Building career in Europe

Question

Hi,

I just feel like most of the advice about a software engineering career online applies to the US, and mostly to Silicon Valley, NYC, and Boston - big cities. After spending 6 years in London, I noticed these things:

FAANG companies mostly hire in the US, and the offices that they have in Europe are quite small, and when an interesting project comes up, it is often moved to the US. FAANG quite often have restrictions that when you want to get promoted to L7+, you have to move to the US.
Startups struggle to raise funding even in London. Closing B2B deals in Europe is really hard, so most of the startups try to find deals in the US.
There are barely any Europe-based scale-ups.
The most successful Europe-based scale ups are in the fintech - monzo, revolut, wise, zilch. Deliveroo got acquired by the US-based company - doordash. Babylon Health went bankrupt.

Are your observations consistent with this? How do you think about your career when you want to stay in Europe? What is your strategy?

Alex Chiou · Accepted Answer

I think if you want to move into the upper echelons of tech, you more or less have to move to the United States. There are meaningful London offices for FAANG, and I think that's more or less the most common peak European engineers can achieve.

Your observations about startups in Europe are spot-on. The big problem with Europe is that the VCs are way too conservative and founders don't give early employees enough equity. This makes it harder for startups to attract the best talent away from Big Tech and even harder to retain them if they do decide to take a chance on a startup. There's a nice video from PostHog's CEO about this culture here: Why You Should Be Racist Toward European VCs (An Argument For YC)

Building career in Europe

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