I'm fine with that. I value employees having balanced lives more than GDP bragging rights.
For the record, yes they're the sort of engineers I'd want to hire. If we're making broad assumptions about a country's workforce, I'd want a happy, well-rested workforce that's not held hostage by their company's health insurance plan.
You say that as if valuing your free time is a sort of moral weakness in an employee.
This might also help explain why so few startups survive in Germany.
If a German startup has a nice idea and start working towards it with 4 ppl 30h/week each, at say 50k$/year/employee, a US startup:
- has access to most VC funds
- the German startup might have proven that there is money there, which helps getting VC funds
- has access to (0) a lot of (1) top and (2) absurdly hard-working talent that will put as much time as necessary for the startup to out-compete everybody else,
- has access to an ecosystems of startups around that might help them,
- has access to better way to compensate these employers, like almost tax-free equity, etc.
- has access to better ways to cash out, IPO, SPACs, etc.
Once these startups outcompete and survive the competition, then and only then they can and do switch to 35h/week, etc.
Some of my friends from MSc. in Germany work there at startup incubators. They have 50k$/year salaries for 40-50h/week, and B2B startups get funded for 2 years, die, and they just move to the next one.
Most of them are trying to switch to bigger German companies like car manufacturers to get a 35h/week job that's higher paid, and are pretty burned out of the life of attempting to build stuff that ends up in nothing because they get outcompeted by the US, China, etc. every single time.
This type of international competition didn't exist 100 years ago at this level, and many DAX companies are that old. AFAICT the youngest company in the DAX is delivery hero which is 10 years old. The most valued company is SAP which is 40 years old.
Compare that with the 30 most valued companies in the S&P500....
The question is "what values are we willing to abandon to stay competitive?" If America can compete by squeezing more out of their labour and operating in a deregulated environment, do we really want to walk down that path?
> "what values are we willing to abandon to stay competitive?"
That's a good question.
In the US, if you are founding a startup with 4 people, while all 4 are "employees", you are way closer to "self-employed" than to "9-4 employee at Siemens", and the startup more than handsomly compensates the employees with equity, to actually make it so: "you are working as an employee for a company that you own a big chunk of".
In Germany, it does not make financial sense to give a sizable chunk of the company to your employees. Many companies offer equity, or equity purchase plans, but as a "minor" perk, and not as the main part of the compensation.
OTOH, how long do you think self-employed people work in Germany? I know some that work 15 hours per day 7 days per week, and the system is perfectly fine with that.
So good question indeed.
My opinion is that Germany values with respect to "work" are incoherent and unsustainable.
Incoherent because Germany is fine with self-employed people working themselves to death for a miserable salary (most post man and DHL sub-sub-sub-sub contractors in Germany), the system itself keeps them miserable, while simultaneously preventing salaried employees to make the decision of how much do they want to work, and giving any freedom to their employers to appropriately compensate employees that perform better. The goal seems to be to squash the outperforming outliers, to try to broaden the average.
That's unsustainable, because cash cows (BMW, VW, Daimler, Siemens, Bosch, ....) come and go, but Germany can't generate them anymore. To the point that the German government essentially has to "co-conspire" with its cash cows (e.g. Diesel Scandal, etc.) to avoid any risks of them dying. The German people complain about the cash cows doing lots of lobbying, having lots of power, etc. but the reason this is the case is because, like the Germans call it, they are "of crucial relevance for the system".
For the record, yes they're the sort of engineers I'd want to hire. If we're making broad assumptions about a country's workforce, I'd want a happy, well-rested workforce that's not held hostage by their company's health insurance plan.
You say that as if valuing your free time is a sort of moral weakness in an employee.