[Systemic33]

I believe that a contributing factor to the pay gap in Europe is the fact that we have so many languages, that we are too segregated to create the same level of competitiveness as seen in the US. This means that each country is fairly protective of its people, and even though EU has free movement of labour, the language and culture barrier is strong, and internationals have a harder time to get hired, unless the speak the local language.

So the end results is that talent is spread across, and no single country has ability to become the place to be.

[Joeri]

It also means that despite being a single market you can’t realistically launch a product across the EU. A SV startup can immediately address the whole US (if they don’t have a physical presence), but an EU startup has to go country by country. That means growth is slower, and talent is less competed for.

After brexit I’d like to see business & gov across the EU standardize on english as lingua franca to enable faster growth.

[Brakenshire]

> After brexit I’d like to see business & gov across the EU standardize on english as lingua franca to enable faster growth.

I wonder whether this will become easier now when the UK leaves, because the English language won't be tied to the competition between the major states.

This is definitely a shame for London, which I think was emerging as the centre of English-speaking Europe, I expect that role now will be more spread across a number of northern European cities, like Stockholm, Copenhagen, Amsterdam etc.

[calgoo]

As someone living in a European country with several languages and internal political problems related to them, i can say that in my opinion this wont happen for a very long time and im not even sure its needed. Kids in these multi language countries are already growing up with english as a second or third language. They are growing up on the internet and are used to reading stuff in english, so the need to standardize on a language, in my opinion, is not even needed. In a generation or 2 the majority of people will speak it anyway.

[adventured]

The problem is that half of the EU has no common language (and that ratio is worse once you step outside the EU and broaden it to Europe as a whole).

Certainly Scandinavia etc. have tremendous English adoption, that doesn't do much for the two dozen nations in Europe that don't. If you're Swedish or Danish and you are fluent in English, the problem is that still doesn't help you with the other half of the EU or Europe that doesn't understand English.

France is near 40%, and Italy is near 35% on English speaking. Even Germany is just barely over 1/2.

Spain, Portugal, Czech, Slovakia, Ukraine, Bulgaria are near or sub 25%. Russia is closer to 5%.

France + Spain + Italy is about $6 trillion worth of GDP, and maybe 1/3 of their combined population is English speaking.

[PeterisP]

That's what the parent post was speaking about - for various reasons these percentages are increasing, especially among the younger people, and the expectation is that in a generation or two the situation would be quite different from the current one that you've described.

[tasubotadas]

Well, in CEE (EU bit) 80% people that are <35 y/o certainly speak solid English - I've been and spent some time in all of them.

The older generation does struggle with English, though.

[te_chris]

London will still be the centre of English-speaking Europe. It's the biggest irony of brexit: London is vehemently opposed to it, but likely not going to be all that affected by it.

[bitL]

Dunno, most people I know are trying to escape London, miserable weather, low pay, massive increase in rent, uncertain future. Despite having most AI startups after US. At FB London as a SWEng you are capped at most at 110k; in the US you'd earn 4-5x more for the same job and on more interesting projects as well.

[mayniac]

Further anecdote to support that claim: in my old job an admin who worked in the London office for over seven years, and had numerous raises and promotions in that time, was on the same salary as her newly hired graduate counterpart in the states. Relatively rural area in the states too, it wasn't NYC where the cost of living may have made that acceptable.

Our relative salaries with the states are god awful.

[bitL]

Nowadays even with Germany. UK is going backwards fast...

[tigershark]

110k$/year? I really find it difficult to believe it, even if it was 110k£/year.

[bertil]

I worked for Facebook London office and the pay level compared to our US counterpart was something that my more talented peers were talking about. The idea of a ‘cap’ feels alien to Facebook in general, but I can confirm that to get more than that, you would probably have to be an exceptional developper -- think: get recognised at a conference, have your work #1 on HN for 24 hours, have regular conversations with iOS or Android core devs, etc.

[simias]

>After brexit I’d like to see business & gov across the EU standardize on english as lingua franca to enable faster growth.

Do you imply that brexit might make it easier for that to happen? That sounds counter-intuitive to me, once the UK leaves I believe that the only country in the EU who has English as an official language will be Ireland and even there it's cohabiting with Irish Gaelic.

Beyond that I've always been torn on this issue, on one hand having a lingua franca across the EU would be amazing and English is probably closest to achieving that, on the other hand English is effectively the language of American imperialism and its cultural hegemony. In an ideal world I'd prefer something less politically loaded and tied to a foreign superpower, like Spanish, Swedish or Romanian for instance (I'm picking random European languages who cannot be suspected of having any kind of cultural overreach in present day Europe).

Of course in this case maybe practicality trumps ideology and we should just accept our English speaking overlords for the sake of convenience.

[skriticos2]

> English is effectively the language of American imperialism

I know this is often said, but why? English did not originate in America, but in England and even there it originated as a mix of various other European languages (Latin, French, Nordic languages and a few more). If anything, it represents the colonial past of the United States.

I think in the EU the main problem is that every country is supposed to have an equal part in the community and choosing the language of one country in the union would contradict that. Simply said: If England leaves the EU, then nobody can say that one of the countries has a language advantage, as everyone has to learn English as a second language. Ireland does not count because they have Irish as the first official language.

Furthermore, adding to my first point, since many places around the word start to speak English for professional communication, it represents the US less as time goes by.

[simias]

>I know this is often said, but why? English did not originate in America, but in England and even there it originated as a mix of various other European languages (Latin, French, Nordic languages and a few more). If anything, it represents the colonial past of the United States.

That's irrelevant and I doubt many people in America considers English the language of the colonial past. The reason English has become the lingua franca for businesses around the world is evidently because the USA became a superpower and managed to gain a huge worldwide influence in both economy, military and cultural sectors. Like most Europeans my age I've grown up eating a huge dose of American cultural goods.

Captain America is in theaters around the world. Katty Perry and Kanye West play on the radios in the middle east. You can watch American politics play out on your TV in Madrid while you sip on your Coca Cola. Or maybe you prefer to watch Game of Thrones while eating your Big Mac? Don't forget to post about it on Facebook, Twitter or Reddit using your iOS or Android phone. Many artists produce music in English instead of their native language in order to sound more modern and reach a wider audience. Yesterday I noticed that they didn't even bother translating the title of Stephen King's latest novel for the French version, French readers are expected to understand it. Can you imagine that happening with a German or Russian novel? American culture spreads over the world like no other, I don't think its hegemony is debatable at this point.

>Simply said: If England leaves the EU, then nobody can say that one of the countries has a language advantage, as everyone has to learn English as a second language.

So in order not to advantage any country in the EU we'd advantage the USA, UK and Australia by doing their job for them? That's cutting off the nose to spite the face, although unfortunately I can see that happening. I'm also not convinced that you can pretend that Ireland doesn't speak English solely because it also recognizes Irish as an official language. Wikipedia tells us that `Less than 10% of the population of the Republic of Ireland today speak Irish regularly outside of the education system and 38% of those over 15 years are classified as "Irish speakers"'. There might be more Spanish speakers in France than Irish speakers in Ireland.

>Furthermore, adding to my first point, since many places around the word start to speak English for professional communication, it represents the US less as time goes by.

I'm not convinced, the more the world speaks English the easier it is for the USA to spread their media and, indirectly, their message and propaganda. And the USA is incredibly good at that already. We call it "English" but let's be real, it's really USA'an that's taking over the world.

[sangnoir]

> The reason English has become the lingua franca for businesses around the world is evidently because the USA became a superpower

No. It was because of the globe-spanning, imperialist behemoth that was the British Empire whose scale and reach at its peak the USA has not yet matched. The empire really waned with the baby boomer generation, so it was not too not so long ago and certainly within living memory.

America's cultural hegemony with Hollywood (and pop music) came much later and built on it.

[simias]

France's influence was also much greater than it is now, as can be seen by prominence of the French language and culture around the world today. Yet it's paltry compared compared to American influence. The British Empire undoubtedly gave America a head start but I don't think English would've become the de-facto lingua franca of the world based on British influence alone.

The "scale and reach" of the British Empire was certainly tremendous but I don't think it's really comparable to the modern "American Empire", their nature is wholly different. I think the influence of American culture on the common people of the world today is much greater than the British Empire ever accomplished. There's a Mc Donalds on the Champs-Élysées, a KFC on the Red Square and Starbucks in China.

[ghaff]

>The reason English has become the lingua franca for businesses around the world is evidently because the USA became a superpower and managed to gain a huge worldwide influence in both economy, military and cultural sectors.

That's true but it was already well on its way in the 19th century because of the British Empire.

[ColanR]

As an American, it's fascinating to read your perspective. But you do leave the impression that you're bitter about my country's comparative economic success. Is that an inaccurate impression?

[FractalLP]

Esperanto is surprisingly easy to learn and is meant to be a secondary language. Realistically, it's probably going to be English. Some say Mandarin in 20 years, but there are a lot of practical reasons why I find that hard to believe.

[simongray]

There's no chance that Mandarin will ever take the position of English and that statement is solely based on the peculiarities of the written language, not even the seeming lack of interesting content produced in Mandarin (comparatively tiny Korea and Japan are much bigger cultural exporters than China and Taiwan).

Chinese is only really spoken in any capacity as a second language in countries that used to use Chinese or Chinese characters for the written language (Korea, Japan, Vietnam) and countries where ethnic Chinese people currently live. If you did not grow up looking at Chinese characters and speaking a language that has a big lexical overlap with Chinese (Korean, Japanese, Vietnamese) then Chinese is extremely difficult to learn. The writing system is incredibly impractical since it requires learning thousands of symbols to read any normal piece of text and the lack of spaces makes parsing many basic sentencse very challenging until the learner is at a very high level (must know all characters in sentence, must know most words in sentence, must know general grammatical flow in sentence).

The coming of electronic dictionaries and Pinyin IMEs has made it much easier to learn Chinese than it used to be, but it is still ridiculously challenging. Many learners living in China simply skip learning how to read, which I don't think happens with many other languages. Chinese people are often functionally illiterate and even educated Chinese have trouble reading certain things (names, especially). There's a very well-known essay in the Sinologist community about all of these challenges: http://pinyin.info/readings/texts/moser.html

[mtgx]

> Some say Mandarin in 20 years, but there are a lot of practical reasons why I find that hard to believe

English has been taught in European schools for decades and most European citizens still don't use it much or know it that well (the biggest reason is that it's not the official language of the countries).

Virtually nobody teaches Chinese in European schools now, so I find it very hard to believe that Mandarin will be anywhere close to the language of the internet in 20 years. It's really only the Asian countries (except India) where a larger percentage of their populations can speak or understand Mandarin, but that's always been the case anyway, so I don't think that's going to change much.

[kk58]

Except singapore and taiwan no other country has mandarin as its national language. Infact more countries have tamil and hindi (ex british colonies) than mandarin. Food for thought

[skriticos2]

I grew up with Esperanto as one of my birth languages - yet I'm writing this reply in English. So yes, I agree - English is the more practical contemporary language as you can communicate with more people with.

[arnvald]

I'd be really surprised if Mandarin reached such status not only in 20 years, but in the next 100 years. While it certainly gets more popular due to China's growth as an economic power, its far behind English when it comes to number of non-native speakers.

On top of that, learning Mandarin is very difficult. It's a tonal language - as someone who has absolutely no ear for music, I find it challenging to understand the differences between different tones. The alphabet is another obstacle - even in China children at school learn words written in pinyin (system of writing Chinese characters in Latin alphabet) first. Even with China becoming an economic world leader, I don't see Mandarin becoming mainstream (having said that, I learn it and I enjoy it, although it takes me much, much longer than to learn any other European language)

[beojan]

> I believe that the only country in the EU who has English as an official language will be Ireland

And Malta. Though Malta is minuscule.

[ghaff]

Historically, French was the court language of Europe and therefore the the language of diplomacy. (US Passports include English, Spanish, and French; I think they used to only have English and French.) Of course, that's not going to happen even though Brussels is primarily Francophone.

[simias]

I didn't propose French because both France and Germany are often accused to have too much control and influence in the EU so I think there would be a significant push back if either of them tried to impose their language to the rest of the union.

Furthermore Spanish is probably easier than French for any kind of objective metric you could throw at them. In particular Castilian is easier to spell and has a simpler phonology. On top of that Spanish is one of the most widely spoken languages in the world. I think it would be a strong contender for "lingua franca", although that might be my romance language bias showing.

[shaki-dora]

Judging by the almost physical pain I experience when listening to non-native speakers trying to express themselves in my language, I think making English the lingua franca is a fitting revenge on all those imperialists.

They may have raped our natural resources and women, but they can’t protect their irregular verbs and diphthongs.

[enriquto]

> Judging by the almost physical pain I experience when listening to non-native speakers trying to express themselves in my language,

Just by curiosity, what is your mother tongue? In my case, hearing non-natives trying to speak my language fills me with a sudden outburst of joy! I just want to immediately become friends and help the person, and introduce them to my friends and family! (Maybe because it is quite rare to see foreigners learning catalan.)

[DoofusOfDeath]

> I’m German. We have a 70-years tradition, well deserved, of being embarrassed by our nationality and its outward signs.

I never understood the rationale of being proud, or embarrassed, about the actions of other persons. Guilt/pride by association just makes no sense to me; it seems like a complete non-sequitur.

Sure you're German, but neither you nor your contemporaries participated in the horrors before or during WW2.

[shaki-dora]

Nationalism is, for better or worse, part of human nature. It’d be mighty hypocritical for humanity at large if people could just pick and choose from their history.

For Germany specifically, denying responsibility for the holocaust just wouldn’t work if you also wanted to field a team at the soccer World Cup. Given that choice, even the right wing at least goes through the motions.

Two well-worn formula encapsulating the idea are “not guilt, but responsibility”, and “it happened once, therefore it can happen again”.

But the “dirty secret” of German identity is that we are living a rather good life within this cocoon of professed guilt. It’s not just about accepting history, but also (I hope) the work for peace and European integration that the country has done over the decades. But the result is that I very rarely actually experience negative consequences of my nationality. I’m far more liable to get encouraging feedback like yours. In a way, it’s the most successful humblebrag of history.

Politically, Germany had it far easier to escape the various calls to arms during the Cold War and beyond, or to keep its military smaller than official NATO agreements require. If you get really lucky, your country might even be forced to give up its fearsome currency, accidentally handing you the keys to a continent’s economy in the process.

Which is why I have no earthly idea why countries such as Turkey and Japan resist acceptance of their historical atrocities. Seriously: stop fighting it, and enjoy the adulation of a repentant sinner.

[shaki-dora]

I’m German. We have a 70-years tradition, well deserved, of being embarrassed by our nationality and its outward signs.

Edit: I should add that, in my initial comment, the “raping” of women and natural resources was not meant to apply to Germany. It was more of a literary device playing on the sweeping accusation of imperialism.

[enriquto]

> I’m German. We have a 70-years tradition, well deserved, of being embarrassed by our nationality

But do you feel pain when non-natives try to speak german because they speak it incorrectly, or for some other reason?

I love german! I started learning it a few weeks ago, by reading the original Hilbert-Courant. I'll try not to slaughter your language by speaking it yet, though :)

[st1ck]

Sure, Spain has never did anything imperialistic!

[madeofpalk]

As someone from Australia, I actually take the opposite impression from that. These startups are faced to deal with being international by day one, making scaling out to more and more countries easier.

For US startups, on the other hand, the US is a large enough market that they might get ‘stuck’ there and need to build up more ‘inertia’ to scale out internationally

[sremani]

Getting stuck in a market that is 23% of world GDP is not so bad.

[jonathanyc]

The fact of the massive advantage that the US gives to companies and researchers in the form of essentially a single regulatory zone and, importantly, a single language, is reflected in the fact that almost all of the technology you are using was designed in the US. Google, Apple, Facebook, Microsoft, Amazon, etc. for companies, C, Python, Lisp, etc. just in programming languages...

You only have to write documentation once for more potential customers or research collaborators to be able to read it than if you wrote in both French and German.

This is well studied. Note that in terms of developed countries the US is the largest by far.

[Thimothy]

Pst, Python is Dutch. Not retracting from your point though, it was built in English and found adoption in SV.

[jonathanyc]

Wow, you’re right! Thanks for that, learned somehow today.

[PeterisP]

Having to be international by day one puts a high barrier to entry, requiring lots of effort in a growth phase that's resource constrained, and kills potential ideas before they can get traction, as it's more expensive (and slower) for them to do so.

On the other hand, California by itself is a large enough market so you can get a profitable (because of sufficient scale) proof of product-market fit and tackle internationalization with much, much more resources. Which seems the proper way to go; good internationalization doesn't really scale.

[icc97]

Its certainly an advantage the European startups don't seem to take up on. For example Duolingo is headquartered in the US.

[DoofusOfDeath]

I would guess that the main reason Duolingo is based in the U.S. is that it originated at a U.S. university (Carnegie Mellon).

[icc97]

Duolingo is purely an example - but you could ask why the research occurred in an American University rather than an EU one. Google Translate is another.

In theory there should be many more people willing to pay to learn another language / translate in Europe. Yet the US is far ahead.

[rorykoehler]

Definitely agree re English being adopted as the lingua franca (that really sounds weird haha). Been saying this for years however there are too many fragile egos in European politics that feel that adopting English is an attack on their identity. There was even talk of removing English from EU legal texts altogether after brexit

[erispoe]

Depends, in regulated industries you might have to adapt to product state by state in the US much more that you would have in the EU, where a lot or regulations are now more uniform.

[bitL]

> lingua franca

Hmm, I seem to recall we already had such a language in Europe since middle ages, it started with L and ended with n. It's still dominant in medicine. It could be funny to use it in tech EU-wide as well with "proper German pronunciation" ;-)

[pcnix]

Does medicine still have universities teaching in Latin?

I haven't come across significant latin usage beyond naming conventions in medicine.

[Thimothy]

In Italy still teach it in school, and it's not the first time I've heard of mayors (beside linguistics) that have some compulsory Latin thrown in. But that depends a lot on the university.

[saiya-jin]

National egos will probably prevent that. I simply can't imagine French people speaking anything but french in their home country. Anytime I visit the place (which is almost every weekend), I see how much they don't like speaking english, although their level is OK and they are perfectly understandable. Italy might be the same, Spain too.

Northern europe has much stronger usage of english and level is much higher (I recall old grannies responding in perfect english around Oslo, and that was almost 20 years ago).

[simias]

I think us French are generally pretty terrible for this, there's definitely a strong anti-English bias (although oddly splicing random English words in a terrible French accent in everyday discussions is seen as fashionable by what seems to be a growing portion of the population).

On the other hand I've never had any issue speaking English in Germany or Portugal for instance, to the point where I kind of became lazy and expected people there to actually understand English and being surprised a couple of times to find somebody who didn't.

But you're right, I can certainly imagine a significant portion of the French people and institutions fighting back hard if the EU ever decides to move towards English as official language.

[hansoolo]

It's true for the northern countries. I remember being in Stockholm once and everybody was speaking a decent English, from little kids to grannies. They said it's because they don't have dubbing on TV and learn it faster and better that way. :)

[enriquto]

> and even though EU has free movement of labour, the language and culture barrier is strong, and internationals have a harder time to get hired, unless they speak the local language.

Certainly not in all fields. In all the math labs that I know (from France, UK, Italy) more than half of the researchers are from other countries.

Of course, if you want to teach, it is much easier to get hired if you already speak the language.

(edit: format of the quote)

[peoplewindow]

Is that really true? Everyone in science speaks English and DeepMind, based in the UK, is in fact one of the world's top AI research hubs. Their papers are consistently excellent and of course DeepMind's workforce comes from around the world.

That's the European AI hub, right there.

The issue here isn't the language barrier. The issue is one that goes largely unstated in the ELLIS letter (it's a call for action, not really a plan). Which is this ... remind me what's wrong with working with the Americans again?

DeepMind was founded by a Brit - the guy who once worked on Theme Park and other much loved British games. He built up an absolutely top class research team out of nowhere, based purely on VC funding, then sold to Google not only because of money but because Google also built a world class AI research team out in California, and it made sense to join forces so they could work together on things like TPUs.

And why shouldn't the European AI hub have joined forces with the US AI hub? What benefit could there be from preserving institutional and funding barriers between Google and DeepMind? The letter sort of dances around the edges of this question, but ultimately the answer is purely politics.

It says things like

"This weakens Europe"

and

"we want the best basic research to be performed in Europe, to enable Europe to shape how machine learning and modern AI change the world"

and

"many European companies whose future business crucially depends on AI are not perceived as competitive"

These are all political goals, worse, they are not logical thinking at all - not a good look for a bunch of scientists.

AI research is entirely open. Having a new academic research hub in the EU-that-isn't-the-UK won't change the access those European countries have to the underlying research papers or techniques. They can use AI just the same regardless of where the research is being done. Maybe China would try to close up their researchers, but America and the UK certainly won't.

So if European companies are "perceived as uncompetitive" or are not "shaping the world" due to their poor use of AI (this is a dubious theory to begin with) then the solution is for more European companies to download TensorFlow and Torch and get cracking. It isn't for money to be poured into academics who will take it, write a few papers and then go straight into industry anyway.

[T-A]

> remind me what's wrong with working with the Americans again?

Make that American companies and the problem, from an academic perspective, is that they recruit away students and researchers from academia. That works for a few years, but longer term, the argument goes, it depletes academia to the point that new talent can no longer be trained... by academia.

At that point, the companies wishing to keep recruiting will create their own training facilities and/or step up collaboration with academic institutions. That's where the American part comes in: if the existing talent has all gone to the US and those making the decisions have been there all along, they are likely to focus their training efforts on the US.

On top of that, you have the well-publicized problems with data collection by foreign entities and local tax avoidance, which are indeed political.

[peoplewindow]

You make it sound like a zero sum game. If academics are being hired into industry, that frees up grant money to be spent on other areas where they aren't recruiting so aggressively. It doesn't actually 'deplete' academia except in the short run, unless the supply of students who want to do research becomes fully tapped out.

Also, people who are trained already can always go into academia or return to Europe. These movements aren't permanent by nature.

[T-A]

> If academics are being hired into industry, that frees up grant money to be spent on other areas

That's great for those other areas, but the open letter in question is about machine learning.

> It doesn't actually 'deplete' academia except in the short run, unless the supply of students who want to do research becomes fully tapped out.

... or the very limited supply of established researchers who can train them is tapped out. Also, "fully tapped out" is a squishy notion; you can always lower your recruitment standards, with obvious consequences.

But there is no need to get into hypotheticals here:

https://www.theguardian.com/science/2017/nov/02/big-tech-fir...

> people who are trained already can always go into academia or return to Europe

But why would they want to? They chose to move away for a reason, so something would have to change for them to change their mind. What would that be?

The authors of the open letter seem to think that a European AI hub could be that thing.

[gaius]

Academics consider anyone who has worked in industry “tainted”, such a person would never make it to tenure, even if they wanted to

Tenure is about the only carrot academia has to dangle

[DanielleMolloy]

I don't see that in computer science, or in my subarea of research. Major industry labs are highly respected contributors to science, and this has a long tradition with Xerox PARC and Bell labs, and now with Microsoft Research, Google Research and DeepMind (to name few among many).

[tnecniv]

That's not true. I knew a lot of professors at my undergrad, which is a well-known university, that worked in industrial research positions after their PhD before returning to academia.

[gaius]

These are all political goals, worse, they are not logical thinking at all - not a good look for a bunch of scientists

Indeed, it’s almost on the level of Make Europe Great Again

[acct1771]

Is this not preferable to one country "buying all the best players" and exerting their will on others?

[chrshawkes]

I'm not sure that's the case because the United States is also filled with people that speak different languages.

[KKKKkkkk1]

A smaller labor supply implies that the supply and demand curves cross higher. Pay should be higher then.

[kitd]

Though the segregated markets could also imply smaller demand.

[segmondy]

From an outsider, I can tell you what. It's not the langauges. It's the culture, it's the work/life balance. It's things like working reasonable hours, spending time with family & friends. Having long holidays, take time off from work to care for a newborn. It's things like GDPR.

America is brutal, America is a gladiator pit, winner take all. Money above all things, the religion is capitalism. Make money or die trying and roll over anyone in the way.

[kome]

No, language doesn't matter: EU has lower wages because it tax (and redistribute) more, and I like it this way.