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Comment by michh | Hacker News Reader

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.

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Or there’s more nuance.

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.

you ask for a solid source but provide among the shakiest of sources yourself

Which is expected given the context. The shakiest source is enough for something claimed without source.

Anecdotal evidence is good counterargument for argument based only on anecdotal evidence.

You may have noticed that I consider my experience good enough to ask for solid data, but not to make an claim myself.

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.

I guess that will vary a fair bit on the country in Europe. Which country/countries where you in?

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.

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