Comment by tajen | Hacker News Reader

Comment by tajen | Hacker News Reader

I've worked outside EU in an awesome startup. The VP of engineering went for a worldwide tour of hype IT capacities, to learn how the like of Twitter, Facebook, Volkswagen or Barcklays perform top-of-the-class software development nowadays. He made a blogpost of about 700 lines about worldwide companies. Europe was at the bottom, in 5 lines: "Europe: Nothing interesting. These guys haven't even moved to Agile after 13 years". I felt insulted but I have to reckon he summarized it well.

I'm a sole trader with a "product" strat-up in France. I spend about 10% of my time on paperwork. I've have a police inspection yesterday "because I'm flatsharing". We have mandatory taxes and charges of about 70% [1]. There's no way we can become big.

[1] Income tax: 20%, Mandatory unemployment/state/health benefits 46%, VAT 20%, land tax $300 for using my own flat for professional purpose, corporate tax, mandatory non-computerized accountant $2800, bank $300, and unclear legislation compared to, say, UK, requiring hours and hours of reading and tax dodging.

Sooo in the US he went to Twitter and Facebook, and in Europe he went to Volkswagen and Barclays, and then he ascribes ancient software dev techniques to geography?

As equally (un)valuable anecdata, I'll quote Jeff Sutherland, one of the two guys who made up Scrum, who told me that in his opinion, Scandinavian companies are way ahead of the agile curve[0] than American companies. But hey, maybe he went to Goldman Sachs and Spotify to draw that conclusion, who knows.

[0] not that "agile" is somehow better than "not agile"[1], but you catch my drift

[1] http://programming-motherfucker.com/

Yeah, lets compare a pair of tech companies which have been around for less than a decade with a car manufacturer and a bank, both of which have software in use today that was created decades ago and operate in heavily regulated environments.

Apple, meet Orange: Surprise! They taste different.

> "Europe: Nothing interesting. These guys haven't even moved to Agile after 13 years"

That's not my perception

Check job openings in London, Dublin, Berlin and see what they're using

Yep, Berlin is definitely heavy with Agile start-ups.

Good that you said Agile. Rarely they are actually agile.

You have to pay tax if you run a company at home? Wow.

That's not all of Europe, though, this must be a French peculiarity.

Not only France, same in Poland.

The taxman cannot in reality come and check your home to see whether you actually work there or not. Can you rent a brass plate address somewhere which has a nominal working place, on a cheap rent? A room in a warehouse in an industrial area could be shared by several (let's say thousands) or people who actually work at home but claim a company residence there. Yes, criminal, but not immoral...

I think you under estimate European bureaucracy. While they don't visit every home they do visit some. As you say tax evasion is criminal; it's a really bad idea to lie to tax authorities.

Here's the UK government talking about visiting your home to check your business accounts if you run a business from that home and they want to check your compliance.

https://www.gov.uk/tax-compliance-checks

Of course you must not lie to tax authorities, but matters are often up to an interpretation and it is not unreasonable that there's a business address even if in reality a person does not want to incur every day the expense, emissions and enmity of traffic in order to travel to that place of business.

In Helsinki, we did have this silly "let's chase the home offices" bureaucracy in 1970's and 1980's but that hunt went to grave at the same time with the Soviet Union, deservedly.

Woa Americans don't pay income tax if they generate the income themselves? Awesome. Completely fair, too.

EDIT: I completely misunderstood, my bad. Not deleting this comment because it's already gotten a reply.

You misunderstood, perhaps intentionally? This wasn't about paying tax for generated income. This was about paying land value tax for using own home for professional purpose.

Over here (Finland) you actually get a deduction for that, not additional tax - although in general we have very very few deductions.

Misunderstood, not intentionally. Thanks.

Not to mention you will pay company tax on profits made while the big guys route their profits through Ireland & singapore and pay minimal tax.

I share your pain, but in many european countries, politics are scrambling to reduce their deficit, so it's not a thriving age for small players. Economically, it's more a surviving age.

You would have better success of doing things on your own, making a product, having a minimal business model. I'm really wondering if there are angel investors in France, but so far I would consider avoiding the company model entirely, like john carmack described it.

It would certainly forbid you from doing certain things, but in this day and age I don't think it's possible to compete with the big boy's club.

So Agile is the only top-of-the-class way to do software development now ?

I'd blame http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flexicurity

That's very odd.

Spotify is one of the world leaders in techniques for scaling Agile across large number of feature teams.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com