
Startups and Work: Europe vs the US - mqt
http://journal.dedasys.com/2008/12/13/startups-and-work-europe-vs-the-us
======
ews
I live and work in the Bay Area. Coming from Spain, where I was born and began
my career in an US company, I have to say that the situation is _very_
different that what is pictured here (and in the 'Joy of vivre' entry): Spain
and other southereuropean or Mediterranean countries have a big combination of
emotions and impulses that make them think they are not productive enough. To
solve this, they apply a patch consisting or working more hours (in Madrid,
people usually work 9-7 the least (and surprisingly at bigger companies such
Google and Yahoo! it could be even more)) without understanding that working
more is not working better or more productive. Being alienated with this
working hors, most Spaniards rely on playing solitaries or youtubing on their
terminals until the time to leave the office, feeding the vicious cycle all
over again.

The managers in Spain don't trust their employees. Knowing this, employees
optimize their time to do the least possible for not being fired.

In my experience, I have a far better life working in San Francisco. I usually
go to work at 12-1pm, come back around 6 or seven and hack some hours in the
late evening/early morning. I work at least once per day (usually two) and
have as many vacations day as I had in Spain (actually some more days) with
the possibility of non paid vacations or working from Europe when I visit my
family.

I have seen this with many other engineers expatriated from Europe and
relocated into the Bay Area. Besides being with like minded individuals, in
this city I am relaxed enough and know the company trusts me enough to keep me
working way more motivated, at nearly the fullest of my capacity.

~~~
ardit33
well I can tell you for sure that is only a San Francisco/Bay area thing. I
lived in the east coast (Boston), and have many friends that live in NYC, and
the culture is very different over there. If you are not in by 9 am., it looks
bad. Even if you are done with your work, and more, or can't be any more
productive, you still have to stay in to put your hours.

You feel extra guilty just for asking a couple of hours off to go to the
dentist or fix your car. etc. etc. Management doesn't trust you for sure, and
half of the sites or the internet are blocked.

If you work in the financial industry, you can't use any external/personal
email, im, or whatever. My company even disabled SMS from company phones.

Yes, it can be that bad even in the US.

So, what you discribing, as rolling in a 10-11am is ok, is just a California
thing, and most importantly a startup world thing, so don't generalise it for
the whole US.

~~~
jbjohns
Looks like you have it ok in NY as well. I worked in the south in a "right to
work" state. The base hours were 45 and you were expected to _be in your desk_
by 7:30. They had automatic badge readers on the door which when unlock when
your badge got within a few feet of it. One of the executives was using the
data from these to see when people were coming in and wanted to start
punishing people for clocking in after 7:25. He figured you needed 5 minutes
to get in your desk.

All internet was disabled by default. If your job absolutely required
something you would need to go through red tape to get the specific site you
need turned on.

Vacation was 1-2 weeks _after_ you finished your first year, 3 weeks after 7
years and 4 weeks after 15.

~~~
gojomo
If you cannot name the employer, can you at least say their industry, or
whether they have thrived versus competitors (including competitors from other
regions) with such policies?

~~~
jbjohns
I can't name either (because saying the sector and how successful they are
would be saying who they are). As far as success; they are miles ahead of
their nearest competitor.... in the US. They only do well in places that allow
one to abuse labor.

------
old-gregg
I don't really have an opinion one way or another, simply because I'm not
multi-cultural enough (haven't seen much of European office life).

All I can look at is what has been done over the years on both continents.
First of all, not much, we all appear to be living off achievements of
previous generations mostly funded by the military in fear of WWIII. "Internet
revolution" actually started in the 60s and was pretty much complete by the
end of the 80s when I, as many of you, was still in middle school. Operating
systems, compilers, protocols, all these basic building blocks all belong to
that era and nobody contributed anything significant on top of them. "5th
generation computing" was supposed to be The Shit but it didn't happen. AI
didn't happen. So... fundamentally, I don't see anything significant coming
out of either culture: yes, computers got smaller and cheaper, not a big deal
- they were supposed to.

Now, looking at lesser degree improvements in the past 10-15 years, US has
produced nothing (well... RMS being a human is not a program, be he can be
considered a product of the US), but Europe did real-world-start the open
source movement saving UINX in process and producing a free alternative to
expensive RDBMS (MySQL). Europe, don't forget, was also responsible for WWW
itself. Paul likes to talk about "how much cheaper it is to start a company
these days". Yes cheaper indeed, - mostly because of those three developments
(Linux/MySQL/Web). They are nice additions on top of the fundamentals
delivered by Americans in the 60-70s, but hey - they have _nothing to do_ with
entrepreneurs.

Call me a skeptic or even an asshole but the picture I am seeing isn't pretty:
there are thousands of smart and involved folks who love computers and who's
been the real force behind all these wonderful improvements we've seen, _they
are the people who make the difference_. On the other hand we have
"entrepreneurs" who's done nothing but milking that other group, producing
largely irrelevant, secondary BS of questionable value (which gets duplicated
by Chinese and Russian companies in a matter of weeks). Yes, SV offers a very
favorable climate for this kind of individuals to strive, but I doubt this has
anything to do with economic prosperity of a nation or with any metric of
"awesomeness" worth arguing about: 99.95% of the time, the code running on an
average CPU of an average server of an average SV startup has been written for
free by someone from US/Europe/whatever. Entrepreneurs don't make anything.
They only find ways to deliver results of other people's work/research to mass
markets. Hardly a noble role, yet not completely useless.

Le Webs, TechCrunch 50s don't matter. These drunk assholes on stage don't
matter. They don't code, don't know shit about computers and Internet and
their main function there is to promote their personal brands/blogs.
Entrepreneurial spirit of Silicon Valley doesn't matter. That's just a thin
buildup on top of something significantly bigger and more important: millions
of true computer lovers firing up vim/emacs/visual studio every day, coding
for free, for that "Internet Love" that got featured on YouTube earlier today.

~~~
delano
I can't make a claim as to whether entrepreneurship is noble but it's far more
than "not completely useless".

Let's continue with your example. We have millions of true computer lovers
coding for free. Let's expand that to include people pursuing their passion in
any field for free. Now what? Now we have a collection of high-quality, but
isolated research and tools.

How do I use this research and these tools to solve my problems? How do I use
them to solve other people's problems? By putting in time and effort to
connect the dots. That's what entrepreneurs do at their best: they bring
existing things together to make something new _to solve other people's
problems_. Where are these computers lovers firing up IDEs, eager to solve my
problems for free?

And that's my point: craft and entrepreneurship go hand in hand. They're both
better off by the presence of the other.

~~~
old-gregg
I guess the point I was trying to make was this: 99.99% of the code running on
"web 2.0 server" somewhere in California is GPL/LGPL stuff, good part of which
originates from Europe. Therefore it's very foolish of us to even hint that
"Europeans are lazy" or inferior in _any_ way. Google, Yahoo and Sun might not
be from Europe, but Linus, Guido, DHH and thousands less famous are.

Moreover, I feel SV entrepreneurs should be far more polite and humble because
they have a terrible track record of returning the favor: where is scribbd's
iPaper's code? We all know it's built on top of OO, why can't OO contributors
host their own Office docs on their own personal servers using iPaper from
scribbd?

~~~
delano
SV entrepreneurs are not a cohesive group. Neither are Europeans. It's just as
ridiculous to say "Europeans are lazy" as it is to say, "entrepreneurs have a
terrible track record". It's worse in the case of "Europe" because that's a
group of groups. How about this: some people are lazy and some people
thanklessly live off of other people's work.

Regarding iPaper, if they do build on top of OpenOffice -- which uses the LGPL
-- they have a legal obligation to make their source available by request. If
they don't, then I agree, those specific entrepreneurs are jerks.

------
gaius
I think it's wrong to think of "Italy" as so homogenous, the North and the
South have very different work cultures. In the North, private enterprise and
entrepreneurship are prized, in the South people just want a 9-5 job working
for the government. This pattern is repeated across Europe, in Belgium for
example the Dutch-speakers in the North are very much more economically active
than the French-speakers in the South. In the UK the pattern is reversed North
vs South but it is still very evident.

~~~
davidw
Very true, but ... my experience is in northern Italy, and I still think the
US has it beat in terms of the environment. In terms of the people, I might
actually give the edge to Italy. Just that the productive ones are still
bogged down in a very bureaucratic system, and even in northern Italy there
are tons of people who home in on the Job For Life as the ultimate goal.

------
bootload
_".... Many Italians are tremendously creative, industrious, inventive people,
but are going to find it more difficult to express that in some form of
business ..."_

I think the problem with Italian business culture (and maybe a strength) is
they have not evolved beyond family based businesses. But I can think of an
Inventive Italian tech. company that has succeeded ~ <http://tinker.it/>
creator of the Arduino ~
[http://www.wired.com/print/techbiz/startups/magazine/16-11/f...](http://www.wired.com/print/techbiz/startups/magazine/16-11/ff_openmanufacturing)

------
arthurk
I don't think the US and Europe can be generalized like this. I've never been
to the US, but I can image that startups are a lot different in SV than in
other cities. Same goes for Europe. For example, when talking about the
"startup culture and mentality" the author provides only one example: Italy.
But cultures are very different across europe, you can't just compare Italy
with Spain, Germany and other countries.

~~~
Prrometheus
What part of Western Europe has a great pro-business, startup friendly
environment, then?

~~~
qw
It doesn't seem that taxes have much to do with innovation, because people
will innovate no matter what country they live in. I agree that SV is a unique
place that attracts talent, and it is probably easier to find investors there.

But you also have to think about all the legal costs of doing business in the
US. The risk of lawsuits and patent trolls are much greater than in Europe.
The benefits of low tax is probably not as important for a startup as the
legal bills that they may have to pay if they are unlucky enough to be noticed
by an unfriendly lawyer

I have read statistics that show that the number of lawyers per US citizen is
many times greater than the number for most European countries. In Germany
there are 593 people for each lawyer, while in the US there are only 265
people for each lawyer.

Source:
[http://wiki.answers.com/Q/What_country_in_the_world_has_most...](http://wiki.answers.com/Q/What_country_in_the_world_has_most_lawyers_per_capita)

~~~
davidw
I think taxes aren't quite as important as long as they're only applied to
actual profit. What hurts in "Europe" (standard disclaimer) are all the fees,
paperwork and associated crap to do before you even get something off the
ground, and that you have to keep doing over the life of the company.

------
andrewl
Does anybody have experience with the work environment in New Zealand?

~~~
tjpick
4 weeks holiday / year + stats. Generally normal office hours (ie 40 hour
week) are encouraged though depends on company and role, making friends with
coworkers is normal, Friday drinks is standard possibly couple of beers
provided at the office or head to a local together. I don't work weekends or
evenings or work from home (ever) but you could find companies that encourage
this workstyle if you want. Previous job it was totally acceptable to come to
the office in shorts, t-shirt and jandles but some places have higher dress
standards, now I just wear casual trousers and a shirt with buttons + collar.

Had a couple of trips to San Francisco last year (previous job @ startup), I
prefer the balance in NZ as a long term lifestyle, though had a great time in
SF too. I just think the work/life culture there is a little shortsighted, in
NZ there is more emphasis on family & out of hours life. This is in
Christchurch where I've worked for 1 small and 1 medium sized company since
graduating.

