Ask HN: Differences between Berlin tech/startup culture and NYC culture?

Many European countries have some kind of “safety net”, so people can be seen as disposable.

First client was scamming you. Send invoices early and regularly. No pay, no work

As someone who runs a small (bootstrapped) startup in Berlin I'd recommend you to avoid the smaller startups, as you will often be paid under par and might have bad experiences like the ones you described. I'd go for larger and well-funded ones. Also, if it's not a must to work at a startup you could have a look at all the digital labs / hubs etc. that established companies like BMW, Daimler, VW, BASF etc. are opening in Berlin. They offer somewhat of a startup experience but with big funding and the standing of a large corporate behind the scenes, so you might be able to get a better deal there. I worked for such a spinoff before founding a company again and I really enjoyed it, great pay, nice work-life balance and friendly and savvy colleagues. Just my 2c.

I worked in SF for 4 years and then founded a robotics startup in Denmark. (I'm originally Australian).

The biggest difference is where startups get their funding from.

I worked at 2 startups in the bay area, both raised low millions in seed and generally paid lowish market rates with decent equity.

In Europe, most financing comes from grants. Behind the scenes, it was likely your position was was subsidised over a fixed time period, and after six months the cost of firing you goes up significantly. My guess is that they got additional subsidies for the new person, and therefore let you go. It's easier to get subsidies for new positions, and there are rules on overlapping funding that make it difficult to keep someone under continuous subsidy during breaks between subsequent applications.

Having been on both sides of the Atlantic, if you have a choice, go to the US.

Truly sorry to hear about your experiences. If you are not explicitly a founder, just do not work for companies that doesn't actually have at lease a couple of employees doing non-managerial IT work. Otherwise the founders may be inexperienced in managing IT teams and consider it okay to pile on forever more work to a stagnant IT staff and be down-right exploitative like in your first example.

When interviewing for a position, remember that you are also interviewing the company. You already know what doesn't work for you, so ask about it. Don't be shy, you're not desperate for that job, you're a developer in Berlin, people want you! What even are "productive hours"? Only the ones where you type symbols into your IDE? Revisit this article [1] from the hn front-page a few days ago then.

https://blog.feenk.com/developers-spend-most-of-their-time-f...

I had a terrible experience in Berlin where a small start up pulled a job offer from me 2 days before the start date. I had already sold all my stuff in my current country and had the first month of rent paid...

At least they paid me 1/2 a month salary for the trouble after I mentioned suing them...

In my opinion, and I say this as a European, technical roles are usually seen as disposable and replaceable here.

It's a deep cultural problem, and it's compromising innovation. Obviously, there are many exceptions. And things are changing, albeit too slowly.

As a former consultant, payment issues are rife everywhere. The startup issues you describe I’ve seen cross cultures. My last company decided to no longer do work for startups because of their shaky finances and sketchy practices.

The big companies have their own issues too. I once had a large client decide suddenly “we decided not to pay our bills in December” - all to make the CFOs numbers look good. Of course our direct customer, the group we worked with, was just as aghast as we were about our non payment. But it was pretty much “we dare you to try to sue us” from procurement. Our direct customer worked tirelessly to get us paid, to no avail. They did eventually pay in January, but it created a cash flow headache.

For this reason (and some other ones) I accepted I’d rather be an employee with reliable paycheck and benefits than the difficult conversation about late payment always looming.

Also I’m not sure it matters, but NYC has a specific law that protects freelancers specifically:

https://www1.nyc.gov/site/dca/about/freelance-isnt-free-act....

In Europe, you’re a code monkey. In the US, you’re still a code monkey. But the monkey market is more competitive. Europe is just not a serious place.

The US values software developers more than anywhere else.