The state of European software is not good. The strategy at the average European company is to spend most of the money on a sales people army and have a few engineers build the product.
This strategy often fires back as the customer base grows, because customers want software that actually works. Paying your tech debt is not feasible when your engineering department is small and they are also expected to build new features nonstop.
Unfortunately, most of these companies react by partially or completely outsourcing their bad software to bodyshops at developing countries. Those companies maintain the initial quality at best -which was already poor- and at worst they keep making it worse until it becomes unmaintainable and it collapses on itself.
The biggest problem of them all is Europe's failure to learn from its own mistakes. This pattern has existed for decades now but it keeps getting worse.
That seems a popular sentiment in this thread. But there are of course quite a few unicorns that emerged out of Europe and there is of course the notion that a lot of the mobile networks in the world are running on software that came out of Ericsson or Nokia, which are the dominant options if you don't want to go with Huawei instead.
There is of course the notion that Silicon Valley has produced a lot of amazing companies. But it should be noted that a lot of these companies are staffed, and lead by people from all over the world. E.g. Amazon CTO Werner Vogels is from my home country the Netherlands. Both MS and Google have Indian CEOs. etc. And of course US companies have long been outsourcing just about anything complicated to India, Eastern Europe, China, etc. That's not just European companies doing that. That game was pretty much invented in the US.
A lot of silicon valley based companies have most of their development departments in different continents. Mot surprising, the local market is very expensive and you can get a full team for the same money that a single developer costs there elsewhere. And you'd be wrong to assume the local developers are better/smarter. There are of course a lot of talented developers there. But I've worked with and been impressed with teams all over Europe. And I've dealt with some US companies where I wasn't so impressed with their engineering.
The state of software development in legacy car manufacturers is not good. That's simply because they are historically not software companies and they are all struggling to adjust. What little remains of the US car industry after the Japanese and the Koreans took over is basically being disrupted by Tesla just as badly as the European manufacturers.
>a lot of the mobile networks in the world are running on software that came out of Ericsson or Nokia
Ericsson's and Nokia's software divisions are offshoring bodyshops at this point. They do the complex RF R&D in Finland, Sweden and Germany and the software/firmware is offshored to Eastern Europe and India.
Discarding Eastern European countries like Poland is a mistake. Says a person who sees the country consistently growing their foothold on the global IT market, often with customer satisfaction.
Also says a person who is an immigrant to Poland and saw the sector boom in both size as well as international impact.
I never discarded Poland and would never do that. Sincerely, an Eastern European.
The thing with Eastern Europe is, it's still a hub for body shops mostly. Sure, there are also big names there working on cool products thanks to remote jobs and offshoring from the tech scenes of other major tech hubs like SV/London, etc. but most of the jobs are still body-shop style.
> The strategy at the average European company is to spend most of the money on a sales people army and have a few engineers build the product.
Did you mean "average European software company"? A lot of the German Mittelstand companies are the opposite. Instead they sell into a niche through trade shows (another thing probably going away).
> Did you mean "average European software company"? A lot of the German Mittelstand companies are the opposite. Instead they sell into a niche through trade shows (another thing probably going away).
I do. My area has Mitteltstands as well, mostly in biochemistry. I had a bizarre experience interviewing for one of those where they posted a Python job offer but they actually wanted me to write Java and a dozen other things on top of it.
This strategy often fires back as the customer base grows, because customers want software that actually works. Paying your tech debt is not feasible when your engineering department is small and they are also expected to build new features nonstop.
Unfortunately, most of these companies react by partially or completely outsourcing their bad software to bodyshops at developing countries. Those companies maintain the initial quality at best -which was already poor- and at worst they keep making it worse until it becomes unmaintainable and it collapses on itself.
The biggest problem of them all is Europe's failure to learn from its own mistakes. This pattern has existed for decades now but it keeps getting worse.