Why Germans have higher productivity and longer vacations | Hacker News Reader

Why Germans have higher productivity and longer vacations

openforum.com

144 pointsy2002129 comments

Reading the comments here, I'm surprised to see so many people defending the 2-week-vacation policies in America, rather than trying to figure out ways to get 6-week-vacations implemented over here. Doesn't anybody think they'd be happier with more time off? Enough so to make it a priority?

I tend to take a lot of time off, and one thing I notice when I come back from a trip is how much more productive I feel. It's like there's all this pent-up brainpower waiting to get out, and none of whatever baggage was clogging it up before I left to get in the way.

I used to work 3 month contracts at this one shop, with 6 to 9 month breaks in the middle. I actually alienated some of the developers there because I'd show up and be 10X - 50X as productive as the next guy (measurable in things delivered), mainly because I was so stoked to be back writing code. I know that if I'd stayed there an entire year at a stretch, my throughput would have come down to a similar level as the rest of the team. But because of the way I worked, they'd get 3 months of fast, and then I'd be out the door.

I notice the same thing with my own projects when I'm travelling. If I dip out of internet coverage for a week or so and then get a day to run, it's amazing to see how much I get done in that day. I imagine that you could get similar results at a regular company by taking 3 or 4 short breaks over the course of the year.

If the sheep are trained well, you don't need fences.

What is the marginal cost to an employer in Germany of an hour of labor? And, in the US? The article did not explicitly state the metric used to quantify "output", but, given other similar studies I've seen, I must presume that profit/employee across the economy is a likely underlying metric. Given such a metric, could labor cost differences explain this "efficiency"? Let us consider a contrived example where, in Ohio, construction workers earn $20/hour and, in New York, $60. If we examined the techniques used (by capitalists) to build a structure, we would surely observe more capital-intensive but labor saving techniques in New York when compared to Ohio. Does this mean that the New York workers get more done? If you measure output (yards of concrete spread per day or whatever), then yes -- using a really expensive robotic concrete spreader allows the $60/hour employee to produce a lot of output. However, it might also be rational in Ohio to forgo the machine in favor of more labor-intensive methods. The profitability of the Ohio construction company might actually be higher, but the laborers in New York are "more productive."

I know little of Germany's regulations w.r.t. employment. Are labor costs (due to not only wages but taxes paid by the employer and other non-wage burdens) higher? Do employers in Germany rationally select higher levels of automation? Could this explain the disparity between countries in such a metric?

You're probably right about the labor-saving techniques. In Germany, you get gardeners with automatic leaf blowers (i.e., faster, but more noise), and with a whole slew of bottom-tier jobs (such as supermarket baggers) missing. The car industry is purely based on robots and automation - which is probably the same in the US.

I suspect this must be a European thing then. I'm in London and I'd assumed that leaf blowers were a universal thing, and I had to google "supermarket bagger" - it seems like a weird gimmick, is this common?

If anything, older Americans lament the reduction in the level of grocery store service over the years. While most stores (at least around Cleveland) have baggers, there is only one higher-end grocery which still loads one's bags in his car for him. The customer leaves his cart by the exit, drives his car up to the store, and some teenagers load the bags into the trunk ("boot" for those in the UK?).

Well, leaf blowers are sold in South America too, but we have supermarket baggers like in the U.S.

Something odd is that gas stations over here are called "service stations", and we get our cars filled (no filling it yourself), oil checked and other niceties - it's so disconcerting for me going to an European gas station (went to one in Vienna).

Wikipedia once again surprised me with the depth of the article on Filling Stations:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Filling_station

I guess I'd only experienced full service stations before going to Europe.

Wages are in general lower, and on the whole the spectrum is compressed -- so low-paid jobs tend to be a big higher, but a software developer in Berlin makes about half to a third of what they would in Silicon Valley.

Also, the article is a bit off on some of its numbers -- 6 weeks of vacation aren't required by law, 24 days are (i.e. just under 5 weeks), though 6 is a common perk.

Additionally, at least in the software industry, I've commonly seen people reporting fewer hours than they actually work because by law overtime must be compensated by money or vacation, which is often an annoyance for the employer and employee (i.e. you're working late to get something done, by choice, and your boss is annoyed because now they're supposed to give you vacation time for that), so I got in the habit of always just reporting 40 hours.

In general I'd take this article with a grain of salt; it's not that it's mostly wrong, but it's clearly written in fandom, rather than a quest-for-understanding sort of way.

Why would you compared Berlin (one of Germany's poorer mega-cities) to pretty much the best paying area for tech workers in the states?

It's true that you'd still see a huge salary disparity even if you compare SV to Hamburg, Munich or Frankfurt, but comparing to Berlin is still a bit disingenuous.

Also, I believe SV (especially for tech workers) is the outlier here - there is no other place in the world where developers are so highly payed, and the highest average wage earners among professionals in Germany are not people in the software industry like in SV (they are probably the people working in finance & banking in Frankfurt).

The example holds for Hamburg, and is pretty close for Munich or Frankfurt. (I've spent four years working in Baden-Württemberg and four in Berlin.) Tech salaries are just a lot lower in Germany. In comparison, in the US, there are a number of cities where wages are pretty close to Silicon Valley. I believe NYC is a bit higher. If you want to compare finance to finance, I assure you that salaries in New York are higher than they are in Frankfurt.

But in Berlin, you can have a top notch meal with fresh veggies and local ingredients for $5, a beautiful apartment near all sorts of great things for $800 easily, and, oh yeah, excellent healthcare and other social benefits.

You can't talk about salaries in other cities without considering the cost-of-living differences.

That said, I know programmers in Vienna making what I would consider pretty good salaries (60-70K/euros), even in the US. With 5-6 weeks of vacation.

You mean a self-prepared meal for $5? If you want to go out, $5 will buy you a Döner or Currywurst.

This matches my limited experience. I toured a German factory once - their level of technology and processes are astounding. I watched a car getting painted - it was on a catwalk over running water with turbines to capture some energy from the process, and bristles on the turbines to take most of the paint out and recycle the water. The efficiencies are enormous, technology investment very high.

I haven't been through so many factories to compare, but the investments in technology I saw seem higher than in the American factories I've been through. Small sample size, though, basically anecdotal, so take me with a grain of salt here.

I know what you mean. I once had a tour at a Volkswagen factory. It was jaw dropping and amazing how well thought out all processes were planned and managed.

I just returned from Berlin a couple of nights ago, and met an English guy (I'm a New Zealander living in London) who'd worked there for a few years. He is an aerospace engineer working for a very famous English engineering firm in their German office.

He was of the opinion that German productivity, at least when compared with other European countries, was a myth. He told exactly the same anecdotes about German individuality as this article mentions, but gave it quite a negative spin.

When handing out bits of work to fellow engineers, the Germans would tend to put their heads down and start work immediately, instead of consulting with colleagues about previous solutions to the same problem, etc. Basically he said they did quite a lot of very efficient, very correct, very over-engineered re-inventing of the wheel.

Particularly he pointed out that to a German engineer, every part of the solution was equally important, where as to an English engineer, it was obvious some parts where more important than others. Focusing on those gave a better quality end-result when faced with a limited budget, but a German with a unlimited budget would give you an absolutely fantastic end-result.

The problem is that Germans have engineers, and an engineering culture and we don't (anymore). Even Aston Martins aren't made here anymore.

R. V. Jones made a similar observation in Most Secret War (WWII) about collaboration between the operational and R&D branches. The Germans would build to spec without interaction with the requesting organization producing a fine piece of engineering whereas in the U.K. there would tend to be back and forth on the requirements and so on, with the U.K. device being less polished but more flexible and more likely to satisfy needs current and future. And I think often more quickly developed, since the R&D types would say "Well, can you relax this requirement?" and so on.

So this sounds like a long established engineering culture.

This is actually a timely piece of advice in my case, as I interact with my German managers. They might be expecting a more "go off and engineer what I asked for attitude" from me, while I'm doing more of the back and forth thing of suggesting alternative approaches with various trade offs.

Of course, they did decide to start their company here in the U.S., so they may appreciate some things about the U.S. style of doing business.

Germany is the long-established engineering culture, building on the old guild system of craftsmen. (Which still exist - the craftsmen's guilds, I mean. You aren't allowed to fix musical instruments until you've gone through your apprenticeship and journeyman's year.)

Well, the UK was there first, with the Industrial Revolution.

It subsequently lost that lead to Germany - I don't have the link to hand, but one possible reason was the lax copyright laws in the German states allowed easier re-publication of technical manuals.

More recently British engineering ability has criminally been allowed to wither on the vine, but that's another story.

I guess you could look at it both ways. When building something you are only as strong as your weakest link. Closest analogy would be the "for want of a nail" in the Art of War.

And when you think of quality "German engineering" tends to get a stamp of approval. It implies that no detail was overlooked or under resourced. It probably doesn't mean much when buying a cheap toy, but if you are spending 40-80k on a car it is reassuring.

Germany would not be the second biggest exporter in the world if it was a myth. German approach seems to work better than English one at least in older, more established industries (cars, etc).

“Geoghegan believes Germans understate their work hours, and Americans overstate work hours. Yet both countries are getting roughly the same amount of work done. This means that Germans are actually doing more, while working less.”

Is it just me, or does the claim about over/understating work hours run exactly contrary to the subsequent claim? (To be explicit: Germans understate their hours ⇒ they work more hours than they say ⇒ statistics showing Germans with higher productivity are exaggerated. And similarly Americans understate hours ⇒ they work less than claimed ⇒ they are more productive than statistics would suggest.)

Reworded your clarification for my own help:

A German makes 10 widgets in 5 hours and bills 4 hours. The German achieves 2.5 widgets per billed hour.

An American makes 10 widgets in 5 hours and bills 6 hours. The American achieves 1.67 widgets per billed hour.

The author got the original statement backwards, partly because the original quote was confusing. From the Geohegan interview:

"Look at their productivity rates. They’re like ours. I think we understate our hours and they overstate them, because they take so much time off and sneak off early from work. If the productivity rates being reported are officially the same, and if they’re understating and we’re overstating, they’re probably working more efficiently than we are, and maybe the fact that they’re taking time off has something to do with that."

Sounds like Geohegan himself made a mistake in the second sentence, which could have led to the confusion.

I think it’s funny that productivity is often the only frame which is used to discuss Germany’s mandated vacation [1]. That’s not at all the intent of the law, its purpose is not increasing productivity. It exists because German lawmakers think that every employee deserves at least four weeks of paid vacation the same way US lawmakers think that every employee deserves at least $7.25 per hour [2].

I [3] am completely willing to accept possible adverse effects of mandated vacations on productivity as long as they are not too drastic [4]. I don’t view vacations as a means of improving productivity. (They might well be but the evidence I know of doesn’t do a good job of convincing me either way.)

[1] The law mandates 20 days if you work five days a week so it’s actually four weeks, not six.

[2] Funny enough, Germany doesn’t actually have a minimum wage.

[3] Just so you are not confused, I’m German.

[4] Germans are extremely wealthy so I’m not exactly concerned.

> Germans are extremely wealthy so I’m not exactly concerned.

... and fond of footnotes.

A discussion I had with a German couple in Verona while I was on vacation suggested that German companies don't generally give sick days and that the mandated vacation time had to be used for sick days. Was what I heard correct?

As a comparison, the American company I work for (in Canada) provides a default of two weeks vacation with two weeks PEL (Personal Emergency Leave) that can be used for doctors' appointments, etc. That's twenty days, although only ten of them can be used for vacations.

I realize that not every company in America provides sick days, but that's IMO a different issue.

I am german also, and I never heard of people having to use vacation for sick days. You need to provide a doctors note (generally only after the third day of sickness) and then you are set. You just miss the time, but get paid and do not have to make up for anything.

They don't have sick days. When you are sick you are sick it could be 1 day or 6 months. They don't give sick days because the government pays for your time off. So while they may miss out on your productivity, financially, they've lost little.

As an American I've encountered far too many Americans coming into work with just "a little cold" and getting the rest of the office sick. Dragging everyone else down with them because they can't afford to take time off to see a doctor and get medicated.

That’s not correct. Your employer has to continue paying you for up to six weeks. (You generally need a doctor’s note after three days.) If you are sick longer than that your health insurance has to pay you some of your wage, usually 70 percent of your gross wage and at most 90 percent of your net wage.

Yes, you are correct. Last time I was sick for a few days I had to bring in the doctors note, which was handed over to the bookkeeper. I assumed, wrongly, they turned it into the state to recover costs. Which is what happens when I buy things for work, travel for work, or use a hotel for work.

But I think the 80/20 split is still in effect for anything longer than a few weeks.

"They don't give sick days because the government pays for your time off."

That is not true. The employer pays the salary for six weeks of sickness. After that, the health insurance provider takes over. I believe that the american sick-day-model could never work here because of unions and other employee-interest organizations. So it is not really up to the company, they have to pay you your salary and cannot take vacation time away from you because of sickness. However, ongoing sickness can be a reason to fire an employee.

Thank you for the clarification. The situation is more complex for most high-tech employees in the U.S. in any case given short-term and long-term illness benefits.

> However, ongoing sickness can be a reason to fire an employee.

Are you sure about that?

There are some very strict requirements, but yes, it can be a reason for termination. The requirements are things like future prognosis of the employee's health, and undoubted negative impact on the economic situaion of the employer because of the illness.

OK. But isn't there a clause, that when you already knew when you hired the guy, that you can't fire him? (Or was it the other way around, and you were barred from knowing when hiring? It's all complicated.)

Six weeks... quite long compared to Finland. Here the employer has to pay full wages for 10 first days of sickness, after that the state (Social Insurance Institution) covers about 70%.

Ongoing sickness is an acceptable reason to fire an employee (with similar "very strict requirements") also here.

My first job out of college was in Stuttgart, Germany. The boss apologized in the orientation meeting that as a small company, they could only provide 28 paid days of vacation.

He wasn't sure why I was laughing.

I'm a bit late to the party but whatever, just wanted to let you know that us Germans don't have 6 weeks federally mandated vacations, it's 24 days: http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bundesurlaubsgesetz#Gesetzliche...

That's the minimum, most people I know have 28-30 days. On top of that you can get up to 5 days of paid educational leave.

The article as a whole is quite superficial, imho.

Not sure if those working in big companies like Deutsche Telekom or Daimler would agree to the claim that Germans don't have many meetings, for example... ;)

Actually, it's only 24 days if you have six work days in a week. For a 5-day-week, it's 20 days per year minimum.

Ah, didn't know that, thanks. In fact, I haven't even known the 24 days before I looked it up in Wikipedia... :D

The article has some facts not completely correct: "The government provides citizens with free healthcare, free university education, and childcare." Healthcare plans are mandatory for most but not paid by the government. University education at public universities costs between 0 and 500 EUR per semester, childcare is subsidized but not completely free.

A related point is that if you are paying taxes and receiving services from the government, then they are not free. They are being paid for by your taxes (possibly subsidized to a degree by other tax payers), and depending on how much you are taxed you may be subsidizing others as well as paying for your own.

You are right. Although your healtcare is paid by the employment agency (Bundesagentur für Arbeit), if you are unemployed.

500 EUR per semester is not mutch in America you pay like 5000$ or something?

As a Brit who used to work in New York, for an investment company, I have a different view. While I agree my US fellow workers are very sociable during the day, they do tend to run off 5pm sharp! There's no "go for beers after work" environment. I spoke to them candidly about this and they said their real friends are the ones they grew up with and tend to hang out with them. I also had a colleague at HSBC and another at JPM who also expressed the same view, but added that's why brits do well over in the states because they are used to working longer hours and this appears favourable to the bosses.

Anyway, not trolling, just thought relevant.

That's what I found working over on the West Coast some years ago - the guys I socialized with after hours were fellow-non Americans. The impression was that Americans form their strongest relationships in their high school/college years and stick to their cliques. That may be a generalization though.

It think it just depends on the company. I moved from NZ to NYC and worked for a software company there (just north of the city in White Plains) for five years. There was a good crew there that went out for drinkies on a regular basis. Someone would mosey round the office about 5:30 and give the nod. Most of my mates there were ex radio guys / DJs and originally from somewhere else in the US though.

I knew a few people who worked on Wall St and they seemed to socialize with their co-workers too but I also knew one chick in publishing who had a similar experience to you.

Conversely I now live in Edinburgh and my team only goes out for drinks once in a blue moon. Of course much of it depends on personal circumstances such as if you're young and single or have a family with small children.

So, um I guess YMMV.

There's no such thing as a free lunch; whether or not we're less productive, nobody's paying you for the hours you don't work. And, indeed, aren't Germany's wages, by sector, consistently lower than those in the US?

According to Max Klein, that is certainly true for programmers. Based on the numbers he gave, "a good programmer" in Germany gets paid less than a fresh college grad in the US.

http://maxkle.in/giving-up-on-europe/

I can vouch for this, the graduate programmers in the US in a company I worked for were taking in around double what we were in Scotland. That said, our wages were a damn sight higher than our counterparts in China and India but at least everyone else got to live somewhere interesting :)

I have different experience (lived in Germany for 10 months), JavaScript/Ruby/Python developers make roundabout 35-55 euros per hour.

Additionally, this article rings true for my experience both living in Germany & working with Germans in the US (especially here); They bust ass & are amazingly productive.

Contracting or salaried? Because that's very low at least for contract Ruby developers in the US.

There is no country where programmers are as well paid as the US. Even in Canada, where cost-of-living and salaries are normally comparable, programmers are paid at least 20-30% less. I'm not sure why, but it's a dramatic difference.

Of course, it's also the reason US companies are so eager to outsource programming jobs.

I'm not sure this is the case. If you had said Silicon Valley or New York I might have agreed but otherwise I think there are places in Europe that pay more than much of the US. At least in Finance.

"Max Klein" isn't a real person, and is hardly a reputable source.

Context: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1353307

"Max Klein" sent me an e-mail essentially inviting me to 'take it outside', I am amused.

Money is not always a good indicator of societal wealth. The standard of living rankings tell a truer story.

It may very well be better for everyone's quality of life to pay people less and mandate more leisure; in other words, it may be better if society decides (for most people) how hard they should work.

But that's orthogonal to my point. You could mandate 6 weeks vacation in the US, too. But wages would go down as a result.

Generally, if you're in our profession and you want more vacation, become a contractor. People have been doing contract work for decades for exactly this reason.

I think the point was that if the US mandated 6 weeks of vacation, and wages went down as a result, so would prices, no?

If supply of money went down, but the amount of goods and services produced remained the same, prices would go down.

If Americans worked less, it's likely that the amount of goods and services produced would also go down. In that case, prices would remain the same, and we would all just have less stuff.

What's cheaper in Germany? Housing appears to cost about as much as a major US metro area. Transportation costs more. Health care is obviously cheaper, but Germans pay much higher taxes. Food appears to be just slightly cheaper in Germany.

Transportation costs more by what metric? I think the population density would do a lot to offset the naive euros/mile comparison. I suspect there's a similar effect with housing, that cultural norms in the US create unnecessarily large housing expenses, for example large manicured lawns. Though I'm reaching a bit here, I still think this isn't as cut and dry 'cheaper.' Question is more what's culturally expected? Daily hot showers are pretty pricey for example.

    Housing appears to cost about as much as a major US metro area.

Where did you get your information? Have you tried comparing the rent of a reasonably central apartment in Frankfurt & Munich (Germany's wealthiest and most expensive cities) with their New York and San Fransisco equivalents?

Housing in major cities in Germany is drastically cheaper than in the US.

Are you seriously suggesting that Manhattan and San Francisco are representative of the housing markets of the entire US?

The average cost of a newly built detached house in Germany in 2008 was $320,540USD. The average cost of same in the United States in 2008 was $292,600[1].

Yes, I did compare, but not aggressively. What's your source?

[1] Bulwien Gesa via "Global Property Guide", and the US Government, respectively.

My source is living in Austria, which has a very similar housing market to Germany & having friends in California & New York who pay $2000 a month for an apartment nobody here would pay even half (maybe not even a third or a quarter) of that for.

And there are also much cheaper cities in Germany, I was comparing the most expensive in both countries since you talked about major US metro areas.

Pretty sure that even if you go down the ladder and compare Seattle/Miami/San Diego to Hamburg/Berlin/Cologne or whatever their German counterparts are German housing is still cheaper.

EDIT: I see you changed your comment while I was replying. You're right that if you compare suburban housing (detached houses) the US is cheaper. But if we are talking about metropolitan housing it's a different story. Also, relatively few people live in detached houses in Germany - these do not represent the average household like they do in the US.

I don't think we are at a disagreement, because I don't think we are comparing the same thing. I am talking about metropolitan life (apartment, central location in a big city) while you are talking about housing in general (which in the US mostly comprises houses in suburbs).

Don't let actual research statistics and my actual argument (US v Germany, not Berlin v NYC) get in the way of your life experience.

Honestly, it's not that hard to actually gather the statistics and muster an argument based on evidence. Every major metro area tracks these numbers.

Having just replied to another comment with 4 minutes of Google research to establish the rough parity between the cost of the Berlin rental market with that of Chicago, the third largest city in the US, I'm comfortable supposing right back at you that you're wrong, and that housing in Germany simply isn't significantly cheaper than it is in the US, despite the fact that it is the single largest component of the typical cost of living and the fact that on average Germans earn less than Americans.

And, sorry, no, I'm talking about major metro, not suburbs.

Berlin is poorer than German average. So I'd take comparisons of Berlin with major metropolitan areas in the US with a grain of salt.

    And, sorry, no, I'm talking about 
    major metro, not suburbs.


    The average cost of a newly built 
    **detached house** in Germany

There are practically no detached houses in major metros in Germany, except in the very outskirts of the city & suburbs.

The few exceptions to that rule are extremely expensive. This is why the comparison is not 100% apt - detached houses are a common form of housing major US cities but very uncommon in major German cities.

These numbers don't take the lifetime of the houses into account. Without having actual data I would say German houses have a higher lifetime than US counterparts. In Europe, and especially in Germany, houses are usually built not for a decade, but for multiple decades (more robust houses, better insulation etc.). I am not sure if this also applies to most American houses. Do the numbers then still reflect the actual price?

Is it your impression that people in the US replace their physical houses every decade? Mine was built in the 1920's.

Mine was built in 1885, but we're not typical, tptacek.

The average house in Oak Park is many, many decades old. I don't know what Europeans think of us, but I hope there isn't a stereotype that we live in disposable houses!

What does "many, many decades old" mean? You do realize that there are people living in houses in Europe that have existed longer than the US has been a country, right?

You do live in disposable houses. Have you seen how a house in the US is built? The walls are made of what are called 2"x4"s [1], spaced 1.5' apart. If you've ever been to Lowes or one of those kinds of places and seen insulation you'll see why. Insulation comes in big rolls 1.5' wide. Once the insulation is in sheetrock is put on the inside and blackboard on the outside. If the home is a brick it will then have bricks laid in front of the blackboard with a strip of plastic in between because of the moisture, otherwise they just put siding on.

And that's it. When I explain this to people in Europe the reaction is always the same. First they look at me like they don't believe me, then they exclaim "so that's why they always fall over in high winds". There is a story over here about a German who build a German-style home on the east coast. When the inevitable hurricane came the only damage his home suffered was from the debris of the cheap American homes that fell apart hitting his house.

[1] It's actually 1.5"x3.5". I believe they are counting the eventual siding as part of the size.

I don't know what this has to do with any part of the actual discussion we're having, so I'm not going to bother engaging it. The houses most people in my neighborhood --- actually, in Chicago in general --- seem to live in will last longer than their lifetime, so the "disposability" of our houses isn't a factor in housing costs.

What is has to do with is: a house that costs e.g. $200k in the US is almost certainly more expensive than a $200k house in Germany because the German house is almost certainly better built (which costs more money, is worth more as materials, costs less to maintain, etc.).

Perhaps in Chicago itself. But Chicago metro consists of suburbs that, yes, are chock-full of the disposable houses you think are atypical for American construction.

I used to have a house built in the late 60's, in Bloomington IN. By no means was it atypical. It was a ranch on a slab, 2x4 stud construction, drywall inside, and Godawful cheap paperboard siding. The windows were aluminum frames and had what I can only assume was a negative R value.

In Europe, people just don't build that way. Well, out in the boondocks, people might build a shack like that - but not in actual cities. Certainly not in a city the size of Bloomington. It's not a stereotype that Americans live in disposable houses, you see: it's just reality.

I'm pretty sure tptacek knows how houses are built, loewenskind. I believe his point, though, is that not all of us live in disposable houses - just all the poor schmucks who have a house built after WWII, really. I have a carriage house apartment that shows a bit of the transition; it was built in 1946. Instead of slats under the plaster, it has sort of horizontal strips of sheet rock, over which plaster was applied.

Most of our workforce - including everybody who did plaster - was gone for several years. Then they all came back and had the GI Bill to buy cheap houses. The market spoke, and we're left with a lot of people who know how to build cheap houses.

Now, my house is built of three layers of brick, made right here in town in a factory long gone. Its interior walls are 2x4 studs that actually measure two inches by four inches, and are roughly the consistency of iron after their 130-year drying period. (They still smell nice when drilled for wiring, though - imagine that!) There is half an inch of real plaster on that. You cannot harm this house.

I should tell you, though, that drywall is gaining popularity in Europe as well. It's just so cheap and quick, you see.

>I should tell you, though, that drywall is gaining popularity in Europe as well. It's just so cheap and quick, you see.

What part of Europe? In the parts of Europe I'm familiar with people seem smarter about real savings. For example if you build a pile-of-sticks US style house, yes it will initially cost very little. But maintenance, heating, cooling, etc., etc. will cost a great deal more for the whole time you have the house. Perhaps if utility costs were so incredibly cheap like they are in the US people wouldn't think about it as much.

England. They generally use a drywall with plaster veneer for new construction there - DIY plaster searches generally turn up a lot of English sites. And a few American ones as well.

I'm not saying I've ever seen a studs-and-drywall approach in Europe, no. In Hungary things tend to just be concrete or block or brick construction, and wood is used for looks. This is partly because wood is really expensive in Europe, since the Phoenicians cut down their forests, mostly. We've got Canada.

I wouldn't be surprised to see a light steel interior frame wall with drywall and plaster on it, though.

Ah yes, you consider England part of Europe. ;) From what I can see the UK is fully embracing the ways of the US for better (e.g. good restaurants/service) and worse (e.g. cheap crap favored over quality in many cases).

The difference in house quality also has other effects. In the US the insulation is poor enough that you probably have to have either AC or heating on year round. In our house we don't even have AC (never missed it) and the temperature has to remain below 0C for a few days before we have to turn the heater on (or we can just invite a bunch of friends over).

Renting an apartment in Berlin is WAY cheaper than in NYC, and the cheap apartments are actually nice.

That's not really answering your question, but for a gigantor metropolis berlin is a lot cheaper than manhattan...

The rental market in Manhattan simply isn't comparable to the rest of the US. The average cost of a 3bdr apartment in the center of Berlin is, from casual Google research, almost exactly the same in USD as a 3bdr apartment in the middle of Chicago. Chicago, in turn, is more expensive than Cleveland, Milwaukee, Minneapolis, Columbus, Omaha, &c &c.

I was comparing Manhattan to Berlin. Who gives a fuck about Omaha or Chicago?

Why stop there? Compare Berlin to Tribeca. Who cares about the Upper East Side?

Doesn't a three bedroom apartment actually have four rooms, three of them bedrooms? In Berlin "Dreizimmerwohnung" means that there are three rooms, period. So maybe your calculation is off by one.

If a hamburger costs 12 minutes' pay now, it should still cost 12 minutes' pay when everyone is working less and getting paid less per year. Because it will still take 10 (normalized) minutes to make, and all the companies along the way probably won't change their profit margins that much.

Maybe, but like I say, it doesn't tell the whole story. Would the average American take a 2% cut in wages for an extra week's vacation a year?

The purpose of earning money is to enable you to live the lifestyle of your choice, that's axiomatic. If you can get everything you want for less money, are you more or less wealthy than someone who can't get what they want, for more?

Also, productivity is not linear with time. 30 hours of actual work beats 50 if half of those 50 is meetings and goofing off. That's the German and French secret, if any.

Would the average American take a 2% cut in wages for an extra week's vacation a year?

From the article: "In 2008 it was estimated that three vacation days were left unused for most American workers."

Since the average American doesn't use all the vacation he has, the answer is probably no.

Because, as the article mentions, the culture of presenteeism.

In the few large company environments I've worked at, banking up unused vacation days was actively discouraged; it's an accounting problem (accrued days have to be paid on separation). That, plus the fact that virtually every established company has policies restricting year-to-year carryover of vacation, suggests that the "culture of presenteeism" idea, while compelling, is not actually suppressing actual vacations.

It's discourage by HR, but is your manager going to pass you over for a raise or a promotion because you didn't take enough vacation days?

I'm not so sure the answer is automatically no - I think a lot of workers will save a few vacation days as a buffer in case they need them for something unexpected. Also, the figure is probably skewed by companies that won't let the leave count go negative - in those cases it probably won't balance out to zero unless the employee makes a specific effort to.

Yeah, the idea of a fixed number of sick days is baffling to me as a European. It's like you're penalized for not being sick, by getting less time off...

I disagree. PPP-adjusted money is a measure of how much of the stuff you want that you can actually afford to have.

"Standard of living" rankings tend to measure how much of the stuff that the study creators want that you can afford to have. A nation might have a low rank due simply to the fact that the people living there prefer different things than what the study creators think they should prefer. Measuring PPP-adjusted money doesn't have this problem.

Wouldn't that have the problem of people in one area wanting more expensive things than the other?

i'm partner at an interactive agency in germany and i was wondering how much development work in the u.s. costs. we are billing our customers 80-100eur per hour (109-136usd). experienced freelancers (frontend/backend devs) bill between 35 and 60 eur per hour (47-81 usd). is that comparable to the states?

Experienced Rails devs in the US generally bill $100+/hr; similar for .NET contractors. I don't have a ton of pricing experience with anything else.

are you talking about companies or freelancers?

Freelancers. Companies vastly more, or the same rates for inexperienced developers.

Yeah. They also have a working health care system, excellent public transit so no matter where you live you don't need a car, and so on. Clothing is insanely expensive. Food is more expensive if you're on a ramen diet, less expensive if you eat produce or bread and good deli meats.

Quality of life is higher no matter what you earn. Germany is set up so you can enjoy your days and your life.

> no matter where you live you don't need a car [...]

In the city, yes. In the suburbs most people consider a car a necessity to get to work.

I lived in the suburbs of Stuttgart, and the public transit to the other suburb where I worked was excellent. I usually biked, just for the convenience and because it was healthier, but the comparison with the situation in most of the United States is mindblowing.

Yes. That's why I said most. It's definitely doable not to have a car in Germany. My family did not have one, when I lived there.

Well - I bought a car when I was there, too. It's too useful. I guess my overall point is that in Germany, unlike most places in the US, makes it possible to live without one.

Here in Indiana, without a car you don't work. Or buy groceries. Period. You are at the mercy of your friends who do have cars, and it's a real burden for the poor.

There is no data backing up the claims and stereotypes in this article.

I'm German I find the recent sentiment towards Germany enjoyable but a bit surprising. Not long ago we we're the sick old man of Europe and Ireland was the European tiger.

I like life in Germany but it all seems like flavour-of-the-month journalism.

flavour-of-the-month journalism

You have a redundant adjective there.

Ireland has the same problems that the US has right now: Not enough industry. Germany actually produces a lot, which made the crisis less severe, even considering that the German finance sector basically did everything wrong they could do wrong. The boom in Ireland was founded on the service industry, with huge tax breaks to finance it. And the US has been moving more and more industrial jobs offshore.

I don't want to over-simplify. The US has a higher population and thus doesn't need to export as much. But actually manufacturing something ain't that bad. Didn't someone complain recently that even Silicon Valley is doing that less and less?

Don't know about that, a large part of the boom in Ireland was founded on the construction industry, fuelled by an oversupply of cheap credit. As far as I know its service industry (and exports in general) are holding up pretty well.

I'm not joining the battle on which country is more efficient but I do think it is important that you can disconnect from work with vacation/holiday. Born in the US and now living in Europe for over 6 years I've worked in both environments. I do have to say when returning from a long vacation you are ready to hit the ground running with your batteries fully charged.

Hmm? That's news to me, I thought the US had a higher productivity overall. Hourly Germany might be better, but considering that you'd have to go to Korea to find people putting in more hours, the US comes out ahead.

And while France was behind Germany, they do even fewer hours.

Whether that matters a lot is a different matter altogether. Life-work balance is one issue, job satisfaction another. Working more hours vs. wanting to work more hours etc.

And in my experience, the IT industry is a bit different anyway, never mind the entrepreneurial sector thereof. So does this matter a lot to the usual HackerNews reader? Probably not.

According to this table Germany actually has LOWER productivity than the United States

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:OECD_Productivity_levels_2...

Or MUCH lower according to this table http://www.nationmaster.com/graph/eco_ove_pro_ppp-economy-ov...

You don't really think we in Norway are 20% more productive than people in the US, right?

The graph is just a rephrased GDP per capita. For a small nation with massive oil sector you have a huge distortion of metric it supposed to illustrate.

Even if it's true that from europe the impression is that ppl in the US have no holidays and do less in more time (here we go, appreciate the honesty pls), I think it's wrong to generalize based on a few examples, as a lot of it probably depends on size and philosophy of the company and, obviously, on how you measure productivity.

I wonder why the term productivity is even used in this article. The debate about how much vacation time people should get has very little to do with productivity in my view. Productivity is output per hour worked, no matter how many hours are actually spent working.

47% of people in Germany are receiving a monthly unemployment or social security pension from the government. http://search.japantimes.co.jp/cgi-bin/eo20060903a1.html

Because they measure productivity in an unAmerican way.

more discussion here:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1635385

has been around here lately quite a lot ...

My counter argument:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_GDP_(nomin...

USA GDP - 14.2 T Germany GDP - 3.3 T

Of course you also have 3.5 times the population

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_GDP_%28PPP...

difference only 26%... guess you should move to Qatar or Luxembourg though -- but when you're not rich from oil or moving large sums of bank money around, that high GDP is not actually helping, is it?

And then there is stuff like http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quality-of-life_index.

> And then there is stuff like http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quality-of-life_index.

Wow, that article looks pretty bogus. Here are their factors:

2. Family life: Divorce rate. My parents are divorced and they both seem pretty happy. This metric seems very biased and not clearly beneficial. Is it better to keep an unhappy marriage together or to create two new happier marriages?

3. Community life: country has either high rate of church attendance or trade-union membership. Seriously? Apparently freelancing atheists are miserable.

6. Climate and geography: Latitude, to distinguish between warmer and colder climates. It's ridiculous to claim that latitude is a prime determiner of quality-of-life. Some people prefer tropical beaches, but others love changing seasons and still others like ice fishing. As far as climate and geography are concerned, would you rather live in a Saharan desert or Crete? Places with similar latitudes can have vastly different climates, anyways.

7. Job security: Unemployment rate. Fair enough, but low unemployment rate isn't necessarily an indicator of job security: there could still be high churn. Also, a nation that provides a sufficient level of services means that the unemployed are never too badly off, while a country that provides none could see its few unemployed living in misery. Serious question: would a country with single-worker households have an unemployment rate near 50%?

9. Gender equality: Measured using ratio of average male and female earnings. Terrible. Does this even factor in number of hours worked? It certainly doesn't account for differences in the work being performed or for cultural differences.

By my count, about half of those metrics are crap. Creating an index from that is basically hokum. Anyone could tweak the metrics to almost arbitrarily reorder the rankings.

> 9. Gender equality: Measured using ratio of average male and female earnings. Terrible. Does this even factor in number of hours worked? It certainly doesn't account for differences in the work being performed or for cultural differences.

This is still a useful metric, cultural reasons or not. Half of the world's population are women.

The problem I have with it is that it implies quality-of-life is tied to earnings. That's like saying a single mother working two jobs has a better quality of life than a rich socialite. I know plenty of women who are perfectly happy to be homemakers, work part-time during the day, or teach so that they can enjoy family life.

"Gender equality" the way they measure it here seems to be saying that men and women should ideally live the same. Freedom of choice and equal rights is what matters, and I don't feel that this metric even comes close to measuring that.

Money is a good first approximation of freedom and independence however. And while the extremes you used to illustrate might indeed be uncommon, when we talk about statistics in magnitude of national populations they are not going to distort overall picture.

Yeah that it's nice that Germany might be more efficient, but we're still > 4 times their size. When we're talking about country "power" no one cares about efficiency.

As for Quality of Life, that's fine, but I love America and I love our lifestyle, so perhaps that's more of a personal choice than an aggregated one.

You are missing the point. We are not talking about "power" here.

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