[arcturus17]

I'm Spanish and I've lived in Germany, the UK, and in short stints in the US, and some of what you say resonates with me. In particular:

> Here work seems to always be some tedious chore that keeps you away from social life

This is just one manifestation of what's more generally a very poor work culture, in what amounts to a giant, self-reinforcing negative feedback loop. Management often lacks professionalism, salaries are poor, and employees are demotivated and must therefore look to anything but work for fulfillment.

To be clear, I don't believe this is inherently Spanish, due to our genes, the climate, or our love for fiesta: similar phenomena could be observed locally in the US or Northern Europe. The problem in Spain is how widespread these attitudes are, in a macro context where good opportunities have been scarce for decades, probably due to the lack of a vision for a national productive model and any effective policies in this regard.

Personally I believe any permanent solution will need to come simultaneously in a top-down and bottom-up fashion, with both effective state policies and a change in attitudes from individuals. The catalyst would likely need to be a multi-partisan, national and universal social pact rallying institutions (politics, education, unions, businesses, etc.) around a well-defined vision. Anyone who follows Spanish politics knows that unfortunately at present that possibility is extremely remote.

[joaodlf]

> The problem in Spain is how prevalent these attitudes are, in a macro context where good opportunities have been scarce for decades

This really nails it. I'm originally from Portugal (now living and working in the UK). Staying late and maintaining presence was a really big thing in Portugal. You really are looked down on when you leave early, it's a really terrible work culture, it genuinely felt like people would either overwork themselves or just generally do nothing with that extra time.

I tell my friends this story all the time: When I first arrived to the UK and started working, I asked my company about having my work email on my phone, my manager just had a completely blank face - "why do you need your work email on your phone?". I have been happily employed with this company for nearly 8 years now, never once feeling the need to stay late or go beyond the contracted hours. If I put in overtime, it's because I want to (most of the time because I actually enjoy the work). Oh, and I am paid for overtime. Completely unheard of in Portugal.

I know a lot of these things might be company culture specific, but there is definitely a level within geography - The lesser opportunities available, the more is expected out of you. As if having the opportunity to work should be seen as some sort of blessing.

[mattmanser]

The irony of this and the parent comment is the UK regularly come up as a country that the exact same problem happens in.

The UK has notoriously low productivity compared to Europe and the US, and longer average work hours than the rest of Europe.

These are larger aggregate studies. I wonder why both your experiences of the UK seem so at odds with the observed studies? Is it just the field you're in?

Some examples:

https://www.tuc.org.uk/news/british-workers-putting-longest-...

https://www.businessleader.co.uk/uk-employees-work-the-longe...

EDIT: Downvoted for actual studies vs anecdotes. Fabulous. Not only that, these studies have been coming out for years.

[joaodlf]

Tech, more than likely, contributes towards personal experience. I can safely say this about Portugal: this is a country where companies do not want to invest in a tech department. There is a culture of outsourcing all tech related work. This has caused the birth of manyyy "outsourcing tech companies" - the sort of companies that hire tech talent just to shift them over to "projects", where you go to work for someone else and are at the complete mercy of the client (who demands the world since they have an expensive contract with the outsourcing company).

This has been my woe, and the same can be said about many of my friends and uni acquaintances. I suspect other fields might not have it this badly.

I have found a completely different culture here in the UK, there is so much demand for tech workers, combined with a much better approach towards companies investing in tech - it feels like the worker has that much power, if I'm not happy I can just go get a job somewhere else, probably within a week of quitting. It's a very different dynamic when compared to Portugal: Jobs are scarce and the pay isn't great. Tech is non-innovation driven, you're not there to think about the future, just to fix present issues that are very specific to some random company.

I don't miss Portugal at all when it comes to work.

[mattmanser]

And the same thing happens here in the UK.

Have you worked for a business in a town, rather than one of the big cities? Or even a lot of the cities.

It's the same everywhere. Most of our businesses are terrible at using tech, view IT as a cost that's to be cut wherever possible and are completely inept.

I helped my last girlfriend automate her excel spreadsheet based job. It basically got rid of weeks or even months of work she was going to have to do manually moving numbers from some CSVs into spreadsheets. The company had something like 10 people doing the same job.

It took me about 2 hours to write that macro. This was a major garden centre chain in the UK, with hundreds of stores, completely clueless about how much money they were wasting on pointless staff busy work.

[brmgb]

> The UK has notoriously low productivity compared to Europe and the US, and longer average work hours than the rest of Europe.

You should be very wary of productivity statistics coming from Europe.

I have worked most of the past decade in France. Like most highly educated employee in France, my contract is in days and not in hours. Officialy and legally, I have no set hours but for accounting purpose I have always officialy worked 37.5 hours a week. In reality, I have never worked less than 42.5 hours and weeks above 45 hours are both common and expected.

This is the norm not the exception.

[vidarh]

People in the UK "officially and legally" have much the same situation, and in reality most people still work longer than the officially stated hours.

Most of the numbers I can find for Europe is from surveys of employees, not gathered from data on labour contracts.

E.g. pretty much all of the EU numbers draws on the European Union Labour Force Survey (EU-LFS)

[brmgb]

> Most of the numbers I can find for Europe is from surveys of employees, not gathered from data on labour contracts.

Then you are looking at it extremely poorly without obnoxious quotes.

Most of the official stastics on productivity like the one published by Eurostat are derived from the total amount of hours worked which is estimated based on contracts.

[vidarh]

EU-LFS, which I referenced, is published by Eurostat, is a core part of the official Eurostat data, and is survey-based, not derived from estimates of contracts.

Here is Eurostat's EU-LFS data browser for "hours worked per week of full time employment":

https://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/databrowser/view/tps00071/defa...

You can find the actual questionnaires used for carrying out these surveys here:

https://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/statistics-explained/index.php...

You'll note they include asking for the same information (estimates of hours worked) several different ways (with and without overtime, and asking separately for the overtime) and that they include instructions to the interviewer for confirming that the result is internally consistent.

EU-LFS is the main source of data on those aspects for the EU. Measuring overall productivity then comes from matching economic indicators up against hours worked.

[mattmanser]

You're just making stuff up, here's a study that contradicts you directly:

https://www.employment-studies.co.uk/system/files/resources/...

See page 14 of the executive study:

- However, simple international comparisons can be misleading. In particular, the UK position (mid-range) is distorted by the fact that, compared with most other EU states, the UK employs a high proportion of part-time women workers (working fewer than 30 hours a week).

- Amongst full-time employees, the UK shows high levels of long hours working (over 48 hours a week), especially amongst men where the UK has the highest level of long hours working in the EU. Just over one-fifth (22 per cent) of UK men working full-time work long hours compared with an average of one tenth (11 per cent) across the other EU member states.

- Full-time male managers work the longest hours in the UK and across the EU member states as a whole. However, (on average) UK managers do not work longer hours than their EU counterparts

[arcturus17]

To clarify, I said I lived in the UK just to lay out my bio, but didn't want to imply that everything is dandy there.

When I was there I lived in London, but occasionally travelled to an office in Peterborough. I therefore saw two worlds, one where opportunity abounds and another which was, in all honesty, pretty grim. I loved the people there to bits but their degree of dejection was very much comparable to what you see in Spain, if not worse in some regards (as many lacked, in my observation, the strong familial ties that support Spanish society).

I will say however that despite this very poor outlook for some regions in the UK, even in the worst of cases many British people seem to hold on to a certain optimistic national outlook and to an entrepreneurial or "trading spirit" that is much more rare in Spain. The culture, laws and economic structures seem to still support this, for example the conditions for sole traders are infinitely better in the UK than they are in Spain.

But otherwise yes, I know from both personal experience and from studies I've read through the years that the situation is far from utopian.

[vidarh]

Indeed, this from Eurostat includes Portugal and Spain, both of which have lower average working hours than the UK.

https://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/web/products-eurostat-news/-/D...

[Arete314159]

I'm part Spanish, grew up mostly in the US, but often have to engage with Spain in order to do paperwork.

Does anyone who's lived there for a while have any insight on why tasks that I could accomplish in the US in 12 weeks take like 5 years in Spain?

Why is every form and document and signature and approval process seemingly arbitrary? Why is the person you need for the next step always on vacation?

Is there some kind of a system where 5 people are drawing a salary for a job that 1 person could do, so they all mutually agree to do it as slowly as possible?

I just don't get it.

[brnt]

If you hold the US as a paragon of administrative velocity, you haven't completed your tour of countries my friend.

As a Dutchman, who is by no means a fan of the country, can only tremble in horror whenever paperwork abroad had/has to be done. There may be a difference between Spain and the US, it's insignificant between the NL and the rest.

Well, I hear good things about Scandinavian countries too. I haven't had the opportunity yet to work/live there, hope to get around to it though!

[thefz]

> To be clear, I don't believe this is inherently Spanish, due to our genes, the climate, or our love for fiesta: similar phenomena could be observed locally in the US or Northern Europe.

It is more or less the same here in Italy. Jobs are so scarce that one has to be grateful for anything better than straight unemployment thus enabling a whole ecosystem of low pay, asshole bosses and coworkers, and toxic work attitude all around.

[doublejay1999]

Imagine a culture that does not fetishize work!

[sbacic]

I don't think this issue is specific to Spain - judging by the rest of the comments and my own personal experience (Croatia) this problem seems endemic to much of southern Europe.

I suspect at least part of the issue is due to climate. I wonder if there is a similar trend in the US?

[arcturus17]

I've thought about this and discussed it a few times with friends, but every conclusion I've ever reached seems quite unscientific, so I've never held on to any of it.

There are quite a few counterexamples of thriving economies with warm climates: California, Miami, Texas, Singapore off the top of my mind. Historically, the Greeks and Romans achieved splendor in the classical era in Southern Europe. In the modern era, the Ottomans and some Italic kingdoms did as well. Spain and Portugal most certainly did as well, but maybe these are all too similar to oil-rich countries nowadays in that they held quasi-monopolies over valuable resources of their time, so I'm not sure they would qualify as much as the others.

Conversely, there are quite a few examples of really bad economies in cold climates.

There may be some correlation between climate and the odds of success of a nation or region, but I believe the counter-examples prove there is no definite causation. It's too easy to fall into the fatalistic idea of "we're fucked because it's warm and cozy here" but I will refuse to accept that until I see unequivocal scientific evidence to back it up.

[grillvogel]

i used to work at an IBM office in the southwest. at the time we were considered lazy and laid back compared to the old school IBM offices back on the east coast

[mschuster91]

> and employees are demotivated and must therefore look to anything but work for fulfillment

It is a sad state of affairs that people are looking for "fulfillment" in work at all. Why are we still forced to work 40 hours a week or more to barely survive?

[arcturus17]

Note how I never said that work should be your main source of fulfillment.

But yes, I whole-heartedly believe that people should derive some meaning out of work, as they devote ~40 of their waking hours to that activity, and it can be a cornerstone of a person's identity. And meaning can take many forms: that you're doing something for yourself, for your family, for your community or your nation, that you intrinsically enjoy the task at hand, or a combination thereof.

This is a common characteristic of thriving nations I've observed in my travels and readings, and conversely, I think that nations that do not have this trait are bound to decline or even crash.

Note how I also do not entirely blame Spaniards for a problem that is clearly systemic; on the other hand, I do believe that we as individual citizens should remain strong in the face of adversity, and not succumb to providential fatalism, as this will also inevitably lead to national misery.

[sverhagen]

People should make living wages, without forced overwork, burnout, and other sorts of abuse. But if I get fulfillment out of my work, could I please? It's not for everyone, but for me it's everything.

[fidelramos]

We don't need to work 40 hours a week to "barely survive", these 40 hours give people a standard of living that was unthinkable centuries ago. If you accept the lower standards of living of the past you can work much fewer hours. On the other hand if you want modern housing, electricity, water, gas, Internet, a modern house, a car, a smartphone, a computer, fridge, freezer, washing machine, dishwasher, etc., then of course you need to work to afford them.

[astrange]

Well, you don't want to design work to be anti-fulfilling, do you? I suppose it's OK if it's neutral.