Honestly I sometimes wonder how much my traveling and experiencing other cultures influenced my perception of this subject. Even in Iraq I feel like the Arab concept of time (flexible guidelines) really rubbed off on me, spent some time in Germany/France as well and loved how slow life could be.

In this day and age I feel like all many people want is retired-style life but then they entangle themselves in debt and job quagmires they don't excape till they are 65. I also highly disagree with the characterization that retirement is sitting around doing nothing. Retirement to me is the chance to pursue your true passions and interests unencumbered by an unrelated need for finances supplied by a wage-slavery job.

Totally agree. Germany has its ups and downs as you know, but I like it more since the approach to life and work life balance is much better. Whether it's the generous social systems or not is more of a political debate, but the focus on "living life" is much greater here, and I enjoy it.

Come on over man. :)

Which is why world dominating tech companies like Google, Apple, Facebook, Amazon, Microsoft, etc were naturally founded in Germany.

I kid, I kiiid... no really that was both sarcastic and joking.

Is the "all work no holiday" necessary for successful tech startups on the order of those?

I don't think those are really relevant to the discussion, because we are talking about lack of incentive. If I was working at space-x and getting the subsequent pay bump, I might consider it worth it. The current problem is outside of the few big guys in SV, the rest of the country is underpaying and overworking IT staff.

You can underpay and underwork, and have low turnover and medium-high return on talent, or you can overpay and overwork, with a high turnover but a high return on talent, but to underpay and overwork is a recipe for hemmoraging talent.

I hope not. I prefer this approach:

1 - have a plan 2 - FOCUS for 8 hours during the workday 3 - go home and play/rest

Seems to me that doing this would create a good company, but it's damned hard to find any examples.