Europe is going to have a long hibernation in the global scene. Whatever existed was killed by bureaucracy and taxation.
Whatever doesn't exist, it will simply not happen, the ship has sailed
Whatever doesn't exist, it will simply not happen, the ship has sailed
Northern European countries consistently rank at the top of the world in ease of doing business
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ease_of_doing_business_index
Some of them have more entrepreneurs per capita than USA.
What you don’t have is the ability to attract a crazy amount of international capital to mega corporations like in California/Texas or some places in China. So it’s hard to build the very largest tech corporations there.
I think European companies tend to be less consumer oriented, not as visible, and focusing on more “behind the scenes” technology. So you get the impression there’s fewer of them than there actually are.
Like, in my industry, there’s nothing like Nvidia or AMD. But there’s ASML and Zeiss for instance, without which Nvidia couldn’t make their chips. There’s nothing like the mega super high performance foundries like TSMC and Samsung but there’s a whole bunch of smaller specialised foundries focusing on very high power, very low power and optics and MEMS stuff.
It also cuts the other way. German hires often cannot start for 3 months, so in addition to the time it takes for a developer to start learning the codebase once they’re hired, it might take 6 months between the time that you realize you need a developer and when they are hired and up to speed.
I’m not sure, but I believe it is also more complex to freelance in Germany, requiring more of an official business entity, vs the US where you can just send someone an email with an invoice and everyone’s happy.
Adding this all together, German employment law is heavily tilted towards larger businesses with longer time horizons and the funding and scale to absorb uncertainty.
In spite of all that Germany is an economic powerhouse and even if the companies don't make profits as ridiculous as those in countries where such protections do not exist your average employee in Germany is going to have a far less stressful life on account of this than elsewhere.
Freelancing all over Europe is best done through a business entity, it offers some basic liability protection and allows you to defer taxes.
A salary like this in Western Europe pays 70% of taxes (UK is the most favorable one with "only" 50%)
As someone who pays tax in one of these countries and manages/recruits people across all Europe (as well as Americas and Asia) I can confirm these calculators are very accurate.
Taxes (incl. pension + unemployment + health insurance and other social contributions) for 200K euros annual salary, for a single, no-dependents employee (the most unfavourable situation)
Spain (1):
Taxes: 81,915 EUR
as % of income: 40.96%
Taxes: 87866.28 EUR
as % of income: 43.94%
Taxes: 86,439.33 EUR
as % of income: 43.22%
(2) https://www.urssaf.fr/portail/home/utile-et-pratique/estimat...
(3) https://www.brutto-netto-rechner.info/gehalt/gross_net_calcu...
Quoting fantasy numbers with an air of authority, without sources and using an aggressive/dismissive tone throughout all your comments strikes me as pretty pathetic but, who knows, it might convince others.
(edited for layout fixes)