Assuming they want to continue Evernote as a product, I wonder if they laid off US and Chile stuff, because it was difficult to manage two teams in different time zones, or just it is cheaper to gather an equivalent EU-only team (Their entry-level positions are approx €50k/year, though the cost for the employer is higher).
Having been there, managing a development team with more than 2-3 hours difference is a real pain, especially if peak usage is not in the developers' time zone. It's almost always a cost saving measure (off shoring).
Add to that the exorbitant salaries of Bay area developers and it's pretty much a no-brainer. In my personal/anecdotal experience, Italian developers are about the same as US developers, even if Italian management is a different story;-)
Now you could say that it's a management problem, that as to be solved.
But meanwhile, this is the situation right now.
And employees that are not very good nor motivated are not very productive remotely, and are difficult to manager from a distance or with time zone differences.
Nothing to do with remote. In-office companies are also filled with people who are not good nor motivated, but need to be there because they have to eat and pay rent/mortgage, and that job was their best option.
For most workers, remote or otherwise, unless they have significant skin in the game in terms of sizable equity, their job is just a paycheck and they'll optimize for doing as little work as possible, for the biggest paycheck possible.
Companies only push for in-office work to better surveil and micromanage workers, thinking in-office builds attachment to the work and workplace, not to motivate people more. You motivate people with money, equity, time off and interesting work.
A lot of those people are comfortable slacking off when noone see them, but will work when being at work.
If people are not motivated to do their job, they'll slack off anywhere, it's just that employers would rather have you slack off in the office instead.
The fact you are telling me this let me think you are coming from a theoretical perspective, but that you have not, in fact, managed such people yourself.
It would be self evident otherwise.
You can motivate and manage people effectively even remotely if you do it right, and you can also catch slackers remotely as well since all these daily standup meetings and SW tools devs are using give you a good insight into who's making progress and who's not.
If you can't manage people remotely (provided they're also of the same culture and Time zone) then you probably can't manage them correctly in the office as well.
Problems with motivation? Plenty.
But never had a problem with remote people slacking off, any more than those that come to the office every day.
Others are more productive when home, able to better focus, these are the type that never come in if avoidable.
Obviously these are the extremes, most people I've met fall somewhere in between.
Notice how slacking off doesn't really come into the picture? That's because there are thousands of ways to avoid working, and thousands of ways to make sure work gets done. Doesn't really matter where you are physically, at least not for creative and autonomous roles like engineering.
Entry-level in Germany is 35-40k for a developer. I hear that italy has lower salaries. France might have higher.
Any source for this as it’s very different to what I’ve seen.
A UK average takes in all the various spots. Like Manchester is about 50k. London about 80-90k. But all those small little companies with developers in the middle of nowhere bring the average down. Then all the digital agencies paying pennies brings the average down.
I had a remote contract in the UK at the start of the year that was 80k. So I know good pay is available but I also have an inbox full of 24-40k a year roles from recruiters.
[1]: https://jobs.bendingspoons.com/positions/63eb93a4a9adba37238...
Don't forget that software engineers in the states tend to work more hours. For instance it's unlikely you're getting more than ~32 hours / week out of a German software engineer on average, due to caps on working hours and paid days off.
That puts the upper limit below what is likely to be the average in the states. Obviously this doesn't translate perfectly into productivity, but it is something you may want to keep in mind as an employer.
Don't forget that software engineers in the states tend to be much less productive than their German counterparts, to continue on your example.
> except for emergencies, where you're paying them overtime
They're not paid overtime, because they're not paid by the hour.
As a German software engineer I've got to ask: are we?
> They're not paid overtime, because they're not paid by the hour.
If you're not compensating them for the overtime, then you're taking those hours away somewhere else, i.e. giving them time off.
In my contract, which is less than "full time", I get paid for overtime up to 40 hours / week. Eventually anyhow if I didn't compensate the hours somewhere else.
One thing I noticed about German office culture (I worked with a bunch of multinationals) is that there's much less chit-chat and more focus on the work to be done, relatively to Anglosphere (Irish/Uk at least) office culture.
I could certainly see how this would lead to approximately the same output even with less hours.
F to doubt. I'm not some jingoist but it seems obvious to me that if Germans were more productive then I'd be able to name at least one FAANG tier company based on Germany.
So me pointing out that there are no FAANGs is reductive but claiming 32 hours is peak productivity isn't being reductive? Hmmm.
I hate to break it to you but productivity is measured not by wishful thinking but by capital markets. If German devs were more productive then capital would move to Germany.
Capital accumulation is much more than worker productivity, it depends on historical factors, the local banking sector, time in the market, investor mentality and risk taking, local laws and regulations for both workers and investors, and most importantly taxes, both on workers and on investors. Worker efficiency is only a small part of that. As a productive worker I have no control of the other factors that attract investors to my city/country like political instability, corruption, geography, wars on my border, banking, taxes and laws.
No I think it's you who is confused about the difference between capital, which can be moved, is fungible, and property (like mcmansions). The whole point, literally the whole point, of capital markets is enabling people to move their money opportunistically in a way that's impossible with property.
> it depends on historical factors, the local banking sector, time in the market
Do you realize you're talking about Western Europe here and not like some developing nation? And Bavaria no less? Like I wouldn't be at all surprised if some of the extant banks in the area go all the way back to knights of templar.
> As a productive worker I have no control of the other factors that attract investors to my city/country like political instability, corruption, geography, wars on my border, banking, taxes and laws.
Again, Western Europe, not LA or subsaharan Africa or whatever. Germany is without a doubt top 5 in terms of both stability and lack of corruption.
For example, if your wealthy Bavarian "Knights Templar" money investor (who probably isn't as wealthy as US VCs, but we'll gloss over that), can make more money through real estate investments, why would risk it all and take a gamble on some risky tech start-up in a country that has more bureaucracy, higher taxes, more workers' protections, smaller scale than the US, conservative consumer who still use cash, etc.? It's too risky to invest in tech here, compared to the US, even if you were wealthy investor.
Germany along with any other wealth European country, and the US aren't remotely comparable in the tech markets to draw the conclusion that because Germany doesn't have FAANGs it's because its workers can't be as productive as the US ones, when there's so may other factors I enumerated above at play that impact the tech sector.
You rant is just not a valid argument for this position.
SAP?
>SAP is the largest non-American software company by revenue, the world's third-largest publicly traded software company by revenue
This is dissembling by picking the metric that measures literally the exact opposite of productivity. SAP has the same number of employees (more?) as eg FB but its net income is 1/10th.
Most software engineer position in Germany have around 30 if they're at all competitive on the market. In total you get around 220 days where they actually work, vs. 260 days you're paying them for (assuming no sick days).
As an American doing cybersecurity in a non-tech industry, I work about 45 hours a week and get 10 days of vacation, 5 sick days, 7 holidays, and 5 floating holidays (basically vacation) per year. I could take it all, but that would be culturally weird and possibly career limiting. If I were at a FAANG I would expect significantly more hours per week with more vacation time and fewer holidays, but it works out to the same expectation that I would take about 15 days per year including sick days and holidays.
This is mostly performative presenteeism[0], sitting more hours in a chair does not mean you're producing more.
I find that being paid by the day/month, instead of the hour shifts your approach to labor.
1. there is a humongous difference between remote work in (roughly) the same time zone and fully distributed work across the globe
2. having non EU employees as a EU company without having a daughter company in the country the employees are in, without them moving to the EU during the employment, without them being self employees/free lancers it a complete nightmare to get legally right. Worse a nightmare which not only changes between any country pairing (different EU countries have different employment laws) in case of the US might even change depending on the US state.... AFIK all companies either only hire freelancers, do have non-EU daughter companies, do hire through a proxy firm (there are firms exactly for this, but there are their own legal mess), or do it not fully legally right. At the same time having a US daughter company also comes as a cost (many a way more complex legal structure). And all of this method still have high book keeping/complexity/fee cost.
3. legal hassles of data protection and having e.g. sys admin outside of the EU (and in case of dev ops that can easily extend to large parts of the team depending on how it was implemented).
So from a business POV it can make a lot of sense, especially if they plane to mostly milk Evernote.
Through without question it has a very high potential for disruption of Evernote development and operation.
> approx €50k/year, though the cost for the employer is higher
yes WAY higher, and you also pay a good amount of the 50k in taxes but together this then covers pension, unemployment and health insurance around 20 payed vacation days and additional payed holiday days, various child benefits if you have one depending on country and in most cases reasonable employee and employer rights and protections trying to avoid power abuse in both directions (through mainly protecting the employed person).
It can also be 100% of the sum and just use them as contractors (with benefit of quick & easy firing if needed, no lengthy HR dances).