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Comment by alexgmcm | Hacker News Reader

But you could hire devs in Western Europe at 50% of SV salaries. With UK-based devs there wouldn't even be a language barrier.

There is quite a lot of red-tape involved with hiring foreign workers though.

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Even between the US and Western Europe, there's a significant gap in workforce quality. Researchers have found that American companies consistently achieve higher levels of IT productivity than their Western European counterparts.[1]

[1]https://www.aeaweb.org/articles?id=10.1257/aer.102.1.167

Article states, that's because of

"Combining pan-European firm-level IT data with our management practices survey, we find that the US IT related productivity advantage is primarily due to its tougher "people management" practices."

So it's not related to IT engineering skills but rather how the company handles those engineers. An US based company will handle EU based engineers like their own, thus nullifying your argument.

And this could lead to higher turnover due a transatlantic work culture shock.

How do you think they achieve that ? We use the same tools all over the world, maybe the same processes, intelligence is uniformly distributed. Maybe training ?

I've worked with many people from abroad (even some from the US) and truth is : there were people better than others, there were people who worked more than the others. But this is never tied to nationality. It is much more tied to : does the guy want to be top notch ? If he asks the question then he probably has the ability and willing to make the sacrifices.

That article talks about multinational companies, not individuals. In other words, American companies are more productive instead of American software engineers being more productive.

That could very well be due to differences in management and in fact that seems to be the conclusion drawn by your link, which states that productivity among European companies increases when those companies are taken over by American firms.

Right from the abstract:

>US IT related productivity advantage is primarily due to its tougher "people management" practices

Not saying that there aren't talented developers overseas (I have worked with many) but in general, the culture isn't at the caliber of what happens in SV/The Bay.

I've interviewed and hired many engineers from the UK and the first thing you'll notice are candidates with resumes filled with pointless certifications and years of cookie-cutter experience at financial institutions working on old technology. I could get into the more esoteric aspects of what happens in really hyper-growth SV startups but it would come as a culture shock to a 9-5'er from London. It also involves sacrifices and lifestyle changes I think most of those folks would be unwilling to make.

> But you could hire devs in Western Europe at 50% of SV salaries

You could get that in Canada. No language barrier, same education, same culture (largely), same exact time zones, flying folks in if need be is far simpler.

That opens up the labor pool (heck, might as well throw in all of Latin America and the Caribbean too), but not as drastically as the entire world.

I would disagree. Canadians share same culture, same education, and same language (natively). The same cannot be said about Latin America and the Caribbean

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