
The State of European Tech 2016 - mxschumacher
http://www.atomico.com/state-of-european-tech/2016
======
kriro
Regarding salary. I think 45-50k Euro is a pretty decent entry level salary in
Germany if you're coming out of university (debt free) depending on the
region. That may look shocking compared to the SV numbers but you can live a
good life off 50k and a lot of the stuff will be taken care of (education of
your children, healthcare) which reduces the stress level quite a bit.

If you want to start a company, you'll face some social issues (failure is
considered failure) but the infrastructure is decent enough. The social issues
have changed a lot in recent years though. Anecdotally I feel like recruiting
good devs right out of universities is a lot easier if you're a typical
startup because many of the good developers will have fought the standard
curriculum of the java-bot and be rather happy to work in a more agile setting
(but still want to stay in their home country).

~~~
superuser2
Healthcare is absolutely taken care of for American six-figure tech workers.
My premium is $2.50/mo and all my care is free or for a nominal fee, like $20.
US healthcare _is_ systemically broken, but not for people who command high
wages.

Having kids in college is at _least_ 30 years out. Knowing that an expense 30
years away will be taken care of is better than the alternative, but would do
nothing for my stress level in the next ~20.

I don't buy that either of these things make any actual difference for an
early-career programmer.

Probably the most important thing is rent. I suspect most European cities can
offer a 1-bedroom apartment within 30 minutes of work by foot/public transit
for a much lower proportion of a developer's salary than SF can, even when
developer salaries are much lower. And in places not SF, $50k USD is not
particularly low for a developer salary.

~~~
hocuspocus
Peace of mind with healthcare isn't so much about one-off costs when you catch
a nasty flu. What happens if you're unable to work for months/years due to a
health issue? Will you be able to pay your expensive rent and other expenses
without worries?

Also you're a bit naive if you think raising kids will cost you only once they
go to college. If you compare direct (daycare, preschool) and indirect (like
moving to a good neighborhood) costs in the Bay area vs. a big European city,
the difference is easily 5 figures year. And then there are things like
parental leave.

But of course, as a 20-something you might not need these things.

~~~
superuser2
Then those (like rent, as I mentioned) are the much more compelling arguments.

If I'm unable to work for months, I'll have to draw down my emergency fund
(probably move somewhere cheap to slow the burn rate). If in Europe I don't
have to save for this, and can freely spend all of my paycheck, then that's a
huge benefit. Ditto with retirement, which takes ~15% off the top of American
salaries (unless you are irresponsible or in crisis so not saving for it).

Preschool is a valid point; moving to a good neighborhood is captured in rent.

I'm just saying healthcare and education aren't the interesting arguments.
Housing costs and socialized savings plans are.

------
lucaspiller
Direct link to PDF:

[http://www.atomico.com/downloads/state-of-european-
tech/atom...](http://www.atomico.com/downloads/state-of-european-tech/atomico-
state-of-european-tech-2016-full-report.pdf)

The slideshow won't go full screen for me, so it's next to useless.

------
swampthinker
Would be great if this was legible on mobile... Does anyone have a good
summary?

~~~
deepnotderp
First sentence is a great summary...

~~~
TeMPOraL
> _We’re excited to share the second edition of The State of European Tech
> report with you._

Ah, so they are excited.

~~~
deepnotderp
I meant the first sentence of OP's comment lol. "not visible on mobile"

------
freekh
Yeah, so this is a pr stunt. However there are many really good startup scenes
here in Europe in my experience. Stockholm is one of them: "everything" in the
heart and kids departments taken care of. Lots of ambition and talent.
Comparatively low vagues so less burn. Lacking VCs, but the startups that have
made it invest a lot here (time and money and mentoring). Compared to the
craze in sf, i would say this is the perfect place to start a small and
successful business. In particular in the b2b domain. So, if you can live with
being well off and not insanely rich, and looking to move out of the us - you
should give Stockholm a chance.

~~~
expertentipp
Sweet, how's the apartment rental market in Stockholm?

------
nec4b
You can ask yourself how many big companies that came into existance for
example in last 20 years are from the USA or from the EU. That tells you a lot
how vibrat the industry is on either side of the atlantic.

------
PunchTornado
why the need for bs like this in a study:

I see no limits to the ambition of young Europeans. We've broken the glass
ceiling etc.

Looks dumb to me. Just show me the data compared to American tech.

~~~
throwthisawayt
Wait...there was a glass ceiling preventing Europeans from creating companies
?

~~~
kuschku
Well, there were actual problems preventing people from creating companies.

Such as the 10'000€ minimum assets that were required for an Ltd. in Germany
until a few years ago. (The problem was basically: How do you handle a company
going bankrupt? The legislators said that any company should always have
enough assets to cover its liabilities. Obviously not compatible with the
snowball-scheme based startup scene).

~~~
matt_o
It's actually 25000 euros. This was somewhat fixed with the introduction of
the mini-GmbH (GmbH - something like Ltd.), but a mini-GmbH comes with some
extra strings attached, so it's still very far from a UK Ltd. or a US LLC in
terms of ease of setting up.

This is indeed an obstacle to creating a company, but there are quite a few
more, all having to do with just plain ol' bureaucracy (handling monthly tax
reporting, interacting with the tax authorities, handling insurance, etc.) The
previous issue of The Economist made a case that these bureaucratic problems
are even bigger in Italy.

I've recently been kicking around the idea that it's kind of weird that some
hard-hit places in the EU like Spain or Greece sport up to 50% unemployed
young folks (18-35) - these people are highly educated, just out of college,
eager to build/work and yet they are economically inactive. My theory is that
this is because it's hard to set up any sort of business activity due to the
bureaucracy. It's also socially discouraged because it's risky.

~~~
matt4077
There have always been options to start without capital requirements, usually
at the price of personal liability. The idea is that you need a bit of "skin
in the game" to protect vendors.

If you're in something like software and have no immediate plans for employees
or large investments you can get the bureaucracy done in 30 min. It's
literally a one-page form with address, name, purpose.

~~~
matt_o
Well, my "self-employement" form was actually 8 pages long and it featured a
lot more items than address, name, purpose and processing it took about 4
weeks. To be fair, I could start my business as soon as I sent that out, but I
could not invoice clients until I got the reply, which included my new tax
number. This is how it works in Germany. Add on top of that the mandatory
monthly VAT tax reporting.

That is a significantly higher cost of entry when compared with an Ltd/LLC,
not to mention a sole proprietorship.

~~~
matt4077
Here's the sole proprietorship form, it's actually one page:
[http://www.hamburg.de/Dibis/form/pdf/Formular-
Gewerbeanmeldu...](http://www.hamburg.de/Dibis/form/pdf/Formular-
Gewerbeanmeldung.pdf) – but obviously it depends a lot on the individual
circumstances (like the tax ID you need for cross-border transactions). VAT is
annoying, but it's only monthly if you're above 120000 Euro or so. We've
started only filling in our revenue (which I can get within a few seconds) and
file the tax we paid to suppliers with the yearly declaration. It's much
faster to do it all in one go.

~~~
matt_o
I had to fill out this form: "Fragebogen zur steuerlichen Erfassung" and I
have to report my VAT using the Elster system monthly, even though my VAT is
always 0 (my clients are all outside of the EU).

I went this way after consulting some other folks in Berlin and a tax
consultant that I found myself. I'm kind of surprised that there's a
different, easier way to go. Thanks for sharing the information.

------
wrong_variable
(cough cringe PR cough)

You could create similar optimistic charts for US, China, India, etc.

The EU ( 550 million ) tech industry is dwarfed by the US ( 350 million )

Looking from a higher abstract plane, EU produces the least new entrepreneurs
and innovative companies compared to the beast that is US and Asia.

The EU also has the most unstable political and financial system globally with
entire countries on the verge of defaulting on their sovereign debt.

The reason why every European developer migrates to London is to escape the
craziness of the continent.

Every European developer's final 'dream' is to work in the US tech industry -
London is the second best thing to reach.

(.. Money Talks .. )

You can see how much value that tech is given in europe by just looking at the
salaries in europe vs N.A - so much for valuing hard tech.

Seeing that both the US and Europe have similar numbers of developers (~ 3
mil) - how is european tech industry 1/8 the size of the US ??

Oversupply of developers due to better engineering school ? ( my sides )

More like MBAs from Cambridge are not as smart as their counterparts
graduating from Sloan in creating value out of tech.

\-- Not an American --- Direct experience with London and Berlin tech scene
---

~~~
jfaucett
Completely agree. I live in Europe, am a part of the tech scene, and am
sitting in the contitental craziness you speak of in Germany. This report is
largely nonsense.

It talks about "top research institutions" are in Europe, neglecting the
#1,#2,#4,#5, and #6 in the world are in the USA. [1]

Honestly, I have no idea why an investor would want to try to tackle this
nightmare of 30+ target markets, especially when you have huge homogeneous
markets in the USA and Asia.

1\. [http://www.topuniversities.com/university-
rankings/universit...](http://www.topuniversities.com/university-
rankings/university-subject-rankings/2016/computer-science-information-
systems)

~~~
cyberpunk
Hmm. I'd really like to hear more about how you see things if you've got the
time..

I'm about to exit london for .de simply because of quality of life concerns;
the 1000ft view I'm holding though is I'm pretty sure I'll be able to build a
crew there which will have fun working on difficult problems, and hopefully
even find a reasonable amount of 'stuff' to do (surely with internet access
and some good staff picks that could be applied almost anywhere in the world?)
-- while you're probably right in that the vast floods of VC cash won't be so
available there (I don't think the situ in london is much diff anyway) or that
things are more complex w/r/t markets; I'm not sure that I really care too
much about "30+" target markets when we're talking B2B hardcore geekery stuff.
We make an API to solve -some-random-hackernews_capable_consumer-problem- then
I'm not sure having a few diff VAT rules around .eu is anything more than some
extra time billed by my accountant..

What I'm more concerned about is the work/company culture differences there
which will probably at a minimum will prevent me whoring myself out for some
quick cash to fund my devs, should things get tight, and at a max make it much
harder to sell to Gmbh's there...

Are you in Germany? Ever worked with a German company or tried to integrate
your product with theirs? The vogons have a quicker moving bureaucracy, I was
really shocked. The crazy adherence to working hours, clocking in/out for
breaks and such even for senior technical staff creates a really strange
dynamic especially if you're used to letting your teams do whatever the hell
they want as long as you're delivering. This kind of free attitude to work
seems largely to only exist in London, at least to me -- and once you've
walked on the wild side it's hard to accept a master.. _shrug_

Germany may have excellent technical prowess in manufacturing and such; from
our side of the perspective though, so far to me at de $bigcorp it seems like
SAP, 2 week change windows, hour long discussions on what FTP client the
customer uses, J2EE, Oracle, monitored lunch breaks and some very
overqualified staff (call me 'dr') who aren't even interesting in moving
faster...

I guess there are a lot of startups there which follow a model more like what
we're used to, but after so long you're not going to be able to avoid working
with the vogons if you're selling them software they want to integrate with..

I'm not sure the majority view of big german businesses really even understood
what agile was pushing for.. Hopefully I'm wrong, I'll find out soon anyhow,
but things seem really fucking backwards compared to how we've been living
even in the relative backwater that's London....

What's your view?

~~~
passiveincomelg
I'm curious what this wild side is like. "letting your teams do whatever the
hell they want as long as you're delivering" sounds like working remotely from
a beach is common. Yet almost all job postings I see from companies in London
are on site. Or does it mean I can leave work after six hours on very
productive days?

~~~
cyberpunk
Well, as it goes, as often as I'm able to (sometimes it takes a while to
change the culture/gain enough trust to be left alone) I don't put _any_
requirements at all on attendance/appearence/sanity/whatever as long as
everything is being done and the team is performing. Nailed all the work for
the day before 12:00 and want to hit up the pub -- how could any sane person
stop you? Working remote makes you more productive and no one else on the team
feels you're just slacking, then go for it.

It's not some intentional psychological ploy or anything, but I've found that
people generally don't take the absolute piss if you let them manage
themselves totally (we are all adults, after all, and who the hell am I to
tell anyone how to handle themselves professionally as long as our obligations
are being met)

Sure, everyone has to get together sometimes, but being onsite and having a
normal lifestyle doesn't work for everyone, especially some of the 'top tier'
engineers I've had who tend to be a bit wild.. Pushing 'school rules' on
people just leads to them exiting, and it's no use kidding yourself that they
need you more than you need them.

One of the best engineers I ever had had some sort of really insane
drink/drugs lifestyle, he would drop commits in between 2-7am and they'd be
brilliant, then he'd vanish for a few days, and repeat. Did I depend on this
person completely for the whole project? No. But why should I care as long as
no one else is annoyed by this behaviour on the team, and the work was solid?

I've never had someone actually emigrate during a role, but often people would
go away for a few weeks and it wasn't a problem, again, as long as work is
being done.

I'm not really sure why this isn't the case everywhere, but as long as my
staff act like adults then they'll be treated as such. Onsite requirements are
usually a symptom of a lack of trust or an insecure lead.

~~~
passiveincomelg
That's when you are running a team, right? But it's not the norm to walk into
any corp in London as a devops/dev/whatever contractor and work like this.
There is no reason why you couldn't run a team that way in Berlin or anywhere
else in the world.

~~~
cyberpunk
Depends on your attitude really.

If you rock up to a client and immediately let them set any kind of
requirements on your life instead of having a "this is our goal, make it so!"
relationship then a subtle kind of power relationship has been created, where
they'll think it's acceptible to mandate employee rules on you like this.

If you're a contractor, then the corp you're whoring out to is _NOT_ your
employer and you must not let them act as such (this makes it worse for all of
us, not just you).

They're paying your buisness to do something for theirs, how you do that is
your business and yours alone. There's no need to be a total weirdo about the
whole thing and go off on one because they want you at a meeting at 10 some
day or whatever -- you have to be diplomatic and be mindful of the way you're
being percieved by the perm staff -- but generally I will not tolerate
requests from clients w/r/t anything like attendance outside of meetings,
dress code, general sobriety or whatever else which isn't impacting the
deliberables we're providing, and wouldn't attempt to push them on my staff
either (contract or not).

I've walked away from several really lucrative contracts because of this sort
of client behaviour and I don't regret that at all. Your clients aren't, and
never will be in control of you, you're there because they need you and they
should treat you with the respect an engineer with your day rate has earned..
_shrug_

Generally, this sort of attitude has been accepted in every contract I've had
in london in the last 5 years or so..

The secret is to get this point across very soon after, or even before,
starting the gig. Absolute confidence is probably rq too tho...

edit: butterfingers

~~~
passiveincomelg
Makes perfect sense, thanks. I think the situation here is very similar.
Telling a contractor when and where to work can get the client in legal
trouble ("Scheinselbstständigkeit", one of those lovely german words ;). How
that works out in practice probably depends on the company. If you work a gig
at Siemens it might be different than at a startup (that is funded well enough
to afford freelancers).

I only have experience with two big corps so far (keep coming back to the
second one ;), but I've seen quite a few contractors at both and some of them
were just plain flaky. That of course makes it worse for all of us as well,
wrt to clients tolerance for things like remote work, etc.

~~~
cyberpunk
Hmm.

I'll be in Berlin next week (I missed Nikolaus and I have some belated shoes
to fill; failing that though definately again around silvester)

If you're up for a beer or sixteen on me, I'd really find the insider scoop
useful on a more personal medium; I'm sure we could probably both get
something from it, at least the worst would be a lot of free beer!

You can find me on freenode as 'cyb3rpunk' (inside a shiny new irssi in some
tmux somewhere so might take me a while to respond) if you're up for it --
otherwise, prost!

~~~
passiveincomelg
Totally up for it! Will ping you on irc.

