America's misguided culture of overwork

There is a world of difference between the social status of the grandchild of an aristo who gambled away the family fortune, and a chav single mother. The former has access to contacts, a peer group, a social network (call it what you will) and even people they deal with every day will treat them with more respect. This at least is nothing to do with actual spending power.

But our hypothetical ex-aristo would be rejected immediately if she tried to become working-class (tho' probably she could become a chav).

I'm interested that this question has got so many votes without any replies.

In my view there are times in start-ups (I've been involved in two, once as a co-founder) there are times when you do have to go that extra mile (or ten), but I don't think coding is the area where this is really obvious.

For example, if there are a handful of people in the company and you try and get VC investment that takes a huge amount of effort so you end up having coding time round about other tasks. So even though your total code output doesn't go up that much you end up doing piles of other stuff (e.g. planning for a major deployment at a customer) thay someone technical has to do but which isn't coding. Something has got to give - so you work longer hours, not because you want to, but because you have to.

Looking back do I think expecting employees to work crazy hours makes them any more productive as developers - absolutely not. But as a founder/exec you have to do it.

Norway is similar to the UK in a way, they both had lots of oil and natural gas reserves in the '80 and '90s. The difference is Norway saved the cash to immense proportions, while the UK spent the cash and used the excess fuel to live cheaply.

It is a basic difference between long term and short term thinkers being in charge. I think that's the true difference between countries like the US, UK and even those in Southern Europe, compared to other Northern European countries like Norway, Germany, Sweden etc.

Two interesting points from your comments.

First, Americans can work any kind of work week they want. There's a book -- 4-hour-work-week -- that a lot of folks are trying to make work. In technology teams especially. I tell my teams that I don't care how much you work or don't: what matters is productivity and predictability.

Sure, lots of others don't feel that way, but it's up to each situation. If there were some good lessons to be learned from some example? Bring them on! I'm all for it.

Second, complex systems of hundreds of millions of people do very poorly as an engineering experiment. Or -- you can't decide how you want things to turn out and then pull some magic lever and have it turn out that way. It's never that simple. So discussions about huge generalizations are premised on a really bad flaw: that somehow we can massively change everything at one time.

[edit]As an example, you couldn't decide in 1970 that you wanted every person to have a notebook computer by 2020. You could decide to train more people in hard sciences. You could decide to make incentives for investing. But you can't take one complex system as an example and then tell another one to conform to it. That's just not the way complex systems work. And that's not meant as a political comment. That's just a rule of complex systems.[/edit]

It's much better to take all the new information you can find and incorporate it from the ground-up. Want a society with 20-hour work weeks? Cool. Go build one. Nobody is stopping you, and if it's wildly successful then others will very quickly copy it. This is a very easy thing. Actually from this angle I don't even see the point of the article.

The only other angle is that someone or somebody -- one presumes government -- should tell us how to do our work. From my own experience, technology is one of the few areas where we create our own reality. And time and time again, we make it sucky on ourselves. But it's our reality. I wouldn't want to take that ultimate ownership away from us, no matter how good the cause.

Isn't it incredibly difficult for non-EU citizens to move to Sweden to work/live?