> All told, French workers put in an average of 39.5 hours a week, just under the eurozone average of 40.9 hours a week, according to the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development.
For comparison, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics the average for Americans in non-farm employment work an average of 34.5 hours per week:
Which is way less than the amount worked by anyone I know or have ever worked with in engineering and corporate jobs. I don't know if this number is so low because of under-employed or part time labor, but I doubt it given the breakdown over the various industries in that table on the bls.gove site.
To an outsider, this is what the US workday looks like:
* 3 hours driving for no reason
* 4 hours working
* 6-7 hours fucking around pretending that you're being productive
I'm sure there's a lot of fucking around in French (and other European) offices as well, but Americans seem particularly adept at spending long hours at the office while actually working very little.
Source: every American I've questioned in depth about their workday. Mainly in Silicon Valley, haven't had the chance to talk to too many others.
Source2: A recent-ish poll on HN where the "I actually work 2 hours a day" option won
A quick google search suggests that the average commute is 25 minutes, and about 0.2% of the population has a megacommute of over 1.5 hours. For comparison 4.3% work from home.
That's the feedback I got from a German co-worker when I was working in Silicon Valley. In Germany they just work 8 hours. But it's all heads down working. In the US we screw around (talking, surfing the web, etc) much more.
But I know from experience that workers in Spain screw around A LOT as well during the work day (and lord the long lunches at sit down restaurants!). So all Europe is not the same.
Can you expand on this? Do you mean to say that much of American GDP comes from things like natural resources where American employees have the fortune of working to extract? What other factors besides employee productivity and natural resources would contribute to GDP?
It's a little disingenuous to compare the US and Germany. While there are large variations in Germany too (and one could look at the individual states there as well) -- it would make more sense to compare US states, rather than all of US. Or: one might compare the whole of EU (or possibly, some older subset of EU) with all of the US.
[edit: On the other hand, as the US leads by a pretty significant margin, there must be other factors at work. While Germany isn't top among the EU, the US is top of the world on that list, anyway. I'm a little surprised the US is even ahead of Norway -- given the pretty big GDP boost Norway gets from oil, and our low population.]
The unadjusted GDP for Norway in 2013 dollars is around $100k, and for the US around $53k.
Purchasing power is depressed in Norway compared to the US primarily because salary structure is one of the flattest in the world, which means salaries in service jobs are amongst the highest in the world, and consequently prices are amongst the highest in the world.
Finance is another factor, both the trade (with the two largest stock exchanges based in the US) and having historical wealth and wealthy immigrants investing in the US.
A lot of it is just higher buying power. For example, you can sell SaaS for more in the US than you can in Europe because Americans are simply able/willing to pay more.
High GDP is a sort of self-fulfilling prophecy in a consumerism oriented economy. If everyone makes more, everyone can make even more, which results in even more spending and then even more money making and ... you get the idea.
Doesn't matter if things cost more in the US - the numbers given are adjusted for purchasing power. They represent the fact that in the US, a given worker produces a larger basket of goods.
Here's another way of boosting the PPP numbers: Distribute salary extremely unevenly, and push large portions of your population into near poverty, and thus drive down the costs of providing essential products and services.
I don't know how the US does in pure productivity, but you can't get productivity rankings from GDP adjusted for purchasing power parity alone.
That's a cultural and management problem. If working long hours makes you "look committed" or otherwise puts you on fast track for promotions etc., that is a problem. It leads to people arriving early and leaving late, and basically not working efficiently because we all know it's simply not sustainable to do 10 or 12 hours in most jobs requiring any thougt work. Obviously, cutting down on the hours without also fixing the cultural and productivity issues may be a bad idea.
I was told this as well by a CTO at BT who had worked in the UK and in SV and he commented that he got as much work from the UK as he did USA (2 weeks leave) and remember british telecom is an ex Civil Sevice orgaisation (think the laundry files level of T&C and beurocracy)
The 40 hour work week was meant for labor work, not thinking jobs. Applying that workweek to devs has to stop. One can only think and plan for maybe 3 to 4 hours a day.
You forgot endless coffees, ceaseless yabbering on mobile phones, thousands of telephone meetings and still pointless face to face meetings with external companies so the sales people can pretend to be busy and get out of the office awhile.
For comparison, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics the average for Americans in non-farm employment work an average of 34.5 hours per week:
http://www.bls.gov/news.release/empsit.t18.htm
Which is way less than the amount worked by anyone I know or have ever worked with in engineering and corporate jobs. I don't know if this number is so low because of under-employed or part time labor, but I doubt it given the breakdown over the various industries in that table on the bls.gove site.