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Comment by ativzzz | Hacker News Reader

Curious how being laid back in regards to work opens up opportunity from countries such as China that have some companies working 996 schedules (9-am - 9pm, 6 days a week) to overtake and make obsolete European global companies. I guess the only way EU can compete is protectionism, no?

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For the Swiss it doesn't matter what China does, anywhere else is cheaper anyway.

Your underlying assumption is that companies where employees work more hours are more successful on the market place. I would say this is a deeply flawed assumption.

If two equally capable entities are competing, the one who puts in more time will almost always win. The Chinese may be lacking the (social and physical) infrastructure that the Europeans have a head start on for productivity, but they are catching up or have already caught up.

This probably applies less to big conglomerates who exist and will continue existing regardless of what happens (honestly most of their employees can just not show up and they will be fine), but more to technical innovation.

No.

I can guarantee you that in general in software engineering, you will produce the same result, whether you work 30 or 40 or 60 hr a week. The productive hours will be the same as you just have so much focused hours inside of you.

The result is markedly worse at 60 hours.

Yep you are 100% correct. Most super productive software developers only really focus/work a few hours a day. Software development is about thinking not typing.

For building infrastructure or manufacturing, probably yes, but not for innovation.

Anyone being forced to work under the conditions you describe is probably too terrified to do anything more than iteratively replicate existing foreign designs.

You can't force innovation by locking people in a dungeon and screaming "INNOVATE!" at them until they succeed.

The world doesn't work like the models they teach at Econ 101 though :-)

They even fail at protectionism. They try to take on American tech but get swatted away in the courts when they realize they need American tech to be remotely competitive again. There's a reason America is launching Teslas into space while the EU bickers in court

Right. So nobody in the US drive European cars like BMW, Mercedes, Porsche, Ferrari etc.? Really? And nobody in the US use mobile phones with European ARM chips in them? Really?

Nope. Number of hours worked have very limited impact on productivity when it comes to high-knowledge/tech work. Laying bricks and designing a high tech robot factory are two very different jobs.

The US put all kinds of barriers in the way of Japanese car manufacturers and was still beaten to a pulp.

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