he faced online criticism for equating desperation with resilience—the original post has since been deleted but was retweeted by Danny Thompson, Director of Technology at This Dot Labs.
Is it true that people celebrate American work practices?!
Nope! Seems like a dystopian nightmare to my Swedish eyes.
In some countries they do, in others they don’t.
From my own experience in Software Development, in England they definitelly do, whilst in Portugal they kinda do mainly because management culture is so horribly, horribly bad and people do not naturally tend to be organised and properly prepare, so overruns and not taking in account risks of problems and delays in time estimates are all the norm (so overwork is not driven by a “work hard” culture like in England but by constant fuckups leading to overwork leading to even worse fuckups because tired people make even more mistakes)
(Mind you, the management culture in England is hardly good, but it’s still better than in Portugal).
On the other had, I’ve also worked in The Netherlands were I’ve only ever once seen a work culture similar to the US, in a small web-development company (and I killed that crap in the projects I was involved in, to great satisfaction of the junior devs) and as half of my career there was as a freelancer, I’ve worked there in maybe 5 or 6 different places in 8 years so I saw more work environments than normal.
One experience that stuck with me in The Netherlands was working for a bank and being still there at 6:05 PM on a Friday by my own initiative to finish something and the project manager coming over and literally telling me “Go home, you’re not supposed to be here” even against my own insistence that I just wanted to finish something. I’ve worked in or for Finance at one time or another in all those countries and what’s typical in that industry elsewhere is the exact opposite of what happened to me in The Netherlands.
