The occasional week-long sprint before a release is one thing. I think better management/planning would avoid them, but they're normal in such a competitive industry, I guess. So I've worked 80-hour weeks at times, no complaint here. In fact, I think they're healthy now and then, I like the buzz that I get at 3 AM, it's good concentration exercise...
Constant work at this pace though, no, can't do. First, that's how bad software gets written. You literally get worse at your business for doing it. Second, those additional hours per day aren't just family time hours. They're also learning-new-things hours, reading hours, keeping myself informed hours, debating stuff with friends hours and so on. Not having them further decreases my chances of getting better employment somewhere else (or even getting a better position where I work right now) and slowly turns me into a social retard living in a bubble made out only of headlines. That can't be good for me.
Oh, and without additional pay, it's illegal pretty much everywhere around here.
It's probably like getting drunk -- getting shitfaced once a year with your old highschool friends to celebrate the anniversary of when you all got arrested for egging the principal's house is kind of a healthy social activity. Chugging a bottle of Jameson every day because that's how we do things around here is called being an alcoholic and it's really bad for your insides.
I've had colleagues who glorified this sort of work. It does create some amount of peer pressure (unsurprisingly, the managers are quick to praise this sort of stuff), but after the ripe age of 17 I've learned to deal with that.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Literacy_in_India
The World Bank, in 2011 based on 2005's PPPs International Comparison Program, estimated 23.6% of Indian population, or about 276 million people, lived below $1.25 per day on purchasing power parity.
The money that is spent on making education free for students at a tertiary level could be spent on improving primary education and it should be. No state in India is as rich as Ireland was in 1970. That's around when Ireland made secondary education free to students. To spend money on what is almost entirely a subsidy for the middle class when it could be used to help the wretchedly poor is an abomination.
Sources on that? Education is not free at a tertiary level. It's just really cheap. Also, your premise is completely opposite to the reality. Primary education in India has seen huge progress. Yes, there's still room for improvement, but the plans are in place. For example, public schools are mostly free and girls below a certain age gets free education. The concern is about low higher education enrollment levels, which stood only at about 24% in 2013 [1]. If tertiary education was free, this should've been much higher.
Coming back to the original comment, people usually don't take huge loans for education in India like in the US. So the chances of you being homeless if you lose your job is lower.
Most of them still aren't homeless. They somehow have a house to live in. Most illiterates still don't go for a loan to educate their kids, they try to educate with hard cash although they do not get very good education but loans are a big no no(mostly)
As far as homelessness goes a homeless shelter in the first world is better than a lot of people's homes in the developing world. There will be clean drinking water, a toilet, almost certainly hot and cold running water, a sufficiency of reasonably nutritious food. One of the facts about the lives of the extremely poor I learned by reading that book is that it's common for migrant labourers in India to sleep on the street or where they're working rather than pay for accommodation. Mostly at work does not mean dorms, it means on a building site or on the floor in a store room.
but not all poor are migrant workers. Most poor people live in villages made by their forefathers.
Poor people borrow money but they do not have to give their house in return and become homeless in case of non payment.
> who's secure enough to make it a blanket rule not to borrow money is well above the kind of insecurity that those living on less than a dollar a day deal with.
But in the US, even people with degrees from good colleges become homeless because of debt. I will be surprised to see many people in India becoming homeless because of education loan.
edit: Just to make my point clear, there is a difference in mindset of people in India and the US. Indians do not risk taking huge loans just to be able to have a job at the end of college or take huge home loans to live a posh life and later become homeless in case of a job lay off.
As a country we've slowly-but-surely gotten so many things right, but we have a god damned long way to go, and it just feels like we're crawling. I guess with a population of 320 million it's kind of like trying to turn the Titanic.
There were a few decades the country wasn't a glorified sheep shearing operation, but those days are long past.
Households in Sweden take on heavy debt. If we loose our jobs here some of us fall back for a while on a (voluntary) system which from an angle looks like a basic income but that cover only a fraction of that household's mortage, enslaving us to a system in the same way Americans may seem enslaved in their.
I always though Americans were used to and didn't have a lost sence of security when job-hopping, the way their employment system is designed.
Edit: clarified the opt-in nature of such an insurance
I didn't say nobody, and I didn't say everywhere outside America. Don't exaggerate what I said.
I used an example that Australia Vs. America is a vast difference.
In my experience (and that of my brother), Americans not having maternity leave, sick leave, decent holidays etc. and having student debt and health care tied to their work means they are treated much more like slaves than in other high-performing OECD countries.
I'm curious about Sweden now.
- When one does lose their job in Sweden, what happens when you break your leg next week? or get cancer?
- How much student debt to those in Sweden incur for a 4 years bachelor degree?
- How many weeks of leave does Sweden mandate by law from full-time work?
- How about maternity leave and sick leave?
Alright then.
>When one does lose their job in Sweden, what happens when you break your leg next week? or get cancer?
Care for children is always for free in all clinics except private ones. Care for the rest of us cost 30 EUR, no matter if you have a job or not. There is an upper roof of how much your yearly medical bill is. This roof stays the same if you have a job or not. I have it that roof a couple of times but never for acctual medicine bills, so I don't know exactly how it works for medicine, but doctor bills, the upper roof is 10 doctor visits for 30 EUR then a year of no doctor bills.
Many have extra insurance to conver for events where you loose your ability to work.
>How much student debt to those in Sweden incur for a 4 years bachelor degree?
One part of the debt you take on you never pay back. That part is like a carte blanche check that students get to spend on whatever education they like, at University level. Second part is a loan. Some work part-time while at University and others hit the roof which would be something like 17 semesters and 17*2000=34K EUR. Then you start paying that back as soon as you take on your first job but never over ~1% of your income.
>How many weeks of leave does Sweden mandate by law from full-time work?
5 weeks. Many have 6 weeks. You can get those in money instead of as vacation. 4 weeks is around a months pay.
>How about maternity leave and sick leave?
Everyone have sickleave. First day: no money for you, poor sick fellow. Next day its around 70% of your pay. If you are chronically ill a special incurance takes care of you, puts you in early retirement.
All mothers: around 300 days of leave per child. You get goverment money during those days. All fathers: minimum is 3 months I think? They can also use some of the mother's days.
As a thought exercise, answer all of my questions above for the USA, comparing the answers to those you gave for Sweden.
Now you know why I said workers in the USA are akin to slaves compared to high-performing OECD countries.
I thought the American system would at least to some degree make job-hopping a non-issue, giving you a much more flexible work force, not anxious, since the fact that you can get fired and have to leave the same day goes both ways. But perhaps that worry comes from not having any type of security nets where we have at least a few. So sure, I see where you come from when you say an American employee is a slave to the corporation that gives him health insurance. He can hop only to other employers with health insurance. He will have less options than me.
We are healther in Sweden, perhaps, but slaves to the money system like everyone else.
- Health care insurance is not (as far as I know) provided by your employer.
- If you take the maximum amount of student loan from CSN (http://www.csn.se/en/2.1034), you'll end up whith ~70 000kr debt per year
- Swedish law mandates 25 day of paid leave per year for a full time employee. https://lagen.nu/1977:480 (in Swedish)
- We have parental leave with some compensation for 480 days, you can find more information here: (http://preview.tinyurl.com/ktgsyyg)
My point was not to say we have not come a long way in Sweden. It was to question if that really makes us feel less like slaves to the system. My view is we have built this system to make sure we have a happy work force. Allthough that might not sound sinister, it does make me feel part of a system that it is hard to opt-out from.
I definetly feel like a slave to the monetary system. But this is already way off-topic.
The point of this is that I wonder why Swedes get into so much debt. Housing is (apart from Stockholm and Göteborg and some popular areas in other cities) affordable by my Dutch standards. Wages are on par with the Netherlands, taxes are comparable (both are high-tax countries for wage earners), cost of living depends very much on your life style but is comparable to or slightly higher than the Netherlands. Still, Swedes seem to take on enormous loans for some unfathomable reason. Unfathomable, because it certainly is possible to live free here, without that yoke of debt. It might be a status thing, people want to live in those expensive areas even though you can get more space for half the price only a few kilometres away.
That being said, someone in the US also easily earns double salary compared to Europe and has lower taxes.
As an aside, I once saw a homeless man in a Scandinavian country. Someone actually stopped their car to check on them. As a tourist from NA, my mind was blown. Was impressed by that but not having to pay 10 bucks for a cup of tea :p
As to the nature of debt, it is almost entirely in housing. It is currently a big debate about whatever there should be laws on private cash investment and mortgage repayment rates.
Homelessness example from Sweden's public radio (2014): http://sverigesradio.se/sida/artikel.aspx?programid=2054&art...
OECD private debt: https://data.oecd.org/hha/household-debt.htm
EDIT: Almost all the homeless people you see in Stockholm are Romani people. They are one of the five officially recognized national minorities in Sweden, along with Jews, Sami, Sweden Finns and Tornedalers (https://translate.google.com/translate?sl=auto&tl=en&js=y&pr...)
EDIT
> EDIT: Almost all the homeless people you see in Stockholm are Romani people. They are one of the five officially recognized national minorities in Sweden, along with Jews, Sami, Sweden Finns and Tornedalers ...
Please refer to my post below replying to this same assertion from another poster.
My point is that the OP was attempting to construct an argument about the supposed failings of a social structure based upon an anecdote about people that were never part of the social structure in the first place.
(NB I never said that they aren't welcome to join the society just that they haven't done so.)
Be in America where employees are close to slaves, and people are scared of losing their job, so you can force them to do these kinds of atrocious things.
My brother lived and worked in North America for 7 years before returning to Australia. He'd been in Australia for a few months when I asked what the biggest change was. He didn't say no snow, he didn't say driving on the wrong side of the road, food or attitudes.
He said in North America people are scared of and slaves to their jobs because of Health Care, student loans and debt in general, where-as in Australia employers are thankful to employees, and nobody is scared of their job.
I think it's a powerful statement when it's the most noticeable difference after 7 years.