Hacker News Reader

Comment by bjornsing | Hacker News Reader

Sweden is fairly decent for avionics actually. For example we’ve designed and built our own fighter yet (the Gripen), which I’d say is impressive for a small country of 10 million inhabitants.

I’m interested in fundamental challenges around computing: programming languages, cloud platforms, operating systems, combinatorial optimization, database technology, machine learning and the like. Not many bleeding edge opportunities around that here.

We also have a work culture were effort and ability is not rewarded (which at least I associate with strong unions), but “playing politics” is. It’s very hard to stay motivated in a culture like that. I think this is an important part of the downward spiral.

View on HN

SAAB is an important aerspace company, from fighters to avionics and electronics. Pretty good place for avionics people actually.

> I’m interested in fundamental challenges around computing: programming languages, cloud platforms, operating systems

Yeah, for programming languages you should probably have been Danish and for operating systems the Finnish have had quite an impact. Both socially stable countries with dare I say pretty strong unions...

Are you serious? Bjarne Stroustrup Lives in New York and Linus Torvalds lives in Portland, Oregon. They are my examples, not yours.

I'm dead serious. Btw, I'm also thinking of Anders Hejlsberg and Rasmus Lerdorf. They also live in North America. But that doesn't remove the fact that they were all born and bred in Scandinavia.

I'm guessing that their decision to move west had very little to do with the "stifling" unions and more to do with the increased opportunity for a skilled SWE over there. I would say that that increased opportunity has also very little to do with "stifling" unions and more to do with the huge single market that the US is. That huge single market allows companies to grow fast. The EU works hard to be a single market as well but we have language barriers, bigger legal differences and dare I say bigger cultural differences.

Also talking about Scandinavia, as tiny as it is population-wise, we've had a disproportionately large impact on the world in many different areas. Some factors that contribute to this, I believe, are our free education system and the social safety net that unions have played an important part upholding.

> We also have a work culture were effort and ability is not rewarded (which at least I associate with strong unions), but “playing politics” is.

To me that sounds like your typical large company. I've had a great time working at small startups but I've found that my job satisfaction pretty much scales with the inverse of company size (within limits, it seems 20-30 employees is the sweet-spot for me).

Adding to this, I also found that once a startup reaches a certain point, more "experienced" management starts getting hired (often from bigger companies), and the large company politics gets brought into the startup. Reflecting on it, oftentimes when this happens it is the time for me to start thinking about looking for a new job.

Well in the US there is at least the hypothetical of becoming the next Jeff Dean. In Sweden, not so much. I think it’s disingenuous to pretend there’s not a difference.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com