23 ms·

I chose to work in the public sector of Denmark because I’m ideologically inclined that way. That was decades ago, today I would chose to work here because of h

by moksly 6y ago

I chose to work in the public sector of Denmark because I’m ideologically inclined that way. That was decades ago, today I would chose to work here because of how much less hours I work compared to my old university friends in the private sector. They earn more money than me, but except for one of them who founded and now manages a successful company, it’s not that much more money. In fact when you calculate in all the extra hours they work, my extra weak of paid vacation, my better paternityleave, the two extra paid child’s sick leave days I get (per time your child is sick), the two yearly extra vacation days (per child under the age of 7) and my pension, I probably only earn around 10-20% less than them, and I get to spend so much more time not working. Hell I even bumped my hours to 30 a week for a while when my daughter was born. That was expensive, but it’s something you aren’t offered in a lot of private sector jobs. I can’t begin to imagine how you guys in America get through life working so much. Let alone how on Earth you raise a family, maintain a relationship and have time for yourselves while you do it.

luckylion 6y ago
That's very similar in most government jobs in Europe, I believe. I don't know about the US, but I expect it's similar there as well. I'm afraid that it works out great for you because others are working more. Individually, that's a good decision for you, but it's not a model you can make society run on, at least not at the same level of output we're currently providing. If everybody had the same circumstances you have, we couldn't afford everything we can afford now, unless there's some explosion in productivity, which is hard to believe for the majority of jobs where it's not about "coming up with the right idea".
- fileeditview 6y ago
  I don't think this is true. In my experience a lot of work time is just wasted time. Often nothing is accomplished. A lot of extra hours for meetings are not productive at all. A lot of extra hours looking into that bug ("so we can fix it today") is not productive at all.. I think you have the impression that working longer means being more productive. I don't believe that. I am often more productive if I have a shorter work day. Also your argument doesn't make too much sense to me because OP already says that he is paid less. So it's not like he gets the same for less work. He gets less for less work.
  - rubber_duck 6y ago
    > I don't think this is true. In my experience a lot of work time is just wasted time. Often nothing is accomplished. A lot of extra hours for meetings are not productive at all. A lot of extra hours looking into that bug ("so we can fix it today") is not productive at all.. And this is not true in public sector ? :D
    - fileeditview 6y ago
      Probably also there.. does this contradict anything I said? That just means that doing more hours won't help more.. where ever you are (there are always exceptions).
      - rubber_duck 6y ago
        I would say equal amount of time is being wasted even if you work less hours but public sector tolerates less being done. For example your morning windup routine is the same, your lunch takes the same time, you need to go to bathroom, pointless meetings are still there - I don't really see what would improve about my productivity if I worked less hours - what would I be able to eliminate in order to shorten my time at work ? Even if time is "wasted" with breaks at work this time is between events - not at the end of the day - and I usually don't have the ability to compress it. And also the economics of working more hours once you become a critical contributor are very different from a person staying in late for appearances - adding a person to take over the load has multiple costs - hiring risk, training and on-boarding time, extra sync and communication slowing things down.
        fileeditview 6y ago
        I see. I don't have experience with the public sector myself but what I meant is this: If I have only a 4 hour workday, people(bosses) think twice about wasting my time with useless meetings. Also it gives me energy to start into a day with only 4 or 5 hours ahead instead of 8h+. Of course having a shorter workday doesn't make it 100% productive. But my personal experience is that it is MORE productive. Sadly most of my days are 8h+. I also want to add that a tired, worn out developer might even cost productivity by introducing flawed code into the codebase. Did you ever do a serious code review while being tired? I don't see how that works. Then others have to deal with all this stuff afterwards.
- trosi 6y ago
  But he said specifically that he earns 10-20% less than his friends (and probably a lot less than the one who founded his company), so in fact he can afford less than them. It's just that he is content with that much. On the other hand, many private companies don't contemplate (on don't look favorably upon) employees who work part time or anything below the standard 40 hoours/week, so if you do work in the private sector you don't have much of a choice. If everyone was magically allowed to reduce his/her working hours and salary by the same percentage I wonder what would be the outcome.
  - barry-cotter 6y ago
    > But he said specifically that he earns 10-20% less than his friends (and probably a lot less than the one who founded his company), so in fact he can afford less than them. If he has a defined benefit pension and they don’t he’s probably going to come out ahead if he lives long enough. Given he’s in government and they’re not that’s a reasonable assumption.
  - luckylion 6y ago
    He earns 10-20% less but they work significantly more than 10-20% more. If they worked (and had worked) the same hours per year, they'd make significantly less money than he does. That's expected, the state pays it's employees very well for a multitude of reasons, but primarily: to buy their loyalty, to make them less susceptible to bribes, and to encourage stability. It also has no reason not to, there's no competition. I don't know the Danish situation, but e.g. a teacher in Germany will have a pension that is higher than the salary of 70-80% of the population.
    - JanSt 6y ago
      Teachers in Germany also have 19.5 (now 18.5) years of education. There are few jobs that require more (e.g. doctors).
      - ckuehne 6y ago
        So, how much percent in pension payments for teachers would the German taxpayer save if the state required, say, one year less teacher education?
- mnsc 6y ago
  >unless there's some explosion in productivity... Or if the historical increase in productivity would have benefited the workers instead of the capitalists. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ https://economics.stackexchange.com/questions/15558/productivity-vs-real-earnings-in-the-us-what-happened-ca-1974 https://economics.stackexchange.com/questions/15558/producti...
  - rubber_duck 6y ago
    If you look down that thread there's a first valid argument against this : breaking down the "productivity increase" by industry shows the huge growth comes from software, also if you look at how they track productivity in manufacturing it's also misleading - if you account for stuff like outsourcing the only sector that's seeing huge real growth is computer related. And software/computer economics are a story of their own. Productivity growth is largely overstated.
  - luckylion 6y ago
    That's the US though, and this is Denmark. European countries, and especially the Nordic countries are set up very differently with regards to income equality. But generally, it's a hard thing to determine that exactly. How much is that 10% gain in life expectancy worth? How comparable is the life of 1970 with that in 2020? Inflation is a difficult thing to tackle. But sure, changing wealth distribution is an option as well. Unless that happens though, somebody else has to work more to cover what another person works less.
- serhatozgel 6y ago
  Having worked in software industry for too long, I've come to conclude that the majority of the workforce today is spent on experimentation (i.e. "let's try project X" in corporate and "a new startup to try X"). There is so much money available in the hands of the rich (angel investment, venture capital) to fund these experiments. Most of these fail but they keep us working.
  - renewiltord 6y ago
    Mais naturalement, in R&D the R part is exactly that. It's really hard to do.
ampgt 6y ago
> but it’s something you aren’t offered in a lot of private sector jobs. To an extent isn’t this because these types of benefits aren’t affordable? The pension, extra vacation, etc wouldn’t be possible without the tax revenue raised from your friends who are working more hours. In America there is a saying “good enough for government work.” I think a lot of public sector jobs get a bad rep because they hand out middle class lifestyles (arguably maybe even upper middle class in Washington DC metro area) at the expense of the private sector. A lot of government employees (and contractors) just got paid to sit at home for 3-4 months during the pandemic if they worked in secure areas (can’t take classified information home). That’s a benefit that the private sector just can’t provide. I guess I don’t really agree with the article. We need hard work, it’s what keeps the system going. We have it so much better than other parts of the world and we shouldn’t take that for granted.
- stormdennis 6y ago
  The reason why public sector jobs are so unproductive, imo, is because there are no real bosses. Everyone's an employee, all the way to the top. No one's remuneration is affected whether you do more or less, better or worse. The logical course for all concerned is to always take the path of least resistance. As long as the paperwork is in order there's nothing to worry about. And even if it's not, there are ways around that too. Best quote I ever heard from an government employee was an unopened letter often answers itself
  - Ma8ee 6y ago
    The public sector isn’t in general unproductive, except maybe in the US where one major party has been working hard to sabotage it for the last 40 years or so. What might surprise some people is that remuneration isn’t what foremost motivates , e.g., teachers or nurses. Big companies are often as unproductive as the public sector, with whole departments often existing just to make some managers feel important.
    - stormdennis 6y ago
      That phenomenon is the reason old established big companies get disrupted. No one disrupts the public service, they are the permanent only business in their sector.
renewiltord 6y ago
That's because every day has 16 hours of living in it. Every hour is precious. 16 hours is enough to do all of those things. About my favourite thing about Europe vs America (maybe even just SF) is how much the people I work with care about doing things. It's not even for anyone else. It's like that scene in The West Wing where Sam Seaborn is told he doesn't have to finish a speech, but he looks up and says, "I just. I just want to nail this." I love working with people like this.
- wpearse 6y ago
  Are you suggesting that Europeans don't care about doing things?!
  - renewiltord 6y ago
    In English, "how much" is used to express degree. So, for instance, if I said "A marked difference I noticed between driving in San Francisco and in Mumbai was how much honking I heard in the latter" what that means is "There was significantly more honking in Bombay than in SF". Concluding "there is no honking in SF" would be reaching beyond what is stated. And I'm suggesting exactly what I said. I didn't make any claims about nationality or ethnicity. It isn't some racist claim that a European can't do it. It's a claim that in Europe I didn't see this as much as in SF (where way more people were like this irrespective of national origin). But all this is a waste. The sentence structure is a classic from the '90s: Are you really saying "thing that person wasn't saying"?!! Are you really comparing "thing that no one was comparing" with "other thing"?! Pity.
    - wpearse 6y ago
      My comment was part jest, part awe. I clearly read too much into what you were saying. Apologies.
      - renewiltord 6y ago
        All good. The back and forth of speech allows for lower-effort clarification so I'm sure this interaction would have done better in real life.
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
erfgh 6y ago
Some people like working you know. When you have small children it's really tough to work 40 hours (I have two little ones) per week but children grow up very quickly. Before you know it you're back where you were, more or less.
ChuckNorris89 6y ago
I feel like you are incredibly privileged that you can afford to to have a family while working so little hours in the public sector and I suspect your situation is not the norm in DK. Friends of mine who moved to SE/NL/DE/DK are definitely working the full 40h/week and sometimes more since, as they say, living there is very expsensive. From my experience, the Europeans who toot their "life is so good here, why do other people work so much?" horn are privileged enough to have a hand-me-down property bought/inherited from their (grand)parents, and since rent/mortgage is the biggest expense here, with property prices rising 8 times faster than wages, that property ownership early in life, which they take for granted, gives them the clear advantage that allows them to not bother with the rat race and could even live comfortably on minimum wage. That of course, is not the norm for everyone and especially not if you've just emigrated here, so anyone wishing to own their own property one day has no choice but to jump in the meat grinder and join the rat race.
- Fredej 6y ago
  For what it's worth I live in Denmark, working a private sector full time (37/week, usually less) job with a nice salary - though nothing out of the ordinary for my education and experience. Came from a middle class family: My mom is a nurse and my father is an engineer. No life-changing inheritance from grandparents (~$10.000). My wife stays at home with our 2 year old daughter. We own an apartment in Copenhagen that we bought some 5 years ago, though we're obviously still paying a mortgage on it (0% loans definitely made that easier!). We're paying it down aggressively, though still have quite a bit of cash left to invest. From my experience it's about priorities. We rarely go out to dinner and don't own a car - hopefully never will. Rarely buy new clothes. While it might not be the norm, it's not something that's completely unheard of. One major factor though is probably student loans. When my wife and I left the university we both had savings of roughly $15.000. A year later, we bought the apartment. That would have been impossible if we had debt we needed to overcome first. If your friends moved here with significant debt, they're definitely playing catch-up compared to their peers.
  - joncrane 6y ago
    It sounds like you are in a great situation, by why would you aggressively pay down a 0% interest loan?
jpttsn 6y ago
What do you do with your time?
- AnIdiotOnTheNet 6y ago
  Every time I hear this question asked of someone who isn't a workaholic, I try to fathom the complete lack of imagination that the asker must posses, and I fail.
- moksly 6y ago
  Spend it with my family. Doing hobbies, I’m a big blood bowl nerd so that takes up a lot of my free time. Read books, watch movies, have fun with friends. Stuff like that. Sometimes I program for fun. I also work as an external examiner for CS students. Though that is only during finals, so twice a year. Mostly to keep up with what’s happening, but I’ll admit it’s a nice side income. My former boss used his spare time to get an MBA and build a startup that he later sold before he moved on to higher management somewhere else. So you can also do that sort of thing if you’re so inclined. He didn’t have any children though. ;)
yodsanklai 6y ago
I used to have a lot of free time (working in academia), and I switched to a software engineer role in the private sector. I miss the free time, but I'm also learning new things and I feel I have more space to grow and more opportunities overall. As for the salary, I earn twice as much. Practically, my lifestyle hasn't changed but I save all my extra income. I could work part-time and still earn more than before but I'm concerned about the future (retirement, medical expenses... all these things which are covered by the state now, but who knows where we'll be in 25 years). I'd rather earn money now when I have the chance. I'm not sure it will last. That being said, I still have good work life balance (living in a "socialist" country).
hkai 6y ago
You have been selected as one of the few people in the society who we will pay way above market rate. Someone like me would probably need to work 80hrs a week just so that my children can catch up with the level of comfort that you have. And I'm not one of those people who tell others to "check their privilege". It's great to be where you are, and yeah, the government jobs here where I live pay double the market rate for half the work. But if everyone worked the same way as you, then the world simply wouldn't exist. All of the good stuff was created by people who worked overtime.
- kyuudou 6y ago
  >All of the good stuff was created by people who worked overtime. What if those creations were largely responsible to lazy people who had time to think of innovations instead of grinding away? I think it takes all types, honestly.

by moksly 6y ago

luckylion 6y ago

That's very similar in most government jobs in Europe, I believe. I don't know about the US, but I expect it's similar there as well. I'm afraid that it works out great for you because others are working more. Individually, that's a good decision for you, but it's not a model you can make society run on, at least not at the same level of output we're currently providing. If everybody had the same circumstances you have, we couldn't afford everything we can afford now, unless there's some explosion in productivity, which is hard to believe for the majority of jobs where it's not about "coming up with the right idea".

fileeditview 6y ago
I don't think this is true. In my experience a lot of work time is just wasted time. Often nothing is accomplished. A lot of extra hours for meetings are not productive at all. A lot of extra hours looking into that bug ("so we can fix it today") is not productive at all.. I think you have the impression that working longer means being more productive. I don't believe that. I am often more productive if I have a shorter work day. Also your argument doesn't make too much sense to me because OP already says that he is paid less. So it's not like he gets the same for less work. He gets less for less work.
- rubber_duck 6y ago
  > I don't think this is true. In my experience a lot of work time is just wasted time. Often nothing is accomplished. A lot of extra hours for meetings are not productive at all. A lot of extra hours looking into that bug ("so we can fix it today") is not productive at all.. And this is not true in public sector ? :D
  - fileeditview 6y ago
    Probably also there.. does this contradict anything I said? That just means that doing more hours won't help more.. where ever you are (there are always exceptions).
    - rubber_duck 6y ago
      I would say equal amount of time is being wasted even if you work less hours but public sector tolerates less being done. For example your morning windup routine is the same, your lunch takes the same time, you need to go to bathroom, pointless meetings are still there - I don't really see what would improve about my productivity if I worked less hours - what would I be able to eliminate in order to shorten my time at work ? Even if time is "wasted" with breaks at work this time is between events - not at the end of the day - and I usually don't have the ability to compress it. And also the economics of working more hours once you become a critical contributor are very different from a person staying in late for appearances - adding a person to take over the load has multiple costs - hiring risk, training and on-boarding time, extra sync and communication slowing things down.
      - fileeditview 6y ago
        I see. I don't have experience with the public sector myself but what I meant is this: If I have only a 4 hour workday, people(bosses) think twice about wasting my time with useless meetings. Also it gives me energy to start into a day with only 4 or 5 hours ahead instead of 8h+. Of course having a shorter workday doesn't make it 100% productive. But my personal experience is that it is MORE productive. Sadly most of my days are 8h+. I also want to add that a tired, worn out developer might even cost productivity by introducing flawed code into the codebase. Did you ever do a serious code review while being tired? I don't see how that works. Then others have to deal with all this stuff afterwards.
trosi 6y ago
But he said specifically that he earns 10-20% less than his friends (and probably a lot less than the one who founded his company), so in fact he can afford less than them. It's just that he is content with that much. On the other hand, many private companies don't contemplate (on don't look favorably upon) employees who work part time or anything below the standard 40 hoours/week, so if you do work in the private sector you don't have much of a choice. If everyone was magically allowed to reduce his/her working hours and salary by the same percentage I wonder what would be the outcome.
- barry-cotter 6y ago
  > But he said specifically that he earns 10-20% less than his friends (and probably a lot less than the one who founded his company), so in fact he can afford less than them. If he has a defined benefit pension and they don’t he’s probably going to come out ahead if he lives long enough. Given he’s in government and they’re not that’s a reasonable assumption.
- luckylion 6y ago
  He earns 10-20% less but they work significantly more than 10-20% more. If they worked (and had worked) the same hours per year, they'd make significantly less money than he does. That's expected, the state pays it's employees very well for a multitude of reasons, but primarily: to buy their loyalty, to make them less susceptible to bribes, and to encourage stability. It also has no reason not to, there's no competition. I don't know the Danish situation, but e.g. a teacher in Germany will have a pension that is higher than the salary of 70-80% of the population.
  - JanSt 6y ago
    Teachers in Germany also have 19.5 (now 18.5) years of education. There are few jobs that require more (e.g. doctors).
    - ckuehne 6y ago
      So, how much percent in pension payments for teachers would the German taxpayer save if the state required, say, one year less teacher education?
mnsc 6y ago
>unless there's some explosion in productivity... Or if the historical increase in productivity would have benefited the workers instead of the capitalists. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ https://economics.stackexchange.com/questions/15558/productivity-vs-real-earnings-in-the-us-what-happened-ca-1974 https://economics.stackexchange.com/questions/15558/producti...
- rubber_duck 6y ago
  If you look down that thread there's a first valid argument against this : breaking down the "productivity increase" by industry shows the huge growth comes from software, also if you look at how they track productivity in manufacturing it's also misleading - if you account for stuff like outsourcing the only sector that's seeing huge real growth is computer related. And software/computer economics are a story of their own. Productivity growth is largely overstated.
- luckylion 6y ago
  That's the US though, and this is Denmark. European countries, and especially the Nordic countries are set up very differently with regards to income equality. But generally, it's a hard thing to determine that exactly. How much is that 10% gain in life expectancy worth? How comparable is the life of 1970 with that in 2020? Inflation is a difficult thing to tackle. But sure, changing wealth distribution is an option as well. Unless that happens though, somebody else has to work more to cover what another person works less.
serhatozgel 6y ago
Having worked in software industry for too long, I've come to conclude that the majority of the workforce today is spent on experimentation (i.e. "let's try project X" in corporate and "a new startup to try X"). There is so much money available in the hands of the rich (angel investment, venture capital) to fund these experiments. Most of these fail but they keep us working.
- renewiltord 6y ago
  Mais naturalement, in R&D the R part is exactly that. It's really hard to do.

ampgt 6y ago

> but it’s something you aren’t offered in a lot of private sector jobs. To an extent isn’t this because these types of benefits aren’t affordable? The pension, extra vacation, etc wouldn’t be possible without the tax revenue raised from your friends who are working more hours. In America there is a saying “good enough for government work.” I think a lot of public sector jobs get a bad rep because they hand out middle class lifestyles (arguably maybe even upper middle class in Washington DC metro area) at the expense of the private sector. A lot of government employees (and contractors) just got paid to sit at home for 3-4 months during the pandemic if they worked in secure areas (can’t take classified information home). That’s a benefit that the private sector just can’t provide. I guess I don’t really agree with the article. We need hard work, it’s what keeps the system going. We have it so much better than other parts of the world and we shouldn’t take that for granted.

stormdennis 6y ago
The reason why public sector jobs are so unproductive, imo, is because there are no real bosses. Everyone's an employee, all the way to the top. No one's remuneration is affected whether you do more or less, better or worse. The logical course for all concerned is to always take the path of least resistance. As long as the paperwork is in order there's nothing to worry about. And even if it's not, there are ways around that too. Best quote I ever heard from an government employee was an unopened letter often answers itself
- Ma8ee 6y ago
  The public sector isn’t in general unproductive, except maybe in the US where one major party has been working hard to sabotage it for the last 40 years or so. What might surprise some people is that remuneration isn’t what foremost motivates , e.g., teachers or nurses. Big companies are often as unproductive as the public sector, with whole departments often existing just to make some managers feel important.
  - stormdennis 6y ago
    That phenomenon is the reason old established big companies get disrupted. No one disrupts the public service, they are the permanent only business in their sector.

renewiltord 6y ago

That's because every day has 16 hours of living in it. Every hour is precious. 16 hours is enough to do all of those things. About my favourite thing about Europe vs America (maybe even just SF) is how much the people I work with care about doing things. It's not even for anyone else. It's like that scene in The West Wing where Sam Seaborn is told he doesn't have to finish a speech, but he looks up and says, "I just. I just want to nail this." I love working with people like this.

wpearse 6y ago
Are you suggesting that Europeans don't care about doing things?!
- renewiltord 6y ago
  In English, "how much" is used to express degree. So, for instance, if I said "A marked difference I noticed between driving in San Francisco and in Mumbai was how much honking I heard in the latter" what that means is "There was significantly more honking in Bombay than in SF". Concluding "there is no honking in SF" would be reaching beyond what is stated. And I'm suggesting exactly what I said. I didn't make any claims about nationality or ethnicity. It isn't some racist claim that a European can't do it. It's a claim that in Europe I didn't see this as much as in SF (where way more people were like this irrespective of national origin). But all this is a waste. The sentence structure is a classic from the '90s: Are you really saying "thing that person wasn't saying"?!! Are you really comparing "thing that no one was comparing" with "other thing"?! Pity.
  - wpearse 6y ago
    My comment was part jest, part awe. I clearly read too much into what you were saying. Apologies.
    - renewiltord 6y ago
      All good. The back and forth of speech allows for lower-effort clarification so I'm sure this interaction would have done better in real life.

deleted 6y ago

[deleted]

erfgh 6y ago

Some people like working you know. When you have small children it's really tough to work 40 hours (I have two little ones) per week but children grow up very quickly. Before you know it you're back where you were, more or less.

ChuckNorris89 6y ago

I feel like you are incredibly privileged that you can afford to to have a family while working so little hours in the public sector and I suspect your situation is not the norm in DK. Friends of mine who moved to SE/NL/DE/DK are definitely working the full 40h/week and sometimes more since, as they say, living there is very expsensive. From my experience, the Europeans who toot their "life is so good here, why do other people work so much?" horn are privileged enough to have a hand-me-down property bought/inherited from their (grand)parents, and since rent/mortgage is the biggest expense here, with property prices rising 8 times faster than wages, that property ownership early in life, which they take for granted, gives them the clear advantage that allows them to not bother with the rat race and could even live comfortably on minimum wage. That of course, is not the norm for everyone and especially not if you've just emigrated here, so anyone wishing to own their own property one day has no choice but to jump in the meat grinder and join the rat race.

Fredej 6y ago
For what it's worth I live in Denmark, working a private sector full time (37/week, usually less) job with a nice salary - though nothing out of the ordinary for my education and experience. Came from a middle class family: My mom is a nurse and my father is an engineer. No life-changing inheritance from grandparents (~$10.000). My wife stays at home with our 2 year old daughter. We own an apartment in Copenhagen that we bought some 5 years ago, though we're obviously still paying a mortgage on it (0% loans definitely made that easier!). We're paying it down aggressively, though still have quite a bit of cash left to invest. From my experience it's about priorities. We rarely go out to dinner and don't own a car - hopefully never will. Rarely buy new clothes. While it might not be the norm, it's not something that's completely unheard of. One major factor though is probably student loans. When my wife and I left the university we both had savings of roughly $15.000. A year later, we bought the apartment. That would have been impossible if we had debt we needed to overcome first. If your friends moved here with significant debt, they're definitely playing catch-up compared to their peers.
- joncrane 6y ago
  It sounds like you are in a great situation, by why would you aggressively pay down a 0% interest loan?

jpttsn 6y ago

What do you do with your time?

AnIdiotOnTheNet 6y ago
Every time I hear this question asked of someone who isn't a workaholic, I try to fathom the complete lack of imagination that the asker must posses, and I fail.
moksly 6y ago
Spend it with my family. Doing hobbies, I’m a big blood bowl nerd so that takes up a lot of my free time. Read books, watch movies, have fun with friends. Stuff like that. Sometimes I program for fun. I also work as an external examiner for CS students. Though that is only during finals, so twice a year. Mostly to keep up with what’s happening, but I’ll admit it’s a nice side income. My former boss used his spare time to get an MBA and build a startup that he later sold before he moved on to higher management somewhere else. So you can also do that sort of thing if you’re so inclined. He didn’t have any children though. ;)

yodsanklai 6y ago

I used to have a lot of free time (working in academia), and I switched to a software engineer role in the private sector. I miss the free time, but I'm also learning new things and I feel I have more space to grow and more opportunities overall. As for the salary, I earn twice as much. Practically, my lifestyle hasn't changed but I save all my extra income. I could work part-time and still earn more than before but I'm concerned about the future (retirement, medical expenses... all these things which are covered by the state now, but who knows where we'll be in 25 years). I'd rather earn money now when I have the chance. I'm not sure it will last. That being said, I still have good work life balance (living in a "socialist" country).

hkai 6y ago

You have been selected as one of the few people in the society who we will pay way above market rate. Someone like me would probably need to work 80hrs a week just so that my children can catch up with the level of comfort that you have. And I'm not one of those people who tell others to "check their privilege". It's great to be where you are, and yeah, the government jobs here where I live pay double the market rate for half the work. But if everyone worked the same way as you, then the world simply wouldn't exist. All of the good stuff was created by people who worked overtime.

kyuudou 6y ago
>All of the good stuff was created by people who worked overtime. What if those creations were largely responsible to lazy people who had time to think of innovations instead of grinding away? I think it takes all types, honestly.