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Germany explores 4-day workweek amid labor shortage

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Re: Germany explores 4-day workweek amid labor shortage

#41

Post by shasts »

yoyoinbog wrote: post #33
shasts wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can confirm this. My wife has a master's degree in engineering from a TU9(top 9 universities in Germany).And a B2 language certificate. She has not found a job so far. Been more than a year and half since she started actively applying. At times she ticks all the requirements in the job description, and still no luck. She is planning to go to a bakery starting next week. The guy at the bakery was so surprised to see s…

TU means Institute of Technology. Says nothing about being a good university. Your wife is likely bound to your location what limits her options and like has a degree that is not very in demand, at least not where she lives. Engineering could be everything. And if she has a degree in, let's say food technology and is willing to work somewhere deep in east Germany for a very low amount of money then she would find a j…

"TU9 German Universities of Technology e. V. is the alliance of nine leading Technical Universities in Germany"

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/TU9

And I have a remote job and we almost have no location restrictions.

If there is no demand, how could she see the job advertisements and apply for them?

Re: Germany explores 4-day workweek amid labor shortage

#42

Post by lutrinus »

mushufasa wrote: post #20

I spent the summer in Berlin and, as an American, was a bit culture shocked by how little time people worked, and how so many people I met bragged about collecting paid time off for reasons they admitted to making up, which the government enforced all employers must allow. As an employer, I'd be afraid of hiring in countries like Germany for an international workforce if that meant I have to have a patchwork of speci…

Interestingly, as a German who lives in a bubble where people take their jobs very seriously, I was equally surprised when I experienced pretty much what you described while visiting the US.

I guess there are “proud to be lazy” kind of people in any country. It’s definitely not a widespread German cultural thing, though, from my experience.

Re: Germany explores 4-day workweek amid labor shortage

#43

Post by khazhoux »

askonomm wrote: post #19
khazhoux wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You seem to infer an emotional or psychological reaction to what is a rather straightforward question: today people typically work 5 days/week to get some amount of work done, so the most-simple assessment is that working 80% of that time would result in 80% of the work being done. Rather than saying people are stockholm-syndrome'd ants who dislike freedom and positive changes, by what reasoning does 100% of work get…

Or maybe if people had more time to enjoy life with their hobbies and loved ones, they'd be more motivated to do good work, and actually more would get done with 4 days than 5 days. From the few experiments[0] done on this topic, that seems to actually be the case. [0] https://www.washingtonpost.com/wellness/2023/02/21/four-day-...

So then some combination of my points (1) and (2), with the theory that there would be less wasted time during "work hours" and increased focus due to better work/life balance?

The counterargument to that theory, of course, would be that neither would happen, and there would be the same amount of time not getting work done, and people would work at same rate without any increase in focus or motivation. As you said, experiments may help answer this.

There's also another angle of why this is a contentious issue. The idea that people pushing for 4dww are already in cushy jobs with low accountability. Maybe of us here are software engineers being paid $$$$ meanwhile we're spending time writing long comments on HN instead of, say, working on that bugfix that people are waiting for. By contrast, a very large part of the workforce might be less affected by "motivation" than the kind of people pushing for 4dww.

Re: Germany explores 4-day workweek amid labor shortage

#45

Post by harryf »

mushufasa wrote: post #20

I spent the summer in Berlin and, as an American, was a bit culture shocked by how little time people worked, and how so many people I met bragged about collecting paid time off for reasons they admitted to making up, which the government enforced all employers must allow. As an employer, I'd be afraid of hiring in countries like Germany for an international workforce if that meant I have to have a patchwork of speci…

One issue is the way taxes work in Germany that disincentives entering the middle rungs of a career ladder. Like if you’re a software engineer and want to become an engineering manager, you might end up earning less after tax as a manager than you did as an engineer as your salary increase puts you in a new tax bracket.

Otherwise Germanys economy is optimized to support medium to large German companies with export businesses. Little attention has been given to support new business ventures, so for young people becoming an entrepreneur makes little sense when you can earn more and have less stress with a normal job.

full disclosure: this is based on personal experience and observation as a Brit that worked in Germany for a while and ended up in Switzerland

Re: Germany explores 4-day workweek amid labor shortage

#46

Post by lm28469 »

ExMachina73 wrote: post #44

Feel like the real question is what is the purpose of work, if not to feed the all powerful need to consume. Perhaps we need to look at the consumption end of things. Consume less. Work less.

> Consume less. Work less.

The entire system we built during the last 200 years revolves around consuming more and working more, the inertia makes it nearly impossible to even imagine something else at that point (as we can see by reading the comments on this very thread)

Re: Germany explores 4-day workweek amid labor shortage

#47

Post by somewhereoutth »

dustedcodes wrote: post #36
appplemac wrote: post #4

Instead of a 4-day workweek how about setting reasonable hiring standards so that hundreds of thousands of people out of work, especially non-native German speakers, have a chance of getting past the job application screen. Most jobs, even in tech, in DE currently require good knowledge of German, and "good" is being interpreted as near-native.

> Most jobs, even in tech, in DE currently require good knowledge of German I mean of course, d'oh!? You say "even" in tech, I'd say especially in tech (or really any job that requires communication in high performing fields) should have high standards for the native language, because good communication is key. Call me old fashioned, but the jobs for people who don't speak the native language (well) are reserved to b…

Except that in the nascent EU single market, the native language is English. Of course you should be fluent in the language of the country in which you work/live, but increasingly this will be less important - assuming that the EU wants any chance of competing with US/China that is.

Re: Germany explores 4-day workweek amid labor shortage

#48

Post by yoyoinbog »

shasts wrote: post #41
yoyoinbog wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

TU means Institute of Technology. Says nothing about being a good university. Your wife is likely bound to your location what limits her options and like has a degree that is not very in demand, at least not where she lives. Engineering could be everything. And if she has a degree in, let's say food technology and is willing to work somewhere deep in east Germany for a very low amount of money then she would find a j…

"TU9 German Universities of Technology e. V. is the alliance of nine leading Technical Universities in Germany" https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/TU9 And I have a remote job and we almost have no location restrictions. If there is no demand, how could she see the job advertisements and apply for them?

Well,ho many technical universities are the in Germany, not taking into account polytechnical universities?

What is her degree? And would you be willing to disclose her origin?

Not all advertised jobs exists. And in a blue chip company there are only three ways to get hired.

1. You have family contacts

2. Your professor has contacts

3. You work for a start up that gets bought by such a company

Re: Germany explores 4-day workweek amid labor shortage

#49

Post by bakchodi »

FirmwareBurner wrote: post #32
mushufasa wrote: post #20

I spent the summer in Berlin and, as an American, was a bit culture shocked by how little time people worked, and how so many people I met bragged about collecting paid time off for reasons they admitted to making up, which the government enforced all employers must allow. As an employer, I'd be afraid of hiring in countries like Germany for an international workforce if that meant I have to have a patchwork of speci…

>I spent the summer in Berlin and, as an American That's a pretty bad way to get an impression of a whole country. That's like those American tourists visiting only the instagramable parts of Paris and Rome and then say they "saw Europe" lol. Especially that Berlin is basically an American/Expat enclave in Germany where the native Germans are a minority to the point they're annoyed that nobody at cafes, bars and rest…

What are some expat neighborhoods in Berlin? I was just trying to find American expat enclaves like Chinatown in NY - couldn't really, outside of Antigua in Guatemala

Re: Germany explores 4-day workweek amid labor shortage

#50

Post by khazhoux »

lm28469 wrote: post #34
khazhoux wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You seem to infer an emotional or psychological reaction to what is a rather straightforward question: today people typically work 5 days/week to get some amount of work done, so the most-simple assessment is that working 80% of that time would result in 80% of the work being done. Rather than saying people are stockholm-syndrome'd ants who dislike freedom and positive changes, by what reasoning does 100% of work get…

The problem is that we treat the baseline/status quo as something which is beneficial and anything "less productive" would be where the tradeoffs are. When you say 20% less medical service you might also get 20% more time with your kids/friends/family, 20% more sleep, 20% more reading, &c. People lived with 99% less of all we have not so long ago, surely there is a middle ground. My mom got oranges for christmas, now…

> My mom got oranges for christmas, now anything short of a new smartphone is borderline a war declaration on your offspring

And not only that, but we're outraged if the super-computer in our pocket costs more than a few hundred bucks, so we expect our goods to be cheap and therefore workers get very little (putting aside "corporate greed" and other buzzy words for a moment).

Does the 4DWW crowd acknowledge the point you are making? Because to me it seems their premise is "We can do the same in 80% of the time."

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