’m not sure that’s connected. Salaries for tech workers are higher because of much higher demand than in Europe, if it was easy to get a green card.. that would change.

Also not sure what does this have to do with healthcare? Americans and American companies especially (since in Europe you have to cover most of the costs through taxes or insurance yourself) spend much more on healthcare than Europeans do.

and anyway, the US healthcare system seems like a great deal when you earn 200-300k+, much better to pay (or have your employer pay) a fixed fee than ~10% of your income.

I guess the public image of fleeing to Europe from Silicon Valley.

Most of the leading software companies are in the US.

Salaries are cheaper while social charges and taxes can be higher. All in all I think it's still a good move if they can find the talent, including extensive remote hiring.

On the advantages of moving to EU, there's also all the GDPR expertise they can find locally, and a lot of paperwork that can be alleviated by having direct access to gov. agencies.

> Salaries are cheaper while social charges and taxes can be higher.

That doesn’t even come close in explaining the gap in salaries. ~10-20% in extra taxes (also remember that your employer is paying for your health insurance in this US, which is about 10% or so of your pre-tax income in Europe in many countries) still leaves an extra 50-100k or so.

But the taxes are off a base that's perhaps 1/3rd. In absolute numbers the employment tax may be higher in the US.

Pretty sure the average senior dev (per hour) wage in western europe is higher than the average in the US if you remove silicon valley from the calculation.

Here in Switzerland you don't earn much less and have a much higher quality of life. It's Europe too

I mean… Switzerland IS the silicon valley of Europe and generally has much higher salaries than every other place in Western Europe. Also it’s a very small country.

Also no.. the average software developer salary in most US (not impoverished) states outside of California is about 90-100k+ which is not that far from what you’d earn in Switzerland on average and significantly above France, Italy and even Germany or the Netherlands.

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