alt Hacker NewsWhen I read about 996-style culture I am happy to be European. That would not work here. 40 hours per week max and most engineers prefer to not work more than 32 hours a week. So you have a good work/life balance. I currently work 4 hours a week.
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I'm in EU and I can't agree this describes most engineers.
Overwork culture is also present here and exploited by a lot of companies.
Which is why fewer and fewer companies are hiring in Europe.
How does this work though? Do you have around 4 hours worth of work you report on? Are you paid for more than 4 hours? I’m so curious when people throw completely alien statements like this out like it’s something that doesn’t even warrant explanation.
>I currently work 4 hours a week.
Which employers hand out 4h contracts?
You don't have to work at an early stage startup - in fact most people don't. But some people do wish to participate in an early stage startup, and plenty do in Europe as well.
> So you have a good work/life balance. I currently work 4 hours a week.
And this is why when I was a PM, we shut down our Amsterdam office and shifted it to Praha, Bucharest, and Warsaw. You won't find as many people who will complain about a 40 hour workweek while earning €80k TCs
4 is very low. Kind of an outlier.
I guess either you have wealth, very low costs or a great hourly rate, or you are the one person who got that Tim Ferriss book to work.
not everyone in the states is 996, but yeah, there's a pandemic of bad management here. or rather... not so much bad management... but management by people who read articles about how Amazon, a company with tens of thousands of engineers, manages projects and then decides they're going to manage their startup of 4 people the same way because they think it's a "growth hacking" hack.
just keep in mind that American tech startups are often just vehicles to evade estate tax. and certainly vehicles for converting VC money into more VC money by selling dreams to greater fools. there's also a down side.