When I read about 996-style culture I am happy to be European. That would not work here. 40 hours per week max and most engineers prefer to not work more than 32 hours a week. So you have a good work/life balance. I currently work 4 hours a week.
I second this. On paper Austria has below average working hours in EU statistics but I've seen a lot of overwork in the tech companies I've been at by some people, but which was never officially reported because the workers themselves just went along with it.
Scandals in the papers around the crazy hours workers at big-4 consultancies in Vienna typically do, which again went unpunished by labor agencies, since there were no written orders from management imposing those long hours but workers just tactilely accepted it as part of the work culture there.
Similarly, a mate of mine at major finance gig in Frankfurt noticed that they were working longer hours than their colleagues from NY. Heard similar stories from colleagues from Italy and France.
So work hours are super dependent on local culture and industry. The meme about everyone in the EU being paid to slack off all day is not as common as people imagine, unless maybe you work for the government or got lucky to score a great gig in some dysfunctional monopolistic megacorp.
I've found in (EU) academia at least that people essentially lie about how much work they do. In anglosphere it's far more common for people to be open/expectant of 80 hour weeks etc. Probably the lieing approach is better for society/culture.
not everyone in the states is 996, but yeah, there's a pandemic of bad management here. or rather... not so much bad management... but management by people who read articles about how Amazon, a company with tens of thousands of engineers, manages projects and then decides they're going to manage their startup of 4 people the same way because they think it's a "growth hacking" hack.
just keep in mind that American tech startups are often just vehicles to evade estate tax. and certainly vehicles for converting VC money into more VC money by selling dreams to greater fools. there's also a down side.
You don't have to work at an early stage startup - in fact most people don't. But some people do wish to participate in an early stage startup, and plenty do in Europe as well.
> So you have a good work/life balance. I currently work 4 hours a week.
And this is why when I was a PM, we shut down our Amsterdam office and shifted it to Praha, Bucharest, and Warsaw. You won't find as many people who will complain about a 40 hour workweek while earning €80k TCs
I think the occasional burst of activity can and does work, but it’s a budget you need to spend strategically and let it recover. Constant 996 indeed won’t work.
you are lucky to have lived a career where that is true. it is largely true in the states and sometimes true in startups. there are corners of the world where it is less true than one would hope.
That's a good callout - I have found European employers and founders to be much stingier with salaries in comparison to those I've worked with in the Bay or Israel, but I feel a lot of this is because of much more conservative investors, with boards pushing back on more "realistic" compensation.
I've been adamant about paying 75th percentile TC - I want the employees in my portfolio companies to be extremely motivated, and that requires incentivizing employees and founders correctly
if you surround yourself with people who are only motivated by money, you will believe that everyone is only motivated by money. if you surround yourself with people who are motivated by a creative urge to build something they can be proud of, you may start to believe that this is everyone's motivation.
it is often useful to think of people as only being motivated by one thing, to see clearly how application of that thing might change their behaviour. but if you believe that is the only thing that motivates them, you will have a very simplistic (and eventually incorrect) model of how they are motivated.
Maybe 15 years ago I would've agreed because there was genuine innovation in tech where you could actually be passionate and proud of building it. "I want to work here because I want this product to exist" could've been a legitimate thing to say back in the day.
Nowadays with every market being saturated and tech being a race to the bottom quality-wise, what's there to be passionate about and/or proud of? Do you think people are proud of building yet another OpenAI wrapper or advertising surface? If they actually are proud of those I would feel pretty sad for them.
Also, the majority of landlords don't take payment in "passion" or "pride" and rents have skyrocketed since the glory days of tech.
i think it's still out there, but yeah, you have to wade through an amazing amount of poop to find it. insert here the joke about someone digging through the muck in a horse stable and the punch line is "there's got to be a pony in here somewhere."
Many people aren't motivated by money so much as wanting to spend as much time they can with their family, where they find their creative energies most rewarding.
Making the most money per hour merely allows me to spend more time with my family rather than working more for less and giving my creative energies to greater society or an employer instead of directly to my wife and children.
I disagree. It is more accurate to say that more working hours is a continuum of productivity. Imagine that you have two nearly identical software engineers. One works 40 hours per week and the other 41 hours per week. Which will be more productive? Very likely the 41 hour per week engineer. Now, if you compare 50 vs 51, then 60 vs 61, and so forth, the productivity gap will become much smaller, possibly hard to measure after 60. I have witnessed a few young engineers in my career with simply unbelievable work ethic and talents that could work 80+ hours a week for months on end. It was amazing to see, and their output was unmatched.
From personal experience, I worked like a dog in my younger years for two reasons: (1) To become a better engineer, you need to make a lot of mistakes and fix them yourself. (2) Much junior engineering work is just time in front of the screen pounding out simple features for a CRUD app. The more that you complete, the quicker you get promoted.
You're making a feely argument for a phenomenon that has evidence. The evidence is that there's a max amount of work you do per week, and the more you work the less you do per hour - and that max amount is below 40 hours, incidentally.
There's effective evidence that people who work 6 hours a day are more productive than people working 8 hours a day, and after 4 hours of active practice, you aren't getting any better.
And on top of this, perpetually tired and exhausted people are not at their best.
Regardless of whether or not you accept that someone working 41 hours really isn't doing more work than someone doing 40 - you can see that two people working 30 is much better than one person working 60. Working people for long hours is mismanagement, at some level.
I agree, but the issue is the impetus behind the statement. The tone which that poster took and the default negative assumption is a negative trait to most hiring managers - especially at the early stage. At an early stage organization, you want your employees to be self-motivated but also open to pull crunchtime if needed (eg. customer escalation, rolled up product launch, pivot)
This is the Charlie Kirk argument against gun control, "I'm ok with a small number of gun deaths, it's a small price to pay for freedom". All well and good until you become one of those gun deaths.
I agree with him by the way. But this kind of maximalist thought ending cliche is weird and anti intellectual.
One death of an amazon employee means we should change the whole system? A huge number of people are employed by them, enjoy their lives, became multi millionaires.
Why am I flagged for a fairly normal opinion? A few deaths are okay if the wast majority are satisfied?
There’s sort of a rotation going on in a lot of companies. There were companies which had Europe as the low cost location compared to America are now moving the type of work that had been done in America to Europe and what had been in Europe to India. But also companies treating European countries as high cost now and looking for new low cost countries
we also sort of effed up a while ago with changes to section 174... suddenly software devs in the states were 10%-25% more expensive. once that happened it made sense to see if moving devs to europe for situations where you have a european based product and sales team made sense.
in the states we've sort of repaired the damage of the section 174 changes, but i think they were rolled into a tax bill that sunsets in a few years. so we may see this again in 2029.
Are they? Do you have a source for that? My impression is that it's easier to find engineering work in Stockholm than in silicon valley atm, but I haven't measured objectively.
I live in Spain. I’ve been in the industry for the last 10 years.
I’ve seen from a very close distance several European companies move a big part of their operations to India. Have had close friends laid off recently and seen them struggle for months to find a new jobs. Plus, I see tighter freelance market these days.
My former company had the brilliant idea to outsource native app development to india. This was mabye 2015 in germany and they tried to roll out the app for several years. There were severe communication and quality problems. Our company wasted massive time on it, until they finally added a single native app dev and we started making progress. We already had like 30 people in tech department and adding a single position was a fucking joke on the payroll.
Any manager that thinks he can beat the value of a single dev with a random ass sweatshop from india is delusional. The cultural difference is massive, quality and work ethics as well. It's a high friction job for a manager. Well at least if you expect a bit of quality and timeliness.
(Sorry for all indians that do a good job, it's just the sweatshop/agency remote software dev culture simply doesn't work. Even a european sweatshop usually delivers worse quality then inhouse devs.)
I’ve worked with great engineers from India/Pakistan. I didn’t hire them, so don’t know too much about the process of how to find them but they were definitely as good as anyone I’ve seen in Europe.
Stockholm is not representative of entire Europe same how SF isn't representative of entire NA. There's too many variables and shades of gray to give a simple answer, with closest to a correct answer being "it depends" based on where you live, how good you are and how in demand your skill set is to the demand of your local market, but the market is pretty much fucked in many high-CoL locations worldwide due to offshoring to cheaper locations and many businesses in Europe seeing orders fall.
I deliberately chose to compare two tech-heavy locations to avoid weird and difficult comparisons like the tech industry in rural Nebraska Vs Moldavia.
Stockholm was a natural point of comparison for me given that I used to live there until very recently.i have a decent picture of the dev market in Stockholm. Silicon valley is the most mentioned tech centre on here, and is therefore the American tech market I know the most about (even if my knowledge is very limited in this front)
Sure but then you still can't extrapolate the comparison beyond SF and Stockholm. I'm also in Europe but the job market where I live don't give a shit about what it looks like in Stockholm but they can diverge massively.
is that for startups or for the big guys like Ericsson?
i have to admit i was surprised by how much startup activity was going on in Stockholm in the last 20 years. but disappointed by how few startups don't get B or C rounds or get bought after their A or B rounds run out.
How does this work though? Do you have around 4 hours worth of work you report on? Are you paid for more than 4 hours? I’m so curious when people throw completely alien statements like this out like it’s something that doesn’t even warrant explanation.
I freelance. Occasionally I get called by former clients to work on legacy systems I was lead on. And I have some support tasks for former clients.
For one company I log on once a month, I start a Renovate process which generates pull-requests for updated dependencies. Patch-versions get auto-merged after tests succeed, minor and major need approval of the current lead. Sometimes I need to manually tweak the code a bit because of API changes or to get tests to pass. I'm allowed to bill them four hours on it regardless of actual work, which is between five minutes (no manual intervention required) and two hours (need to rewrite some code).
For another company I create a report once a month for all outages and which errors frequently show up in logging. I automated this to be a five minute task and it generates a Wiki page. I review the page to see if everything is ok. I bill an hour on this.
The company is happy to not have to allocate engineer hours on maintenance so they can continue pumping out new features.
I'd say that on average I work 4 hours and bill 12 hours. This is comparable to the income of someone in employment working around 24 hours. But I do run a significant risk obviously.
Depends what one considers “work”; if you’re only counting focused, active coding work then there are places where 4 hours is the max you’re going to achieve of that anyway.
I count work the contracted time I need to be available/tied to my employer. Doesn't matter if I'm doing focused coding or not, it's still work because I can't be paragliding or swimming in that time, I need to be at the office or near my laptop, so it's not leisure, it's still work time.
But let's say it's only counting "focused work", 4h/week is huge stretch, unless we're competing in slacker olympics.
