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Comment by vkaku | Hacker News Reader

Call me a cynic, but Europe isn't the USA.

There are a lot of countries in EU which have, IMO, better work culture and fairness of negotiation as the guiding philosophies behind the work.

If Google did this in the USA, it wouldn't be seen as much. However, they have strong laws against this in EU, and this incident would not portray Google in favorable light, IMO.

I also feel that it is high time engineers realized that fairness in work is something we'd all love to have, and historically, skilled people have kept unions to ensure that they don't get screwed over.

I believe that at the end of the day, if you need fairness in negotiation, you need to have a way to express it, especially if it isn't supply driven.

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I remember reading this post* which is very useful for comparing US and Swiss(Or European in general) work culture.

* "Living in Switzerland ruined me for America and its lousy work culture" https://www.vox.com/2015/7/21/8974435/switzerland-work-life-...

I can attest to the European side of comparison, they do value work but they also value the resting and recovering part.

I'd vote for everyone who has a reasonable plan of more scrutiny towards 40 hour work weeks.

This may reduce salaries but oh God most of us make too much money anyhow. Let's have a life now! When are you going to enjoy life, after retirement? Would you wait with sex till after retirement, too, if that offered a salary increase?

>but oh God most of us make too much money anyhow

Nope, that's just in the USA, us in Europe not at all.

And I'm not even comparing EU salaries vs US salaries just tech salaries/property prices ratios for each location.

You're not overpaid, it's us that are severely underpaid in comparison.

The lower salaries are probably due to the lack of VC funding, which in turn is rooted in a lack of really successful European tech companies.

If you work for a European company, chances are it won't grow and be successful to the same extent as an American one, and therefore your work has less value.

Is that a startup thing, because i've only worked for the big 5 (GAFAM) and I've always worked 40 hours a week. Add in the way higher comp, and I don't know why anyone outside of founders work at startups.

"We're a team", "we're in this together", that kind of things. People buy into it.

There are a lot more factors in a successful and enjoyable career than salary and hours worked.

I wouldn't take a job that pays double what I make now and has half as many hours if those hours were nothing but sitting in a dark room.

You can get a lot of satisfaction from building something meaningful with a team that people enjoy using.

Not that you can't do that in a big company, but all development jobs at big Corp are not that.

I would tear my hair out if my only job every day was figuring out how to get more people to click on sidebar ads.

This sounds crazy to me. If you're a funder / owner, sure, you don't count hours and it can get crazy. But if you're an employee... Most of my hires now are 30 hours a week, a few at 35h. I don't have anyone at 39h anymore, although that was still the norm a few years ago. Paid stayed the same, just reduced the hours. People are just way more productive that way, and they have two half day free on top of the normal Saturday Sunday.

Probably doesn't work for all position, and in fact the worse the job the more likely it doesn't work for it, but uh yeah you can totally reduce to 40h...

(France, 35h is the legal work time for a full time contract here, but you can absolutely have a contract with more or less hours, you just pay extra social charges for hours above the 35th)

In which country is the working week 30h? Or is it just your company?

My company only, working week by law is 35h hours here

You can not reduce your 40 hour week? I know of at least two companies in Berlin, one of it is the one i work in, that are pretty flexible regarding the 40 hour week.

Union busting and retaliation against unionisation efforts is prohibited in most (all?) EU countries. Of course in practice not always easy to prove.

Switzerland is not in the EU.

Yea I feel like it’s cliche to hate on America these days. For those comparing Switzerland to USA, you’re comparing a highly homogeneous culture and highly optimized country to a land full of immigrants gathering in excess of 300 million.

Americans criticize their own country more than anyone else.

OP’s post not only misses the fact that Switzerland is not in the EU, but more importantly the spirit of argument is baseless with the general perception that things are better in EU.

> For those comparing Switzerland to USA, you’re comparing a highly homogeneous culture and highly optimized country to a land full of immigrants gathering in excess of 300 million.

Percentage wise, the Swiss have more immigrants, more foreigners and more people with immigrant backgrounds. Not to mention the whole "four official languages" thing.

If you exclude Western Europeans from your "immigrants" statement, which is what the parent comment was clearly implying, it's not even close to true.

If you think Western Europe has some glowing history of harmonious relations, I’ve got news for you. Heck, ask German-speaking Swiss people how they feel about French-speaking Swiss (and vice versa) and you’ll get a quick picture of how things aren’t so rosy.

Would love to read more on the topic of German/French-speaking Swiss, would you mind sharing some reads you would recommend?

Start here and then google rostigraben: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/R%C3%B6stigraben

Most of my knowledge of the subject comes from Swiss friends, so unfortunately can’t recommend any books or articles.

Even better: ask German-speaking Swiss people how they feel about Germans.

That is precisely what is wrong with the assumption. Diversity is not just skin color as Americans think. I have people of color as neighbors who I share more cultural traits with that neighbors who are white (I am white) My wife is of Asian decent but I have more in common with her than with many other white Western Europeans.

Diversity is also language, culture, language, identity etc.

It doesn't seem clear at all that having many different kinds of Western Europeans makes for a "highly homogeneous" culture compared to neighboring countries that generally have only one kind of Western European.

The culture between Italy and France is much closer than Italy and Algeria. For as much difference there is between the countries in Western Europe, there are far more similarities amongst them compared to other continents and larger regions. Counting Italians as "immigrants" is at the very least slightly misleading.

It is more misleading to count somebody as different who is second or third generation American and who has fully adapted American culture values and norms but count that person as more different to the host country due to different skin color or remote country of origin than a Spanish person whom just settled in Switzerland.

The slightly racist assumption in America is that if I as a white Norwegian settle in America I contribute less to diversity than a black American who has lived his whole life in America.

In America diversity is all about what you see on the outside.

To be fair, this kind of diversity is important because in the US it still matters (very much!) what you look like on the outside, regardless of how long your ancestors have lived here. It'd be great to be in a post-racial society but we're very far from that.

It is not misleading at all, you have to learn a new language, learn to deal with a different government and laws, we are talking several years of effort until you get accustomed.

The differences between accepted social behaviour in Britain, Spain and Poland are significant too.

Sure, if you came from Saudi, you'll feel more out of place. But it's not trivial.

I think only Americans can really swallow the canard that “Western European culture” is some uniform thing. If you’ve spent any time around people from the various parts of Europe, you’ll know that they have all kinds of opinion about their neighboring countries, some gentle, some cruel. But all see themselves as quite distinct. Certainly the Swiss do!

And while we're at it we can count non-Caucasian Americans as immigrants /s

... provided they have money.

As someone now living in Switzerland, I've found it largely futile trying to explain anything about Switzerland to most non-Europeans. For starters, no one seems to bother with what countries are in the EU, let alone the EEA, let alone where Switzerland is in all of this. Apparently "everyone in Europe" has free government-paid healthcare and never has to pay for any medical expenses. I could go on...

Tbf the borders of "Europe" are fairly complicated, there is the EU itself, the EEA, the Schengen Area, the Eurozone, EFTA and CEFTA, the EUCU, the EEU, the CISFTA, the OBSEC, the Eastern partnership (or EPA), the OECD Countries, the CEI, and finally the Council of Europe.

There is more that I probably forgot about but this should about cover it. None of these political areas and borders have 100% coverage amongst eachother, they're all different groups.

Definitely. One could even add NATO to that alongside OECD. I don't really expect most people to understand all of these groups, but just to avoid making sweeping statements about the continent (which already has an ambiguous definition) without understanding the groups. I guess this problem of generalizing is a concern with nearly every issue, though.

A lot of Europeans on this site make similar statements.

Well, if you're willing to take one more shot at explaining the situation, I for one would be interested.

20% of the Swiss working population is made of immigrants, plus many more in temporary work contracts.

Swiss cities where most of the economic value is being created are far from homogenous.

> you’re comparing a highly homogeneous culture

Are you talking about a different Switzerland than everyone else? A country literally made out of three different cultures (French Swiss, German Swiss and Italian Swiss)?

Even apart from the diversity of the natives, Zürich has roughly the same proportion of foreign born residents as San Francisco.

Isn't it illegal in the US also? Doesn't seem to stop it from happening.

In theory, but the US laws are a lot weaker and also not well enforced.

The EU actually enforces it's laws on this subject and they are not as simple to "not technically illegal" them.

Not all of us want a union

Outside the US there tends to be free choice of union. E.g. in Nordic countries Germany etc you normally have multiple unions to choose from and you don’t have to be member if you don’t have to.

It is the US and Anglo-Saxon countries were unions tend to be a binary thing. Germanic countries tend to follow a different union system: sector wise unions rather than company specific unions. Different types of employees will typically join a different union depending on the type of work and interests they have.

Unions are optional. There are at least 3 unions at my place, and most employees aren't members.

What's the issue?

In the united states most unions are not optional

I would go one farther. I won't join a union, and I won't work in a union shop.

If my company goes union, I'll go work somewhere else.

Cynically, their response will be to grow offices elsewhere.

Cynically, the Swiss will respond "bite me". After all they still do have a pretty sweet tax-heaven setup, despite the scandals.

A yes, google expect setup the office just for because they liked local cheese. Not any advantages the place, people and infrastructure offers.

Well, good luck finding alumni as good as the ones from ETH Zürich anywhere else.

Not counting the MIT, Stanford, Harvard, UOT etc. that they have to compete with other FAANG for graduates.

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