> And you can still do that in Europe, no one is stopping you from working more.

Well, unions do. But that's a good thing, it prevents a race to burnout.

Does that actually apply to every field? I've only worked briefly as a software developer in Germany and not full time, but I never got the impression that unions would realistically stop anyone in that field from working till midnight. If you are working as a factory worker for example that's of course a totally different story. However, I doubt that people in that kind of job regularly decide to put in a few extra hours on some days and are usually on the clock.

If you're in management (defined as having authority to hire/fire IIRC) you're exempt from the law, same if you're self-employed.

For a regular programming job, I believe the the law applies (no more than 10h/day and (8h/weekday average over 6 months). Practically, it only matters if somebody cares about it which only happens systematically on larger companies with a union presence.

But: you're responsible for your employees and they can not waive this right. If you regularly tolerate it, you may run the risk of someone changing his mind after a few years and getting you into trouble, trouble being up to 15000 Euro in penalties and (theoretically) a year in prison if someone was harmed.

In the UK you can opt-out of the EU working time directive.

It's the EU Working Time directive.

You can work longer for yourself, but not for someone else.

http://ec.europa.eu/social/main.jsp?catId=706&langId=en&intP...

But is not applied for everyone. In my country, it doesn't apply to engineers typically: the only limit is 13h/day, 6days/week, so that's a "limit" of 78h/week...

In most developed EU countries, especially the happy Denmark, mr. Taxman will make sure that you see little marginal benefit of those longer hours.

Well, for those who love work so much, they'd do so regardless of the extra monetary benefits, would they not?

The overtime regulations vary from union to union, but generally there's an upper limit – you can work 50 hours a week (and get compensated in some form), but not 90.

You can have two jobs if you want to. They won't stop you from that.

Nobody is stopping you but why would you work 60 hours a week for some boring European company that only pays you EUR60k when you can work the same hours in SV on something interesting and make $150k+.

Because a house costs you 200k instead of 400k

Not in London, or Paris, or any of those places where there is some interesting work.

So move back to Europe after five years in SV and buy the house in cash.

Are you implying all European companies are boring? That seems like a strange assumption..