Fetishizing hard work is a purely American phenomenon
True, if by "American" you mean "American, German, Swiss, Austrian, Swedish, Japanese, Victorian British, and Protestant". (I'm sure I left out a few, actually).
True, if by "American" you mean "American, German, Swiss, Austrian, Swedish, Japanese, Victorian British, and Protestant". (I'm sure I left out a few, actually).
This, in the end, makes for a every different business culture than I remember from US -- the meetings are as short as possible. The managers actually listen to their engineers, because their expertise is what they are paying them for, and I have yet to meet a German Pointy Haired Boss, while experience both mine and of my friends with US or US-run corporations is that more than half managers are PHBes. They also don't care what you wear, don't care what you do after work, and the don't want unnecessarily long hours. They are efficient an serious about what they do, but they don't worship work the way USians and Japanese do, for example.
(I don't have experience with working with other cultures. Also, I'm not German.)
EDIT: But in no way would Germans require you to do more hours just for the sake of more hours. You owe the company you work for your best, professional effort. But you owe them 40 hours, not more.
I work for a small company, where the owner work long hour, 12 - 16 hours a day. My desire to stay at home in my hammock in the garden doesn't really fit their view of working. However if I did my jobs a developer to perfection, then they wouldn't know the different between me sleeping in the hammock or sitting behind the desk. It can be hard to explain, because it quickly become "time we could be spending on other projects".
In my experience nationality (or, to put it another way, the culture that you share with the people in your region) does matter. I'm certainly not saying that a nation's work ethic is shared by every single citizen - generalizations naturally don't apply to everyone. I'm also not saying that all companies in a country behave the same - there are going to be variations. But overall, the way you look at work varies greatly from country to country.