Comment by bagacrap
5 days ago
> Relative to income, it costs large companies four times more to lay off Germans and French than American workers
Yep, so saying Europe can build software is pretty much like Western factories trying to compete with slave or child labor in some developing part of the world.
I mean most Americans probably don't want to open their own sweatshop garment factories. But it does mean that if we start ww3 that shirts may be harder to come by. I think it's probably a good thing that the entire world is too interdependent to want to start shooting at each other? (G10 at least)
As a software developer in an at will arrangement, i dont quite see the comparison with sweatshops. Look, the US isnt perfect by any means, and Europe has the brainpower. Were waiting for a European Tesla, that should have been your domain. Yet here we are, Skype and Angry Birds being the last big hits. Maybe Lovable is a current exception. Your Nordic countries really doing heavy lifting.
Cost of layoff is wrong measure of competitiveness, to start with.
Production of innovative technology pushing the frontier of whats possible is the measure. Cost of laying off is one possible non exhaustive diagnosis as to why it might not exist in Europe.