Yeah, the US viewpoint versus the European viewpoint might be the sticking point between our opinions on this... in the 6 years I've been at my US company, I've gone through 3 or 4 major restructures where hundreds or thousands of people have been let go... and the workloads of all those people is constantly dumped on the people who remain.
The culture says that they respect work-life balance, but then managers are constantly pushing deadlines that can only be achieved by working way more than 40 hours a week. All the managers I know are in meetings all day, then go home, spend time with their families and then spend another couple of hours replying to all the emails they couldn't respond to during the day. My manager is awesome, but is constantly, constantly a bottleneck because their workload is way too much.
I genuinely know people that don't go for managerial positions because they don't want to work all those extra hours for not much of a pay bump.
My wife often worked 16 hour days maybe a third of the time.
I think American companies often demand long, long hours. China does as well... I'm not sure if you've heard of 996 (a thing US companies want to adopt) where lots of Chinese companies expect their employees to work from 9am to 9pm 6 days a week. I've heard South Korea is similar.
In Australia I've worked for lots of different companies, and some government agencies, and in some places everyone is out the door at 5pm, and others there's still lots of people around at 8pm. I do wonder if your harsh view of your peers is because you started your career in Australia and have imported your work ethic to Finland?
The company I worked for had people on both sides. Americans came and went frequently and likely had an average tenure under two years. Europeans were more around the 6-12 year average.
This sounds like something that Trump would push for, whilst the rest of the world is looking at 4-day weeks.
I don't think so. Most of my professional life has been here in Finland and I used to have less of a work ethic. I think the difference might be that coming to Finland where things are harder in many ways and I started a business, I know what it is to have to work hard in order to survive, with no safety net. I had to grow up and what I found was, I am a better, more rounded person for it - not just with work.
If Trump keeps devastating the US economy and unemployment skyrockets, 996 could very well become the norm.
Honestly dude, I can't imagine starting a business in another country. I was never allowed to start one in the US because of my visa, and it made things hard because for the first few years we were paid less because we were visa-holders, but I'm glad I didn't have to navigate the US federal and state tax codes for businesses, healthcare, etc.
Obviously I haven't shared your experiences, but you don't seem to respect workers in Finland, especially younger ones, I imagine there has to be some level of resentment there since you literally had to work really hard to survive, and they just... don't.