>the low work ethic, the 8 weeks of vacation every month (I exaggerate, slightly)
I'd say we better keep our lifestyles and worldviews and be corporate also-runs, than be slaves also-run-by-corporations like the US.
I'd say we better keep our lifestyles and worldviews and be corporate also-runs, than be slaves also-run-by-corporations like the US.
But the work attitude is usually “lets do something cool”, “lets solve that problem”, “why can’t we be the best?” versus a work mentality of “i don’t think that will work” and “we’ll never get support for that idea” and “i can start on that after the holiday”.
I’m not knocking the lifestyle at all! If work is just a paycheck, then hats off to you. But don’t expect innovation and money to flow. It’ll go elsewhere.
The first is a tiny sliver of people who make good money doing interesting, possibly even fulfiling work. Like say running their own business, or building great new tech.
The larger slice though don't have this. They work long ours doing meaningless boring tasks for long hours and low wages. Think amazon warehouse, and any service level job.
There's a middle ground for qualified trades - like say plumbers - but that's getting eroded.
So when comparing things like leave, ability to fire, heath insurance etc, it's worth understanding that your view in those things is relative to your job.
For the lucky few millionaires, the US is great - it's a very easy place to live if you are rich. But for the rest Europe with lots of vacation time, shorter working hours, free health and education is a lot more appealing.
Or maybe you actually get to work on technology most/all of the time, doesn't mean you enjoy it.
Sure, working in R&D is probably pretty awesome for most tech guys there, but what about the guy maintaining that PHP app from 10 years ago that is "absolutely critical" for that one customer?
My point is you can either give a shit about your job or not. If you don’t, don’t expect to do anything innovative or produce a lot of value. If you’re cool with that, so am I.
Just don’t complain in a few decades when you have to cut back social programs.
You seem to have conflated working overtime and not taking vacations with "giving a shit about your job".
Sure, not giving a shit about your job wont give you innovations. But working overtime and not taking vacations wont give you innovations either. It's totally orthogonal (if not detrimental to healthy worklife and innovation) issue to whether you're passionate about your job or not.
Case in point:
(a) No innovations come out of the hundreds of millions of Americans who work BS jobs, think them as BS jobs, but still being culturally or openly forced to work overtime and to only take meagre vacations. No innovations come from office drones who share all that, and Japan has not made any dent in CS/IT, despite working even more and having worse life balance than Americans. Working overtime is good for production lines, mindlessly churning out stuff.
(b) Innovations come just fine from companies with a healthy work-life balance. Heck, most of the great CS and IT innovations, that in substance and impact no FAANG or BS "unicorn" ever matched, came from places like IBM, Bell Labs and the Xerox Parc, of the 60s and 70s, great places to work, with good work life balance, and research focus -- not toxic overtime environments.
The idea that innovation and liking your job is not compatible with worklife balance or EU-style vacations, is a toxic and dangerous to humanity (ito ndividuals and their families, for starters), idea.
It makes for good profit and docile workforces though. Whatever makes the US employer sleep well at night...
You’re setting up a bunch of straw men then knocking them down.
It has nothing to do with “lets do something cool”, “lets solve that problem”, “why can’t we be the best?”.
That's easy to see, if one considers that it's not just the much fewer employees working on things they consider cool that try to solve interesting problems and be the best that willingly don't go for vacations.
The hundreds of millions of US employees in BS companies, with BS products, who don't like their jobs, and don't think they're building something cool, and so on, also don't get to enjoy any significant vacation time.
Heck, papers pushers, burger flipers, and corporate cubicle drones don't get to enjoy vacations. And it's not because the McDonalds employee "wants to build something cool" while burger-flipping...
It's a distortion to make it about "lets do something cool” US mentality vs "I don't care for my job" European mentality. It's purely the puritan work ethic culture, as established by the religious minded people that dominated early America, plus the rampant release of corporate rule and cut-throat neoliberalism post-80s.
The point is - many (not all) Europeans are happy with a 10 to 4 paper pushing role. Butt in seat, collect a paycheck. That's fine. But you can't have that plus innovation and global leadership in entrepreneurship.
Well, we can consider slavery (or rape, abuse, etc.) a binary thing. That it's just about threatening someone with direct violence and not giving them any other choice.
Or we can consider it a spectrum. Few people work in a corporate job by free choice. People might enjoy work, want to build something great, and so on. But they wouldn't go do it under some idiot middle managers, in some crappy corporation, if they had the monetary freedom.
That's true even for programmers - many would just rather work on their own thing, with their own vision. It's 10x times as true to office drones, burger flippers, and the majority of corporate employees that just do a job for the money, and have absolutely no passion, or great role even, in the final outout.
>The point is - many (not all) Europeans are happy with a 10 to 4 paper pushing role. Butt in seat, collect a paycheck. That's fine. But you can't have that plus innovation and global leadership in entrepreneurship.
Innovation is not about the hours.
Globar leadership isn't about the hours either (it's more about access to a unified market, positioning, places like SV where you can easily mix and match talents and services, synergies, etc). The US has global leading companies that have little to no innovation - they're just fed well. A military and diplomatic pressure that ensures you get favorable deals worldwide also helps.
And the Fed printing money that goes to the rich and ends up as VC spending. The EU might subsidie businesses but is very stingy compared to how the US does it: shamelessly, and through a few layers to make it appear like "private" investing.
And most of it starts from Europe being devastated from WWII, and the US being barely affected. Not from some work ethic change. In the 19th century and early 20th century, Europe was a global leader in innovation, with many of today's fundamental technologies and core research being invented there (from Maxwell to Einstein, and from the car to the computer (Babbage, Zuse).
And I said nothing about overtime. It’s the mentality of “oh I’ll do it tomorrow” and tomorrow never comes.
I did cool stuff at work, but without work, I could do much cooler things.