* "Living in Switzerland ruined me for America and its lousy work culture" https://www.vox.com/2015/7/21/8974435/switzerland-work-life-...
I can attest to the European side of comparison, they do value work but they also value the resting and recovering part.
This may reduce salaries but oh God most of us make too much money anyhow. Let's have a life now! When are you going to enjoy life, after retirement? Would you wait with sex till after retirement, too, if that offered a salary increase?
Nope, that's just in the USA, us in Europe not at all.
And I'm not even comparing EU salaries vs US salaries just tech salaries/property prices ratios for each location.
You're not overpaid, it's us that are severely underpaid in comparison.
If you work for a European company, chances are it won't grow and be successful to the same extent as an American one, and therefore your work has less value.
I wouldn't take a job that pays double what I make now and has half as many hours if those hours were nothing but sitting in a dark room.
You can get a lot of satisfaction from building something meaningful with a team that people enjoy using.
Not that you can't do that in a big company, but all development jobs at big Corp are not that.
I would tear my hair out if my only job every day was figuring out how to get more people to click on sidebar ads.
Probably doesn't work for all position, and in fact the worse the job the more likely it doesn't work for it, but uh yeah you can totally reduce to 40h...
(France, 35h is the legal work time for a full time contract here, but you can absolutely have a contract with more or less hours, you just pay extra social charges for hours above the 35th)
Americans criticize their own country more than anyone else.
OP’s post not only misses the fact that Switzerland is not in the EU, but more importantly the spirit of argument is baseless with the general perception that things are better in EU.
Percentage wise, the Swiss have more immigrants, more foreigners and more people with immigrant backgrounds. Not to mention the whole "four official languages" thing.
Diversity is also language, culture, language, identity etc.
The slightly racist assumption in America is that if I as a white Norwegian settle in America I contribute less to diversity than a black American who has lived his whole life in America.
In America diversity is all about what you see on the outside.
The differences between accepted social behaviour in Britain, Spain and Poland are significant too.
Sure, if you came from Saudi, you'll feel more out of place. But it's not trivial.
There is more that I probably forgot about but this should about cover it. None of these political areas and borders have 100% coverage amongst eachother, they're all different groups.
Swiss cities where most of the economic value is being created are far from homogenous.
Are you talking about a different Switzerland than everyone else? A country literally made out of three different cultures (French Swiss, German Swiss and Italian Swiss)?
The EU actually enforces it's laws on this subject and they are not as simple to "not technically illegal" them.
It is the US and Anglo-Saxon countries were unions tend to be a binary thing. Germanic countries tend to follow a different union system: sector wise unions rather than company specific unions. Different types of employees will typically join a different union depending on the type of work and interests they have.
What's the issue?
If my company goes union, I'll go work somewhere else.
Not counting the MIT, Stanford, Harvard, UOT etc. that they have to compete with other FAANG for graduates.
There are a lot of countries in EU which have, IMO, better work culture and fairness of negotiation as the guiding philosophies behind the work.
If Google did this in the USA, it wouldn't be seen as much. However, they have strong laws against this in EU, and this incident would not portray Google in favorable light, IMO.
I also feel that it is high time engineers realized that fairness in work is something we'd all love to have, and historically, skilled people have kept unions to ensure that they don't get screwed over.
I believe that at the end of the day, if you need fairness in negotiation, you need to have a way to express it, especially if it isn't supply driven.