I would love to see some research on the factors that contribute to this. Work culture? Leadership culture? Rigor in interviewing process? Education? There has to be a reason US tech employees are 5x-10x as "productive". What are we doing differently?
There are several factors, but let's not forget that some of these companies have gotten so productive with some shady practices.
Would Facebook have become the Facebook we all know and love today if it had started in Europe? Probably not, because local legislators as well as the public would have said "whoa, we're not doing THAT!" I mean, Belgium outright banned Facebook from collecting data a few years ago, and there are other cases as well.
Companies such as Intel and Microsoft have been repeatedly fined, and it's not hard to see how they would have ben prevented getting in such a position in the first place if they had been started in Europe.
Now, according to some viewpoints profit and size is everything; I've seen this expressed on HN a few times with comments such as "all tech giants are American, Europe is shit", but what this misses is the question if we're really better off with all these tech giants in the first place, because to be honest I'm not so sure that we are. I think quite a few Europeans would see the existence of these companies as a failure of the American system, rather than a success.
So part of the reason is that the US allows for some business practices that would be very difficult (or outright illegal) if a company would be EU-based.
There was a discussion about this a couple weeks ago [0]. SV (and presumably by extension other US firms) give engineers authority to make their own decisions. UK/EU firms do not, preferring to manage everything with non-technical managers and give the engineers specific tasks.
Academic research shows that US multinationals consistently lead in adapting the best corporate management practices of any major country.[1]
Germany and Scandinavia come in a distant second, with Southern Europe falling significantly behind. The disparity in IT-intensive industries is particularly large.[2]
This is true even when comparing the productivity of workforces within the same market. I.e. European who work for American multinationals tend to be more productive than those who work for local multinationals. The short answer is that American management culture is really world-class. And, I think in software in particular, good management is a major force multiplier in terms of output and execution.
It's economic productivity, not worker productivity - so it has more to do with the circumstances of the company in the market than the employees.
The companies are bigger with much larger market share (often a significant fraction of the Earth's population) and benefit from the economies of scale that go with that - it's not like Facebook needs a million times more employees than a tiny web service a fraction of its size - tech work benefits massively from scale.
I'd argue the USA has these large companies for various reasons (the start-up environment with lots of VC money, supportive universities etc.) and dominates Europe because Europe doesn't engage in protectionism.
In Russia and China, where protectionism is much more common, the American tech giants are nowhere near dominant and they have their own local giants with Baidu, Yandex etc.
I would like to see numbers which would compare the 'normal' IT market from US with the normal IT market from Europe.
No one can beat Companies like Google, MS, Amazon.
Even a company like Facebook which basically does nothing useful earns so much money just because it was the social media platform which was early enough and one.
And with Google and similiar companies having the money year over year to hire the best people puts them even further at the edge.
It is not magic to be market leader in a market as young as it.
