Hacker Newsnew | past | comments | ask | show | jobs | submitlogin

You have actually addressed the actual issue here but from wrong perspective.

Culture is the issue here. EU tries to live, USA tries to earn. If the only thing that interests you is money then yes, probably USA is the right direction. Of all the people that I know that went working outside of their country, they were mostly going to EU companies (or USA companies in Europe), sometimes to the Asia. None left for USA. On the other side I know a CTO that left USA for Europe and bought a small property in France where he lives with whole family.

This shows very well in environmental laws, gdpr, protection of workers, actually having friends, nature, having hill-climbing organizations that aren't only lobist groups to be actually allowed to climb the mountains, public transport, able to drink spring water in center of capital city, most people working 40h/week max, actually do use their vacations in one piece, free education, maternity leave measured in years not months (yes under a year too but not month or two),...

So it depends on the personal cultural preference. Some people just love the money and things they can buy with it, maybe even power that it brings and surely a lot of such people are also in EU. The difference is in the percentage of population although Hollywood did great job at exporting the view of world trough money glasses.

---

Regarding the topic. EU was quite satisfied with buying processors from the States, it was also happy with using Windows, Android, Apple thing. The problem is, as in every other thing, USA corporations became vampires that wants to eat you alive from pure greed and systemic addiction to blood (endless growth).

It has become imperative to produce our own processors as you can no longer trust USA or China to not shovel inside some spying equipment. Well the times have changed and it is no longer an option to buy it from USA/China, so EU has moved forward and dont worry, we will have our own chips our own phones and operating system (linux, sailfish or something else...).

EU is an elephant and it needs a lot of coordination of muscles to move its legs but once it starts moving...

I am sorry, I would love to just use the USA/China products and not re-develop hardware (based on what we know now, maybe not dragging 40 years old anchor of previous development with me), not having a need for GDPR, but they have both just screwed everything up from pure greed. Now we need to fix it and a lot of time and resources will have to go that way. But we will eventually fix it.




>Of all the people that I know that went working outside of their country, they were mostly going to EU companies (or USA companies in Europe), sometimes to the Asia. None left for USA. On the other side I know a CTO that left USA for Europe and bought a small property in France where he lives with whole family.

Now let me give you actual statistics.

In a survey of scientists from 16 countries (http://spectrum.ieee.org/at-work/tech-careers/the-global-bra...), the US is the top destination from 13 of the 15 others and the #2 choice from the other two.

By comparison, only 5% of all American scientists move to another country, of which 32% go to Canada.


Sure, I have never argued with that.

Meanwhile (since 2012) Trump happened, race unrest's, police brutality, corona handling fiasco, Google/FB/Amazon public image is going down, USA public depth has roughly doubled [1] and general perception of USA has changed (to the worse[2]), China is hiring, student depth is going trough the roof (and immigrants want to have children someday), no one believes in "war on terror" any more (talking about EU), Snowden, war on privacy,...

This graph is outdated, did you find some that is up to date? Also interesting one would be how many of those in 2012 survey stayed and where.

[1] https://www.statista.com/statistics/187867/public-debt-of-th...

[2] https://www.pewresearch.org/global/2020/09/15/us-image-plumm...


I see that you deleted your further attempt to mock my presenting statistics in exchange for your anecdotes (I had no idea until reading your contributions here that that in the US there is no "actually having friends, nature, having hill-climbing organizations that aren't only lobist groups to be actually allowed to climb the mountains").

But since you did bring up Germany with the deleted mention of Operation Paperclip, I suggest you read https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25367731 , in which @bildung and I discuss German migration to the US over the past 30 years (including 2019 data).


"Google/FB/Amazon public image is going down" why would this affect anyone's reason for moving to the USA?


>This graph is outdated, did you find some that is up to date?

I provided statistics in response to your anecdotes. The onus is on you, not me, to prove that a) your anecdotes are actually representative of broader trends, and b) my statistics are, in fact, outdated.


Aren't Europeans interested in ending this brain drain?




Consider applying for YC's Fall 2025 batch! Applications are open till Aug 4

Guidelines | FAQ | Lists | API | Security | Legal | Apply to YC | Contact

Search: