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FirmwareBurnerHNSource author
Lessons learnedExperience excerpt · English

>but if €10k is newsworthy Unpopular opinion that's gonna get downvoted/flagged soon based on my …

>but if €10k is newsworthy Unpopular opinion that's gonna get downvoted/flagged soon based on my experience here: That just shows you how broke EU tech companies are that even 10k is newsworthy for them. For context, I only worked for average (not big-tech/unicorns) EU/French/Dutch/German tech companies my whole life and I was shocked to see how much more, the average US tech companies spend on frivolities(forget the wages) than the European companies I worked at. From what I saw, for US tech companies big or small, buying fully decked MacBooks and Herman Miler chairs for their SW devs was the norm, while I only saw the discount bin chairs and base spec HP/Dell/Lenovo laptops wherever I worked here. Even where I work now, SW engineers get the same crappy HP notebooks that HR uses to read emails, since beancounters love fleets of the same cheap laptops for everyone, so my manager needs to jump through hoops for the beancounters to let him order more powerful notebooks for the SW engineers in his team, cause ya' know, Docker and VMs eat more resources than Outlook and Excel. …

Original discussionProxmox Donates €10k to the Perl and Raku Foundation185 source comments · at import
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ZI
ZiiSHN

I am sure we are all grateful for Proxmox's generous donation; but if €10k is newsworthy for a Foundation with Perl's historic profile, I would be very worried.

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NE
NeutralForestHN

I don't think it's unpopular, I'm European and it's sad to see the tech scene and the kind of capital we have available, compared to the US.

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CJ
CJeffersonHN

How many US companies are donating more than 10k to perl? Or even that much? If your anti-EU rant is right, open source projects should just naturally come into a whole bunch of donations this size from these rich US companies. Does that happen? Especially once we get past the big 3?

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TL
tlamponiHN

Note that Proxmox did not put out any news, the Perl foundation did, and that is based in the USA, so not sure if it really shows what you try to suggest.

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TR
tristorHN

> I always naively assumed (mostly due to anti-US propaganda we get here in EU) that due to how expensive US labor and healthcare is, it would be the opposite that US companies would have to cost cut to the bone, but no, despite that, US companies still have way more money to spend than European ones. Crazy. It's actually almost the opposite here in the US. Because labor is expensive, especially engineering labor, it doesn't make sense to scrimp on expenses like computer equipment or office chairs that support that labor, as you want to reduce development costs. If a faster laptop costs $500/unit more but reduces toil/wasted time for a $300k/yr developer of 30 minutes a day, it is easily justified that it's worth the cost since labor cost is so much higher.

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AL
alephnerdHN

> European companies are just run the same way EU governments are run, on austerity and cost cutting To a certain extent yes. But that's because of margins. An large automotive parts vendor or a major biopharma company isn't generating revenue on software, so software engineering is treated as a cost center. It's the same in the US, but at least you have tech first companies that generate most of their revenue of tech. Europe's tech industry died out because of a mixture of mismanagement and bad luck. Velti [0] used to outcompete AdSense, but their management was incompetent and borderline fraudulent, and that's why the AdTech industry boomed in the US and collapsed in Europe. The same thing happened to Nokia, Ericcson, and others. The good European startups like Datadog, Spotify, Databricks, and UIPath all ended up relocating to the US so an entire generation of startups doesn't exist i…

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