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Comment by oblio | Hacker News Reader

It will stop, at some point. IT is still growing but we're reaching the point where IT workers are a decent percentage of all workers, so they are starting to become representative of the population at large. Larger and larger cohorts of IT workers are aging and recent graduates will stop being enough even for the top companies.

Also, salaries are lower in general but I get the impression Europe is better in this regard. I see older people in IT, at least in Western Europe (in Eastern Europe the field is too new).

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I could probably go to the Web sites of at least a dozen successful IT companies, and go to the "Meet the Team" page.

They are invariably a large group of smiling -young- faces. There may be one or two greyhairs in the picture, but a quick shufti of the "Leadership" page often shows them to be C-suite or Board.

Yeah, I'm a cynic.

When you are old, everyone looks young. =)

I see 35 year olds and think "that guy is just a kid"!

This made me chuckle as it reminded me of an older employee referring to another employee as “one of the good interns”. Except the guy he was talking about was in his late 30s and had been with the company for over 5 years :-)

I wonder if there's a corelation in the sense that the young-biased "startup-y" companies are more likely to even have something like a "meet the team" page. (I.e. you kind of need to be below a certain size, and even then plenty places don't have them)

There's a fairly common ideal of what a team photo should look like, and so the people that contribute to that ideal will be in the photo.

This is certainly the case for newer VC funded companies. That isnt all of tech though.

Yes, being older and working in software doesn't seem to be big problem in Europe. A previous (European) employer of mine with a very geopraphically distributed workforce even employed some older Americans.

With regard to Germany, I have the same impression. Mature companies, at least, seem to have a mature workforce. Have a look at a picture of the SAP big band: https://image.jimcdn.com/app/cms/image/transf/dimension=2060...

It’s not that much of a problem either in the US outside of Silicon Valley and venture backed companies. Plenty of older guys in the not so cool industries.

Salaries may be lower but work/life balance seems much higher in Europe.

> work/life balance seems much higher

That doesn't sound too great. You probably mean better.

Indeed. :)

If you offer an American a choice between more money or more vacation, they will take the money, for the most part.

That's because American's can't afford vacations without more money.

Money is typically not the issue with most US jobs compared to Europe.

Americans have far more disposable incomes than Europeans. It's not even close. Average household consumption in the US is 65% higher than Germany.[1]

[1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_household...

That measure is wrong, it was designed to make USA look better. Read this part about the measure, it misses government subsidised healthcare etc:

> Household final consumption expenditure (HFCE) is not an exhaustive measure of the goods and services consumed by households. The general government and non-profit institutions serving households (NPISH) often provide goods and services to households for their individual consumption free of charge or at reduced prices. Examples are health services provided by governments or reimbursed by a social security fund, education services, the part of service provided by public museums, concert halls, operas, swimming pools that is not financed by entrance fees, aid for social housing etc. By adding the general government's and NPISHs' individual consumption expenditure to household final consumption expenditure one receives the actual final consumption of households.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Household_final_consumption_ex...

Edit: Also another way to interpret that value is that is how much households has to spend to uphold decent way of life in that country. So it is really expensive to live in America so people have to work hard to survive. Of course you can't say for sure what is true, but if an American has to spend 50% more to live the same quality of life as a German person then of course he will be less willing to take vacation instead of the money.

Hard to know where those figures come from, and the article itself says they divide household by capita, which is extremely weird.

If we look at median wealth (don't use average because highly distorted by wealthy tail), the US comes below a lot of other countries:

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_wealth_...

i.e. cherry picking and using invalid metrics can tell whatever story you wish.

A lot of Americans I know seem to associate vacation with super luxury trips. They don’t seem to understand the concept of just taking off and relax but instead want to do trips that go to five star hotels and spend 100 dollars on dinners. No wonder they can’t afford vacation. When I compare myself to colleagues I can often do a one week trip for what they are spending per day.

It definitely is depending on the country!

This is something that is very difficult to see at a distance: Just like in politics, it's very easy to get an unrepresentative picture of the world online.

I am a Spaniard who was fortunate to qualify to a US visa, so I was able to come over. I have many friends who went into CS, but didn't have the chances to come over as I did. As far as Spain goes, what I am able to make in the American Midwest pays for an entire team of developers in my hometown, who don't get more vacations than I do, and often work far longer hours.

And it's not just Spain. A local company here has started a Polish development center, because despite the language barriers, and the time difference, it's hard to pass up a total cost per employee of about 1/4th the equivalent developer in Missouri, and those Missouri developers get a month of vacation, and nobody works more than 40 hours a week.

If the concern is just places with bad work/life balance, we can find them on both sides of the Atlantic. My brother in Spain works 60 hour weeks more often than not, just like some people I know at very large online retailers. Those kind of situations can happen anywhere: But in some cases someone gets to choose it because they like the RSUs that come with it, and in others, it's just that the local market really is that bad.

So if I were you, I'd look in detail, as a generalization on work life balance might be very different than you think once you are on the ground. Take a look at "The trimodal nature of the European software market". There really are very few jobs in the top tier, the second tier is quite a bit worse than the US's second tier, for similar work/life balance, and the third tier is so far from the US, you might as well be comparing working conditions of Software developers with Uber drivers.

People on this forum say EU - but they mean "rich parts of EU". Reality is EU has way more inequality between member states than the US, ironic given the propaganda.

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