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Comment by e_modad | Hacker News Reader

The whole time I was thinking "Man, this is crazy, don't they see how that hurts productivity?" And then I thought about Europe compared to the United States. To our European colleagues: Do you think of us as working ourselves to death?

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(I am Swedish.)

I think Silicon Valley-style working hours are actually sometimes required to win in the race of building world leading products. Of course, in the vast majority of the time it's probably being applied in a stupid way, just like in Japan.

It all comes down to how hard it is to scale up a team. ("The mythical man month", etc.) You can actually borrow against future productivity by running a team really, really hard when it really matters. (Compare with the stories of how iPhone 1.0 was developed.)

In Europe pulling off something like this is only feasible in a small start-ups where everyone knows what's at stake, and there is a reward mechanism in place that works.

You can, but the debt generally comes due in a timescale of days. Running your team into the ground might be a useful strategy in a situation of "we have to have something to ship by nine a.m. next Monday morning or the company goes bankrupt," but situations where that's actually true are extremely rare. Trying it in the more typical case where the deadline is e.g. three months away will at best stretch three months work out to four or five months.

A scenario that does actually happen now and then is "the system has gone down, we don't know why, and there'll be hell to pay if we don't find the bug, fix it and get everything back up and running by Monday morning." In that case, fine, work the weekend if you have to - but then take Monday and Tuesday off.

I don't think I will trust you on that until you have built something, in a fierce global competition, ends up being used by hundreds of millions of people. Perhaps you have?

(I have.)

Again, after that sort of experience I would be glad to discuss this.

Just curious, where can I find stories about how the iPhone 1.0 was developed? I'm not sure what to search for.

A book would be a fairly heavy undertaking since it's a compilation of interviews, casual chats, etc.

For casual chats, the Debug Podcast: http://www.imore.com/debug

http://www.imore.com/debug-39-nitin-ganatra-episode-i-system... with the former Director of Engineering, iOS Applications at Apple Inc, Nitin Ganatra

http://www.imore.com/debug-40-nitin-ganatra-episode-ii-os-x-... Debug 40: Nitin Ganatra episode II: OS X to iOS

http://www.imore.com/debug-41-nitin-ganatra-episode-iii-ipho... Debug 41: Nitin Ganatra episode III: iPhone to iPad

http://www.imore.com/debug-47-melton-ganatra-episode-i-demoi... What's it like to demo software to Steve Jobs http://www.imore.com/debug-48-melton-ganatra-episode-ii-unde... Part II

Why am I posting this into a talk about Japan? Oh well.

The Bio book of Steve Jobs has some chapters about it. There are also some citations about some members of the team and good part of them said it was a fantastic experience, but they had also to change job after it because they felt really exhausted (in some parts they talk about 100h per week as a standard in some teams, so I can understand them).

Brit here. Yep, what I hear about your working hours, working culture and amount of holiday terrifies me to the extent that I'd certainly think twice about coming over to work there for awhile. In my 10 years experience working in the London web development industry I've seen it become quite unfashionable to be slavishly devoted to your work life - and now in my current employment the studio manager practically kicks us out the door at 6pm. YMMV naturally ...

I keep hearing all this talk about overworking in the valley, but someone who I met, and many of his colleagues, work about 35 hours a week.

Most of you, yes. And I'm not talking only about software. I heard some horror stories about lawyers as well.

Plus you're nuts with your education loans, no matter what those colleges offer!

Personally there are two things that scary me enough to never try to find a job in the US. The first one is how you handle the whole health system, I am hardly capable to find even a single thing good about it. The second is, indeed, the long hours per week you are willing to do often in salaried jobs (at least here in Europe when I have to do more hours I get them paid a lot more than standard hours, and even in that case there is a limitation on the number of extra hours that my employer cannot surpass).

Yes, I think Europe has us beat on so many levels. I get hammered for admitting this, but living in the U.S. is stressful, and unrewarding on so many levels. There are many things to like about living here; political freedom, religious freedom, a system that eventually catches corrupt individuals, it's great for the wealthy. Now the negative; absolute slavery to your career/job, and making money/paper! I have seen people do horrendous things in order to get ahead financially. No, most people don't break the law in order to make money, but they break many moral laws. I have a successful sister who has literally lied and backstabed family members/friends in order to live in a good neighborhood in Los Angeles. Why do Americans work themselfs to death? Because there's a reality that's all to real here, and it's Homelessness. I am a proud American, but my list of our good traits is getting smaller each decade. I watch that program on T.V. about the Amish, and I literally tear up at how materialistic/evil Westerners have become. (Yes--I want to eventually live somewhere in Europe). Start the down voting--

If you are a software engineer you can get a job a company with good health insurance easily so that's a non-issue. The hours per week is a work culture specific to the business. Startups are more demanding, but you can easily find roles at large businesses where they are fine with 35-40 hours per week.

I have exceptional health insurance, as far as US health insurance goes.

My insurer was in the news today because they denied air medical transport without prior authorization.

If you're in a serious motor vehicle accident and the paramedics call airlift to transport you to the trauma center, your insurer will deny coverage because they weren't called first to authorize it. And you'll be left holding a bill for between twenty and seventy thousand dollars.

I did a search and found this:

http://abcnews.go.com/Health/texas-mom-sues-insurance-denies...

Unbelievable!

Right. And even apropos of anything else, you're then overruling the provider on scene with the patient (be it EMT or Paramedic pre-hospital) to that of an insurance company physician who doesn't have those eyes on the patient.

Not sure I'd call it a non-issue - having recently immigrated to the US from Canada, having "good health insurance" by American standards has still left me significantly worse off than I was when I had universal healthcare.

Its rare, but actually good health insurance exists here. I'm young/healthy enough that I haven't hit the limit of coverage, but I understand that's pretty hard to do, and deductibles/co-pays/drug costs are all reimbursable.

That said, I understand its a fairly unique situation.

That is an exceedingly unique situation. I have never heard of any of that being reimbursable. Even with the amazing insurance I had at my previous job, none of that was true.

Also, FYI, because of the ACA (Obamacare) there is no longer a lifetime or yearly cap on benefits.

By limits to the coverage, I meant health issues that are not covered (I don't know what those might be, but I have to assume there's something).

As reference: http://www.joelonsoftware.com/items/2014/07/24.html

There you can see a short list of companies with aforementioned insurance plans, and a description that was probably treated by most as exaggeration (it's not) - "health insurance where everything is paid for".

To refer back to earlier in this thread, I also work 35-40 hour weeks despite working at a startup. This is all balanced by what I suspect are slightly below-market salaries (NYC is expensive). We're hiring, in case any of this is appealing.

> By limits to the coverage, I meant health issues that are not covered [...]

Again, being British, this is staggering to me. I just kind of assumed that health insurance covered, you know, your health. Do you mean that with American health insurance I could get turned away from the hospital for having the wrong kind of disease or something? I would understand if it's cosmetic surgery or similar that isn't covered; but even here I have friends who have had rhinoplasty (nose jobs) on the NHS, for essentially cosmetic reasons! I sort of forget how good our system is, sometimes, with all the media complaints about it here...

I'd like to repeat that these are assumptions - the worst I've ever done is broken a finger, so I'm not the one stretching the limits of the plan. Some of the things I don't know about:

Is abortion covered? I don't know; I'm a guy. Mental health issues? Not sure; I've never had any. Preventive/elective surgeries? Birth control? Where's the line between dental and health insurance? (I know my dental is a little weaker.) These haven't come up so I haven't bothered to learn about them. Maybe I should.

I expect that if I have to go to the ER, I'll be covered; its some of the the edge cases I don't know about. There are probably laws that ensure some of these, but I just don't know much about it. I'm a largely healthy person and have been my whole life.

I think the whole problem is "it depends on your plan."

I had to select a healthcare plan (an idea which I found rather strange) and spent many happy hours in October curled up with countless HMO/PPO/WTF policy books, looking into exactly these details. I have a history of mental illness and addiction, and my wife came within about 12 hours of death during a two month hospital stay earlier this year, so minor questions like "can I receive appropriate treatment for a potentially life-threatening illness?" have taken on an urgency that they did not possess when I was younger.

Is abortion covered? I still haven't found an answer there despite poring over my plan manuals. My wife has not been able to take birth control until very recently and we are not in a financial situation to be able to care for an infant. Did I click the right button in my convenient private healthcare web app?

Dental, weirdly enough, is not actually covered under Canadian universal healthcare, despite the relationship between dental health and seemingly-unrelated things like cardiovascular health (seriously!). It's pretty strange.

If I had any actionable advice to offer, it would be to look into this crap now. Some of the plans on offer were shockingly bad, despite the price tag - "we pay up to 75% of your hospital bill!" Fantastic. My wife had her appendix out in Florida on vacation, the surgeon lost a few staples in her abdomen, and next thing you know, she's looking at a $250,000 bill (covered by travel insurance, thankfully). $250,000 * 0.25 = $62,500. Not checking this stuff out could cost you - health problems strike when you least expect them .

Thanks for the response. That's all very interesting.

> If I had any actionable advice to offer, it would be to look into this crap now.

Is that still relevant given that I don't have options? My company only offers one plan (and they cover the monthly cost, so I might as well take it). I'm wondering if there are situations where knowing what is covered would change my actions, even if I can't change which plan I'm using.

It is not a problem only for me but also for those around me. Let's say I am covered by my work, I would feel anyway really bad having a friend, parent, wife, etc not covered because they do other jobs in which they are not lucky or simply because they have not enough money to pay for it. I want to work in a society where the healt system automatically helps anyone who needs without putting him under various K$ of debt.

Obviously this is my personal point of view

Believe me, a lot of us agree with you!

Non issue? Until you want to take some time off work to try starting your own business, or travel, or be a stay at home parent, sure.

If we're going to turn this into yet another United States - Europe comparison, you could also compare the flip side of the equation: high barriers to entry in starting a business in Japan being similar to Europe. In some ways Japan seems to have the worst of both worlds - regular jobs are low pay with deathmarch hours, yet it's seemingly impossible to escape by striking out on your own.

Interesting - what are the high barriers to starting a business in Europe?

AFAIK most countries in EU have higher unemployment benefits and other social protections than US (many ppl live on benefits while starting a business). People who say leave a mega corp to do a starup still have health insurance. Registering a company take a few hours. Most countries have all kinds of tax subsidies for the founders, investors and employees of new businesses.

Except from the actual productivity angle, Silicon Valley (and to a larger extent, the U.S. economy) do have the most to show in terms of final results when compared to the rest of the world.

By what measure does Silicon Valley have good final results to show? Simply GDP per capita or something of that sort?

I lived in the SF Bay Area for years, and I left in part because it was such a bad place to live, which to me does not seem like a very good showing. I now live in Copenhagen, and if you want to talk about results to show for an economy, Copenhagen is better in every way I can think of. It's just a nicer place to live. It has less poverty, lower crime, lower incarceration, better transit, better healthcare, sidewalks are not covered in human feces, homeless rate is massively lower, housing is more affordable, there is a more experimental startup culture, offices are more affordable, unemployment is low, etc.

I can believe that SF is richer numerically, but walking around Copenhagen subjectively feels like a much more economically successful city. SF's is a weird kind of segregated wealth: there are some very rich people, driving expensive cars and living in penthouses, but the area overall has a lot of poverty and a ton of social problems, and does not subjectively feel wealthy to me. If I have to worry about stepping in feces or being mugged, to me that is not a mark of a particularly successful economic system, or the mark of an area that is desirable to live in.

I agree that SF is a dirty city, but there are nicer parts of the bay area. I think the parent was talking about more than numbers, though focused in a different area: what Silicon Valley creates.

Consider how much time you spend using things created in the bay area: Google, Facebook, Apple, YouTube, Yahoo, Twitter, LinkedIn, Ebay, WordPress, Pintrest, Reddit, Instagram, Paypal... the list is too long to name everything.

I'm living in the south of Sweden near Copenhagen and will be going to a open-source dev meet-up in Copenhagen today in fact. There's not the same Valley feeling perhaps but there is a startup and dev scene.

The region is really really productive technically. There are lots of startups and some do really well. Skype (Swedes, Danes and Estonians), Spotify, Mojang (Minecraft), Dice (owned by EA; Battlefield etc), Massive, etc etc. Lots are in the game-making space.

There are lots of big companies too such as Ikea, Ericsson, Saab, etc etc. Names you recognize.

And Sweden is a really really big exporter of music; the third biggest exporter in the world, or something like that, which is not bad for a population about that of London.

Of course many want to move to the Valley and I know many who have. But having been over to visit a few times I'd much rather work remotely from my farm house deep in the Swedish countryside with my great broadband.

One thing to note: lots of VCs basically require you to relocate to SV to do your startup. That's one reason there's so many startups in SV.

Man. I studied in Copenhagen, and I really disliked the place. It was a sentiment shared by a lot of the international students I ran into, sans the ones on exchange. The variety of stores, the opening hours, the size of grocery, the limited food selection, and especially the unwelcoming culture got to me pretty quickly. How are you integrating into the Danish culture (assuming you're not a native Dane)?

I haven't had much of an issue with groceries/etc. Opening hours are good enough for me, typically 8am-10pm x 7 days a week (depending on how long ago you were in Copenhagen, that might not have been the case at the time).

I guess I'm not really attempting to integrate into Danish culture per se. I feel pretty comfortable with cosmopolitan Copenhagen culture, which is a bit different. Copenhagen is a really international city these days, and my group of friends is from a number of countries (Spanish, German, Greek, Polish, Italian, Swedish, Norwegian, Korean, Syrian, and yes, Danish). So unless we all become fluent enough in Danish to prefer it over English, we're going to speak English as a practical matter anyway. If you're in the central areas of the city, in my experience that's not uncommon— in a typical bar in Indre By, Vesterbro, or Nørrebro, the table next to you is almost as likely to be speaking English as Danish. It'd be nice to speak Danish too, just from a practical perspective I have little opportunity/need to.

I'd say about half of the cultural events are in English as well, so it doesn't even really feel like being in some kind of expat bubble. Especially anything to do with science or technology: game-dev meet-ups, hackathons, research talks at universities, etc. are mostly done in English. Looking at the talks at http://www.cphtalks.org/, for example (which admittedly leans towards academic talks), I count 50 talks in the coming week, of which 41 are in English and 9 are in Danish. Between that and having learned enough written Danish that I can read a newspaper ok, I feel reasonably connected.

I do think it's hard to meet Danish people, but once you know 1 or 2, it's easier to meet others. And Copenhagen is a great place to meet non-Danish people. I think I have honestly met more German people here than I would have if I were actually living in Germany.

Yeah, that's what I ended up doing as well. I collected more than a few Danish friends from going to school with them, but a good portion of my friends were Norwegian, Danes that lived abroad, French, etc. The international crowd is always good fun.

Groceries wise, I'm still sort of 'there', but I live in the U.S. Just pop in for exams, I'm having difficulty finding housing. That actually might be a huge part of my dislike of the city; I'm sure if I lived near Norrebro, my experience would be a lot better. Commuting is never fun.

I guess the little things got to me though. I'm used to people generally having some degree of friendliness/politeness in public, which I found lacking in CPH. The cashiers at Netto would often not even acknowledge my presence. That was weird. Asking a random stranger for something like directions sometimes felt like you were committing a no-no. Maybe I'm just projecting, but the entire city's atmosphere felt mildly hostile/alien.

In other words, not for those dependent on consummerism and overeating.

Right. Because there's no consumerism in Copenhagen and no fat people either. I'm curious as to how you pulled that out of everything I said.

More accurately, there's little room for individualists in Denmark. The atmosphere of Jantelov is not very pleasant, and outsiders especially struggle to find their place within it.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Law_of_Jante

Yup. Sorry.

Yes

yes

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