Startups and Work: Europe vs the US | Hacker News Reader

Startups and Work: Europe vs the US

journal.dedasys.com

28 pointsmqt24 comments

I live and work in the Bay Area. Coming from Spain, where I was born and began my career in an US company, I have to say that the situation is very different that what is pictured here (and in the 'Joy of vivre' entry): Spain and other southereuropean or Mediterranean countries have a big combination of emotions and impulses that make them think they are not productive enough. To solve this, they apply a patch consisting or working more hours (in Madrid, people usually work 9-7 the least (and surprisingly at bigger companies such Google and Yahoo! it could be even more)) without understanding that working more is not working better or more productive. Being alienated with this working hors, most Spaniards rely on playing solitaries or youtubing on their terminals until the time to leave the office, feeding the vicious cycle all over again.

The managers in Spain don't trust their employees. Knowing this, employees optimize their time to do the least possible for not being fired.

In my experience, I have a far better life working in San Francisco. I usually go to work at 12-1pm, come back around 6 or seven and hack some hours in the late evening/early morning. I work at least once per day (usually two) and have as many vacations day as I had in Spain (actually some more days) with the possibility of non paid vacations or working from Europe when I visit my family.

I have seen this with many other engineers expatriated from Europe and relocated into the Bay Area. Besides being with like minded individuals, in this city I am relaxed enough and know the company trusts me enough to keep me working way more motivated, at nearly the fullest of my capacity.

well I can tell you for sure that is only a San Francisco/Bay area thing. I lived in the east coast (Boston), and have many friends that live in NYC, and the culture is very different over there. If you are not in by 9 am., it looks bad. Even if you are done with your work, and more, or can't be any more productive, you still have to stay in to put your hours.

You feel extra guilty just for asking a couple of hours off to go to the dentist or fix your car. etc. etc. Management doesn't trust you for sure, and half of the sites or the internet are blocked.

If you work in the financial industry, you can't use any external/personal email, im, or whatever. My company even disabled SMS from company phones.

Yes, it can be that bad even in the US.

So, what you discribing, as rolling in a 10-11am is ok, is just a California thing, and most importantly a startup world thing, so don't generalise it for the whole US.

Looks like you have it ok in NY as well. I worked in the south in a "right to work" state. The base hours were 45 and you were expected to be in your desk by 7:30. They had automatic badge readers on the door which when unlock when your badge got within a few feet of it. One of the executives was using the data from these to see when people were coming in and wanted to start punishing people for clocking in after 7:25. He figured you needed 5 minutes to get in your desk.

All internet was disabled by default. If your job absolutely required something you would need to go through red tape to get the specific site you need turned on.

Vacation was 1-2 weeks after you finished your first year, 3 weeks after 7 years and 4 weeks after 15.

If you cannot name the employer, can you at least say their industry, or whether they have thrived versus competitors (including competitors from other regions) with such policies?

I can't name either (because saying the sector and how successful they are would be saying who they are). As far as success; they are miles ahead of their nearest competitor.... in the US. They only do well in places that allow one to abuse labor.

I lived in the east coast (Boston), and have many friends that live in NYC, and the culture is very different over there. If you are not in by 9 am., it looks bad. Even if you are done with your work, and more, or can't be any more productive, you still have to stay in to put your hours.

You feel extra guilty just for asking a couple of hours off to go to the dentist or fix your car. etc. etc. Management doesn't trust you for sure, and half of the sites or the internet are blocked.

If you work in the financial industry, you can't use any external/personal email, im, or whatever.

The email firewall is there for security reasons, or so it's said.

I don't know that what you're describing is a "New York" phenomenon, but it's certainly true on Wall Street. I worked at a hedge fund where I ran into exactly what you're talking about. I developed substantial health problems for a period of about 2 months. Having a strong work ethic, and not wanting to call in sick needlessly (it wasn't contagious) I showed up to work whenever I could-- sometimes arriving late or leaving early, or taking a midday break, but still putting in the 45-50 hours that was expected.

I found out the hard way that it's worse to show up a half-hour late because of illness than to call in sick and throw out a day-- this is obviously stupid, inefficient, and bizarre. I had a new boss who gave me a ration of shit for showing up 8 minutes late (I was puking during that 8 minutes; thanks) and threatened to fire me. I sent him an email basically telling him that I worked for the company, not him, and that it was unfair both to me, but "more importantly" unfair to the company, to destroy a day's worth of my productivity over 8 minutes in the morning.

I don't work there any more.

I don't really have an opinion one way or another, simply because I'm not multi-cultural enough (haven't seen much of European office life).

All I can look at is what has been done over the years on both continents. First of all, not much, we all appear to be living off achievements of previous generations mostly funded by the military in fear of WWIII. "Internet revolution" actually started in the 60s and was pretty much complete by the end of the 80s when I, as many of you, was still in middle school. Operating systems, compilers, protocols, all these basic building blocks all belong to that era and nobody contributed anything significant on top of them. "5th generation computing" was supposed to be The Shit but it didn't happen. AI didn't happen. So... fundamentally, I don't see anything significant coming out of either culture: yes, computers got smaller and cheaper, not a big deal - they were supposed to.

Now, looking at lesser degree improvements in the past 10-15 years, US has produced nothing (well... RMS being a human is not a program, be he can be considered a product of the US), but Europe did real-world-start the open source movement saving UINX in process and producing a free alternative to expensive RDBMS (MySQL). Europe, don't forget, was also responsible for WWW itself. Paul likes to talk about "how much cheaper it is to start a company these days". Yes cheaper indeed, - mostly because of those three developments (Linux/MySQL/Web). They are nice additions on top of the fundamentals delivered by Americans in the 60-70s, but hey - they have nothing to do with entrepreneurs.

Call me a skeptic or even an asshole but the picture I am seeing isn't pretty: there are thousands of smart and involved folks who love computers and who's been the real force behind all these wonderful improvements we've seen, they are the people who make the difference. On the other hand we have "entrepreneurs" who's done nothing but milking that other group, producing largely irrelevant, secondary BS of questionable value (which gets duplicated by Chinese and Russian companies in a matter of weeks). Yes, SV offers a very favorable climate for this kind of individuals to strive, but I doubt this has anything to do with economic prosperity of a nation or with any metric of "awesomeness" worth arguing about: 99.95% of the time, the code running on an average CPU of an average server of an average SV startup has been written for free by someone from US/Europe/whatever. Entrepreneurs don't make anything. They only find ways to deliver results of other people's work/research to mass markets. Hardly a noble role, yet not completely useless.

Le Webs, TechCrunch 50s don't matter. These drunk assholes on stage don't matter. They don't code, don't know shit about computers and Internet and their main function there is to promote their personal brands/blogs. Entrepreneurial spirit of Silicon Valley doesn't matter. That's just a thin buildup on top of something significantly bigger and more important: millions of true computer lovers firing up vim/emacs/visual studio every day, coding for free, for that "Internet Love" that got featured on YouTube earlier today.

I can't make a claim as to whether entrepreneurship is noble but it's far more than "not completely useless".

Let's continue with your example. We have millions of true computer lovers coding for free. Let's expand that to include people pursuing their passion in any field for free. Now what? Now we have a collection of high-quality, but isolated research and tools.

How do I use this research and these tools to solve my problems? How do I use them to solve other people's problems? By putting in time and effort to connect the dots. That's what entrepreneurs do at their best: they bring existing things together to make something new to solve other people's problems. Where are these computers lovers firing up IDEs, eager to solve my problems for free?

And that's my point: craft and entrepreneurship go hand in hand. They're both better off by the presence of the other.

I guess the point I was trying to make was this: 99.99% of the code running on "web 2.0 server" somewhere in California is GPL/LGPL stuff, good part of which originates from Europe. Therefore it's very foolish of us to even hint that "Europeans are lazy" or inferior in any way. Google, Yahoo and Sun might not be from Europe, but Linus, Guido, DHH and thousands less famous are.

Moreover, I feel SV entrepreneurs should be far more polite and humble because they have a terrible track record of returning the favor: where is scribbd's iPaper's code? We all know it's built on top of OO, why can't OO contributors host their own Office docs on their own personal servers using iPaper from scribbd?

SV entrepreneurs are not a cohesive group. Neither are Europeans. It's just as ridiculous to say "Europeans are lazy" as it is to say, "entrepreneurs have a terrible track record". It's worse in the case of "Europe" because that's a group of groups. How about this: some people are lazy and some people thanklessly live off of other people's work.

Regarding iPaper, if they do build on top of OpenOffice -- which uses the LGPL -- they have a legal obligation to make their source available by request. If they don't, then I agree, those specific entrepreneurs are jerks.

I think it's wrong to think of "Italy" as so homogenous, the North and the South have very different work cultures. In the North, private enterprise and entrepreneurship are prized, in the South people just want a 9-5 job working for the government. This pattern is repeated across Europe, in Belgium for example the Dutch-speakers in the North are very much more economically active than the French-speakers in the South. In the UK the pattern is reversed North vs South but it is still very evident.

Reversed in Germany, too.

I guess it's just proximity to Switzerland that counts. ;)

Very true, but ... my experience is in northern Italy, and I still think the US has it beat in terms of the environment. In terms of the people, I might actually give the edge to Italy. Just that the productive ones are still bogged down in a very bureaucratic system, and even in northern Italy there are tons of people who home in on the Job For Life as the ultimate goal.

".... Many Italians are tremendously creative, industrious, inventive people, but are going to find it more difficult to express that in some form of business ..."

I think the problem with Italian business culture (and maybe a strength) is they have not evolved beyond family based businesses. But I can think of an Inventive Italian tech. company that has succeeded ~ http://tinker.it/ creator of the Arduino ~ http://www.wired.com/print/techbiz/startups/magazine/16-11/f...

I don't think the US and Europe can be generalized like this. I've never been to the US, but I can image that startups are a lot different in SV than in other cities. Same goes for Europe. For example, when talking about the "startup culture and mentality" the author provides only one example: Italy. But cultures are very different across europe, you can't just compare Italy with Spain, Germany and other countries.

Which is why 'the author' notes up front what his experiences are. Despite this, though, the author has traveled extensively throughout Europe, and while Oslo, Norway is certainly different from Braga, Portugal, the author feels that there is something of a common thread, even though the author realizes that the differences between, say, England, Portugal, and Slovakia are enormous, and far greater than, say, Vermont, Oregon and Texas.

On this topic, everyone, myself...err, 'the author' included, agrees that Europe is quite diverse. That said, do you think there are some commonalities that are applicable to "Europe"? If so, what are they?

What part of Western Europe has a great pro-business, startup friendly environment, then?

It's important to note the distinction between small businesses/startups and businesses. Everyone is "business friendly" when it comes to their Peugots, Fiats, Mercedes, GM's, Toyotas and so on. Where you really notice the difference is in small businesses.

It doesn't seem that taxes have much to do with innovation, because people will innovate no matter what country they live in. I agree that SV is a unique place that attracts talent, and it is probably easier to find investors there.

But you also have to think about all the legal costs of doing business in the US. The risk of lawsuits and patent trolls are much greater than in Europe. The benefits of low tax is probably not as important for a startup as the legal bills that they may have to pay if they are unlucky enough to be noticed by an unfriendly lawyer

I have read statistics that show that the number of lawyers per US citizen is many times greater than the number for most European countries. In Germany there are 593 people for each lawyer, while in the US there are only 265 people for each lawyer.

Source: http://wiki.answers.com/Q/What_country_in_the_world_has_most...

I think taxes aren't quite as important as long as they're only applied to actual profit. What hurts in "Europe" (standard disclaimer) are all the fees, paperwork and associated crap to do before you even get something off the ground, and that you have to keep doing over the life of the company.

I would personally like to nominate The Netherlands: good universities, internationally oriented, business friendly.

There is a lot of tech coming out of the Netherlands and we hear about it because their english is very good. There's a lot of tech inside Germany, France, Italy, etc obviously but most of it is in their mother tongue. Just a few links off the top of my head:

http://phusion.nl/ (Passenger) http://gitx.frim.nl/ http://www.quirksmode.org/

Does anybody have experience with the work environment in New Zealand?

4 weeks holiday / year + stats. Generally normal office hours (ie 40 hour week) are encouraged though depends on company and role, making friends with coworkers is normal, Friday drinks is standard possibly couple of beers provided at the office or head to a local together. I don't work weekends or evenings or work from home (ever) but you could find companies that encourage this workstyle if you want. Previous job it was totally acceptable to come to the office in shorts, t-shirt and jandles but some places have higher dress standards, now I just wear casual trousers and a shirt with buttons + collar.

Had a couple of trips to San Francisco last year (previous job @ startup), I prefer the balance in NZ as a long term lifestyle, though had a great time in SF too. I just think the work/life culture there is a little shortsighted, in NZ there is more emphasis on family & out of hours life. This is in Christchurch where I've worked for 1 small and 1 medium sized company since graduating.

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