I wonder what this means for Atlassian's international clients.
Does the Australian government have unfretted access to any code hosted with Atlassian ?
Maybe if you are a small business in Australia you would not care about it - but big European, Chinese or American clients would definitely not be convinced by any assurances.
The most important thing is that kind of question should not be raised in the first place, the biggest threat is not the Australian govt or Australian rival companies, the biggest threat are rival companies in their own soil that can take advantage of such a backdoor - it could just be as easy as a cash transfer to a low level employee in the Australian govt.
All of these factors just means Australia is not a good place to invest when it comes to cloud infrastructure, data warehousing or intellectual property, that if is leaked could literally destroy your livelihood.
While the idea that the laws of math can be revoked in Australia is silly, any company that trades with or sells services to Australians is liable under this proposed law if they are a designated provider.
So Atlassian is no less or more likely to be covered here than any other software house that sells to Australians.
Atlassian may have been founded by Australians but its headquartered in the UK (for tax reasons I assume) and listed in the US, it's as exposed as any multinational to this sort of thing
True, but there are markets that are completely outside the reach of international capital markets - and are highly non-correlated to the US stock indexes.
- Congo, Somalia are the extreme case but you can make really good gains in real estate, telecommunication in these places. (I know that people might balk at the idea of investing in Somalia but I consider it a no brainer to invest in renewable energy in a place like Somalia - I also get to enjoy the risk premium for it)
It it like using LOC towards judging the complexity of a code base :
"God 100K ! your code must be filled with so much boiler plate !"
- During the Second World War Britain / US went deep in the red to fund their survival, I wonder if anyone
though "We cannot afford to go into debt to defeat the Nazis !".
- Debt and deficit by itself is neutral - being a creditor is not inherently a good thing just like being
a debtor is not inherently a bad thing.
- If you look at the list of countries that have the lowest debt / Gdp ratios you will find its mostly low income, low productively countries, the question is not "damn how do they not need credit !" but "why are creditors
not willing provide credit to these countries".
- A country with high deficit is also a country with either high FDI or high rate of internal investment, its
just doesn't sell as good a headline to say that though.
- For China is makes sense since they are quickly ageing, so the current cohort of working age people will
have high savings to draw down from at old age, same for the US / Japan / EU.
- The big question is what does the saving and investment get you ? Is it to fund foreign wars like Vietnam during Nixon, real estate speculation, education for the next generation ?
- The world is awash with credit and savings due to rise in income across all of humanity, driving down interest rate, its a good time to be a debtor and a awful time to a creditor (only generally, if you are a creditor/debtor in the payday loan sector then the inverse applies ).
What is frustrating is the problem can be attacked even without introducing any new law.
In many industries the reason employers have monopsopy power is regulations that prevents new players from eating the fat profit margins of incumbent players.
telecom, healthcare, real estate, legal services ......
Just like coders see every problem as a software problem - lawmakers tend to think any problem can be solved with more laws ! not realizing they are also playing the economic game theory charade.
In this case particularly, introducing more laws is going to make is harder for new players from gaining market share.
I am not also just making this up, France has some of the most progressive labor laws written with the best of intentions - but lawmakers failed to see the economical ramification of their laws. It made employers reluctant to hire full time workers - creating a painfully high unemployment rate.
A lot of American multinationals also have most of their growth happening outside US borders, I think stronger Unions and ill thought out reform is going to result in more aggresive offshoring.
I know supply side economic arguments has gone out of fashion - but by allowing entrepreneurs to more easily embrace globalization the same way as larger companies exploit it will more comfortably increase income without causing massive spikes in inflation.
This also includes less regulation so that workers can strike without legal trouble and cause trouble for employers, by dragging the process through the court system will just mean more money for lawyers - and large companies have deep pockets anyway to fight any potential lawsuit. Think about how things like fraud are already illegal but companies seem to get away with it anyway.
The only power labor has to collective withdraw it - which painfully show up in the balance sheet in every board room, its the only language capital understands.
We just need to get the union-busting right-to-work laws off the books, and let the free market sort things out.
Right to work laws are a restriction of free, voluntary contracts between employers, and their employees. They forbid employees from demanding to be a sole supplier of labor for an employer, and from negotiating special, union-only employee agreements.
It's absurd that someone selling cabbages to a grocery store is allowed to enter into a mutually voluntary contract that makes them the sole supplier of leafy greens for that grocery, but the people working for that store are not allowed to enter into a mutually voluntary contract that makes them the sole supplier of labor for that store.
Given the vicious opposition of business leaders against the freedom of workers to enter into meaningful collective bargaining agreements, it's clear that they are not actually interested in free markets.
I don't understand why Right to work laws are bad, maybe you can explain. If I am looking for a job at a company and I don't agree with the unions politics, high fees, etc. and I would like to make the contract between me and my employer by myself, what is wrong with that. Why should I be forced to join a union? Or more specifically, why should I be forced to join a specific union? What if that union wont let me join because I support Republicans?
You mentioned letting the free market sort things out. That is exactly what Right to work laws do. They let two independent people make an employment agreement without anything interfering with them. If the union was good and worthwhile, the employees would join. If the unions were good then employees who were not part of the union would be paid less and get less benefits. If that is not the case then that union is not a good one and should not force workers to join it.
> If I am looking for a job at a company and I don't agree with the unions politics, high fees, etc. and I would like to make the contract between me and my employer by myself, what is wrong with that.
That employer already entered a contract with another group of people, that lists them as a sole supplier of labour for said employer.
Imagine if I had a cabbage farm. I don't care about corporate politics, I just want Whole Foods to buy cabbages from me.
But they won't. They already have an exclusive supplier contract for cabbages with Dole, or Sunrise Produce, or whatever.
Is this unfair? I don't like it? That's my problem. I should not be demanding that there be a law that forbids sole suppliers, of cabbages, or labour.
If I still want to sell cabbages, I should talk to Dole, Sunrise Produce, or start my own grocery store. Or negotiate a new contract with Whole Foods, after their current contract expires.
Providing services to an organization isn't a god-given right. If you don't like the working environment, the requirements of the job, the pay, or the hoops you have to jump through to sell to a company, that's your problem. Go work for a non-union shop, or start your own company.
> They let two independent people make an employment agreement without anything interfering with them.
If one of those two people entered into an agreement with a third party, that lists the third party as a sole supplier of services for them, that's your problem. The law should allow that person to make such an agreement with said third party, to the detriment of you.
That's the libertarian response. They are bad because they stop people from entering into voluntary contracts.
The socialist argument is that they are bad because employment negotiation is not done on a person-to person level. It is done on an organization to person level. The organization has more power, and this power imbalance produces unfair contracts.
This imbalance is solved when you allow employees to negotiate as an organization. Right to work laws let scabs and freeloaders parasitically leech off the negotiations of others, without paying into the system that benefits them. The only way to deal with that is to exclude them.
So if I understand correctly all that the right to work laws do is forbid companies from making a contract that requires them to hire exclusively from one union. I was under the impression that a majority of the workers of a company can unionise and then require every other worker in the company to join the union.
If you are correct then I can see why right to work laws are not so good. However, keep in mind that there are many laws preventing people from entering certain contracts. Such as laws forbidding a person to work at a company if the company doesn't want to pay minimum wage, or offering to give someone some money but requiring that they pay back a large amount in a set amount of time.
1. Make it illegal to have an exclusivity contract.
2. Make every concession that a union gets out of their employer apply to non-union employees. [1]
This would be like Dole getting a special deal with Whole Foods... And a "Right-to-sell" law would mandate that the terms of that agreement would also apply to me - even though I was not a party to those negotiations.
> I was under the impression that a majority of the workers of a company can unionise and then require every other worker in the company to join the union.
That would be the case in a truly free market, if the employer entered into an agreement with the union that going forward, it would only employ union people. The employer's not compelled to do that - it does so by choice.
> If you are correct then I can see why right to work laws are not so good. However, keep in mind that there are many laws preventing people from entering certain contracts. Such as laws forbidding a person to work at a company if the company doesn't want to pay minimum wage, or offering to give someone some money but requiring that they pay back a large amount in a set amount of time.
I agree. You have rights, some of which you can't sign away - for instance, it would be illegal to discriminate against someone based on race, despite the existence of a contract to the contrary. Contracts aren't entirely absolute, and this gets complicated quickly. There's also questions of monopolies, which libertarians generally do not oppose, but other people do.
[1] The obvious consequence is that the game-theory optimal strategy for everyone is to not join a union.
The tl;dr of it is that if 50% + 1 of a workforce unionizes, the union bargains collectively for everyone. Even for free-loaders who don't pay union dues.
This is like being able to opt out of paying taxes, while still receiving all government benefits. If that were legal, then our public services would collapse by next week.
Thank you for the information. I don't understand legalese that well (many colloquial things mean something different in legalese) so I will take your word for it. That changes my view on RtW
You obviously didn't read the article and appear to be just spouting talking points. The three laws proposed in no way impede small businesses. Prohibiting anti-poaching , Limiting non-competes, and considering the labor market effects of mergers will primarily impact large businesses.
In fact, all those changes reduce friction and increase competition in the labor market. These should be precisely the kind of changes I would think you would support?
- The article strongly highlights lack of union membership.
- Warren is interested in introducing laws.
- I do not agree regarding M and A - so what if companies want to combine capital ? If Labor can also combine more freely then I do not see the problem.
Who decides what is the correct size of a company ?
I wonder if non-compete agreements actually matter. I mean, come on. Lewandowski landed at Uber after Google. Does anyone cares if some dude from burger king will join KFC? Will BKing really sue him?
Probably not, but he would not dare join KFC for the fear that Burger King decides to sue him. Even if he wins the case, he will go bankrupt navigating the court.
And KFC would include a question on their hiring form "Are you subject to a non-compete clause?" to cover their asses. If he answers yes, he is immediately disqualified and KFC moves to the next candidate. After all, it's not like he has unique knowledge for which it is worth getting sued over, unlike Lewandowski. If he answers no and it is ever discovered he had lied, he is immediately fired.
The UAE is an independent country and can do whatever it wants.
A few weeks ago the guardian was complaining about the "folly" of Musk sending a Roadstar to space.
It seems to me that anything that is not about feeding poor people is africa is a waste of time if you are a guardian writer.
I am glad that Dubai is pushing the envelop of engineering - yes its kinda stupid - but so was electricity at one point. Maybe these projects will someday lead to them gaining the expertise to turn the middle east into some sort of futurist garden of Eden ?
Compared to the looming war in the Congo, and the humanitarian crisis in Burma, alongside North Korea's nuke - doing a large civil engineering project seems downright nobel.
And the migrant workers getting paid slave wages ..
Are we supposed to pay them 3000 pounds / month like Journalists ? /s
They are getting paid better than what they would get paid back in the countries they are from - sometimes multiple times. I do not see Guardian writers shedding tears for all the folks in 3rd world countries that would consider themselves lucky to go work for tax evading Europeans so that they can feed their family.
These people are beyond hope. They are basically Communists. They can't grasp the benefits of the modern economy and so they just complain.
Sure it would be nice if workers were paid more. It would also be nice if a homeless person could sleep in a bed tonight, or at least on a couch. Perhaps a Guardian writer could spare their couch? That wouldn't be too much to ask.
He is not calling Dubai a communist state, he is calling people who are criticizing how a sovereign country spends its income communist - which is true by definition.
I'm confused by "calling people who are criticizing how a sovereign country spends its income communist - which is true by definition". So if I criticize how a monarchy or a "communist" country (like Dubai or China), or even a "capitalist" country like the US or EU spends their money then... I'm a communist? No.
If you recommend that the workers own the means of production then you might be a communist, but it's silly to all criticism communist. You might as well call everyone who criticizes a Nazi (i.e. socialists==communists, am I right?).
> The reason why every European developer migrates to London is to escape the craziness of the continent.
> Every European developer's final 'dream' is to work in the US tech industry - London is the second best thing to reach.
Sorry but no. I think you're delusional about tech salaries in London. And if you want to sell your soul to the finance industry, there are other places where developers make good money, without the need to live in an overcrowded city.
That's an avg of 10k a month, then add 6% on that if you're on flat rate vat scheme. Take off 20% if you don't have a ninja accountant and with the (now sadly, over) dividend rules and such you're still looking at a pretty healthy 8-9k take home a month..
Even in london where a 2 bed 30 mins from the center is about 2k/month that's not exactly hard living is it?
As I said 500gbp/day is not much. I see a lot of IT people earning this is Germany, especially in the Devops field. With something like that you would get an average qualified person hired in, say, Munich.
That is my impression as well. My rate is currently around 445gbp/day for backend development in Berlin and it is far from being at the high end (according to a yearly survey run by gulp.de). My total monthly expenses including rent, health insurance, etc. are below 2k gbp. I do pay higher taxes though.
As far as I know, setting up a "UG" is easy enough. I'm registered as a freelancer ("Freiberufler") with the tax authorities. I guess that's like a sole proprietor? Upside is that I don't pay corporate tax (because there's no corporation). Downside is that I pay taxes on all my income instead of keeping most of it in the corporation.
Honestly I don't see this as a bad thing. It would be a tragedy if every country turned into a cut-throat capitalist place like the US.
In fact I'd go further and say it would be better if the US is like NYC of the world - a place where hyper ambitious people live for varying periods of time. Leave the rest of the world to preserve culture, produce human capital etc. and in return reap benefit from tech progress in the US.
I agree with the broad strokes of your comment, but I have some nitpicks. I think it's culture that's holding the European tech sector back. Investors in Europe are generally very risk-averse and anything that's less than 100 years old isn't really taken seriously. It's fascinating to see how the more neophile countries pull ahead of the rest; how much financial conservatism holds the economy back. When Germans invest, they think mostly of dividends, not growth. And Germany is reasonably sane. Many countries (Italy, Spain) don't have functioning stock markets at all.
>(cough cringe PR cough)
I so agree. This is a VC blowing its own horn and disguising it as information. Painful.
>the craziness of the continent
Britain isn't especially rich by European standards (poorer than Germany). London is a deviation. People are flocking to London, not away from the continent. Britain is pretty average in the European silliness contest. We're talking about a country that doesn't have a written constitution or equivalent thereof.
i can only comment on the german economy, but i think it's not always comparable. It's true that germany is not producing the same number and caliber of startups as silicon valley, but it's very good at supporting medium sized, specialised business in the long term (from enabling them to conduct cutting edge research though heavily distributed government research institutions to a high number of organisations that help them tackle foreign markets and opportunities). If you're not into these things it's challenging, but as a student i see the different paths and institutions helping the more german subjects like chemistry or building engineer.
> Many countries (Italy, Spain) don't have functioning stock markets at all.
Is there some kind of irony in this comment that I am not getting? I mean, both countries have fully functioning stock markets. The main index for the Spanish stock market is IBEX35 and the Italian is the FTSE MIB.
"Every European developer's final 'dream' is to work in the US tech industry - London is the second best thing to reach."
Maybe in the pre-Brexit or pre-Trump era but today... . I turned down a London offer because of the uncertainty Brexit brings and I'm certainly not alone.
It's not that Great Brittain or the US is that political stable with al that happende the last couple or months.
Europe is much, much stabler, at least right now. I follow the political polls in Europe and what you say is... mostly not true.
> AFD in Germany in the 15-20% range
According Wikipedia, no poll ever has given AFD more than a 15%, with the vast majority giving it around a 12.5% (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Opinion_polling_for_the_German...). Even if AfD would get to 20% (which it's very far away from their predicted results) it's very unlikely they would get to the government.
> Le Pen might win in France
She might, but right now is very unlikely, much more than a Trump victory or Brexit. The problem is that she is losing in the polls by... a lot. For the French presidential election, all polls predict Fillon v. Le Pen. The only two polls conducted since Fillon was chosen candidate give him +34 and +42 (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Opinion_polling_for_the_French...). 42 points was the distance between President-elect Trump and Johnson, the Libertarian candidate, in the last election.
I'm not saying it's impossible. Just very unlikely. The errors in the polling for the US Presidential Election and the Brexit referendum were much smaller.
And even if Le Pen is elected in France, the election for the parliament the following month would surely go in the opposite direction, meaning her power would be limited (since, in France, the government is chosen from the party with the majority in the parliament).
Still, I don't think that Le Pen would be that bad, especially considering the failures of the two last présidents.
That does not matter much in Germany, where the political system is very different from the UK and the US. Germany has proportional representation, which does not produce the two party system of the US.
The conservative parties CDU/CSU are totally sane compared to large parts of the UK tories or the republicans in the US.
Completely agree. I live in Europe, am a part of the tech scene, and am sitting in the contitental craziness you speak of in Germany. This report is largely nonsense.
It talks about "top research institutions" are in Europe, neglecting the #1,#2,#4,#5, and #6 in the world are in the USA. [1]
Honestly, I have no idea why an investor would want to try to tackle this nightmare of 30+ target markets, especially when you have huge homogeneous markets in the USA and Asia.
> It talks about "top research institutions" are in Europe, neglecting the #1,#2,#4,#5, and #6 in the world are in the USA. [1]
If you don't count any German research institutions, and only count those releasing their results in US magazines.
Sure.
If I don't count for-profit universities, and only those releasing their results in Esperanto, I can also top my own ranking.
Those rankings completely ignore that in Europe, research doesn't happen at universities - but at research groups where multiple universities come together.
Think of the Max Planck Society (Wendelstein 7-X Fusion Experiment), or the Fraunhofer Society (they brought you mp3), or the Helmholtz Society (globally leading in Marine Research).
while i think you're right, but these things are not always visible to an developer/foreigner. Fraunhofer is not as visible as they should, because they are conduction a lot of commercial research in joint ventures with local businesses and are not specialising into research areas where they are most visible. I recently read an interview with the director of an ivy-league university where he stated that they only finance research team that have an realistic shot at being leading, outstanding and visible in the research world. If you compare that to germany where you might end up in one of the countless mechanical engineering research groups it's way harder to be outstanding, just because it's more crowded. But that's not what the Fraunhofer Society is about, it's doing very practical research, mostly driven by local businesses and their needs.
Indeed. That's an issue Germany seems to have repeatedly recently: While the US went full on into marketing, we've never done that - and that's exactly what's missing, not the research, but the marketing and propaganda of being the #1.
If we actually want that, though, is another question.
>Honestly, I have no idea why an investor would want to try to tackle this nightmare of 30+ target markets, especially when you have huge homogeneous markets in the USA and Asia.
One would hope they would have the sense to go global. You have to to survive in most software. Where the HQ of the company is doesn't matter. I always cringe when I hear software execs talk of being a leader in their home country. Well, some company who actually went global and therefore have a lot less development cost per user will eat any local leader for breakfast. Companies that care about their home markets are dead men walking.
It's OK, if you look at it as a cow to be milked until a multinational drives you out of business. From a business perspective there's nothing necessarily wrong with milking a cow until it runs dry, but you should have made a conscious decision to do it. The execs I'm talking about haven't.
>It's OK, if you look at it as a cow to be milked until a multinational drives you out of business.
That's not a given. There are tons of entrenched companies, from web services to local restaurants, than no multinational managed to drive out of business.
In many cases the multinational had to work with them or buy them to gain a serious share into a particular country.
Hmm. I'd really like to hear more about how you see things if you've got the time..
I'm about to exit london for .de simply because of quality of life concerns; the 1000ft view I'm holding though is I'm pretty sure I'll be able to build a crew there which will have fun working on difficult problems, and hopefully even find a reasonable amount of 'stuff' to do (surely with internet access and some good staff picks that could be applied almost anywhere in the world?) -- while you're probably right in that the vast floods of VC cash won't be so available there (I don't think the situ in london is much diff anyway) or that things are more complex w/r/t markets; I'm not sure that I really care too much about "30+" target markets when we're talking B2B hardcore geekery stuff. We make an API to solve -some-random-hackernews_capable_consumer-problem- then I'm not sure having a few diff VAT rules around .eu is anything more than some extra time billed by my accountant..
What I'm more concerned about is the work/company culture differences there which will probably at a minimum will prevent me whoring myself out for some quick cash to fund my devs, should things get tight, and at a max make it much harder to sell to Gmbh's there...
Are you in Germany? Ever worked with a German company or tried to integrate your product with theirs? The vogons have a quicker moving bureaucracy, I was really shocked. The crazy adherence to working hours, clocking in/out for breaks and such even for senior technical staff creates a really strange dynamic especially if you're used to letting your teams do whatever the hell they want as long as you're delivering. This kind of free attitude to work seems largely to only exist in London, at least to me -- and once you've walked on the wild side it's hard to accept a master.. shrug
Germany may have excellent technical prowess in manufacturing and such; from our side of the perspective though, so far to me at de $bigcorp it seems like SAP, 2 week change windows, hour long discussions on what FTP client the customer uses, J2EE, Oracle, monitored lunch breaks and some very overqualified staff (call me 'dr') who aren't even interesting in moving faster...
I guess there are a lot of startups there which follow a model more like what we're used to, but after so long you're not going to be able to avoid working with the vogons if you're selling them software they want to integrate with..
I'm not sure the majority view of big german businesses really even understood what agile was pushing for.. Hopefully I'm wrong, I'll find out soon anyhow, but things seem really fucking backwards compared to how we've been living even in the relative backwater that's London....
Berlin is a pretty excellent place if you're after a compromise b/w QoL and business. The tech scene is 50%+ expats and the mixture does wonders for company culture. It's also quite easy to connect with people and do freelancing, and I know many people fluidly joining and leaving different teams – doing freelancing for some, joining for equity at others, and sometimes groups form for exciting ad-hoc collaborations without an immediate profit motive.
Berlin doesn't have an much of an industrial base, though. It was an enclave during the 40 years where most of the large manufacturing companies grew and it was impossible to do so from here. Siemens, for example, moved to Munich after 1945. So it may depend on the industry you're targeting. For some (mobility, politics, web, environment) Berlin has gotten more attractive in the last years, with companies sometimes opening offices to connect with the tech scene.
Large companies are obviously more conservative, but the differences are minor compared to their international peers. Bureaucracy tends to be much less of a hassle as people make it out to be.
I'm curious what this wild side is like. "letting your teams do whatever the hell they want as long as you're delivering" sounds like working remotely from a beach is common. Yet almost all job postings I see from companies in London are on site. Or does it mean I can leave work after six hours on very productive days?
Well, as it goes, as often as I'm able to (sometimes it takes a while to change the culture/gain enough trust to be left alone) I don't put any requirements at all on attendance/appearence/sanity/whatever as long as everything is being done and the team is performing. Nailed all the work for the day before 12:00 and want to hit up the pub -- how could any sane person stop you? Working remote makes you more productive and no one else on the team feels you're just slacking, then go for it.
It's not some intentional psychological ploy or anything, but I've found that people generally don't take the absolute piss if you let them manage themselves totally (we are all adults, after all, and who the hell am I to tell anyone how to handle themselves professionally as long as our obligations are being met)
Sure, everyone has to get together sometimes, but being onsite and having a normal lifestyle doesn't work for everyone, especially some of the 'top tier' engineers I've had who tend to be a bit wild.. Pushing 'school rules' on people just leads to them exiting, and it's no use kidding yourself that they need you more than you need them.
One of the best engineers I ever had had some sort of really insane drink/drugs lifestyle, he would drop commits in between 2-7am and they'd be brilliant, then he'd vanish for a few days, and repeat. Did I depend on this person completely for the whole project? No. But why should I care as long as no one else is annoyed by this behaviour on the team, and the work was solid?
I've never had someone actually emigrate during a role, but often people would go away for a few weeks and it wasn't a problem, again, as long as work is being done.
I'm not really sure why this isn't the case everywhere, but as long as my staff act like adults then they'll be treated as such. Onsite requirements are usually a symptom of a lack of trust or an insecure lead.
That's when you are running a team, right? But it's not the norm to walk into any corp in London as a devops/dev/whatever contractor and work like this. There is no reason why you couldn't run a team that way in Berlin or anywhere else in the world.
If you rock up to a client and immediately let them set any kind of requirements on your life instead of having a "this is our goal, make it so!" relationship then a subtle kind of power relationship has been created, where they'll think it's acceptible to mandate employee rules on you like this.
If you're a contractor, then the corp you're whoring out to is NOT your employer and you must not let them act as such (this makes it worse for all of us, not just you).
They're paying your buisness to do something for theirs, how you do that is your business and yours alone. There's no need to be a total weirdo about the whole thing and go off on one because they want you at a meeting at 10 some day or whatever -- you have to be diplomatic and be mindful of the way you're being percieved by the perm staff -- but generally I will not tolerate requests from clients w/r/t anything like attendance outside of meetings, dress code, general sobriety or whatever else which isn't impacting the deliberables we're providing, and wouldn't attempt to push them on my staff either (contract or not).
I've walked away from several really lucrative contracts because of this sort of client behaviour and I don't regret that at all. Your clients aren't, and never will be in control of you, you're there because they need you and they should treat you with the respect an engineer with your day rate has earned.. shrug
Generally, this sort of attitude has been accepted in every contract I've had in london in the last 5 years or so..
The secret is to get this point across very soon after, or even before, starting the gig. Absolute confidence is probably rq too tho...
Makes perfect sense, thanks. I think the situation here is very similar. Telling a contractor when and where to work can get the client in legal trouble ("Scheinselbstständigkeit", one of those lovely german words ;).
How that works out in practice probably depends on the company. If you work a gig at Siemens it might be different than at a startup (that is funded well enough to afford freelancers).
I only have experience with two big corps so far (keep coming back to the second one ;), but I've seen quite a few contractors at both and some of them were just plain flaky. That of course makes it worse for all of us as well, wrt to clients tolerance for things like remote work, etc.
I'll be in Berlin next week (I missed Nikolaus and I have some belated shoes to fill; failing that though definately again around silvester)
If you're up for a beer or sixteen on me, I'd really find the insider scoop useful on a more personal medium; I'm sure we could probably both get something from it, at least the worst would be a lot of free beer!
You can find me on freenode as 'cyb3rpunk' (inside a shiny new irssi in some tmux somewhere so might take me a while to respond) if you're up for it -- otherwise, prost!
It is not what you are asking for, but as I repeatedly hear is that The Netherlands is closer to the UK with regards to the business practice. Less strict, less formal, no hierarchies. But VC isn't big in The Netherlands as well. Salaries are still a joke compared to the US.
I worked in NL a few years ago and the corp culture there was good generally. I'll never acknowledge frikandellen as fit for human consumption however..
I'm not sure about the money argument still though -- a joke? How much more money do you think your avg dev is getting paid in the US vs what we get here in Europe? A regular employee/salaried dev is looking at at least 90k euro/year in nl, which is a very very comfortable living before bonus/benefits and NL also has the 13'th month thing which allows for easy laptop buying every year... Senior/Lead folks are looking at more plus options and whatever..
It's obviously a hard thing to measure, but I think the quality of life argument for your typical european is somewhat higher than your generic american worker (25 days holiday, employee-biased employment laws, various lifestyle protections (e.g in holland if you're a fully 'paid up' taxpayer and you lose your job then the govt will give you some 75% of your last salary while you find another role)).
I guess there's no way to really compare all these things, there are too many other factors -- I'm really curious on how much more money you're talking about here though...
90k is attainable at Booking.com for a senior dev, but you have to be into Perl :) And I imagine that your total comp is pretty big at Uber too (at least on paper). Clearly not the norm in NL though.
It might be easier in hardware, I don't know how well ASML pays.
As an American who recently moved to London, I agree with this. The salaries here are shockingly lower, especially considering how expensive London cost of living is. I wound up just working remotely for a SF firm, which I realize is a luxury thanks to my US passport.
Out of curiosity what area are you working in and if you're willing to share, what sort of numbers are we talking about?
London salaries have always been rather good in my view (if we ignore the shocking cost of living here) and although the higher remittances tend to based on experience here vs having a good degree, I'm not sure for me at least I could make more money anywhere else outside of the arab countries.
I'm a backend web developer (Django, Postgres, Redis) and I get paid right around 100k USD (plus some extra money in bonus and pension contributions). My understanding is that this is actually on the low end for SF/Silicon Valley.
I've interviewed for some UK jobs, and the best I've been offered was 60,000 GBP (which equates to about 75k USD at current exchange rates). I routinely see job postings requiring quite a bit of experience and expertise, and offering salaries in the 40-50k GBP range.
Honestly, I don't understand it. It seems like London tech firms are competing in the same market (in some cases, they literally are satellite offices of the same companies) as the US firms, so how do they get away with offering so much less money?
Very short-sighted thinking. Most multinationals were started by entrepreneurs, some even bear their names: e.g. Boeing, Ford, Dell, Bristol-Myers-Squibb. If you create a start-up unfriendly regime ( like in EU currently), they don't get started. Out of 1000 startups one becomes Boeing and 20 become sustainable medium size businesses that can be discarded for the microeconomic estimates.
Like, swap right button with left? There is an option for that in "accessibility settings" of most OSs. Left-handed people use it sometimes.
BTW, two possible sources of mouse issues I know:
1. Sharp angle between palm and forearm, happens when the mouse is too low and too close to the body. Put it elsewhere.
2. Palm forced to lie horizontally, while the natural position would be angled (lay your hand comfortably on the desk and see that the palm isn't flat at all). This is solved by putting mouse on angled surface or getting mouse/trackball with angled top. See Microsoft Trackball Optical (not sold anymore) for example of what I mean.
Does the Australian government have unfretted access to any code hosted with Atlassian ?
Maybe if you are a small business in Australia you would not care about it - but big European, Chinese or American clients would definitely not be convinced by any assurances.
The most important thing is that kind of question should not be raised in the first place, the biggest threat is not the Australian govt or Australian rival companies, the biggest threat are rival companies in their own soil that can take advantage of such a backdoor - it could just be as easy as a cash transfer to a low level employee in the Australian govt.
All of these factors just means Australia is not a good place to invest when it comes to cloud infrastructure, data warehousing or intellectual property, that if is leaked could literally destroy your livelihood.