When I read about 996-style culture I am happy to be European. That would not work here. 40 hours per week max and most engineers prefer to not work more than 32 hours a week. So you have a good work/life balance. I currently work 4 hours a week.
Overwork culture is also present here and exploited by a lot of companies.
Scandals in the papers around the crazy hours workers at big-4 consultancies in Vienna typically do, which again went unpunished by labor agencies, since there were no written orders from management imposing those long hours but workers just tactilely accepted it as part of the work culture there.
Similarly, a mate of mine at major finance gig in Frankfurt noticed that they were working longer hours than their colleagues from NY. Heard similar stories from colleagues from Italy and France.
So work hours are super dependent on local culture and industry. The meme about everyone in the EU being paid to slack off all day is not as common as people imagine, unless maybe you work for the government or got lucky to score a great gig in some dysfunctional monopolistic megacorp.
just keep in mind that American tech startups are often just vehicles to evade estate tax. and certainly vehicles for converting VC money into more VC money by selling dreams to greater fools. there's also a down side.
> So you have a good work/life balance. I currently work 4 hours a week.
And this is why when I was a PM, we shut down our Amsterdam office and shifted it to Praha, Bucharest, and Warsaw. You won't find as many people who will complain about a 40 hour workweek while earning €80k TCs
From personal experience, I worked like a dog in my younger years for two reasons: (1) To become a better engineer, you need to make a lot of mistakes and fix them yourself. (2) Much junior engineering work is just time in front of the screen pounding out simple features for a CRUD app. The more that you complete, the quicker you get promoted.
There's effective evidence that people who work 6 hours a day are more productive than people working 8 hours a day, and after 4 hours of active practice, you aren't getting any better.
And on top of this, perpetually tired and exhausted people are not at their best.
Regardless of whether or not you accept that someone working 41 hours really isn't doing more work than someone doing 40 - you can see that two people working 30 is much better than one person working 60. Working people for long hours is mismanagement, at some level.
The reason Europeans don't want to do 996 is because the extra effort isn't fairly compensated.
Software work is bursty and creative, not mechanical and hourly.
And it's readily visible in terms of software quality and technological capability of the company.
it is often useful to think of people as only being motivated by one thing, to see clearly how application of that thing might change their behaviour. but if you believe that is the only thing that motivates them, you will have a very simplistic (and eventually incorrect) model of how they are motivated.
Nowadays with every market being saturated and tech being a race to the bottom quality-wise, what's there to be passionate about and/or proud of? Do you think people are proud of building yet another OpenAI wrapper or advertising surface? If they actually are proud of those I would feel pretty sad for them.
Also, the majority of landlords don't take payment in "passion" or "pride" and rents have skyrocketed since the glory days of tech.
Making the most money per hour merely allows me to spend more time with my family rather than working more for less and giving my creative energies to greater society or an employer instead of directly to my wife and children.
I've been adamant about paying 75th percentile TC - I want the employees in my portfolio companies to be extremely motivated, and that requires incentivizing employees and founders correctly
You don't need to push yourself into burnout as an employee in order to participate in an early stage startup.
> earning €80k
80k€ gross is not a lot for a decent SWE in western europe. The reason people complain in Amsterdam is not the hours, it's that your comp is shit.
80k a few years ago was the price point at which you would get few Western Europe remote candidate and many Eastern Europe ones.
I’ve seen from a very close distance several European companies move a big part of their operations to India. Have had close friends laid off recently and seen them struggle for months to find a new jobs. Plus, I see tighter freelance market these days.
This was unthinkable not long ago.
It's the typical Western management behaviour of knowing the cost of everything but the value of nothing
Any manager that thinks he can beat the value of a single dev with a random ass sweatshop from india is delusional. The cultural difference is massive, quality and work ethics as well. It's a high friction job for a manager. Well at least if you expect a bit of quality and timeliness.
(Sorry for all indians that do a good job, it's just the sweatshop/agency remote software dev culture simply doesn't work. Even a european sweatshop usually delivers worse quality then inhouse devs.)
And then a few years later, when it doesn't work out, I saw them bringing it back.
Outsourcing seems to go in cycles, like fashion
Stockholm was a natural point of comparison for me given that I used to live there until very recently.i have a decent picture of the dev market in Stockholm. Silicon valley is the most mentioned tech centre on here, and is therefore the American tech market I know the most about (even if my knowledge is very limited in this front)
i have to admit i was surprised by how much startup activity was going on in Stockholm in the last 20 years. but disappointed by how few startups don't get B or C rounds or get bought after their A or B rounds run out.
in the states we've sort of repaired the damage of the section 174 changes, but i think they were rolled into a tax bill that sunsets in a few years. so we may see this again in 2029.
Most engineers in the US work normal 40 hour work weeks, too.
For one company I log on once a month, I start a Renovate process which generates pull-requests for updated dependencies. Patch-versions get auto-merged after tests succeed, minor and major need approval of the current lead. Sometimes I need to manually tweak the code a bit because of API changes or to get tests to pass. I'm allowed to bill them four hours on it regardless of actual work, which is between five minutes (no manual intervention required) and two hours (need to rewrite some code).
For another company I create a report once a month for all outages and which errors frequently show up in logging. I automated this to be a five minute task and it generates a Wiki page. I review the page to see if everything is ok. I bill an hour on this.
The company is happy to not have to allocate engineer hours on maintenance so they can continue pumping out new features.
I'd say that on average I work 4 hours and bill 12 hours. This is comparable to the income of someone in employment working around 24 hours. But I do run a significant risk obviously.
Which employers hand out 4h contracts?
But let's say it's only counting "focused work", 4h/week is huge stretch, unless we're competing in slacker olympics.
I guess either you have wealth, very low costs or a great hourly rate, or you are the one person who got that Tim Ferriss book to work.