It's already looking good:

https://www.mothership.blog/

There were Eurobooks and they were pretty well bought out by Facebook. Hyves and so on. The online CV networks were bought by LinkedIn.

It’s not just the Internet. It’s politicians and businesspeople and more generally, shameless citizens.

There’s a lot to dislike about shame as an enforcement mechanism but I’m starting to miss some of the upside it delivered.

Could you expand on the other problems with Europe other than hiring and firing laws?

Senior/staff type engineers are not a union position so great people refuse promotions and responsibility because they don't want to leave the union. Thus they won't mentor juniors, and other things that you need great engineers for. (At least that is how the union people I work with in Europe are, there are other unions with different rules)

There is probably more.

Like siblings comments, I would be really interested to know to which country and union you are referring to. In France it's certainly not true (I have a very senior engineering role and I am in a union and it never was an issue, and anyway, the percentage of unionized engineers here is so low that even if that was true, it would hardly be noticeable)

Which country is that in? Can you not offer them better conditions than the union? Are they forced to leave the union or just no longer required to be in it?

Never heard of that, and I've worked in about 7 EU countries...

Never heard of that, nor of a union in tech. What part of Europe?

What union ? In which country ?

Me too. I've seen that horror too :-)

This might be the new location:

https://gistdeck.github.io/

Because obscurity works against insider threats and OSint /s

I ran a corporate networking team in the 2000s with two of the five network engineer team members, being two years out of retraining (they were welding specialists in the former local shipbuilding industry). Non-white collar supervisory and work ethic issues, but excellent work in general. Had an issue with the team on-call car getting bullet holes once (suspect some drug dealing on the side, long story!) but excellent colleagues in general.

I've worked with a lot of retrained and second-career people and I can't sing their praises enough.

Hiring from your own and employee's network.

Provide significant referral bonuses to employees and ex-employees if a new hire stays on board for more than 6 months with above-average performance reviews.

Run evaluations with external recruitment firms - do quality shoot-outs with three recruitment firms for the same open role - each may present only three CVs. Never run any position with less than two external recruitment firms and let them clearly know that you're tracking quality metrics (CV fit, interview quality of candidates, job role fit, and six month retention and above-average performance review) and will retire your partnership if they drop below mean.

Run an empanelling process for the recruiters for each role and learn how to do it properly and repeatedly. This is a simpler process than the one you run internally with the hiring exec (you?), hiring manager and interviewer pool. You have an empanelling process, right?

Traditionally, network effects have allowed us to socialize costs (and socialize benefits) in power, water, gas, roads and communications. We've used very different models in different places for each of these "natural monopolies" that get constructed.

When consumers opt out en masse, these systems collapse if they're not actually socialized - and where there is no actual financial benefit to consumers for going "off-grid" since they're still paying with taxes or equivalent.

I'd love to see an analysis of the different approaches in the different phases, possibly including TV-for-public benefit, like the BBC or NPR too.