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Comment by oezi | Hacker News Reader

And that's why performance tracking is prohibited in countries where unions still have a bit of power.

Yeesh. Prohibited? Then how do you decide who gets a promotion? At random?

You have human managers discussing with their team (instead of human-decided metrics that cannot see the full picture)

As companies grow, they tend to move away from subjective performance reviews like that and toward more objective metrics. Otherwise, it's too easy for personal politics to contaminate the promotion process. Employees are incentivized to find whichever manager will give them 5 star reviews no matter what, and managers are incentivized to be that guy, because then they have access to the best employees. When a company is small, and everyone knows everyone, this is not an issue. But when 90% of the company is a stranger to you, you need more objective metrics to rely on.

Not that hard, but also why would you want to promote based on metrics? That will get you people gaming the system, and I can't imagine a single software dev metric that actually captures the full gamut of value a dev can provide. You will surely miss very valuable devs in your metrics.

I didn't realize "performance tracking" actually just meant "blind metric tracking". Are there lots of rules to differentiate the good kinds of metrics (like actual outcomes for customers and co-workers) from the bad kinds of metrics (like time spent using an LLM)? Sounds like this is all about treating a symptom (poor business leadership) rather than a root cause (noncompetitive markets).

There are no real promotions. It‘s about employment duration. In Bavaria you have like 12 salary groups. For white collar workers 9 is entry level, 10 is for some experience, 11 for experienced and 12 is the carrot to work harder for. Some companies do some downgrade to pay less. Group 8 for experienced folks job ads started appearing recently. The bonus is up to 28% depending on the performance. So basically you can slack all day, have +5% bonus on the base salary when someone doing overnighters will have +15%. The higher bonuses are reserved for oldtimers. This system is absolutely cringe. Btw most of these unionized companies offer 35 hours contracts. 40 hours must be negotiated as a bonus… Anyway union will take care of regular base salary increase, that’s really nice. +6% for doing nothing good is amazing!

This describes payment and promotion functions in one unionized job sector in Bavaria.

Many German companies are not, in fact, unionized, and tend to pay 'übertariflich / außertariflich' - instead of union protection, they just pay you significantly more than you'd get with an union job. Which is a good thing 9 out of 10 times.

I heard during two decades only single time about small company paying significantly more. The guy is specialist. There are handful of them worldwide. He was absolutely perfect fit and super desired candidate. Never ever heard more about small companies with serious salaries. It was always -20% or -30% from union tables be it in Bavaria or Baden-Württemberg. Special case might be small establishments of American companies with great salaries, but this is different topics. And some statistics at the end: https://karriere.de/mein-geld/gehaltsstudie-diese-20-unterne... So no, not unionized smaller companies pay less with possible exemptions for key employees.

Truth probably is somewhere between my extreme and your extreme ... but I have - in 20 years of working in the country - not once encountered a situation in which an AT-contract I saw was not significantly better than an union contract when it came to compensation - both from some of the largest - and 100% pure German - conglomerates, and in the KMU sector.

Which - incidentally - is why such companies advertise paying 'außertariflich' in their job adverts.

Situation might be different for low- and non-skilled workers.

Why is it only falling apart now? Why was a system like that able to dominate the global manufacturing economy for half a century?

The answer probably isn't American work ethics inspired by American compensation schemes, but rather Chinese ingenuity and grit. But seriously, why can you build so much on 35 hours per week and a mid-five-figure salary?

And why those countries tend to have barely any growth in their economies (i.e. europe).

It is ok, I earn enough to pay my bills, the ones from my family, a bit of travelling around and healthcare.

Usually over here we don't dream of making it big with big villas and a Ferrari on the garage, we work to live, not live to work.

France and UK are in giant fiscal crises. The German economy is in the toilet with no hope in sight. All of them have seen large deterioration of the quality of health care in the last decade. The EU leaders care more about Ukraine and destroying all privacy than any economic reform.

The irony of promoting performance tracking at employee level and criticizing the EU for destroying privacy

How are those tarifs working out?

I am european lol.

Korea has strong worker protections and unions. Not on tracking, but in general.

Low union membership though.

Which may be related to unions having been actively persecuted (to the extend of actual state-sanctioned torture, disappearences, and bona-fide massacres against people involved with unions - and people living next door. With active support of US civilian and military leadership, that is).

Google Gwangju.

No? Unless you don't count intra-company worker committees. Those fulfill much of the same role and are mandatory above a (relatively low) company size.

The economy is supposed to serve us, not the other way, there is no pride in being a slave, it's not the flex you think it is lol.

Let's work 90 hours a week and retire at 80, imagine the growth, big numbers get bigger makes bald monkey happy

> Let's work 90 hours a week and retire at 80, imagine the growth, big numbers get bigger makes bald monkey happy

that is all you heard in the 80-90s, people over the pond showing off how many hours per week they worked. like... how is that something to be proud of? So wauw, you spend 12hrs+ per day working , had no free evenings, zero paid holidays. And that is supposed to impress who?

please.

What happened in the 80s too is that politics told us automation would bring a 3 days work week, which never materialized. But now we have to trust the same people, moved by the same greed, that this time it'll be different

40 years on, how many of them truly are the same people?

It's the same breed of people, bred from the same system, not literally the same people but the people following on the footsteps. Greed is the constant.

Hell, it has been going much longer than only 40 years ago, on "In Praise of Idleness" Bertrand Russell talked about how industrialisation with its automation should be helping workers to work less 90 years ago.

They're cloning them in the same schools, that's why we have 30 years old full blown boomers

Which seems to be a great thing for liveability and happiness metrics across the board.

Not when your economy is reduced to mass importing of third world labor to keep salaries down and your economy going (i.e. Italy, France, UK and Germany).

As if it is not happening in usa.

You do realize that a lot of people in EU are working 4 days a week? Are you aware that McDonalds employee can live by having only one job?

EU decided to distribute the productivity benefits instead of hoarding it into stock market gains like US does.

Btw, you do realize that US commodified investing in Us stocks? Whole world can easily invest in US stock market. Basically, instead of taking care of their own citizens, US economy is paying out gains to foreigners.

US GDP growth in the first half of 2025 was 0.1% when you take out NVIDIA and OpenAI sending the same $100 billion back and forth to each other

and as we all know, economic growth is the only good thing in life

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