Seeing a lot of comments say (in one way or another) 'well duh, wages are lower in the EU' than they are in Silicon Valley.
But I don't know, if they'd laid off their EU staff instead this thread would be full of people saying it's just too expensive to be EU-based due to all the regulations and 'unnecessary' worker protection. In fact, there are many such threads on this brightly-colored website.
Maybe, if you feel inclined to post something like that, consider if you'd used pretty much the same reasoning if it were the other way round and reflect on that.
Yes, California salaries are more expensive than Europe. Yes Europe has more laws. There are trade offs.
If your business is boom/bust (lots of hire/fire) then Europe is expensive due to worker protections and smaller talent pool.
If your business has anything data based, or other high-regulation topics, Europe is expensive due to their regulations.
If your business just needs warm bodies to iterate on some codebase, Silicon Valley is expensive.
Or, in the case of Evernote, if you’re a Silicon Valley based company that doesn’t push the cutting edge and you lay off most employees AND you’re purchased by a European company that has European employees, maybe stay in Europe.
European regulations are expensive? Do you have data or a solid source for that?
I ask because I worked for European a company that set up a subsidiary in the US; the costs of US regulations was higher than we were used to. The biggest factor was some sort of insurance that we absolutely needed to cover things that might happen. I didn't even want to know the details, I wanted to write code, but I did notice that the total budget for lawyer stuff was high. Back home we had clear regulations and low uncertainty, in the US the uncertainty was higher and we needed insurance.
This can vary by industry. The US has very burdensome financial regulations but generally more lax privacy and speech regulations. So a fintech might be cheaper to operate with compliance in the EU but a social network might be cheaper to operate with compliance in the US.
For having set up businesses on both sides, Europe was more expensive in time wasted in paperwork. There is also a lot of old rules and weird fiscal policies. In the US setting up and running a business was relatively a breeze.
"The company says the step is intended to “boost operational efficiency and to make the most of the Bending Spoons employer brand, which is extremely strong in Europe.”
I do find surprisingly that they said that their brand is strong in Europe. Personally, I discovered Bending Spoons during the pandemic because they gifted the italian government of a Contact Tracing app, that ultimately never worked. I guess that from their point of view it was mainly a marketing initiative. However I don't see their brand as something to be considered strong in Europe in my perspective and by looking at their website the first thing that comes into mind is a glorified sort of software agency.
> I wonder if it's one of these cases where a company believes themselves to be bigger and more important than they really are.
I think that it's quite sure one of those cases. From their messaging it seems like they are committed to solve big hairy problems (that in my minds are things like AGI, nuclear fusion, stopping world's hunger, etc...), but when you look at their product portfolio the expectations they set certainly don't match the reality given that you'll find mobile apps for video and image editing, fitness, etc... BTW with the exception of Evernote (that it's not something they created) I've never heard of any of those apps.
Their website is very branding based. Pretty visuals. Headline "Impossible. Maybe". Cutting edge technology.
Product page is a video editor. A photo filter thing. A personal trainer phone program. Then some animations about how it's all very high tech.
Seems a bit of a disconnect between presentation and product to me. On the other hand they've raised ~400M and have a revenue of ~70M for ~400 employees, so it's possible that ostentatious marketing over uninteresting software works better than great software with a partial readme.
Bending Spoons is an Italian company. Most of their job postings are Milan, Italy, or fully remote, with the preference for those in between GMT-2 and GMT+3 time zones.
Assuming they want to continue Evernote as a product, I wonder if they laid off US and Chile stuff, because it was difficult to manage two teams in different time zones, or just it is cheaper to gather an equivalent EU-only team (Their entry-level positions are approx €50k/year, though the cost for the employer is higher).
Having been there, managing a development team with more than 2-3 hours difference is a real pain, especially if peak usage is not in the developers' time zone. It's almost always a cost saving measure (off shoring).
Add to that the exorbitant salaries of Bay area developers and it's pretty much a no-brainer. In my personal/anecdotal experience, Italian developers are about the same as US developers, even if Italian management is a different story;-)
The thing that is never said about remote, is that a lot of employers work with employees that are neither very good nor motivated.
Now you could say that it's a management problem, that as to be solved.
But meanwhile, this is the situation right now.
And employees that are not very good nor motivated are not very productive remotely, and are difficult to manager from a distance or with time zone differences.
>The thing that is never said about remote, is that a lot of employers work with employees that are neither very good nor motivated.
Nothing to do with remote. In-office companies are also filled with people who are not good nor motivated, but need to be there because they have to eat and pay rent/mortgage, and that job was their best option.
For most workers, remote or otherwise, unless they have significant skin in the game in terms of sizable equity, their job is just a paycheck and they'll optimize for doing as little work as possible, for the biggest paycheck possible.
Companies only push for in-office work to better surveil and micromanage workers, thinking in-office builds attachment to the work and workplace, not to motivate people more. You motivate people with money, equity, time off and interesting work.
Meh, workers do also slack off in the office a lot: water cooler breaks, coffee breaks, smoking breaks, browsing memes social media on the toilet for half an hour, reading Reddit and HN on the work PC for half a day, catching up on the latest sports-ball events with the coworkers, walking to the restaurant and back for lunch, etc.
If people are not motivated to do their job, they'll slack off anywhere, it's just that employers would rather have you slack off in the office instead.
The fact you are telling me this let me think you are coming from a theoretical perspective, but that you have not, in fact, managed such people yourself.
Sure, but if grown up adults need to be in the office with someone watching over their shoulder and micromanaging them to make sure they get their work done on time and aren't slacking off, maybe you hired the wrong people or you're bad at managing.
You can motivate and manage people effectively even remotely if you do it right, and you can also catch slackers remotely as well since all these daily standup meetings and SW tools devs are using give you a good insight into who's making progress and who's not.
If you can't manage people remotely (provided they're also of the same culture and Time zone) then you probably can't manage them correctly in the office as well.
Some people get more motivated when being around others, these are the type that come in even if allowed to work remotely.
Others are more productive when home, able to better focus, these are the type that never come in if avoidable.
Obviously these are the extremes, most people I've met fall somewhere in between.
Notice how slacking off doesn't really come into the picture? That's because there are thousands of ways to avoid working, and thousands of ways to make sure work gets done. Doesn't really matter where you are physically, at least not for creative and autonomous roles like engineering.
Indeed, entry level positions in Italy are much lower in general, but that's what Bending Spoons advertise on their website [1]. Milan is an expensive city, the average wage 2.5x the national average, and they're kind of a cool employer, so I suppose they can be more selective.
Not sure what currency you have in mind, but I'm in Europe and I know it is. In fact, I just checked and it is a meagre €26k according to Glassdoor (median). I don't know why that is. First thought would be that European countries' economies are still mostly based on old industries and so the value of software isn't as big here? I'd like to know.
Salaries just aren't as a large by default the average dev salary for an experienced in the US is 100k. In the UK for example it's about 35k GBP. Germany about 50k EUR.
Entry-level in Germany is 35-40k for a developer. I hear that italy has lower salaries. France might have higher.
Median salary for all software developers in Germany (not just experienced) was 64.584€ in 2021 and should have risen quite a lot with current inflation by now.
A UK average takes in all the various spots. Like Manchester is about 50k. London about 80-90k. But all those small little companies with developers in the middle of nowhere bring the average down. Then all the digital agencies paying pennies brings the average down.
I had a remote contract in the UK at the start of the year that was 80k. So I know good pay is available but I also have an inbox full of 24-40k a year roles from recruiters.
Don't forget that software engineers in the states tend to work more hours. For instance it's unlikely you're getting more than ~32 hours / week out of a German software engineer on average, due to caps on working hours and paid days off.
That puts the upper limit below what is likely to be the average in the states. Obviously this doesn't translate perfectly into productivity, but it is something you may want to keep in mind as an employer.
> Don't forget that software engineers in the states tend to be much less productive than their German counterparts, to continue on your example.
As a German software engineer I've got to ask: are we?
> They're not paid overtime, because they're not paid by the hour.
If you're not compensating them for the overtime, then you're taking those hours away somewhere else, i.e. giving them time off.
In my contract, which is less than "full time", I get paid for overtime up to 40 hours / week. Eventually anyhow if I didn't compensate the hours somewhere else.
> As a German software engineer I've got to ask: are we?
One thing I noticed about German office culture (I worked with a bunch of multinationals) is that there's much less chit-chat and more focus on the work to be done, relatively to Anglosphere (Irish/Uk at least) office culture.
I could certainly see how this would lead to approximately the same output even with less hours.
>Don't forget that software engineers in the states tend to be much less productive than their German counterparts,
F to doubt. I'm not some jingoist but it seems obvious to me that if Germans were more productive then I'd be able to name at least one FAANG tier company based on Germany.
That's not how developer productivity works. US has more FAANGs than Germany because they have a lot more money, and because the ones with the money (investors and VCs) are a lot more likely to invest it in starting SW companies than in Germany where investors are a lot more conservative with their money and don't take any risks.
So me pointing out that there are no FAANGs is reductive but claiming 32 hours is peak productivity isn't being reductive? Hmmm.
I hate to break it to you but productivity is measured not by wishful thinking but by capital markets. If German devs were more productive then capital would move to Germany.
No, it's because you're massively confusing capital accumulation with worker productivity and you boiled your argument down to "that neighborhood is full of McMansions, while the other neighborhood is full of slums, therefore that neighborhood must be full of hard working productive people and the other must be full of lazy bums who aren't as productive otherwise they'd also have McMansions too".
Capital accumulation is much more than worker productivity, it depends on historical factors, the local banking sector, time in the market, investor mentality and risk taking, local laws and regulations for both workers and investors, and most importantly taxes, both on workers and on investors. Worker efficiency is only a small part of that. As a productive worker I have no control of the other factors that attract investors to my city/country like political instability, corruption, geography, wars on my border, banking, taxes and laws.
> You're massively confusing capital accumulation with worker productivity.
No I think it's you who is confused about the difference between capital, which can be moved, is fungible, and property (like mcmansions). The whole point, literally the whole point, of capital markets is enabling people to move their money opportunistically in a way that's impossible with property.
> it depends on historical factors, the local banking sector, time in the market
Do you realize you're talking about Western Europe here and not like some developing nation? And Bavaria no less? Like I wouldn't be at all surprised if some of the extant banks in the area go all the way back to knights of templar.
> As a productive worker I have no control of the other factors that attract investors to my city/country like political instability, corruption, geography, wars on my border, banking, taxes and laws.
Again, Western Europe, not LA or subsaharan Africa or whatever. Germany is without a doubt top 5 in terms of both stability and lack of corruption.
You missed out on important factors like different investor behavior, consumer spending behavior, taxes, laws and regulations, national scale and language barrier, for your anecdote.
For example, if your wealthy Bavarian "Knights Templar" money investor (who probably isn't as wealthy as US VCs, but we'll gloss over that), can make more money through real estate investments, why would risk it all and take a gamble on some risky tech start-up in a country that has more bureaucracy, higher taxes, more workers' protections, smaller scale than the US, conservative consumer who still use cash, etc.? It's too risky to invest in tech here, compared to the US, even if you were wealthy investor.
Germany along with any other wealth European country, and the US aren't remotely comparable in the tech markets to draw the conclusion that because Germany doesn't have FAANGs it's because its workers can't be as productive as the US ones, when there's so may other factors I enumerated above at play that impact the tech sector.
You rant is just not a valid argument for this position.
This is dissembling by picking the metric that measures literally the exact opposite of productivity. SAP has the same number of employees (more?) as eg FB but its net income is 1/10th.
I guess not (honestly don't know) but if there aren't then that seems to be more evidence in favor the idea that American devs are more productive, not less.
I don't think companies reach "FAANG tier" due to national average developer productivity. It's far more about the business culture than the developers.
You're getting around 34 hours per week for German employees assuming they don't get sick. US employees in these tech companies either get unlimited time off or generous vacation time anyways, and in average I doubt they take less than 15 days off a year (versus 25 per law in Germany). I don't know how many public holidays you get in the US per law, if any, but still --- the wages in the US are basically double what you'd get in Germany, so I don't think this day difference would justify it.
After having worked they my US colleagues for over a year now, I can safely say: Americans have more time off than people in Northern Europe. They more public holidays, contractually they have more vacation time, because it's assumed that the vacation required by law in Europe is always very high, so when your country falls below that expectation, then you easily end up with tech companies being more generous in the US.
Seriously? In eg Finland the legal minimum is 5 weeks and it's very common for people to take a month off in summer. I've yet to see a US company that matches that ("unlimited" vacation doesn't count), much less one where it's normal for people to completely disconnect for a month.
Same in Denmark, technically 25 days, because weekends, but my American colleagues get 30 days. 25 is absolute minimum and most companies will give you 5 days extra, but the accounting is different from the 25 days required by law. That means you can't transfer them to a new employer, they are accounted for in a different cycle than first 25 and the employer can technically tell you when to use them, say between Christmas and New Years, or one of the in-between days in the public holidays in spring. Most just let you use them whenever, if you're an office worker.
I in the US but I work for a (private) university. I get 27 personal days per year and we have 11 public holidays per year. Each year of service my personal days goes up by a few hours a month.
Most software engineer position in Germany have around 30 if they're at all competitive on the market. In total you get around 220 days where they actually work, vs. 260 days you're paying them for (assuming no sick days).
That's not my experience! I'm currently on a very competitive on the market company (I'm paid way more than most devs I know), but since it's an American company and they can't offer unlimited time off in Germany by law, it seems the amount of days was an afterthought and they just went for 25.
I agree this isn't really it, but I'm finding it a bit hard to square 25 days off a year with the fact that every European I've ever worked with has been on vacation the entire month of August, except the British, and they do all right too. Although come to think of it I think I have not worked with Germans.
As an American doing cybersecurity in a non-tech industry, I work about 45 hours a week and get 10 days of vacation, 5 sick days, 7 holidays, and 5 floating holidays (basically vacation) per year. I could take it all, but that would be culturally weird and possibly career limiting. If I were at a FAANG I would expect significantly more hours per week with more vacation time and fewer holidays, but it works out to the same expectation that I would take about 15 days per year including sick days and holidays.
1. there is a humongous difference between remote work in (roughly) the same time zone and fully distributed work across the globe
2. having non EU employees as a EU company without having a daughter company in the country the employees are in, without them moving to the EU during the employment, without them being self employees/free lancers it a complete nightmare to get legally right. Worse a nightmare which not only changes between any country pairing (different EU countries have different employment laws) in case of the US might even change depending on the US state.... AFIK all companies either only hire freelancers, do have non-EU daughter companies, do hire through a proxy firm (there are firms exactly for this, but there are their own legal mess), or do it not fully legally right. At the same time having a US daughter company also comes as a cost (many a way more complex legal structure). And all of this method still have high book keeping/complexity/fee cost.
3. legal hassles of data protection and having e.g. sys admin outside of the EU (and in case of dev ops that can easily extend to large parts of the team depending on how it was implemented).
So from a business POV it can make a lot of sense, especially if they plane to mostly milk Evernote.
Through without question it has a very high potential for disruption of Evernote development and operation.
> approx €50k/year, though the cost for the employer is higher
yes WAY higher, and you also pay a good amount of the 50k in taxes but together this then covers pension, unemployment and health insurance around 20 payed vacation days and additional payed holiday days, various child benefits if you have one depending on country and in most cases reasonable employee and employer rights and protections trying to avoid power abuse in both directions (through mainly protecting the employed person).
I can't imagine a similar position would cost 50k in Chile. Also, offering remote in EU gives you access to places like Romania, Slovakia or Bulgaria, where you can get good enough talent for half of that.
It can also be 100% of the sum and just use them as contractors (with benefit of quick & easy firing if needed, no lengthy HR dances).
Simultaneously on the HN front page: Evernote acquirer Bending Spoons laying off people, and a story about the original spoon-bender Uri Geller and his impact on the world.
I've never used any of the fancy features of Evernote (web clipping, OCR, etc), but I have a lot of notes still left in it. I'm gradually moving them all over to google docs finally. The main advances in recent years for google docs that now make this viable:
- Checkbox lists
- Pageless view
- Offline editing in the mobile app
I'll miss the lack of some organizational features in Evernote, but I don't want to ever move the notes again and google is the only service I feel like I don't have to question its longevity. (Apple notes aren't a good solution for me because I'm in Windows too much.) I also plan on doing occasional archive downloads via Google Takeout.
I'm a paying user of Evernote and have a lot of notes in it. I vaguely fear the moment that Evernote will throw the towel. I tried to orient what would be an affordable, future-safe alternative, but I haven't found any.
The fact that I can create notes from mobile and desktop, with integration into the browser are my main requirements.
I've been using Foam for the last 6 months or so, it's very simple but I find it pretty effective and it's pleasant to edit notes with the same tool I edit code with.
However the only compatible mobile app I've found is GitJournal. It's well designed but unfortunately hopelessly buggy.
I think for work (where I always just use my laptop) I'll keep using Foam but for personal notes I'm planning to try out Joplin.
> I tried to orient what would be an affordable, future-safe alternative, but I haven't found any.
I think it would be OneNote. But if you really wand to future proof your data, I think nothing beats using Obsidian on top of a bunch of folders in a cloud drive.
I am all-in on Apple and I replaced Evernote with iCloud Drive, Notebooks.app, Obsidian and EagleFiler all pointing to the same "vault" folder. While on mobile I just use the regular Files app to browse the iCloud Drive. It's much less convenient than just using Evernote, and that's exactly Evernote's greatness.
But the Obsidian iOS app forces you to use the default iCloud location for your vault folder, which cannot easily be accessed by other apps even on Desktop due to the strange macOS/iOS permissions. For example, if memory serves, Chrome on desktop will not generate .webloc files there by dragging and dropping the URL from the address bar (although Safari will).
For my use case, I do not do much note creation while on mobile, so it's enough to use iOS Files app with a bunch of favorites.
I've switched to Obsidian two years ago and I am 100% happy with it. All my notes and attachments are stored in iCloud, Obsidian works great on all Apple devices and even Windows. There is no browser integration AFAIK, but I might be wrong - there are tons of third-party plugins. I love the fact that all my notes are Markdown files - gives me peace of mind.
Joplin has served me well as an Evernote replacement. If by integration with the browser you mean snipping content then I think it meets your requirements.
I'm from Denmark (which, admittedly, I understand is on the lax side of things as far as Europe goes), but I can't see what would stop you. If you want to close your company or office for strategic purposes, you just say so and fire the people as per the terms of their contract, which'll mean three months notice in most cases. Same with cutbacks, you can just do it. You can't fire someone without notice or for no reason, but "we don't need this work to be done here anymore" is of course a perfectly valid reason. At least that's my impression.
> fire the people as per the terms of their contract
That's not possible in much of Europe. For example, in Ireland, you can't fire someone without cause, regardless of notice period. If the position is being made redundant (and you can prove it, which in this case, where you're moving the role to a different country would be easy to do), then you can let them go, but you have to pay them a statutory severance payment (as well as anything else specified in their contract).
EDIT: There might also be a language barrier going on with the terminology here: when I read the word "fire" in this case, I generally take it to mean "to be dismissed from the role for cause".
I don't really think you're contradicting me? If you, as a company, want to get rid of a group of staff because you think you're spending too much money on wages, you phrase that in a more palatable way, probably involving the word "strategic", and you give them what they're owed according to their contract. That sounds very straight-forward to me.
The thing that's possible in America and arguably not possible in Europe is to just show someone the door on the spot. And sure, it's easy on companies if they're able to just put a post-it on the door one morning that tells your now former employees they can go home because you don't want to pay them anymore. But I don't think what you're describing can reasonably be termed "not possible".
EDIT - Point taken about the terminology. I'm talking about any sort of "you won't be working here anymore" situation.
> The thing that's possible in America and arguably not possible in Europe is to just show someone the door on the spot.
Spaniard here. It's possible, it's just more expensive: the employer has to pay them the salary for the next 15 days --so it's like: "you will be fired in 15 days, but you must go home now"-- and the mandatory compensation for the years worked (33 days per year worked, up to 2 years compensation).
"The thing that's possible in America and arguably not possible in Europe is to just show someone the door on the spot."
It's only sort of possible in America. If you are laying people off (for economic reasons, not cause) then federal law requires 60 days notice. This is enforced civilly however, so if a company is going bankrupt they may ignore it because there will be no one left to sue.
An employee laid off that way will be eligible for unemployment benefits, which is a form of insurance payout, not public assistance. What we don't require is severance. Most companies that are not going away will do something like 1-2 weeks severance pay per year of service because they want people to not sabotage anything on the way out and for new employees to continue to be willing to work for them, but it's legal to just pay people for time worked and give them the boot.
See my edit, I think this is just a confusion of terminology. I wouldn't really refer to someone whose position being made redundant as "getting fired", there's very different procedures to be followed and it has very different implications.
>I'm from Denmark (which, admittedly, I understand is on the lax side of things as far as Europe goes), but I can't see what would stop you.
Same in Austria, which has a very un-European business-friendly approach to terminations. You can fire anyone anytime without a reason, unless your company is big enough and has a unionized worker's council willing to stand up to terminations and ask for precise reasons (usually factory style jobs).
But no SW companies usually do, so you can get terminated on the spot for no reason, with you taking your notice period as garden leave without the employer having to pay you with severance or any other compensation. It's pretty similar to the US in this regard.
Well for one, you'd have to actually pay the employees in Denmark per the contract. They can't just not pay. If they don't pay they'll be declared bankrupt by the workers income insurance(lønmodtagernes garantifond) and the owners will be last in line to get anything. As a counter example see Twitter where employees still haven't received their three month severance.
Yeah, it's the same in Norway. You need justification to fire an individual employee, but it's not hard to close down your entire business, do cutbacks etc. for business reasons. It doesn't seem unlikely that it's much harder to do this in southern europe though.
USD 100 million in recurring revenue and 250 million locked in customers [0] is not all that bad an outlook. It would likely rather take exceptional mismanagement to squander it.
The locked-in part is what will screw them. People arent going to stick around with a smallfry version of Computer Associates. They'll find a way to migrate out, and they'll have an SGI final arc soon enough.
Even with taxes you can be around 100k, middle/eastern europe has a lot of good developers. And if you pay EU contractors, it can be pretty tax efficient for company
