[Sami_Lehtinen]

It's just like the lean startup process. In Finland and especially in Sweden, things are talked being talked about for years or decades. We need to plan, think, prepare, study, blah blah, whatever. You know what? Meanwhile Estonians did it, actually several years ago. Skipping (or doing really leanly) most of these major time and resource wasters.

[johnchristopher]

Which goes against the wisdom of that Norwegian story about the oil resource management from a few days https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9673157.

> The politicians and senior bureaucrats had not caught oil fever. A serious mining accident had recently brought down a government, and most did not want to touch oil matters with a bargepole. “Everything I said was met with, ‘Oh, you think so? Mmm. Maybe. Let’s wait and see’,” al-Kasim recalls. “This characteristic saved Norway from the curse of oil: the fact that they are completely incapable of getting carried away by the oil dream. They were very sceptical – plain horse sense basically. They didn’t want to move until it was absolutely proven that it was the right time to act.”

[ido]

I've never lived/worked in either but it seems both Finland and Sweden have really successful and huge tech industries though?

[inglor]

Finland was really hurt when Nokia fell - startups at scale and as a national priority are relatively new there. They're spending a lot of money and they have an excellent education system compared to a lot of other places but this sort of mental shift takes time.

Finland has a cultural problem: working for a big company is considered good, working for a small one is considered being unsuccessful and failure at founding a startup is considered a shame. Contrary to that - in Israel failure at founding a startup is considered great because you tried and forfeited a comfy life for a while which people will respect you for.

Finland is spending a lot of money to change that perception - there are whole institutions that are working on it and they're doing a really good job but it takes time.

[tsiki]

>Finland has a cultural problem: working for a big company is considered good, working for a small one is considered being unsuccessful and failure at founding a startup is considered a shame.

Maybe 10-15 years ago. Now with the rise of successful startups and the national interest towards them, working at a startup is considered good and trendy and rather, most of the CS students avoid large companies. Even my mom was proud and supportive when I cofounded a startup, and she's always been the one to advocate for a good and stable job.

[drawkbox]

I haven't been to either but they have an impact for sure in gaming.

Finland is home to Supercell and Rovio, arguably the two biggest juggernauts in mobile gaming. This has spawned many studios there.

Sweden is also big in gaming as the home of Notch and his little multibillion dollar game company called Mojang with Minecraft. And of course PewDiePie with the youtube game review new era, it also has spawned all sort of gaming/tech interest there. They seem to have a play for entertainment as well with Kung Fury.

Both countries are a force in creating content with technology, which is probably the winning strategy and both places have been ignited by it.

[OlleTO]

If we're looking at the swedish game industry you also want to add Paradox Interactive and Dice to that list.

Our general technology industry is "restructuring", with pretty big layoffs at the large companies. The same week this spring Sony and Ericsson gave advance notice of upcoming layoffs to 1000 and 2000 people respectively.

While not a catastrophe in itself, and a several companies stepped in to offer jobs, it's worrying as a general indication of the state of our technological industry.