Why Germans Work Fewer Hours but Produce More: A Study in Culture | Hacker News Reader

Why Germans Work Fewer Hours but Produce More: A Study in Culture

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115 pointsrtcoms50 comments

This article is bullshit fluff. In Germany, I've witnessed excellent efficiency of course, but most of the workers are dicking around just as much as their counterparts from any other country. They're not machines, after all.

I won't get into details, but here's some first hand observations: the health care is great, the pay is average, the taxes are high, the Internet is average, working hours are average and there is no minimum salary (also there are people who work 9-6 incl. Saturdays, mostly foreigners), people are great, crime is low, language is hard, opportunities through the roof, business is hard (esp. compared to the US and nearby UK), basic living prices are OK, but any "luxuries" are expensive.

In Germany, I've witnessed excellent efficiency of course,

I live in Germany. Coming from The Netherlands, it surprises me how inefficient Germany often is. A lot of administration is still done on paper. Government organisations barely communicate, e.g. probably half of my non-native co-workers had taxation problems in their first months as a result of that. For every minor thing, you have to fill in a form.

The private sector is not much better. E.g. in NL I could arrange virtually all my banking affairs via internet. Here, except for some internet banks (such as the non-German ING DiBa), you have to go to an office to arrange anything. In NL, most local branches are gone from villages and are slowly retracting from cities as well. Here you have many branches in a small city, with many employees (probably because stuff is all handled on paper) and royal interiors. And then you have to go to the bank every couple of weeks to print your statements using a machine (I am not making this up).

Compared to Northern European countries, there is a huge space for increasing efficiency.

there is no minimum salary

Yes. This is I dislike very much too, it's hard to see people working hard, only earning a few Euros per hour in an extremely rich society. Luckily, Germany may finally see a minimum wage now that the SPD is part of the government again.

What does virtually all banking stuff include? I don't think there are any banks not offering online banking remaining.

I said arranging stuff. I would be surprised if there is any public/general bank in Western Europe without online banking. I mean things like: changing account limits, requesting a credit card, changing the phone number associated with an account, opening an extra savings account.

That is why I asked, it was not clear to me what you meant. Now I can add a second data point, I can do all these things online.

Oh, where do you live? You go to bank to print statement - seriously? I live in Berlin, and I never go to bank for anything banking - the popular Sparkasse netbanking works in all cases - online purchasing, rent payments, making transfers, printing statement(like you mentioned) etc.

And I do so many things on internet - getting internet connection, subscribing to electricity providers etc, and direct debit or online banking works here as well.

I have lived in Netherlands too, and I think NL is more efficient and has automated lot of things though.

If I don't print my bank statements for a while, the bank will print them for me and send them by mail (charging me for it, too). Apparently there is a legal requirement for them to do so, probably insurance-related (you must be able to note any unkosher activities within a certain time), so I'm surprised that it's different in Berlin. Could my bank be bs'ing me? Nahh... they're a bank... they wouldn't lie...

I don't know about legal requirement, but in my case - there is option to receive e-statement in netbanking. I have activated it and I get e-statement every month which I can view after logging in. They don't charge anything for this service.

Their love for paper is really annoying, but so far, I've had all the online banking features that you'd find in the US or UK, including e-Statements. Having to schedule an appointment the first time was a bit inconvenient. But Paypal, for example, verified my account using only SCHUFA, and you can sign/confirm stuff online, as well.

    *there is no minimum salary*
    
    Yes. This is I dislike very much too, it's hard to see
    people working hard, only earning a few Euros per hour
    in an extremely rich society.

This is changing January 1st, 2015, at least for some.

    Luckily, Germany may finally see a minimum wage now that 
    the SPD is part of the government again.

Let's not forget who brought the Agenda 2010 on its way, including the Hartz reformations.

> A lot of administration is still done on paper. Government organisations barely communicate, […] For every minor thing, you have to fill in a form.

My impression is that Germany requires a lot of paperwork, but this paperwork is often well guided and backed by organizations that are reasonably big and efficient. So the inefficiencies of living in a "paper bureaucracy" where you have to fill out a form for everything are there, but people barely notice them because the bureaucratic machine is well oiled.

The problem is that if you happen to meet one of the not well oiled parts of the mechanism you will be crushed by the bureaucracy. But this is mostly a foreigners' problem, so it not a very important part of the political agenda.

This is true, I am foreigner and I still find it fairly straight forward to work with bureaucracy here.

I've had similar experiences, but I think it's more that Germany is inefficient only in comparison to the (I suspect) very few countries that do some of these things as efficiently as Holland.

We will have a minimum wage of 8,50 € from next year on.

I heard about that - has the law been passed, is it official?

Passed in August.

That's great, also, Euro 8.50 is very comparable to other Western European countries that have a minimum wage (e.g. NL is 8.63 p/h with a 40 hour work week or 9.85 with a 36 hour work week).

Writing from Germany, this article is shallow and stereotypical due to not being well researched.

Please don't read it, or forget what you read in it; not all work is good work, and you shouldn't value bad work; this article is a bad article.

I have read similar articles before, and would be interested to counterpoints you might have.

> A lot of administration is still done on paper. Government organisations barely communicate, e.g. probably half of my non-native co-workers had taxation problems in their first months as a result of that. For every minor thing, you have to fill in a form.

Somebody said that. And currently It's true. (I live there aswell).

The most companies aren't very efficent when it comes to stuff like paperwork. Look at our governement. We could save lots of money if we would change a few things.

Also we are a nation that could only problems that needs a lot of work and are long living. We aren't good in rapidly changing things, like internet business. Let's look at our IT companies as an example. We have SAP. But SAP's business is around money which needs to be stable and can't emerge rapidly. Also when somebody in germany founds a super fast growing thing he will sell it really early. There is no billion dollar internet company.

Your comment provides a fine example of German efficiency :-)

Do they actually produce more? It seems like they produce almost 15% less per hour worked than Americans for example.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_GDP_%28PP...

And while the stats here are collated, it's not nearly as worthless a measure as nominal GDP of the whole country.

In Europe (according to Eurostat so possibly using comparable methodology), they're behind France.

http://epp.eurostat.ec.europa.eu/tgm/table.do?tab=table&init...

15% less than Americans is also what is indicated by http://stats.oecd.org/Index.aspx?DataSetCode=PDB_LV.

I would want to know if military, prisons, and the amount we outspend European economies in health care count as productive output.

They do count, if I understand correctly.

In particular, the figure I quoted has been adjusted to try to account for differences in the cost of living in the 2 countries ("purchasing power parity"), but I doubt the adjustment takes into account the fact that Americans spend more for health care while enduring worse health outcomes than Germans do -- or the fact that American spend more on prisoners while enduring higher rates of crime than Germans do.

(I never meant to imply that the US is superior to Germany, just to illuminate one of the limitations of the OP.)

I get it, and I also suspect that financial services is a large factor is US productivity. And even within financial services there is productivity in, say, retail banking and insurance that most people would equate with productivity in any service function on the one hand, and productivity in creating trillions in derivatives where the risk came to bite us in the arse. Was the "productivity" in that adjusted downward when derivatives fueled the financial crisis bomb? As others have suggested, I'd like to see productivity on a per-industry basis.

I would like to understand all the nitty-gritty deails behind those numbers.

1. How are work hours measured, do they include overtime, etc.

2. How is "productivity" measured? Eg: if an American company has a factory in China, then are the man-hours in those factories accounted for in a reasonable way, because the profits of those products are probably being counted. Or maybe the measures only calculate the value added by American workers.

Yes it will be value added in the country being measured. But if you get stuff assembled or made to order you are keeping the value added from design etc.

The us is a service economy, while germany is a manufacturing one. It's a bit hard to compare. As for the French with their short work weeks, it makes sense that they're very efficient.

This is incorrect.

The US is the world's second largest manufacturing economy, and just until recently was in front of China.

Proportions?

You can't compare by total output, you need to normalize by population or as percentage of GDP. It's only about 13% of the U.S. GDP and 23% of Germany's GDP according to the World Bank for 2011.

I think you can compare by total output. How about we normalize based on manufacturing output vs population and claim China isn't a manufacturing economy either.

If you have a manufacturing sector roughly the size of the entire economy of France or Russia or Brazil, and that doesn't qualify as having a manufacturing economy, then no country qualifies as such.

You'd probably need to have a per-industry dataset to make a robust conclusion. The two countries above the US are Norway and Luxembourg that are probably as high as that because of oil and financial services respectively being a larger part of their economy.

Isn't that list biased towards countries with more natural resources?

No, the number (if calculated correctly) is unbiased. But it's pretty hard to interpret. It's certainly doesn't measure what people typically understand by the terms productivity or efficiency.

Btw. these Lists don't count unemployments.

Also the list could also mean that you guys have more super rich people. Since it's only a measurement per people. So if your rich guys will buy a lot of stuff it will get up really quickly.

Also the numbers are rising in EVERY country even when MORE people getting POOR. So these numbers are just indications that a lot of things go wrong in our world.

History has given us an image of crazy-efficient labour-soldiers and (evil) thinkers, which is passed on with articles like this.

In reality Germany is just an export nation with solid centuries-old world-known brands, a currency of an emerging country [0] and stagnating wages [1], producing luxury and investment goods, while Asia's growth creates demand for these like crazy.

[0]: http://www.forbes.com/sites/moneybuilder/2013/06/20/greece-d...

[1]: http://www.diw.de/sixcms/detail.php?id=diw_01.c.342374.de

Germany also produces non luxury and non investment goods, it has a world class engineering industry producing all sorts of products.

French are working even less and produce even more: http://www.businessinsider.com/are-the-french-the-most-produ...

Not to step into a troll, but basically depending on the metric you take, it is either less or more (it's a big troll in France), so I prefer to think we work about the same.

But the office habits are very different, in France people leave the office way later than in Germany or the US (6 or 7pm), so it's quite a shock for some foreigners (basically our lunch break is longer, and our coffee breaks are shorter). You might have trouble getting a hold of people on Friday afternoon because they might take it off, and more and more on Wednesday (some people just take a 20% salary cut and spend one day with their kids).

Interesting, but feels a bit like pop-sociology. Any citations? Any evidence that this isn't just broad brush generalisations based on anecdotes and stereotypes?

Agreed. It links some article about how Germany is a "powerhouse" and then goes on to make some seemingly stereotypical claims about why.

It does feel a bit like they are over generalising. In that spirit, anecdotal evidence feels appropriately non-rigorous. I'm Indian, worked in Silicon Valley for about 6 years and then moved to a small town in Germany a year back. Given this, I've seen both cultures from the perspective of an outsider. In my limited experience life feels more relaxed here in Germany. However, it definitely feels like less gets done here compared to Silicon Valley. Keep in mind that of those 6 years, 3 were at Google and 2 at a startup so I might have a positively biased view of American productivity :)

If you're reading about the focus of Germans and wishing that described you (i.e. you want to cut out Facebook, gmail, etc.), there are a lot of technological solutions that can move you in the right direction. For me the pair that have worked best are TagTime and Beeminder. I'm not where I want to be on focus, but having a constant incentive to focus well has substantially moved the needle on that.

A pothole of stereotypes combined with cheesy imagery. Seriously, why the upvotes?

The article just narrates this documentary by BBC https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9bTKSin4JN4

In article, it compares with US, documentary compares with UK.

Well, the reason Germans produce more is because they have more industry.

Machines could do the work of lots of people and Germany has lots of capital, lots of automation and lots of organization.

What I hate about Germany is their Winter. I would happily live there 6 months a year, the other six in Argentina, SA or Australia.

Studies shows Scandinavians usually put in fewer hours than people form other european countries. Bosses normally don't stay late at the office to make sure employees do what they are told. Instead there are lot's of long meetings where tasks are delegated.

Even if they work less hours in average, this is the french people who is the most productive. And this is probably related.

http://www.businessinsider.com/are-the-french-the-most-produ...

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