Live data from Hacker News

Living in Switzerland ruined me for America and its lousy work culture (2016)

vox.com

61–70 of 207 posts

Re: Living in Switzerland ruined me for America and its lousy work culture (2016)

#61
post #9

Is Switzerland producing anything like SpaceX? Or Google? Or Apple, Amazon, Netflix, Tesla, Stripe, Y Combinator? More importantly, would we have produced these with their system? If so, then great, but let's see the evidence. No problem to have a work culture preference, and things could definitely be improved(!!), but I think we're kidding ourselves that there are no tradeoffs and everything would simply be better.…

and Facebook?

Re: Living in Switzerland ruined me for America and its lousy work culture (2016)

#62
post #47

I personally find Switzerland boring and expensive. And I'm not sure your work culture is going to be that different if you work at Google or another tech company. If I go back to Europe I would go to Portugal or Italy or Spain. These countries are laid back, cheap, have good weather and good food. What else do you want? London and some cities in France like Bordeaux or Montpellier are insanely fun too.

> These countries are laid back

Have you worked in Italy or Spain? I'm Spanish and laid back at work is not a thing. The main reason I moved to Sweden is for is better work life balance.

Never go to live where you go for vacations, you will be very disappointed.

Re: Living in Switzerland ruined me for America and its lousy work culture (2016)

#63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’m not sure transportation is as important as, say, healthcare or work/life balance.

It's a vital part of it. It's much healthier to walk bike or ride transit to work and daily activities. Additionally, being closer to everything means less stress and more free time (better work/life balance).

Yeah but it doesn’t have anything to do with my healthcare premiums being more than my rent, or my boss making me work 80 hour weeks without overtime and a measly 2 weeks per year vacation which I am discouraged from taking.

Those are far more pressing issues imho.

Re: Living in Switzerland ruined me for America and its lousy work culture (2016)

#64
post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Just so you know usa is ranked 10 in GDP. I don't think being the richest means much, but USA is not the richest https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_GDP_(PP...

Pretty disingenuous to say GDP when you mean GDP PPP. The US does have the highest GDP (by a large margin).

Fine by me, but it's meaningless since it's not adjusted. And anyway, still not the case

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_GDP_(no...

Re: Living in Switzerland ruined me for America and its lousy work culture (2016)

#65

> America is the most rich and powerful country in the world Source needed.

Not every statement needs a source, especially not that are pretty much general knowledge (but then again that's not the strong side of a lot of people)

Re: Living in Switzerland ruined me for America and its lousy work culture (2016)

#66
post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Have you been there? I really don’t think Russia has it figured out better than the US. Russia’s infrastructure is certainly not close to the level of Europe/Japan or China.

> Have you been there? I really don’t think Russia has it figured out better than the US. Yes, I live here. Russian transportation absolutely blows anything in the US away, and I've traveled extensively in both countries. Transportation is embarrassing and frustrating for me when I come back to the US. The US is absolutely car-dependent. Russia has everything from Rail transport (trans-Siberian, etc), city subways (M…

You don't think US cities have mass transit? The NYC subway[0] is 30 years older than the Moscow Metro[1], if you want to talk about "having things for a century".

The US has train lines that cross the entire country as well. No HSR, which is what is needed, but then again neither does Russia.

Here is a map of transcontinental railroads in the US in 1887[2].

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_York_City_Subway [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moscow_Metro [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transcontinental_railroad#/med...

Re: Living in Switzerland ruined me for America and its lousy work culture (2016)

#67
post #8

Transportation is the biggest difference between the us and a lot of the rest of the world. Switzerland is the size of a small New England state. Mass transit is a tough thing to scale. That said I’ve noticed that a lot of the jobs in the us that would be considered “glamorous” are by and large the lowest paying jobs with the longest hours. Looking past the status of a company and career and looking into the practica…

I live in the wealthiest and most successful city in the history of world civilization and I can’t take a fucking train to any of the three massive airports. In fact recently at LaGuardia it’s been so dysfunctional that’s it’s impossible to be picked up by cars.

Meanwhile, not too long ago I was in Lucerne, where I got on a train and then got off an hour or two later 100 feet from the check in counter at Zurich airport, a completely different city.

They could do this in NYC if they wanted to. They don’t. It’s not because of the size of the country.

Re: Living in Switzerland ruined me for America and its lousy work culture (2016)

#68
post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why did they win the war?

Because of the Russians?

I mean, it's not 100% true but the actions of Russia during WW2 make this pretty true, and the fact that it seems the US intentionally stayed out of the way to inflict as much damage on Soviet Russia as it could before we got involved. There is no situation where you look at the number of deaths in the war and judge their massive suffering of the Soviet people as anything other than key in the defeat of Nazi Germany.

I'm not about to say that the non aggression pact wasn't a problem, but WW2 finds lots of organizations in the same boat that we can attack in the same way. It was an old system where bodies and land meant power, a system that is really dying.

Re: Living in Switzerland ruined me for America and its lousy work culture (2016)

#69
So the USA is fucked up when it comes to work/life balance and the US has no social system worth anything. Who knew? Well, we all knew. The US has been the laughing stock of the world for decades and the only ones who haven't noticed are the americans. No news here.

Re: Living in Switzerland ruined me for America and its lousy work culture (2016)

#70
post #50

I recently moved from working for a US company to working for a CH one. There’s some disadvantages, like people not giving their all at work slowing things down. Compared to the previous role, it’s glacial. But no on call, 6 weeks vacation, and 8% pension contribution from the company that I don’t even have to match is a good trade-off. Work is always going to be frustrating, but I’m at a point in my life that I’d ra…

What's the deal with people putting 120% efforts at work. It's clear that this is not necessary (for example - Switzerland is just fine). Put a steady 60-80% and bump it up to 100% when things get rough. I truly don't get it, sometimes it feels like people simply want to spend lives at work rather than do something else.

Why do so many technology breakthroughs and successful companies get founded in the US, compared to Europe, then? Why do so many Europeans go off to work for US companies? There must be something beneficial about the US approach.
Post reply on HN