Why Germans have higher productivity and longer vacations

http://www.openforum.com/idea-hub/topics/lifestyle/article/why-germans-have-longer-vacation-times-and-more-productivity-glen-stansberry

by y2002 • 16 years ago

144 129 16 years ago

openforum.com

tptacek11• 16 years ago

There's no such thing as a free lunch; whether or not we're less productive, nobody's paying you for the hours you don't work. And, indeed, aren't Germany's wages, by sector, consistently lower than those in the US?

yummyfajitas4• 16 years ago

According to Max Klein, that is certainly true for programmers. Based on the numbers he gave, "a good programmer" in Germany gets paid less than a fresh college grad in the US.

http://maxkle.in/giving-up-on-europe/

smcl• 16 years ago

I can vouch for this, the graduate programmers in the US in a company I worked for were taking in around double what we were in Scotland. That said, our wages were a damn sight higher than our counterparts in China and India but at least everyone else got to live somewhere interesting :)

auston• 16 years ago

I have different experience (lived in Germany for 10 months), JavaScript/Ruby/Python developers make roundabout 35-55 euros per hour.

Additionally, this article rings true for my experience both living in Germany & working with Germans in the US (especially here); They bust ass & are amazingly productive.

gamble• 16 years ago

There is no country where programmers are as well paid as the US. Even in Canada, where cost-of-living and salaries are normally comparable, programmers are paid at least 20-30% less. I'm not sure why, but it's a dramatic difference.

Of course, it's also the reason US companies are so eager to outsource programming jobs.

cdr2• 16 years ago

"Max Klein" isn't a real person, and is hardly a reputable source.

gaius5• 16 years ago

Money is not always a good indicator of societal wealth. The standard of living rankings tell a truer story.

tptacek11• 16 years ago

It may very well be better for everyone's quality of life to pay people less and mandate more leisure; in other words, it may be better if society decides (for most people) how hard they should work.

But that's orthogonal to my point. You could mandate 6 weeks vacation in the US, too. But wages would go down as a result.

Generally, if you're in our profession and you want more vacation, become a contractor. People have been doing contract work for decades for exactly this reason.

yummyfajitas4• 16 years ago

I disagree. PPP-adjusted money is a measure of how much of the stuff you want that you can actually afford to have.

"Standard of living" rankings tend to measure how much of the stuff that the study creators want that you can afford to have. A nation might have a low rank due simply to the fact that the people living there prefer different things than what the study creators think they should prefer. Measuring PPP-adjusted money doesn't have this problem.

mars2• 16 years ago

i'm partner at an interactive agency in germany and i was wondering how much development work in the u.s. costs. we are billing our customers 80-100eur per hour (109-136usd). experienced freelancers (frontend/backend devs) bill between 35 and 60 eur per hour (47-81 usd). is that comparable to the states?

jdminhbg2• 16 years ago

Experienced Rails devs in the US generally bill $100+/hr; similar for .NET contractors. I don't have a ton of pricing experience with anything else.

Vivtek9• 16 years ago

Yeah. They also have a working health care system, excellent public transit so no matter where you live you don't need a car, and so on. Clothing is insanely expensive. Food is more expensive if you're on a ramen diet, less expensive if you eat produce or bread and good deli meats.

Quality of life is higher no matter what you earn. Germany is set up so you can enjoy your days and your life.

eru7• 16 years ago

> no matter where you live you don't need a car [...]

In the city, yes. In the suburbs most people consider a car a necessity to get to work.

JohnIdol• 16 years ago

Even if it's true that from europe the impression is that ppl in the US have no holidays and do less in more time (here we go, appreciate the honesty pls), I think it's wrong to generalize based on a few examples, as a lot of it probably depends on size and philosophy of the company and, obviously, on how you measure productivity.

gaborcselle• 16 years ago

There is no data backing up the claims and stereotypes in this article.

lenni• 16 years ago

I'm German I find the recent sentiment towards Germany enjoyable but a bit surprising. Not long ago we we're the sick old man of Europe and Ireland was the European tiger.

I like life in Germany but it all seems like flavour-of-the-month journalism.

bd_at_rivenhill• 16 years ago

flavour-of-the-month journalism

You have a redundant adjective there.

mhd2• 16 years ago

Ireland has the same problems that the US has right now: Not enough industry. Germany actually produces a lot, which made the crisis less severe, even considering that the German finance sector basically did everything wrong they could do wrong. The boom in Ireland was founded on the service industry, with huge tax breaks to finance it. And the US has been moving more and more industrial jobs offshore.

I don't want to over-simplify. The US has a higher population and thus doesn't need to export as much. But actually manufacturing something ain't that bad. Didn't someone complain recently that even Silicon Valley is doing that less and less?

mhd2• 16 years ago

Hmm? That's news to me, I thought the US had a higher productivity overall. Hourly Germany might be better, but considering that you'd have to go to Korea to find people putting in more hours, the US comes out ahead.

And while France was behind Germany, they do even fewer hours.

Whether that matters a lot is a different matter altogether. Life-work balance is one issue, job satisfaction another. Working more hours vs. wanting to work more hours etc.

And in my experience, the IT industry is a bit different anyway, never mind the entrepreneurial sector thereof. So does this matter a lot to the usual HackerNews reader? Probably not.

ShabbyDoo2• 16 years ago

What is the marginal cost to an employer in Germany of an hour of labor? And, in the US? The article did not explicitly state the metric used to quantify "output", but, given other similar studies I've seen, I must presume that profit/employee across the economy is a likely underlying metric. Given such a metric, could labor cost differences explain this "efficiency"? Let us consider a contrived example where, in Ohio, construction workers earn $20/hour and, in New York, $60. If we examined the techniques used (by capitalists) to build a structure, we would surely observe more capital-intensive but labor saving techniques in New York when compared to Ohio. Does this mean that the New York workers get more done? If you measure output (yards of concrete spread per day or whatever), then yes -- using a really expensive robotic concrete spreader allows the $60/hour employee to produce a lot of output. However, it might also be rational in Ohio to forgo the machine in favor of more labor-intensive methods. The profitability of the Ohio construction company might actually be higher, but the laborers in New York are "more productive."

I know little of Germany's regulations w.r.t. employment. Are labor costs (due to not only wages but taxes paid by the employer and other non-wage burdens) higher? Do employers in Germany rationally select higher levels of automation? Could this explain the disparity between countries in such a metric?

sqrt17• 16 years ago

You're probably right about the labor-saving techniques. In Germany, you get gardeners with automatic leaf blowers (i.e., faster, but more noise), and with a whole slew of bottom-tier jobs (such as supermarket baggers) missing. The car industry is purely based on robots and automation - which is probably the same in the US.

akadruid• 16 years ago

I suspect this must be a European thing then. I'm in London and I'd assumed that leaf blowers were a universal thing, and I had to google "supermarket bagger" - it seems like a weird gimmick, is this common?

wheels2• 16 years ago

Wages are in general lower, and on the whole the spectrum is compressed -- so low-paid jobs tend to be a big higher, but a software developer in Berlin makes about half to a third of what they would in Silicon Valley.

Also, the article is a bit off on some of its numbers -- 6 weeks of vacation aren't required by law, 24 days are (i.e. just under 5 weeks), though 6 is a common perk.

Additionally, at least in the software industry, I've commonly seen people reporting fewer hours than they actually work because by law overtime must be compensated by money or vacation, which is often an annoyance for the employer and employee (i.e. you're working late to get something done, by choice, and your boss is annoyed because now they're supposed to give you vacation time for that), so I got in the habit of always just reporting 40 hours.

In general I'd take this article with a grain of salt; it's not that it's mostly wrong, but it's clearly written in fandom, rather than a quest-for-understanding sort of way.

ido4• 16 years ago

Why would you compared Berlin (one of Germany's poorer mega-cities) to pretty much the best paying area for tech workers in the states?

It's true that you'd still see a huge salary disparity even if you compare SV to Hamburg, Munich or Frankfurt, but comparing to Berlin is still a bit disingenuous.

Also, I believe SV (especially for tech workers) is the outlier here - there is no other place in the world where developers are so highly payed, and the highest average wage earners among professionals in Germany are not people in the software industry like in SV (they are probably the people working in finance & banking in Frankfurt).

ahoyhere• 16 years ago

But in Berlin, you can have a top notch meal with fresh veggies and local ingredients for $5, a beautiful apartment near all sorts of great things for $800 easily, and, oh yeah, excellent healthcare and other social benefits.

You can't talk about salaries in other cities without considering the cost-of-living differences.

That said, I know programmers in Vienna making what I would consider pretty good salaries (60-70K/euros), even in the US. With 5-6 weeks of vacation.

lionhearted• 16 years ago

This matches my limited experience. I toured a German factory once - their level of technology and processes are astounding. I watched a car getting painted - it was on a catwalk over running water with turbines to capture some energy from the process, and bristles on the turbines to take most of the paint out and recycle the water. The efficiencies are enormous, technology investment very high.

I haven't been through so many factories to compare, but the investments in technology I saw seem higher than in the American factories I've been through. Small sample size, though, basically anecdotal, so take me with a grain of salt here.

wil2k• 16 years ago

I know what you mean. I once had a tour at a Volkswagen factory. It was jaw dropping and amazing how well thought out all processes were planned and managed.

raphman• 16 years ago

The article has some facts not completely correct: "The government provides citizens with free healthcare, free university education, and childcare." Healthcare plans are mandatory for most but not paid by the government. University education at public universities costs between 0 and 500 EUR per semester, childcare is subsidized but not completely free.

timwiseman• 16 years ago

A related point is that if you are paying taxes and receiving services from the government, then they are not free. They are being paid for by your taxes (possibly subsidized to a degree by other tax payers), and depending on how much you are taxed you may be subsidizing others as well as paying for your own.

danielh2• 16 years ago

You are right. Although your healtcare is paid by the employment agency (Bundesagentur für Arbeit), if you are unemployed.

nickik• 16 years ago

500 EUR per semester is not mutch in America you pay like 5000$ or something?

jacobolus• 16 years ago

“Geoghegan believes Germans understate their work hours, and Americans overstate work hours. Yet both countries are getting roughly the same amount of work done. This means that Germans are actually doing more, while working less.”

Is it just me, or does the claim about over/understating work hours run exactly contrary to the subsequent claim? (To be explicit: Germans understate their hours ⇒ they work more hours than they say ⇒ statistics showing Germans with higher productivity are exaggerated. And similarly Americans understate hours ⇒ they work less than claimed ⇒ they are more productive than statistics would suggest.)

nodata• 16 years ago

Reworded your clarification for my own help:

A German makes 10 widgets in 5 hours and bills 4 hours. The German achieves 2.5 widgets per billed hour.

An American makes 10 widgets in 5 hours and bills 6 hours. The American achieves 1.67 widgets per billed hour.

timr• 16 years ago

The author got the original statement backwards, partly because the original quote was confusing. From the Geohegan interview:

"Look at their productivity rates. They’re like ours. I think we understate our hours and they overstate them, because they take so much time off and sneak off early from work. If the productivity rates being reported are officially the same, and if they’re understating and we’re overstating, they’re probably working more efficiently than we are, and maybe the fact that they’re taking time off has something to do with that."

Sounds like Geohegan himself made a mistake in the second sentence, which could have led to the confusion.

hugothefrog• 16 years ago

I just returned from Berlin a couple of nights ago, and met an English guy (I'm a New Zealander living in London) who'd worked there for a few years. He is an aerospace engineer working for a very famous English engineering firm in their German office.

He was of the opinion that German productivity, at least when compared with other European countries, was a myth. He told exactly the same anecdotes about German individuality as this article mentions, but gave it quite a negative spin.

When handing out bits of work to fellow engineers, the Germans would tend to put their heads down and start work immediately, instead of consulting with colleagues about previous solutions to the same problem, etc. Basically he said they did quite a lot of very efficient, very correct, very over-engineered re-inventing of the wheel.

Particularly he pointed out that to a German engineer, every part of the solution was equally important, where as to an English engineer, it was obvious some parts where more important than others. Focusing on those gave a better quality end-result when faced with a limited budget, but a German with a unlimited budget would give you an absolutely fantastic end-result.

gaius5• 16 years ago

The problem is that Germans have engineers, and an engineering culture and we don't (anymore). Even Aston Martins aren't made here anymore.

hga• 16 years ago

R. V. Jones made a similar observation in Most Secret War (WWII) about collaboration between the operational and R&D branches. The Germans would build to spec without interaction with the requesting organization producing a fine piece of engineering whereas in the U.K. there would tend to be back and forth on the requirements and so on, with the U.K. device being less polished but more flexible and more likely to satisfy needs current and future. And I think often more quickly developed, since the R&D types would say "Well, can you relax this requirement?" and so on.

So this sounds like a long established engineering culture.

jimbokun2• 16 years ago

This is actually a timely piece of advice in my case, as I interact with my German managers. They might be expecting a more "go off and engineer what I asked for attitude" from me, while I'm doing more of the back and forth thing of suggesting alternative approaches with various trade offs.

Of course, they did decide to start their company here in the U.S., so they may appreciate some things about the U.S. style of doing business.

Vivtek9• 16 years ago

Germany is the long-established engineering culture, building on the old guild system of craftsmen. (Which still exist - the craftsmen's guilds, I mean. You aren't allowed to fix musical instruments until you've gone through your apprenticeship and journeyman's year.)

yardie3• 16 years ago

I guess you could look at it both ways. When building something you are only as strong as your weakest link. Closest analogy would be the "for want of a nail" in the Art of War.

And when you think of quality "German engineering" tends to get a stamp of approval. It implies that no detail was overlooked or under resourced. It probably doesn't mean much when buying a cheap toy, but if you are spending 40-80k on a car it is reassuring.

tonf• 16 years ago

Germany would not be the second biggest exporter in the world if it was a myth. German approach seems to work better than English one at least in older, more established industries (cars, etc).

GiraffeNecktie• 16 years ago

According to this table Germany actually has LOWER productivity than the United States

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:OECD_Productivity_levels_2...

Or MUCH lower according to this table http://www.nationmaster.com/graph/eco_ove_pro_ppp-economy-ov...

varjag3• 16 years ago

You don't really think we in Norway are 20% more productive than people in the US, right?

The graph is just a rephrased GDP per capita. For a small nation with massive oil sector you have a huge distortion of metric it supposed to illustrate.

sasvari2• 16 years ago

more discussion here:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1635385

has been around here lately quite a lot ...

rjurney• 16 years ago

Because they measure productivity in an unAmerican way.

ugh2• 16 years ago

I think it’s funny that productivity is often the only frame which is used to discuss Germany’s mandated vacation [1]. That’s not at all the intent of the law, its purpose is not increasing productivity. It exists because German lawmakers think that every employee deserves at least four weeks of paid vacation the same way US lawmakers think that every employee deserves at least $7.25 per hour [2].

I [3] am completely willing to accept possible adverse effects of mandated vacations on productivity as long as they are not too drastic [4]. I don’t view vacations as a means of improving productivity. (They might well be but the evidence I know of doesn’t do a good job of convincing me either way.)

[1] The law mandates 20 days if you work five days a week so it’s actually four weeks, not six.

[2] Funny enough, Germany doesn’t actually have a minimum wage.

[3] Just so you are not confused, I’m German.

[4] Germans are extremely wealthy so I’m not exactly concerned.

eru7• 16 years ago

> Germans are extremely wealthy so I’m not exactly concerned.

... and fond of footnotes.

halostatue2• 16 years ago

A discussion I had with a German couple in Verona while I was on vacation suggested that German companies don't generally give sick days and that the mandated vacation time had to be used for sick days. Was what I heard correct?

As a comparison, the American company I work for (in Canada) provides a default of two weeks vacation with two weeks PEL (Personal Emergency Leave) that can be used for doctors' appointments, etc. That's twenty days, although only ten of them can be used for vacations.

I realize that not every company in America provides sick days, but that's IMO a different issue.

ulf3• 16 years ago

I am german also, and I never heard of people having to use vacation for sick days. You need to provide a doctors note (generally only after the third day of sickness) and then you are set. You just miss the time, but get paid and do not have to make up for anything.

yardie3• 16 years ago

They don't have sick days. When you are sick you are sick it could be 1 day or 6 months. They don't give sick days because the government pays for your time off. So while they may miss out on your productivity, financially, they've lost little.

As an American I've encountered far too many Americans coming into work with just "a little cold" and getting the rest of the office sick. Dragging everyone else down with them because they can't afford to take time off to see a doctor and get medicated.

charlesju2• 16 years ago

My counter argument:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_GDP_(nomin...

USA GDP - 14.2 T Germany GDP - 3.3 T

fforw• 16 years ago

Of course you also have 3.5 times the population

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_GDP_%28PPP...

difference only 26%... guess you should move to Qatar or Luxembourg though -- but when you're not rich from oil or moving large sums of bank money around, that high GDP is not actually helping, is it?

And then there is stuff like http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quality-of-life_index.

BrandonM2• 16 years ago

> And then there is stuff like http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quality-of-life_index.

Wow, that article looks pretty bogus. Here are their factors:

2. Family life: Divorce rate. My parents are divorced and they both seem pretty happy. This metric seems very biased and not clearly beneficial. Is it better to keep an unhappy marriage together or to create two new happier marriages?

3. Community life: country has either high rate of church attendance or trade-union membership. Seriously? Apparently freelancing atheists are miserable.

6. Climate and geography: Latitude, to distinguish between warmer and colder climates. It's ridiculous to claim that latitude is a prime determiner of quality-of-life. Some people prefer tropical beaches, but others love changing seasons and still others like ice fishing. As far as climate and geography are concerned, would you rather live in a Saharan desert or Crete? Places with similar latitudes can have vastly different climates, anyways.

7. Job security: Unemployment rate. Fair enough, but low unemployment rate isn't necessarily an indicator of job security: there could still be high churn. Also, a nation that provides a sufficient level of services means that the unemployed are never too badly off, while a country that provides none could see its few unemployed living in misery. Serious question: would a country with single-worker households have an unemployment rate near 50%?

9. Gender equality: Measured using ratio of average male and female earnings. Terrible. Does this even factor in number of hours worked? It certainly doesn't account for differences in the work being performed or for cultural differences.

By my count, about half of those metrics are crap. Creating an index from that is basically hokum. Anyone could tweak the metrics to almost arbitrarily reorder the rankings.

charlesju2• 16 years ago

Yeah that it's nice that Germany might be more efficient, but we're still > 4 times their size. When we're talking about country "power" no one cares about efficiency.

As for Quality of Life, that's fine, but I love America and I love our lifestyle, so perhaps that's more of a personal choice than an aggregated one.

Vivtek9• 16 years ago

My first job out of college was in Stuttgart, Germany. The boss apologized in the orientation meeting that as a small company, they could only provide 28 paid days of vacation.

He wasn't sure why I was laughing.

jasonkester• 16 years ago

Reading the comments here, I'm surprised to see so many people defending the 2-week-vacation policies in America, rather than trying to figure out ways to get 6-week-vacations implemented over here. Doesn't anybody think they'd be happier with more time off? Enough so to make it a priority?

I tend to take a lot of time off, and one thing I notice when I come back from a trip is how much more productive I feel. It's like there's all this pent-up brainpower waiting to get out, and none of whatever baggage was clogging it up before I left to get in the way.

I used to work 3 month contracts at this one shop, with 6 to 9 month breaks in the middle. I actually alienated some of the developers there because I'd show up and be 10X - 50X as productive as the next guy (measurable in things delivered), mainly because I was so stoked to be back writing code. I know that if I'd stayed there an entire year at a stretch, my throughput would have come down to a similar level as the rest of the team. But because of the way I worked, they'd get 3 months of fast, and then I'd be out the door.

I notice the same thing with my own projects when I'm travelling. If I dip out of internet coverage for a week or so and then get a day to run, it's amazing to see how much I get done in that day. I imagine that you could get similar results at a regular company by taking 3 or 4 short breaks over the course of the year.

ovi256• 16 years ago

If the sheep are trained well, you don't need fences.

known• 16 years ago

47% of people in Germany are receiving a monthly unemployment or social security pension from the government. http://search.japantimes.co.jp/cgi-bin/eo20060903a1.html

vegasbrianc• 16 years ago

I'm not joining the battle on which country is more efficient but I do think it is important that you can disconnect from work with vacation/holiday. Born in the US and now living in Europe for over 6 years I've worked in both environments. I do have to say when returning from a long vacation you are ready to hit the ground running with your batteries fully charged.

flannell• 16 years ago

As a Brit who used to work in New York, for an investment company, I have a different view. While I agree my US fellow workers are very sociable during the day, they do tend to run off 5pm sharp! There's no "go for beers after work" environment. I spoke to them candidly about this and they said their real friends are the ones they grew up with and tend to hang out with them. I also had a colleague at HSBC and another at JPM who also expressed the same view, but added that's why brits do well over in the states because they are used to working longer hours and this appears favourable to the bosses.

Anyway, not trolling, just thought relevant.

zeemonkee2• 16 years ago

That's what I found working over on the West Coast some years ago - the guys I socialized with after hours were fellow-non Americans. The impression was that Americans form their strongest relationships in their high school/college years and stick to their cliques. That may be a generalization though.

CaptainDecisive• 16 years ago

It think it just depends on the company. I moved from NZ to NYC and worked for a software company there (just north of the city in White Plains) for five years. There was a good crew there that went out for drinkies on a regular basis. Someone would mosey round the office about 5:30 and give the nod. Most of my mates there were ex radio guys / DJs and originally from somewhere else in the US though.

I knew a few people who worked on Wall St and they seemed to socialize with their co-workers too but I also knew one chick in publishing who had a similar experience to you.

Conversely I now live in Edinburgh and my team only goes out for drinks once in a blue moon. Of course much of it depends on personal circumstances such as if you're young and single or have a family with small children.

So, um I guess YMMV.

JustAGeek2• 16 years ago

I'm a bit late to the party but whatever, just wanted to let you know that us Germans don't have 6 weeks federally mandated vacations, it's 24 days: http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bundesurlaubsgesetz#Gesetzliche...

That's the minimum, most people I know have 28-30 days. On top of that you can get up to 5 days of paid educational leave.

The article as a whole is quite superficial, imho.

Not sure if those working in big companies like Deutsche Telekom or Daimler would agree to the claim that Germans don't have many meetings, for example... ;)

danielh2• 16 years ago

Actually, it's only 24 days if you have six work days in a week. For a 5-day-week, it's 20 days per year minimum.

JustAGeek2• 16 years ago

Ah, didn't know that, thanks. In fact, I haven't even known the 24 days before I looked it up in Wikipedia... :D

fauigerzigerk• 16 years ago

I wonder why the term productivity is even used in this article. The debate about how much vacation time people should get has very little to do with productivity in my view. Productivity is output per hour worked, no matter how many hours are actually spent working.

Why Germans have higher productivity and longer vacations

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