Title makes it sound like there is anything like a concerted effort, whereas these are just 45 random companies. No details on size of those companies, no data on number of employees or fields. I would expect that in particular the traditonal German "backbone" of the economy is not the kind of company amenable to this work week model or even participating in such a study. Example, classic automative supplier with more "blue collar" style work.
The source seems to be https://www.intraprenoer.de/4tagewoche but this is equally opaque.
Overall a weird article with not a lot of original research.
To not have this comment only be a rant, here is some data [1]: There are 3.4 Million companies (definition at link, they need to have employees and taxable turnover) in Germany, with 35 Million employees. That includes small 1-person shops as well as Fortune 500 companies.
Anyone seems to be able to sign up for that study, and without any further details this seems hardly representative. I am very much interested in the outcome of these studies and would probably for myself assume that I can be productive in 4 days as well, but I'm not sure how this gives us usable data.
1: https://www.destatis.de/EN/Themes/Economic-Sectors-Enterpris...
So, it is a 4-day workweek? So how is title misleading?
HN has a character limit, so sometimes titles get changed to fit.
German work culture as a whole is very much still "butts in seats", working for the predefined number of hours per week with a fixed quota each day, and the Stempeluhr [1] is very much alive even in white collar jobs.
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.
In Germany, you do have a right to at least 20 days of fully paid leave every year; most companies actually even grant 26-30 days off. And you’ll even have to take a mandatory leave of at least 12 consecutive days once per year. As this affects everyone, you don’t have any career disadvantages by going on a vacation- in fact, it’s normal and expected. Additionally, being on sick leave is very much normal and expected, and (other than in toxic company cultures, exceptions do exist) neither do cause you any disadvantages.
And finally, you cannot be fired without a very good reason, and even then, you have at least a month of notice (the period increases depending on how long you’ve been employed by a company, up to four months for 10 year contracts).
So I think it’s safe to say that Germans do take being on a fully paid leave - either on vacation or sick (and I didn’t even talk about parental leave) - as something granted and natural.
And while the distribution of people trying to avoid work as much as possible is probably the same as in the USA, our baseline is very different. So while it may look like people here take pride in not working, that is definitely a flawed assumption. We just have a different legal system.
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 restaurants can take their orders in German.
Try vising smaller cities in Germany where the locals are a majority to get an actual feel of the country's culture and people. Berlin is too far from representative, it's just the place most foreigners feel comfortable because they're surrounded by other foreigners.
This is a pretty tired trope. As an immigrant living in Berlin since 2020, first in Prenzlauer Berg and now in Schöneweide, I still haven't found those enclaves that even speak English, let alone don't speak German. I'm sure they exist, but generalising from them to the whole 4 million+ city seems as misguided as generalising from your Berlin experience to the rest of the country.
Berlin attracts people from all over Europe and the common language is English.
C'mon, let's not exaggerate, it is 71% of ethnic Germans according to Wikipedia.
On the other hand working as an independent consultant (contractor, B2B model in EU) - you may get paid similar or even more than what you'd make in the US.
(1) https://www.reddit.com/r/Finanzen/comments/191nypz/comment/k...
Working in Germany is mostly more exhausting than many jobs in the US.
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
That's not how progressive taxation and the tax brackets work. In reality you pay higher tax rate only on the amount above the threshold. So if, say, the tax rate is 20% on the income up to $10000 and 30% above it then if you earn $30000 you pay 20% on the $10000 and 30% only on the remaining $20000. You don't pay 30% on the whole $30000. Why is this misconception is so common?
This is impossible, even with the very high German taxes :-)
You will keep less of each (EDIT: additional) Euro you earn, but the tax progression is not that broken that getting paid more results in less money for you. There are diminishing returns on hours worked, if that is what you meant, but otherwise it's untrue.
For example A Software Engineer can earn 90K while an Engineering Manager can earn 85K at a different company.
because cultural inertia (see also why USA still uses imperial units instead of metric)
but agree that we should have more poeple working less instead of a few people working a lot (or making all the money)
6 hour workdays would also be cool, instead of 3 shifts to cover a 24 hour period companies would be forced to have 4 shifts a day (for 24/7 operations)
This is famously why shitty minimum wage jobs have endlessly changing schedules. Many companies have actual rules against setting regularly scheduled shifts.
Was interesting watching the shift happen, regular schedules used to be the norm and it was far easier to work several jobs. Especially once everything became part-time in the 90's.
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)
Most jobs, even in tech, in DE currently require good knowledge of German, and "good" is being interpreted as near-native.
Hmmm... real earnings are down 4-6% every year, so... no.
https://www.destatis.de/EN/Themes/Labour/Earnings/Real-Earni...
They cannot conceive people learning new skills quickly, being dynamic, or their two years worth of experience weighing much heavier than your average, mentally checked out 4 YoE developer.
Screening hundreds of people quickly is tough, I get it, but either be actually open minded or quit crying about labour shortage.
Take today’s date: if you quit February 1st, you can only start at a new place June 1st! At least 3, but up to 4 months of a continued work relationship is unattractive for both parties I’d say.
(At least that’s the widely used rule; the law only specifies a minimum notice period of 1 month)
Your work is not serious if your employee can risk you leaving within 1 month (counting in unused holidays, 1-2 weeks even?)
Explain to me how we haven't had a significant change in the amount of days per week or hours per week we work in about 100 years, and yet the amount of things we can get done now in that same amount of time is orders of magnitude more? Tell me we're not part of an ant colony with a injected idea of freedom to strive for, that we'll never really get, but that serves as a motivator so that we keep on grinding, oiling that capitalistic system for the benefactors of the few.
I swear it's like a sci-fi film plot.
We operate a helpdesk where clear communication is essential. Internally, we need to be able to quickly coordinate with each other on highly technical problems. If someone from another country came in with a bad attitude about "why do I need good English?" we would be more than a little hesitant about hiring them. It doesn't matter how good you are in tech, English literacy and fluency are foundational to everything else.
It would surprise me if Germans see this very differently.
If you insist on using your local language only, then you will only have applicants from your own country: very few qualified candidates living outside Germany(/Austria) or Japan can speak those languages at a highly proficient level. If you have no need of importing professionals from abroad, that's OK; obviously it's easier to recruit people in your own country if you stick to your country's native language. But if you have a big talent shortage (as is typically the case for the tech sector), then not accommodating English will mean you can't compete against companies that are more international (i.e., they use English).
Like it or not, English is the most commonly-spoken 2nd language in the world; it's the international language of business and trade. College-educated professionals mostly all speak it these days. So if you want an international company, English it is.
Why are you entitled to have people speak your language, when you are the immigrant?
I work with plenty of engineers who speak English as a second (or even third) language. It's not really an issue.
Your "entitlement" argument sounds a bit harsh for me, to be honest.
This is still a country, not a back office for multinationals, people who talk to a German business should be able to have a conversation in German. This can be expected from immigrants. I've lived abroad myself and made sure I was proficient enough to be able to integrate. It's culturally vital as well.
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 someone with master's degree in engineering ready to work at a bakery. So the perception and reality is different.
Unless you are in IT/software development, it is hard to get a job. Traditional engineering disciplines are hard to break into.
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 job.
That's quite reasonable. No matter how good you're at a certain skill, most jobs will require an advanced level of communication.
Imagine if you hired a builder and the person wouldn't be able to understand the intricacies of the job you need performed?
Having teams that are exclusively English speaking in Germany would make sense, but Germany is large enough to not have them yet.
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 be: cleaners, putting tins into shelves, scrubbing toilets, warehouse work, sorting foul carrots from good carrots on a production line, etc.
I'd say you need a decent level of being able to communicate with your colleagues and stakeholders. If someone struggles then they can drive an Uber and practice until they are better.
I guess that's what happens when digital nomad ideology collides with the real world...
Rather than saying people are stockholm-syndrome'd ants who dislike freedom and positive changes, by what reasoning does 100% of work get done in 80% of the time?
Potential ideas would include:
* Maybe people today spend 20% or more of their week slacking off. If they can eliminate that slack-off time, they could have every Friday off.
* People could "work faster/harder" and get the same amount of work done in less time?
* Maybe we don't need all this work to get done anyway? But then what are the side effects? 20% fewer medical services, restaurants, groceries, deliveries, plumbing, construction, government operations...?
[0] https://www.washingtonpost.com/wellness/2023/02/21/four-day-...
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 anything short of a new smartphone is borderline a war declaration on your offspring
Software is an area where you can get absurd productivity gains just from having different task definitions, by simplifying things where they can be simplified, or by simply planning better. I've seen plenty of bad PMs making a team work 2x, 3x, 4x more to accomplish something, purely because of unimportant details that ended up being too much trouble.
Not to mention I've seen countless times teams growing from say, 2 to 10 developers and not having even close to 2x difference. Heck, half of Mythical Man Month is about that.
So yeah, amount of time doesn't correlate to amount of work. And especially doesn't correlate to amount of value delivered.
If you want to prove all the excess productivity of the last 50 years is useless busywork you have to bring some proofs. The money is moving from pockets to pockets so surely some value is created, it just happens that all these pockets are at the top, and not much trickles down
https://economicsfromthetopdown.files.wordpress.com/2020/01/...
The only way to show it's possible is through experiments, which have been very successful showing limited reduction in productivity moving to a 4 day work week (which benefits workers by allowing them to live more full lives vs toiling at work an extra unnecessary day per week).
Another example is the 900+ school districts in the US that have moved to a four day week, as it is the only way they can retain talent.
As with everything, it will come as the population turns over, older workers aging out of power and relevance (either through retirement or death), and younger workers aging in with different ideas of work arrangements. Progress occurs one funeral at a time - Planck
https://www.cbsnews.com/newyork/news/companies-around-the-wo...
https://www.washingtonpost.com/wellness/2023/02/21/four-day-...
https://www.nbcnews.com/news/world/uk-employers-4-day-workwe...
https://www.thestar.com/business/could-a-4-day-work-week-wor...
https://www.npr.org/2023/11/08/1211632901/schools-across-the...
https://www.cbsnews.com/news/school-districts-4-day-week-tea...
Once the population pyramid is upside down, the ant colony model does not work anymore.
There’s no progression in between.
Of course, for serious work, notice periods of 3 months or even longer make sense. But those levels should only kick in after several years. If you’ve been with a company for only a year, there’s no point in a 3 month period.
I have experienced breakdown in communications due to English not being good enough many, many times.
There's plenty of stories in comments here, about how bad offshore teams are. In most cases it's just a result of poor communications(due to lack of English proficiency). I've had to switch to other languages to explain some basic things about "what the client actually wanted", because of breakdown in communications.
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.
It's probably going too far to call it an "enclave", but I don't think any of this would happen in any other German city.
1) There's no shortage of developers just a shortage of pay.
2) It's also hard to find doctors, that doesn't mean hospitals should compromise and let everyone practice who doesn't speak the language practice medicine just because there's a shortage.
Similarly, a lot of companies don't want to compromise on the language skillset, especially if most of their products are only for the local market that will be used mainly by other German speakers. So having devs not fluent in the local language and not understand the little details and semantics in requirements written in German, means a lot of time wasted with translations and clarifications.
It's the first argument HN brings against offshoring, saying it doesn't work because foreign devs don't understand the business and semantics of a foreign language or culture. Why do you think it suddenly doesn't also apply with foreign workers on-shore?
>How else did you acquire your knowledge? By only falling back to literature in your language? That seems kind of limiting if you are working in IT.
The limiting factor is not other developers, although it could be sometimes. It's the managers who don't use English on a regular basis like IT workers do, especially if like I said before, their company mostly caters to the German speaking market, and they wish to address developers directly for questions and feedback in meetings without only reaching out to the German speakers in the team to have to transalte further.
If you have a company meeting in the US or UK, is it not in the local language ? Why would any other country be different?
It's really simple: English is the international language of business. So a German IT professional can easily get a job in the US or UK, because every college-educated German speaks English fluently. Same goes for every such person in China, India, Russia, France, everywhere really. So US and UK companies routinely hire professionals from outside those countries.
The reverse isn't true: how many Brits or Americans can speak German well enough to relocate to Germany and get an IT/software job there? Almost none. So German companies are limited to candidates from Germany, Austria, and part of Switzerland and maybe a few people from some other nearby countries maybe. American and UK companies, OTOH, have all the best candidates from around the world available to them.
>1) There's no shortage of developers just a shortage of pay.
Sure, offering more money than any other company in Germany would probably get a company their pick of candidates. But it'll also increase their costs a lot and make them less competitive internationally. Don't forget though: German companies aren't just competing with other German companies for candidates: they're competing with companies in other countries, especially English-speaking countries. German candidates aren't stuck in Germany: they can easily move to English countries and work there too. Can German companies really afford FAANG-level salaries?
>2) It's also hard to find doctors, that doesn't mean hospitals should compromise and let everyone practice who doesn't speak the language practice medicine just because there's a shortage.
If you have people dying left and right because there's no medical treatment due to a doctor shortage, then yes. At some point, there really is a such thing as a labor shortage and you have to adapt.
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?
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
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."
I'm already working 4 days a week, with a 20% pay cut, and not even a great salary to begin with, but I could get by with 2 days with my current lifestyle (if my company allowed it)
People who want to work less and keep everything the same are delusional imho, something's got to give
There are plenty of companies in Germany that have English as a working language, but even then local teams are better served by people with good local language proficiency.
Germany can import/export and trade with everyone outside of Germany without dumbing down their population to people with a vocabulary of 100 words. Cross border trade language may be English, but domestic business language is German.
I have a friend who migrated from India and his wife used to work for a pharma/biotech firm back in India and had some temporary work here in Germany, when peak COVID happened, when pharma companies were hiring a lot.
She already has a master's degree from India and she has been undergoing further trainings supported by Job center, and still no luck.
I fully disagree. I'm talking about the Arbeitgeberbrutto as it does not make any difference for the employer if he sends the money to you or to the state/health insurance/.... He is already paying it so he would be willing to also pay it to you if he would not have to pay it to the state/health insurance/... So in my opinion it is part of the salary and I think the split into employer deductions and employee deductions just exists to make the contributions appear to be smaller than they actually are.
The post I linked just made it clear to me that salaries aren't that bad in germany compared to other states it is just that we have to pay most of it to the state/health insurance/...
Your premise just seems fundamentally flawed.
Yes, that's my first sentence in my first comment. My comment was not about reasoning if it is worth to employ people in germany but to state why people may prefer to work less.
> How much do all those benefits to US employees cost? Do you include that when you list US salaries, or do those get magically excluded because health insurance isn’t mandatory?
Yes, if the employer pays it it is part of the loan and should be considered if you compare the loans between different countries.
> Your premise just seems fundamentally flawed.
Okay, to be honest I just don't see how it is flawed. Also I don't have anything left to say. I just don't see why I shouldn't consider it as part of the salary as it would not make a difference to the employer to pay it to the employee instead if the employee deductions wouldn't exist.
-------
Edit: I can't answer anymore. So I'm editing this post.
> Making an argument about how people may want to work less based on a number most have never seen [...] is a flawed argument no matter how you approach it.
Yes, that makes sense. Most employees likely won't think about how much of the Arbeitgeberbrutto is taken away. Still I think if you know it then it reduces ones motivation and it also has the indirect effect of reducing the Arbeitnehmerbrutto an employer is willing to pay and therefore employees may be less motivated due to a low salary.
Edit: https://www.stepstone.de/jobs/wasserbau-ingenieur Here are far more jobs, so there seem to be at least some available.
Did she contact some professors at her university here in Germany? They often can provide contacts to industry or the government.
Other than that good look at finding a job for her, she should not give up!
