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Comment by danielvaughn | Hacker News Reader

I have no idea whether Europeans work harder than Americans, but I do want to say that you can't extrapolate the overall work ethic of America by looking at the SF tech world. It's a very, very small (and very privileged) microcosm of the country.

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In my experience, American and European software developers work similarly "hard", that is not explanatory. There are noticeable cultural differences in how they spend their working time.

American software developers have a tendency toward more ambitious and therefore risky solutions to problems, which have a higher variance in outcomes. European software development seems to gravitate toward what is seen as the safe conservative solution always. You may find yourself working more hours to deal with the risks that materialize as an American but sometimes that ambition pays off and you make a significant leap forward, and I suspect there is a higher sense of satisfaction with this result when it pans out. Particularly in the west coast tech cities, tolerance for both the risk of ambitious approaches and dealing with the consequences is dialed up anomalously high, that is just the water you swim in.

With the higher risk tolerance, both cultural and what the business allows, comes a requirement to be willing to work extra hours when needed for when it blows up in your face. This is sporadic, most days they don't work any harder than Europeans. Many Americans value the freedom to take ambitious risks more than they hate the downsides of that risk-taking.

Heck you can't even generalize about American tech industry and only talk about SF tech world. Granted that generalization is done in America too.

It's always a bit of a frustration running into constant comparisons, managers who want to emulate processes, and such when "Hey, you know what, we're not them... and we're doing well being ourselves." Not that you immediately dismiss new ideas because they seem to be from there, but don't just adopt them arbitrarily or operate like them too.

I have a sneaky suspicion that "most" of the American tech industry is NOT at all like SF / valley tech world.

It really isn’t! A lot of the SV stuff on here is frankly baffling to the rest of the country.

Agreed. I worked in tech in Chicago from 2017-2021 before moving to SF to take a new job in SF @ big tech. Feels like a different planet.

Couched in the article:

> US folks love talking about how hard they work. And honestly with service workers and blue collars I believe it. But not in tech.

> In SF you frequently hear big tech people talking how hard they work, while they queue 30mins for a coffee at Blue Bottle and chitchatting there for another 20mins.

Might be true for an established rest and vest company or position like sales or marketing, but the article seems to be wanting EU to be easier for startups. Not a single startup has that culture, especially when you’re building it from the ground up. You’re most definitely working 1.5-2x the hours as a regular job when it comes to starting a company and making it successful, even as an employee.

Also couched in the article:

> Americans love their hero-arcs so much that people manage to spin anything into a “coming from nothing story” – even if they got their first investments from their uncle and worked for free in the “garage” of their parents multi-million-dollar house in Palo Alto.

It's hard to argue against the fact that access to opportunities is not evenly distributed across different states.

It's a bit unfair to talk about the garages in Palo Alto being attached to "multi-million-dollar" houses. When the people starting Apple, HP, Google and Facebook took over a garage, the places were solidly middle class.

Even now, the price tags distort our perceptions. I've heard some venture capitalists say that most of their investments would go for salaries that would be turned over to the real estate world.

I mean, I live in London in the biggest place I've ever lived in (700sqft!) since moving out of my parents home. Having a garage would add another £200/month easily. Having that amount of spare room in a tech hub is a massive advantage!

Apple didn't start in New York, which was a major hub and where space was at way too much of a premium for teenagers to have free reign to build things in a garage. It started in a middle class suburb. The area later became very expensive, largely due to the success of so many startups.

Move to a suburb of Birmingham or Manchester, an hour outside of the city (just as SV was from SF, and then there will be plenty of room for teenagers to build things in garages.

I have to admit I raised an eyebrow at Greece being near the top of the list. That's going against stereotype hard.

Stereotypes aren't necessarily true. There's for example a stereotype about Mexicans being lazy, but anyone who's actually taken the time to look at the statistics - and gotten to know any number of Mexicans, for that matter - knows that to be a complete fabrication.

The funniest thing about that stereotype is how can they simultaneously be lazy, yet also be taking all our jobs?

Stereotypes are just stupid and lazy thinking.

Schrödingers migrant: taking our job while being too lazy to work. Very common perception over here, too.

Lotta tech offshoring to Mexico these days over India, PI, etc. Perception is that the Indians generally get their skills through diploma mills while the Mexicans were generally more reliable and qualified. Better overlap with timezones -- Mexico City is on Central Time, and it's not hard to open a shop in Baja for Pacific Time -- and you also have access to the NAFTA TN Visa if you want to bring people across the border; no H1B visas headaches.

I seem to remember that one issue was that warmer climates had higher infestations of hookworms which manifests in ways that reinforce a "lazy and stupid" sterotype.

What is not mentioned in the article is that productivity is much more important than the number of hours worked. By productivity, I mean output per hour worked, which is usually an estimation made from the total output of the country (GDP) and the numbers of hours worked by the working population.

Well, that's a very inadequate productivity metric imho.

How can two people with exactly the same output (say two doctors working a shift with similar number of patience) lead one to be 20 times more productive because one bills $400 per hour and the other makes that number in a week (such as in say Turkey).

That's a 40x difference in productivity.

You would usually use Purchasing Power Parity (PPP) such that comparison between countries is possible, because as you pointed, comparisons in absolute values between countries are not useful.

It is hours worked, not productivity. If a shopkeeper takes a three hour lunch and sits in the sun in front of his shop half the time but stays open from 08:00-20:00 according to the stats he’s working 12h days.

Which is correct, in any case. If he isn't doing anything else but "tending the business" even when there's no business because there are no clients, then he is "working".

Thats because they refactored their economy during the debt crises.

On this point, I suspect something:

(Some) Europeans work more hours, but less efficiently

Go to a supermarket in Germany, see how quick a cashier rings your order. (yes self-checkout does exist)

And this is not only a North/South (or West) divide. Germans have their way of wasting "work energy" in some micro-bureaucracies in one way or another (and still they are more efficient than the average worker)

Some other southern countries will waste more time doing some things while in some other areas they will be the fastest/least-bs players around.

> But Americans definitely love talking about how hard they work; way more than we do.

Can't disagree with this.

am pretty sure that the post also acknowledged that w/ "I don’t disagree. SF is a unique place. We currently don’t try to get on the level of SF. We are trying not to fall behind China, India and random second- and third-degree hubs in the US."

To be fair, the author wrote about tech workers in SV specifically, not about the "overall work with of America" (which btw is a continent, not a country).

The hero arc story is true and has to do with large Protestant population.

> (which btw is a continent, not a country)

North America is a continent. America is absolutely a country. What do you mean?

No. In English, "America" refers to the country, "North America" and "South America" each refer to a continent and "the Americas" refers to the two continents.

There is no continent called America.

they are talking about the americas: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Americas which is sometimes called america. (mostly in non english native countries i suspect)

No, certainly the USA (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States). The author is most likely Austrian or German and it is quite common to say "Amerika" for the USA there.

it is also equally common there to have an argument about that, just like on HN ;-)

i was referring to this btw: America" (which btw is a continent, not a country)

アメリカ (the romanization of America) is also how the country is referred to in Japanese. There are many languages (including English) that use America as the common name for the United States of America.

A notable exception, and where much of the disagreement comes from is Spanish. I generally try to follow the convention of the language I'm speaking.

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