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Comment by lampe3 | Hacker News Reader

But isn't it normal to change you work place every X years?

Even here in Europe. If I ask my current boss that I want like a raise of 1/3 of my salary he laughs but when I leave to a new company I laugh.

I worked in Germany, Lithuania and Norway.

Basically you are forced to change your job if you are a good developer and want to get more money.

And for me a lot of gaming studios which I loved in the 90's and 00's have lost all the glory. Just look at Blizzard, EA and Ubisoft.

It really worth looking at the history of EA and why it even exists.

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Americans have always done it in larger numbers though, because in times of economic slowdown they don't try and prop up existing business employment using furlough schemes, and it has been extremely easy to move and get a new job throughout the history of the country. (EU freedom of movement was inspired by the US which has always had it at a continental scale, and it's a lot more practical since nearly everyone's first language is also the US's lingua franca.)

This leads to upsides and downsides. Generally speaking, a lot more people lose jobs during US slowdowns, but the US tends to bounce back a lot faster as well since the labor market is flexible and responds rapidly to changes. One concern with furlough-type schemes is that they keep people at "zombie" firms that the economy may be pivoting away from.

> One concern with furlough-type schemes is that they keep people at "zombie" firms that the economy may be pivoting away from

That's a valid concern, but IMHO market forces can still correct for that ( if other companies are doing better they can provide better salaries which could entice employees at zombies to switch jobs), and there are limitations ( of time). And from what we saw during times of crises like pandemics, furlough schemes are drastically better than buggy localised unemployment schemes unfit for the scale of the labour shift, and checks in the mail, which heavily distorted the US labour market.

The issue with zombie firms is not really furlough itself but the fact that anything that prolongs a zombie firm's life will mean that firm is still sucking up things like credit and capital that would inhibit the ability of new firms to take their place. And firms that are clearly dying take a long time to finally die; even in the US, where firms are not really supported, department stores like Sears and Macy's limped on for a decade or two.

The extreme version of the sclerotic economy is probably Japan, with an honorable mention for Italy. Policymakers desperately want to avoid falling into a zombie trap, because there hasn't been a country that has made it out of one yet.

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