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Comment by landl0rd | Hacker News Reader

Calviño is the wrong choice to lead this. Why not tap a few people from Mistral if they care about AI? Spotify if they care about more generic tech?

Funding will not fix the fact that euro salaries are not even remotely competitive especially after tax. Maybe it’s better to be poor in europe than America but MLEs at large AI labs and bigtech SWEs are definitively not.

Plus, capital is somehow still more risk-averse in the EU despite the ECB's policy rate consistently running >200bps lower than fed funds. And of course the process of getting funds from the EIB remains agonizing even with this change.

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I hear these salary comparisons a lot, but when I was studying at the most popular Dutch technical university none of the future SWEs I talked to where even considering moving to the US (this was back when there was an excess of swe jobs everywhere). There's not much of a braindrain of engineers as far as I can tell, European engineers are not vastly less impressive than their American counterparts, and the people running succesfull startups in the US do not posess any particular brilliance.

All of which is to say, I don't think lack of Software Engineering talent is the problem.

>There's not much of a braindrain of engineers as far as I can tell

Not in your bubble: top university in the tax heaven EU country with some of the most US companies. Of course those grads can just stay and get FANG jobs there but not everyone comes from the NL.

>the people running succesfull startups in the US do not posess any particular brilliance

Their advantage is easier access to more capital than those in the EU. Capital helps with success even more than skills. Hence why the US has more big successful companies than Europe.

Big successful companies in USA aren’t big just because of better access to capital. It’s easier to create a monopoly there without major consequences for the business. Europe has no interest in having such businesses, as was demonstrated by DMA.

> Europe has no interest in having such businesses

That's objectively false. EU would love to have its own monopolistic companies in the tech sector the same way it has in other sectors. It's only against them because it has none.

> as was demonstrated by DMA

Europe's DMA is orthogonal to its wishes of having monopolistic companies as all of those companies are American not European.

Objective statements require some evidence. Are you referring to evidence elsewhere in the conversation or have you forgotten to include it?

Like I previously wrote, the evidence is the monopolistic-style European companies that exist in different sectors than software.

Can you give an example of a European consumer-oriented business being a monopoly in the EU? When it was founded? How is it regulated?

First of all, I'm not in a bubble, those don't exist. Secondly, if your assesment is remotely true, shouldn't every european software engineer be moving to the netherlands to work at these mythical FANG locations? Has that happened?

>First of all, I'm not in a bubble, those don't exist.

Why do you think bubbles don't exist. People's perception of reality is shaped by their own experience within their immediate proximity and network of people.

> Secondly, if your assesment is remotely true, shouldn't every european software engineer be moving to the netherlands to work at these mythical FANG locations? Has that happened?

A lot of EU people used to move to the NL for tech jobs at big US companies like Uber. Obviously the NL can't house every single person from EU as evident from the NL's housing crisis, nor is every EU worker willing to relocate to NL.

I was just trolling, sorry. Bit of a bad mood yesterday

I'm in the bubble where probably the most engineer brain drain of any bubble (VC early stage). My observation is that the brain drain is... moderate. Huge, huge brain drain of startup founders. But of engineers? A tendency towards risk aversion and a preference for stability nixes that in my experience. I know some specialists who hopped over to the Bay in pursuit of the niche and lucrative jobs that their specialism rewards. But for most run-of-the-mill software engineers, I really haven't seen anyone fleeing to the bay for more money.

I guess I wouldn't call startup founders leaving "brain-drain" necessarily.

The cost of living is smaller in most countries in the EU, though. Also, most get free healthcare and free higher education, so it evens out considering these benefits

> Calviño is the wrong choice to lead this

Will Calviño be picking and choosing the grantees?

This isn't the point. More knowledgeable people at lower levels can help. But when leadership lacks domain expertise it's very hard to know what to do or not do, what will help and won't. She could be smart and lean heavily on industry experts but that still makes her the wrong choice to lead it when one of them could have done so better.

This is the equivalent of private equity installing someone who knows nothing but MBA material at a biotech company or a ML research company or anything else where domain expertise can actually help.

The EU is actually better at bringing in bits of "technocracy" to let industry experts lend their expertise. I don't know why they are doing that here. I think it's the wrong call.

Elon Musk lacks domain expertise given how he asked to rewrite Twitter stack to the devs after it was bought

If you're talking about the domain of startups and companies themselves though, I'll give you that

> Elon Musk lacks domain enterprise

What does this mean? I can't parse it.

Sorry, I meant expertise not enterprise

Ah, okay. I still don't quite know what it means. He clearly has something, as he's launched/run various successful and wildly innovative companies.

I think that's different to someone allocating public funds well. In my very limited experience of that in the UK, the people involved were completely unaware of what to do, and were convinced by salespeople and partisan semi-internal contractors with a bias. If Elon Musk wants to risk his own money on an internal decision at Twitter, so be it. That's a lot better than risking somebody else's money forcibly extracted from their pockets.

Knowledge of the domain he launches company of. I'll give him that he's great at launching and probably managing companies, he's still not an expert in the technical side of the field his companies operate in

I answered because the guy above me complained about lack of domain expertise

Ah yes I understand. I think for me the difference isn't just domain expertise, although it is a little bit. It's more whose money you're risking. If investors want to give Elon Musk some of their money to try something, I don't care, as it's not my money to lose.

His domain expertise is running a high performance engineering team. I think he has a good record of that.

I don’t remember mentioning Musk once in my comments. He’d also be a poor choice. They should stick with a european who understands the challenges of start-up high tech in europe.

I am in fact talking about start-ups and tech as a domain. That’s the area at issue so they should hire euros who understand those challenges well to fix them.

You don't see why it might not be a good idea to give leaders in for-profit companies like Mistral or Spotify the keys to billions of dollars in funding?

It's a much better idea to give it to people who actually have experience turning financial investment into a valuable technological product than giving it to bureaucrats with no such experience.

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