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I have worked a lot in international teams with many different cultures, but predominantly US. Being born in NL and based in DE currently, it has always amazed
by mvdwoord 10y ago
I have worked a lot in international teams with many different cultures, but predominantly US. Being born in NL and based in DE currently, it has always amazed me what a low standard of living my american colleagues had compared to us. The elections provided me some more insight into the debate surrounding Bernie Sanders' plans and I just can't understand the seeming lack of understanding of how nice it is to have true (imho) quality of life. Free time, insurance, working roughly 35 hours a week, fresh air, exercise, good food, etc . etc. I don't want to engage any political discussion, and I see similar mindset with some europeans. It somehow just baffles the crap out of me to see people want to, and be proud of, overworking / sitting in a car 2-3 hours a day / breathing polluted air / eating prefab sandwiches or other junkfood. Meanwhile labelling any alternative as 'communism' Had a bit of that for the first few years of my working life. Never again.
- arjie 10y ago> It somehow just baffles the crap out of me to see people want to, and be proud of, overworking / sitting in a car 2-3 hours a day / breathing polluted air / eating prefab sandwiches or other junkfood. Meanwhile labelling any alternative as 'communism' Had a bit of that for the first few years of my working life. Never again Wtf lol. America isn't necessarily like this. You just had a shit job.
- techsupporter 10y agoIt's much easier to say "portions of America aren't necessarily like this" while also saying "portions of America very much are like this." I know because I used to live in one of the latter parts and now I live in one of the former. Just because your experience doesn't match the experience of the person to whom you are replying doesn't mean that person's perception is wrong.
- sidlls 10y agoAmerica in aggregate most certainly is like that. There are cases where some or all of these things don't apply, but these aren't representative of a typical American worker's experience.
- estrabd 10y agoLOL Yeah. Sounds like bullshit to me.
- sctb 10y agoPlease comment civilly and substantively on HN or not at all. https://news.ycombinator.com/newswelcome.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newswelcome.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
- deleted 10y ago[deleted]
- tdb7893 10y agoI don't know. I've met tons of software engineers in the US that never work less than 45 hours a week in spite of having only 3 or 4 weeks of vacation a year. It seems kinda ridiculous to me
- spost 10y agoJunior dev here, but 3-4 weeks of vacation would be an improvement over my current 15 days...
- jrs235 10y ago15 days is 3 weeks.
- webo 10y ago15 days is 3 weeks.
- drjesusphd 10y ago15 days is 3 weeks of vacation...
- biznamespammer 10y agoFYI, 15 days is 3 weeks. You must not be a very good developer.
- dasil003 10y agoIsn't 15 days 3 weeks?
- ozgkrc 10y agoNot necessarily. In my current industry if you don't work for maximum weekly work hours, saturday will be count as a work day if you literally work or not. So a week vacation is counted 6 days. Ps. Non-US
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- rayiner 10y agoDescribes the upper middle class DC suburb where I grew up to a T.
- cylinder 10y agothat's the culture of most of the country once you get out of Cali and northeast. also, why should good living standards only apply to those with "elite jobs?" it's a rich country.
- acchow 10y agoYeah, "America" is really a loose union of 50 states with diverse cultures and standards of living. San Francisco is not like Indianapolis, which is not like Fargo.
- typaux 10y agoyou're really stretching the definition of the word diverse, there.
- FabHK 10y agoYou're right that the USA are more diverse than often acknowledged. However, they are still sufficiently clustered and distinct from, say, northern Europe (also comprising multiple states with diverse cultures etc.) that the discussion here is meaningful.
- wil421 10y agoSeriously not all jobs are like these. Even part time jobs, it's up to you to find the right place to work.
- yequalsx 10y agoYour comment reinforces the point mvdwoord made. It ought not be up to a person to find the right job. It is up to society to enforce basic worker protections. Failure to do so leads to exploitation. The U.S. is not as nice a place to live as other rich nations.
- MichaelScarn 10y agoOut of curiosity, what are these other "rich nations" you are referring to? Always open to new places to look at besides the U.S.
- yequalsx 10y agoJapan, Canada, Sweden, Norway, France, Germany, Denmark, Netherlands, Belgium, Lichtenstein, Italy, Austria, Switzerland, Iceland, Findland.
- jblow 10y agoI know several people who have emigrated from some of the above countries to the USA, because running a small business is extremely painful (see for example France). If you think about companies as "us versus them", where "us" is workers and "them" is giant faceless monolithic corporations, then your idea that enforcing worker protections is a high priority might make sense. But most companies are small. I run a software company ... I am just a guy trying to get by, who now in addition to the normal-person's burden of making my life go, has to also make a company go, and that company provides jobs for 10-12 people. If you make my situation much harder than it is, the company would cease to exist or would downscale to 2-4 people, shedding the majority of the jobs. I am not a faceless corporation, I am just a guy who wants to get interesting things built. My little company is certainly not set up to "exploit workers", especially not on an industrial scale. Now, paraxoically, if you add a lot more friction to what needs to happen to run a business (regulation around hiring, firing, invoicing, etc), then people like me drop out, and then what you mostly have left is the larger companies who do want to exploit workers because that is just kind of how larger companies work. Plus then you lose all the innovation / energy / economic activity that comes from smaller companies. It maybe seems like not the best idea. (If it is, how come Silicon Valley is not in France?) As an investor, I fund a small French company and I have seen some of the crap they have to deal with just because they have a handful of employees. It makes me very glad I don't live in France.
- c0nducktr 10y agoA lot of people have shit jobs in America. That's their point.
- holydude 10y agoSomeone has to do the dirty job for you. Most of your wealth comes from mega corps like Royal Dutch Shell. You are keeping it clean in your home country but you wreak havoc everywhere else. It's the same with your "working culture". How many "cheap workers" have to work hard so you do not have to ?
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- hockeybias 10y agoYou are painting with a massively large roller! ;) I live near Minneapolis which is a beautiful city with all sorts of museums, theaters, and recreational activities. It is a great biking town to boot. It is affordable. The majority of the public schools are quite good and many are excellent. There are great jobs in the area at companies large and small. I've traveled throughout the world and would not trade it for anywhere. It is a wonderful place to call home!
- yequalsx 10y agoYou can spot the Americans who are responding to you. They are the ones who say it's not every job like this. Or that some areas of the country are different. You'll notice that the concept of having worker protections like mandatory paid time off etc. mandated by law and enforced by the government doesn't figure prominently into their thinking. It provides insight into the politics of the country. Looking to government for protection from exploitation by employers, polluters, etc. is not what a large percent of Americans do.
- rsync 10y ago"You can spot the Americans who are responding to you." American here (although I own a swiss business and travel there frequently). The reason that americans do not embrace these things is that, for the most part, the United States still has a very, very flat social hierarchy. If you put Joe-6-Pack and Larry Ellison into a room together, J6P will still hold his head high and demand equal treatment and respect - from both Ellison and other third parties. But J6P intuitively knows something else: asking for favors alters that relationship and establishes an explicit power balance (as opposed to the implicit one which was obviously there to some degree). On the other hand, if you come from Europe, the idea of a "better class" isn't so foreign - even if you disagree with it. That power balance is quite a bit more explicit and there is a fairly well established (sometimes in blood) "contract" between the people who work for a living and the people who own things. Personally, I like the American arrangement but I think it's days are numbered - eventually the sorting will complete itself and workers will have more days off ... but "gentlemen" will have certain privileges like english lords do in 2016.[1] [1] Exemption from jury service, immunity from arrest for civil cases, "access to the sovereign".
- crpatino 10y ago> ..., for the most part, the United States still has a very, very flat social hierarchy. HAHAHAHAAHAHAHHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA HAHAHAAHAHAHHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA HAHAAHAHAHHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA HAAHAHAHHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA HAHAHAHHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAA HAHAHHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAAHA HAHHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAAHAHA HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAAHAHAHHA HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
- disordinary 10y agoThe categorising (and dismissal) of ideals that you don't agree with under a blanket statement and refusing to see them as anything other than binary is the most destructive thing in our society IMO. It means you can group public healthcare with the forced redistribution of wealth and call them communism and equally bad. The war of drugs is the same, it means you can group (relatively) harmless drugs like Marijuana with harmful drugs like Heroin and dismiss both as equally nasty when they are anything but. The world is seldom binary, but categorising things makes it such. Unfortunately the word "green" is the new "communism".
- benevol 10y agoIf you'd constantly be told (in the media, the movies, TV shows, by the government, and thus society in general) that you live in the Greatest Country on Earth, wouldn't you end up believing it, too? Yes, you would.
- Fej 10y agoFrom NJ, US - the reason Bernie's plans were seen as nuts by the mainstream media is because the US has an extremely conservative bent compared to many European countries. Our left-wing, I imagine, would be right-wing in Europe, and our right-wing would be decried as extreme-right fascists. Anything that helps the average American is Communism, and we can't have that, can we?
- disordinary 10y agoYeah, and even the extreme right in other countries would likely be to the left in the US, but only on some policies.
- kevin_thibedeau 10y agoMuch of the rancor from the right about government programs is actually veiled/transmuted bigotry against any form of assistance going to non-whites.
- fjrieiekd 10y agoYou'd be surprised. I'm not sure if you've ever spent significant time in Europe, but it's not a fairy-tale land. You would also be surprised at how insular and "right-wing" they can be. As a non-American, what I see is that many Americans, especially those commenting here, suffer from a particularly virulent form of "the grass is greener over there" syndrome. Europe is a beautiful place, but behind the beauty lies ugliness of a different kind. The US has many problems, but there's also a reason why Silicon Valley and people like Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos are in the States. If you value knowing your place in the social hierarchy and having less and paying more for it, then by all means, adopt the European model. However, as jblow said above, there are so many bright spots in the US, too, so maybe it's better to just work on the rough spots instead of always looking over the fence.
- querulous 10y agojeff bezos was born in new mexico?
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- jjawssd 10y agoThe big problem with America is the lack of public transportation infrastructure, including high speed train service in convenient locations.
- throwaw-zxcvbn 10y ago> The big problem with America "One of the big problems with America"
- neuromancer2701 10y agoI currently work in central Virginia a bit more rural. Good pay and great cost and quality of living. 3 of the more senior engineers work 60% and 80%. But HR has told me that no one wants to come here. It has been a great place for starting a family, the only risk is there is not very many software engineering options.