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Comment by dghf | Hacker News Reader

I find it curious that a writer for a site called EMEA Entrepreneurs is either ignorant of, or choosing to ignore, the colloquial British meaning of the word "cowboy": an incompetent or dishonest (or both) tradesman. It's seen most commonly in the combination "cowboy builder", but can be applied to pretty much any trade, and can stand alone ("I wouldn't work with them again, they were a complete bunch of cowboys.")

So a business owner who describes their operation as "more cowboys than drones" to a British audience may not be conveying quite the message they intend.

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Both drone and cowboy were clearly meant to be equally negative, as that is how each sees the other.

The article does not pick either type as the better one. It only says that each sees the other as a problem, but both have both positive and negative facets, and both are necessary, and whichever one you are, you are actually a source of both positive and negative forces, and so is the other.

EMEA means "Europe, Middle-East & Africa" I believe? Why would that imply the author is particularly familiar with British idioms? I'm from that region and have never heard of that until now.

I guess I was focussing more on the "Europe" part of EMEA: apologies, that was Eurocentric of me.

But the UK is the most populous English-speaking country in Europe, and the second most populous in EMEA as a whole (after Nigeria), and the only English-speaking G7 member in the region. If an EMEA-based company is looking to do business with UK customers (which I don't doubt is a less enticing prospect than it was, thanks to Brexit), it would be advised to avoid associating itself with the word "cowboys" in anything other than a literal sense.

Jein, as we say in my part of the world. Working on IT projects in German-speaking countries I’ve quickly found that English is often the lingua franca of a team made up of both German native speakers and random other Europeans. Euro English is not the same as British English: you get a crazy mix of both British and US idioms not to mention an influence from the Indian English dialects when team members have family roots on the subcontinent. British English is one of the dialects spoken and understood in Europe but not the only one and probably not even the most widespread.

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