Labor laws in various countries tend to push companies toward one end or the other of a spectrum. One end of the spectrum is hire fast/fire fast, the other is h

Labor laws in various countries tend to push companies toward one end or the other of a spectrum. One end of the spectrum is hire fast/fire fast, the other is hire slow/fire slow. The US is very much toward the hire fast/fire fast end of the spectrum, relatively speaking. For tech companies in particular hire fast/fire fast seems to have worked well. It creates a more competitive labor market. That makes sense because tech is a new industry where things are changing all the time, skills are evolving, so it benefits from a labor pool which can adapt quickly. Is it good for workers though? Many people would say it isn't great. You become an employee for the sake of stability and in a hire fast/fire fast culture, you have less of that. It's not so good for quality of life when you're always afraid of losing your job. The counter-argument is that in a situation where it's hard to replace people the cream doesn't necessarily rise to the top and there are less opportunities for top performers to get paid what they're worth (a common complaint in European tech). If you don't mind getting out there and marketing yourself and playing the job market aggressively, you can make a lot of money. If you would rather avoid all that it's a source of anxiety and something you want to avoid. One place where I think the US system has it wrong though, is in tying health care to employment. This is catastrophically bad from a quality of life standpoint and bad for keeping the labor market fluid as well because it creates perverse incentives which are unrelated to whether someone's actually good at their job or not. Overall I'm personally of the view that it's good for different parts of the world to have different ways of doing things, and if you truly can't stand the overall package you're getting on a particular continent, maybe you should move. (I did and I don't regret it. I might do it again one day. I am continually surprised by how many people seem to utterly hate the place they live, and yet don't leave it!)