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Comment by AwaAwa | Hacker News Reader

And then we have UK's child Canada trying to their spin on the internet with bill C-18. Apple doesn't fall far from the tree.

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Strangely, we get flooded with resumes from England and Canada here in America.

Yet the reverse almost never happens.

Surely, these laws will help reverse this brain drain...

But that's about the $. Nevertheless, plenty of Americans do apply for work in Canada.

Quite happy working in the UK still. There is no brain drain past the usual one related to being a tiny island but there is a shortage of staff. And we get paid handsomely not to fuck off :)

Might want to check up on dev salaries outside of the UK, I found the norm pretty terrible relative to CoL in London...

My understanding of bigger salaries outside the UK is that they are based on longer working hours, with very little focus on quality of life outside work. This may only apply to the US, but in any case I’ll always personally consider off-work time a very precious requirement.

How many hours do you think the average US programmer works?

probably almost four to eight weeks more per year than the average British or European programmer. In the EU and UK most countries have about six weeks of mandatory paid time off per year, and strict limits on overtime work.

Anecdotally from my own experience in the US I'd say Americans work probably about 20% more hours annually. Even people who had comparable vacation would often only take two weeks, and weekly hours seemed to be closer to 40-45 than the 35-38 that's common in Europe.

edit: btw that's not industry specific, it's a long running trend: https://www.stlouisfed.org/-/media/project/frbstl/stlouisfed...

I mean, I went from 11 weeks of PTO to 8 and I still have trouble adjusting 3 years later, I can't imagine having only 2.

In fintech operations. Salary is very much fine over this side of things. In fact we get paid more than our US counterparts.

"In fact we get paid more than our US counterparts."

That is almost never the case in the UK.

We also get paid holiday and sick leave, and can leave work at 5pm without anyone raising an eyebrow.

Around the 2000 years and the dot com boom, When I worked at a very large and well-known US software company, on-site for an external (German company) partner, their campus parking lots filled up around 9-10 am and emptied at 4 pm. Long midday breaks in the (several) restaurants on campus, or the sports building, many driving off-site for eating in some nearby city (many to choose from on the SF Bay Area peninsula).

True, the Americans didn't get much vacation, when I and some German colleagues went skiing over that long fall weekend (forgot what holiday it was) the resort was suddenly empty exactly at the end of the holiday, while we Germans stayed a day longer.

However, during regular hours it's pretty casual. My job involved traveling to many IT companies all over the country, I don't think the insane hours are anywhere near normal apart from some very few companies and not for long. The best you will get is people pretending to work - often enough I saw lots of "office golf" and web browsing or being out for coffee breaks, lots more than people actually working. That was before the wave of remote work so I think I saw the "real work". I'm fine with it, I think that's sane and reasonable for these kinds of jobs.

On the other hand, what I saw from low-level service jobs was really bad. It seemed to me that those employees do have it hard and are under constant supervision with little authority to do anything or to use their brain, just follow the script and call a supervisor if any actual decisions have to be made, and they really have to work those hours.

If I ever see something comparable to https://levels.fyi in UK, I might be interested… but for now, UK compensation levels are usually laughable compared to US or, say, Switzerland (and US companies pay better than Swiss).

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