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Comment by constantcrying | Hacker News Reader

European economies always have lived of long term, large scale technology companies. This is the case especially for Germany and France.

Germany especially does not want startups to exist, they want to have companies which are large and succeed over the long term. The employee protection laws in Germany (which are often praised on this site) make it extremely hard to run a startup without violating the law. E.g. if you want to employ someone you need to pay their healthcare and pension insurance. They can't work for more than 10 hours a day, no this doesn't mean you aren't allowed to compell them, you have to actually stop them if they wanted to. How do you build a product while figuring out that bureaucracy?

The European model will succeed if and only if those large corporations are actually able to innovate at the same pace as American or Chinese companies. Which currently looks very unlikely.

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German here.

If the way you are building a product requires you to risk the well being of your employees, which these laws are designed to protect, you and your product are not welcome here.

Please build it somewhere else.

German here as well.

This is a trade of. Startups can be extremely lucrative for people willing to take that risk. These laws exist to prevent abuse, yes, but they also prevent highly driven people from engaging in high risk, high reward economic activities.

As I said Germany does not want startups to exist. The only way the German economy can stay competitive if is the large German tech corporations are able to stay competitive.

If you don't want to work hard (10h+ per day) at a startup, then don't. Nobody's forcing you. Working at a startup and finding it's not for you? Just quit! You can just walk out the door. Nobody's forcing you to stay.

Germany is really great in treating its citizens like infants and it shows.

Don't play naive.. the laws and regulations are not put in place for that percent of business owners/managers that would not abuse their employees out of principle even when they can, it's for the other ones that do.

There are actually employees a company is allowed to abuse more than their "regular" workers, namely managers.

If there was a legal category for "startup employee", with significantly fewer protections, but who can only be employed with a minimum wage of e.g. 3x the average income, would you object to that?

> They can't work for more than 10 hours a day

What are those employees doing for upwards of 10 hours per day? I've never met anyone who could put in more than 8 hours of high quality, attentive knowledge work for more than a few days in a row and if we're being completely honest with ourselves, most of us are lucky if we can consistently put in 6h of that high-quality work.

You might have people occupying seats for 10 hours, but you're definitely burning them out, and they'll make more mistakes, and quality of their work will drop off overall. Don't mistake "butt in seat time" with "innovation pace"

As far as I'm concerned, encouraging employees to work long hours is a dead give-away for bad leaders who want to be perceived as good leaders with a team of people who "get shit done". That's exactly the type of abuse those laws are designed to prevent.

If anyone is really capable, and willing, of doing more work, they'll keep thinking about the problem on their personal time. That's probably where they'll get some of their best ideas anyway and no laws can stop that.

>What are those employees doing for upwards of 10 hours per day?

Hypothetically there could be a very important deadline to meet. I absolutely do not believe that you can consistently do high quality mental work for 8+ hours a day, but certainly I have worked productively for 10+ hours in a single day on occasion, that was during University though.

To be clear this is in a startup context, an organization which is highly informal and tries to be extremely productive in a short amount of time to create some viable product.

I agree it's possible to work 10+ hours on occasion. I quickly looked up German laws regarding working hours, and it seems like the legal weekly maximum is 60h (6x 10h per day) which should cover very occasional crunch time to meet deadlines (that's 50% more than the average work week), but long-term average over 6 months must not exceed 48h/week, which seems sensible.

> To be clear this is in a startup context, an organization which is highly informal and tries to be extremely productive in a short amount of time to create some viable product.

I understand, though I don't believe that working long hours is a productive use of anyone's time over time periods longer than a few weeks. From my personal experience working longer than ~8h impacts both concentration and quality, which decimate efficiency of any subsequent hours worked (more bugs then mean more time needed to fix these bugs, which just adds to the crunch).

After a while these side-effects begin to bleed into the next workday which ultimately nullifies the benefits of longer hours.

I don't know what you are arguing. Do you believe that there will never be a situation where in a startup employers can spend more than 10+ hours of productive work in a day?

I don't know why you are talking as if I didn't completely agree, and already said so, that demand 8+ hours of high quality mental work is counterproductive over long periods of time.

My point remains that German labor laws make startups very hard to do. Not that I believe that you should work 10 hours a day over months, but in a startup there might very well be a situation where you can spend 12 hours effectively, which would be a violation of labor laws.

> What are those employees doing for upwards of 10 hours per day?

The government shouldn't regulate the work hours in the first place.

German here. There are plenty of ambitious people who work more than 10h/day and nobody cares. Law companies who should know best, are especially known for their dumb working hours. That rule is rather in place to protect workers that are not in a powerful negotiation position. Which is fine I guess. About healthcare: wouldn't that make it actually easier to hire employees because they know they'll be covered if they join a startup (risky!) instead of having to worry about that as well?

>There are plenty of ambitious people who work more than 10h/day and nobody cares.

If you are an employer and allow this you are really, really dumb.

>About healthcare: wouldn't that make it actually easier to hire employees because they know they'll be covered if they join a startup (risky!) instead of having to worry about that as well?

No. It isn't about money, it is the fact that if you want to hire someone, you have to spend hours upon hours each month managing their legal rights. The process of legally keeping an employee in Germany is incredibly involved, healthcare is just one point, but there are many more.

In America you can just offer people enough money and tell them to worry about health insurance themselves. If you are running a startup and trying your hardest to make some product a reality the last thing you want to worry about is the details of your employees health insurance.

If you were paid 3 times your current salary, but you had to worry about your own healthcare, pension insurance and were expected to put in serious effort, would you take that offer? And, even if not, would such an offer be so immoral that companies aren't allowed to make it?

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