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Comment by Fraterkes | Hacker News Reader

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.

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>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.

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