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).
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).