Danish CS degrees are in high regard, and we’re all fairly good at English.
There are a lot of Danes in Silicon Valley, I mean, C++, C# and Ruby were made by Danes, so it’s not like Murica isn’t open for us.
You can make a lot of money in IT anywhere though. I manage 70 people, in a muniplacity that is well paid. I’ve been headhunted for much higher salaries throughout my career though, but I’ve always preferred public service.
The fact that I could be home at 15:00 on a Friday, with my kids picked up and the groceries done helped a lot in my younger years as well of course.
"Danish CS degrees are in high regard, and we’re all fairly good at English.
There are a lot of Danes in Silicon Valley, I mean, C++, C# and Ruby were made by Danes, so it’s not like Murica isn’t open for us."
That is my point. Many of them move to the SV because they can get better conditions (caused by more leverage) there than if they stay in Denmark because there is a magnitude more tech companies there than in DK.
I'm pretty sure they don't just move to avoid the rain :)
But there are three profound advantages to Denmark (which is where I am based)
1) Danes are smart... I went to the valley on an exploratory tour a few years ago to gauge the standard, and I was really disappointed. I might of course not have met the right people, and my sample could have been bigger. But seeing what comes out of the valley everyday I think that it is not totally off. I think that it is no coincidence that the hackers behind turbopascal, Delphi, c#, PHP, c++ and Ruby on Rails are all from Denmark. A friend of mine even got disqualified from a hacking contest (hack together a functioning system in one hour) because they thought he must have gotten outside help...
2) Because of the restraints we face (the whole ecosystem of startups is severely lacking), our cultural heritage and our education system we have a great knack for designing smart systems. I and my peers often wonder how upstarts in the valley can spend so much money and come up with stuff that is so badly designed and so bloated. Both programatically and design wise.
3) The girls are beautiful.
That said there are of course many advantages to the valley, primarily momentum. This part is almost impossible in Denmark.
Edit: I don't mean to sound as a selfrighteous idiot, so I hope it doesn't sound that way :-)
That article is just a bunch of prejudices. And I say that as a Dane. I am sure American, French or Spanish programmers think for themselves too and that they also take pride in their work.
First of all, a number of nations in Northern Europe have done well in tech: Dutch (python), Norwegians (css, opera), Swedes (erlang, skype), Finns (linux, nokia) and Brits. What do these countries have in common? They are close to each other, they had strong universities within science or engineering before the computer revolution, they have been wealthy for the past 50 years or more and they speak English as a first language or as a strong second language.
You get nowhere in computer science without a good understanding of English. Virtually all the popular programming languages use English terms, most (all?) articles are in English and almost all documentation and tutorials are in English years before they are translated to local languages (if ever). So it's much easier for an average Scandinavian or Dutch teenager or college student to get into computer science than for an average Italian or Greek.
Oh, and they have all had a generous welfare states for the past 50-100 years so even back when computer science didn't pay well it wasn't so risky to go down that path.
While it's hardly as dynamic as the U.S., Denmark seems to be doing just fine in the tech space. It's fair to say that a lot of tech talent is in larger organisations rather than startups. Denmark is a very sticky place to live (the quality of life is amazing, particularly for families), so people are reluctant to leave even if wages are not excellent. That said, wages are very good for Europe (there is only one or two countries where I could earn more).
All in all I see plenty of tech talent, it's just that, internationally, tech talent doesn't see Denmark as an obvious choice to which to relocate. Nine times out of 10, that's the U.S.
Oh, cool, are you a small tech company person in Denmark? Can I ask: why aren't there more small tech companies in Denmark? It can't be for lack of quality education!
I've been working for startups in Copenhagen ("the most livable city in the world") for a few years now, and every young tech company I know of have extremely diverse developer teams (it's not uncommon to be in the minority as a local). People absolutely do want to move here, including Americans. As for the language, the working language is English, and for better or worse people do live here for years without learning the language.
Oh absolutely, and couldn’t you add C# and Unity to that list or am I remembering wrong?
A lot of those things leave Denmark though. We don’t have that many interesting tech houses that actually stick around. I think there is an important distinction between “made by Danes” and “made in Denmark” when we’re talking about companies.
Innovation isn't slow in Denmark at all (source: I work for a Danish software company). Do you have any evidence people from these 'everyone can learn to code bootcamps' actually land good jobs or end up doing something innovating in the US?
I think the difference between Denmark and Silicon valley is investment money and the size of the domestic market. If the EU wants to recreate Silicon Valley, it's not tech they need to stimulate, but money.
I think trying to recreate silicon valley is like trying to recreate Hollywood or Mecca.
I'm living in the south of Sweden near Copenhagen and will be going to a open-source dev meet-up in Copenhagen today in fact. There's not the same Valley feeling perhaps but there is a startup and dev scene.
The region is really really productive technically. There are lots of startups and some do really well. Skype (Swedes, Danes and Estonians), Spotify, Mojang (Minecraft), Dice (owned by EA; Battlefield etc), Massive, etc etc. Lots are in the game-making space.
There are lots of big companies too such as Ikea, Ericsson, Saab, etc etc. Names you recognize.
And Sweden is a really really big exporter of music; the third biggest exporter in the world, or something like that, which is not bad for a population about that of London.
Of course many want to move to the Valley and I know many who have. But having been over to visit a few times I'd much rather work remotely from my farm house deep in the Swedish countryside with my great broadband.
The tech scene in Norway is definitely nowhere near as good as Silicon Valley's. I live in Bergen, the second-biggest city in Norway, and the parts of the tech scene I have seen here seem very old-fashioned compared to the US. There are a couple of companies exploiting web technology for all it's worth, but much of what is going on is just old-fashioned consulting related to Microsoft's platform. Opportunities for real start-up work with equity and the whole shebang seem pretty slim.
Also, as dagw hinted at, the Norwegian oil industry has a tendency to suck in pretty much every talented engineer in the country. The oil industry is currently desperate for engineers and is importing skilled and ambitious people from all over the Northern hemisphere (Italy, France, Finland, even Thailand). I know people with degrees in applied mathematics who work with offshore oil drilling. The salaries and benefits you can get in this industry have a tendency to dwarf what you can expect as a salaried IT consultant. (For instance, the average salary for offshore oil workers in Stavanger is now more than 170,000 USD/year. Granted, offshore work pays better than land work, but many on-shore workers also have salaries in this range).
It stands to reason that tech will attract less talented people with a competitor like this. However, I would love to hear it if someone could disprove my theory. I don't have extended contact with the Norwegian CS crowd outside of my own university.
Yeah, this is pretty general. But I'm often interested in hearing the hacker point of view on topics outside technology.
For instance, one issue that tends to fascinate is why silicon valley is so far ahead of everyone else. I read an article (in BusinessWeek, I think) about tech centers in Europe -Barcelona and Copenhagen were listed.
I don't feel any particular need to escape San Francisco, which I absolutely love. But I've heard Copenhagen and Barcelona are extremely cool cities, and I'd dig checking them out.
Problem is, many of the elements of the Danes's happiness might night work well with startup culture. There's a powerful welfare state, and a high degree of homogeneity in the populace. Silicon Valley thrives on risk, failure, and diversity.
Who knows, maybe the Danes are too happy to be a great startup center. Maybe startups are a great way to build wealth, but not happiness, and in the end, they end up hurting a region. Or maybe that's all crap, and the happiness of Denmark will cause just the right people to move and/or stay there, and build an incredible tech community...
Either way, it seems like a good topic for conversation on hacker news.
Not just that, but there's a good pool of tech talent due to relaxed immigration laws and being an attractive destination and an English speaking country (for the most part).
Yes, if you want to build something in technology (software more precisely) then Silicon Valley is the best place to do this. It has to be said you can build a technology company in Norway; Opera is proof that you can build software, Tandberg is proof you can do hardware.
A story that may be of interest; I used to work for a company called Aker Solutions here in Scotland, which is Norwegian as you probably know. The owner of the company, Kjell Inge Rokke, played to your strengths in Norway right. You are a maritime nation; read oil, gas and seafood. So despite no college education, he went on to work in your country's main industries and now is one of the richest persons in the world.
Looking forward, hydrocarbons are harder than ever to find. You'd imagine that geologists and the oil companies they work for will need amazing software. Importantly, they will be able and willing to pay for it.
Sure, if you work in tech. It happens there are many innovative tech companies in California. Suppose now you have a "regular" job, you'll be probably be happier in Denmark.
I actually work for a Californian big tech company, remotely in Europe. I could move to the bay area but my life quality is better here, on many levels.
I am from a very cold northern area filled with Norwegians, in the USA. From a cultural and seasonal affective disorder point of view, I do think it is a good thing to get out of that sort of environment if you want to be a software entrepreneur.
If I were you I would try to figure out how to go to school in the USA. It's expensive but I think worth it. You would kill two birds with one stone. Plus, I think it's better to start out in school, rather than move to a new place and jump into a job. You meet a lot of friends, learn interesting things, and have fun. I have worked on a visa in a foreign country, and it is a lonely and kind of boring existence.
Can only speak for Scandinavia, but there is plenty of technology work available, for both locals and anyone who speaks fluent English (it's a plus, but not necessary, to also speak a Scandinavian language). True both at "tech companies" and in many, many places in other parts of industry. For example in Denmark, Maersk (a global shipping/logistics company) hires large numbers of technologists, ranging from straightforward programming jobs, to data-science / operations research / mathematical modeling type roles. They are perhaps uniquely easy for foreigners to work for as well, because they have a workplace language policy that comes close to "English-only" (with so many global offices they really, really do not want anything in Danish, not even email chains, out of fear that it will slow down inter-office communication).
The finance industry is another traditional sector that's frequently hiring in tech. The jobs there pay well and are good for work/life balance (no overtime, not much stress), but have a reputation of being staid and boring. You might even have to wear a suit to work (I have seen this explicitly mentioned in job postings). They also tend to require at least a bachelor's degree, and look positively on an MSc.
There is a ton of freelance work as well; lots of companies, government agencies, etc. seem to be regularly in need of someone to build an app, redesign a website, build a "serious game" / "training game", analyze some data, etc., and some are even willing to pay well for it. The freelance gigs are harder for foreigners to find, though, unless they speak the language and have developed a good local network.
What there is generally less of is: 1) salaries in the $150k+ range; and 2) venture capital. But there are plenty of good normal jobs, and a small mostly-bootstrapped startup scene.
The above list makes sense for people outside of tech. People in tech have most of the above in US. Some countries in Europe have pretty competitive comp like Switzerland (Denmark, Norway have decent comp too but its getting destroyed by high taxes)
There are a lot of Danes in Silicon Valley, I mean, C++, C# and Ruby were made by Danes, so it’s not like Murica isn’t open for us.
You can make a lot of money in IT anywhere though. I manage 70 people, in a muniplacity that is well paid. I’ve been headhunted for much higher salaries throughout my career though, but I’ve always preferred public service.
The fact that I could be home at 15:00 on a Friday, with my kids picked up and the groceries done helped a lot in my younger years as well of course.
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