Average Working Hours in Europe • Hacker News Board

Re: Average Working Hours in Europe

#21

Post by n_ary » Sun, Jun 25, 2023, 12:49 PM UTC

ChuckNorris89 wrote: post #8

anticristi wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ditto. Sweden defines a working week as 40 hour. However, 1 hour of wellness and two daily coffee breaks (15 minutes) are usually included in working time. So "butt-in-chair" time is 36.5 hours per week.

Ha, come to Austria where your break times are not included in your working time, so if your contract is 38,5h per week, then that's your expected butt-in-chair time as that doesn't include any breaks. The mandatory 30min lunch break and other coffee breaks are not included in that, but as extra in your own non-billable time, while the clock is not running, so you could easily be spending 40+h/week in the office if y…

Also applies in Germany. Infact, every contract I have(had) includes a special clauses “40 hours per week, not including any lunch or break hours…”. However, I see my colleagues spending 2-3h each day on coffee/lunch break and doing actual work for ~3-4h and then going home. Only people I’ve seen religiously maintaining that 40h/week are consultants/contractors/HR.

Re: Average Working Hours in Europe

#22

Post by kioleanu » Sun, Jun 25, 2023, 3:01 PM UTC

This is also a cultural thing. I come from Romania, where it is (was before the pandemic?) very uncommon for people to work part time. The expectation when having children was to have the grandparents take care of them during the week until they are independent. Otherwise to hire a full time nanny until the kid goes to kindergarten and then have the child go to kindergarten or after schools for about 10 hours per day, with kindergartens closing late in the evening.

Now I live in Germany, where there is little reliance on grandparents, children don’t stay that long in kindergarten (they close between 15:00 and 16:30) each day. This, to my understanding was because the women would assume a housewife role and would have time to take care of children. As the economy shifted and two income started becoming necessary, the society adapted to the old rules, but did not change them. Some people work part time, some work flexible schedules. For most office jobs I’ve seen, it’s easy to have a flexible schedule. My wife starts later and takes care of the kid in the morning, I start earlier and take care of the kid in the afternoon.

Re: Average Working Hours in Europe

#23

Post by camgunz » Sun, Jun 25, 2023, 4:55 PM UTC

bojan wrote: post #15

camgunz wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah can confirm, both my partner and I each take a day off because day care only gives us 3 days. This is actually preferable as day care is almost a 2nd rent at just 3 days a week. There are some policy changes in the works to more heavily subsidize day care costs, but I think they won't kick in until next year or something.

Those changes won't kick in until at least 2027, but even then, it's very questionable how feasible it is, considering there aren't enough teachers to cover the demand even at these exorbitant end-user prices.

Yeah I think we did the math and our day care costs ~11 euros an hour, which is pretty low if it was 1 person's income, but there are like 6-8 kids in the group every day, so it's something like 75/hr, which is maybe adequate: 4 groups pulls 600k/yr, you burn 360k on staff (6 nannies across 4 groups at 50k each plus an admin), rent/supplies/tech is 100k/yr let's just say, so your margin is 25%. Even if we're way off here, that's a lot of margin.

All that said, I don't really get why day care is privatized while school is public. I mean I do: it's vestigial from when we didn't allow women to work; what I mean is that if we want more women to work full time--and I know that we do because every month it seems there's yet another thinkpiece about why women in the Netherlands won't work more hours and policies floated to address it--it seems like the main things to do are give more partner leave and nationalize day care.

My partner had this great idea where both parents should get a year off with pay (maybe 70%, whatever), which is a good idea in general for couples but also would dramatically lower the load on day cares.

Either way, childcare is a huge societal enterprise; we're not gonna get out of paying through the nose for it. Basically, you can either have a low fertility rate, a very male workforce, or raised taxes for childcare; there's not really another option.

Re: Average Working Hours in Europe

#24

Post by anticristi » Mon, Jun 26, 2023, 7:50 AM UTC

low_tech_love wrote: post #18

anticristi wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm at the seniority in my career where I still find stalking flattering. :))) I think in every job you need to (a) do good work, (b) make that work visible. So at least some amount of self-advertisement is good both for the individual and the organization. You would wonder how much time I spend on "stalking" engineers and making their amazing work more visible towards our customers -- giving proper credit during our…

I never worked in the industry, so unfortunately I don’t have a basis for comparison. But in our case (academia in Sweden) I’d say it is certainly not because of lack of safety. If anything, one of my assumptions is that it’s actually the opposite. Since we’re not being judged by merit (at least not in any significance way for better or worse), and there is no easy way to get paid more for extra time or better outcom…

Interesting hypothesis. I think your hypothesis has some merits. The way salary increases work in Swedish academia is that the union negotiates an average increase over the whole university -- say 2.5%. Then the department head will give some below the average and some above the average.

So it's up to you to be "the loudest in the department" to get an above-average increase.

Not saying how things should be, just saying how things are.