A layoff fundamentally changed how I perceive work

I was thinking that it seems strange to fire a 10x dev that has regular one-on-one meetings with a VP. OP could have contacted said VP and outlined that he was worth keeping, until I got to this line :

>the law enforces a social scoring system to determine who is affected, prioritizing the protection of the most vulnerable employees

This is the reason OP got laid off, if all he says about his high performance is true. The good old positive discrimination making unintended victims. Germany just lost a 10x dev's productivity for this.

While I agree with the spirit of the law and don't have the details of this case, it is quite the sad situation for everyone involved.

At no point does the law force a company to fire a high performer. The company can literally just fire one fewer person - if the employee really is 10x and if the company has its shit together, that's what would happen.

Let us face it, the European welfare model is a blind alley. No one in the world is going to copy this from us again, now that it is clear that it makes us

a) uncompetitive - taxes too high, too much protection for people who might not merit it;

b) less likely to start new businesses - in theory, you can have a great welfare system and a great atmosphere for enterpreneurship, but in practice, the former will usually stifle the latter, as the "eat the rich" types will dominate the discourse;

c) extremely vulnerable to the aging problem. Too many pensioners, not enough kids, not enough highly qualified migrants who have zero reason to subject themselves to lower compensation, higher taxation and, on the top of all, interaction with bureacracy that insists on the local language. OTOH hardly literate people from Afghanistan or Niger don't mind any of that; the German / Dutch / Swedish welfare system will take care of them even if they do nothing and/or immerse themselves in the black market.

IDK how to get out of this pickle, the local population is addicted to high welfare spending and other onerous protections like to crack and won't vote against it, even though it is becoming clear that as we fall more and more behind the US, we won't be able to afford a system like that.

Robust welfare states can be only carried by robust economies and a lot of young workers. Those conditions existed in the 1960s or 1970s, and our current systems are downstream from that, but the foundation is eroding with every passing year.

The final collapse will be pretty ugly, something like Argentina, but full of 70 y.o. paupers. Weaker spots in the EU already have a huge problem providing healthcare to the elderly, or even anyone. On paper, it is an universal right, but in reality, there simply aren't enough doctors to carry this obligation out.

The Czech Republic is somewhere in the middle, nowhere near as bad as rural Bulgaria, but try finding a dentist who accepts insurance patients outside the major cities like Brno and Prague. That will be an exercise in the impossible.

I had to look this up, and the law states that the Sozialauswahl (social selection) only applies to employees who have the same qualifcations, rank etc. The law applies when the company is doing across-the-board layoffs (e.g. because they have become unprofitable).

It says that employees who have been longer at the firm, have disability, need to support family etc. should be let go last, compared to employees who have the same qualifcations, rank etc. So, in theory, what you're saying is wrong – the company would not lose their "10x devs" (whatever that means) because of this law.

Also, OP mentions the law, but does not say that he was affected by it.

What does "European welfare model" even mean? Europe consists of many countries, and different countries have significantly different welfare models.

Many EU countries have enough wealth, the problem is that it is unevenly distributed.

Not sure why you are being downvoted. I live in welfare mecca with the worlds highest tax pressure and heqlthcare is breaking under the load.

Staff is overworked and underpayed, waiy lines for crucial procedures can count to decades.

The workforce is aging because young people have stoped reproducing and fear of losing welfare money and the sight of brown faces prevents authoritiesfrom importing competent foreign non eutopean workforce.

This will collapse. There is no doubt this is not sustainable.

This is not an uneven distribution of wealth. Its a monster system that costs more than the national GDP can reasonably sustain in the long term.

Now I am no proponent of privatized healthcare, the current system does not work though.

Everyone suffers like this.

Note: My employer provides private healthcare insueance for us. I live in the richest part if the world. The Nordics. My private insurances gets me same day medical appointments.

The poor sods that cannot afford it have to wait weeks.

Tell me how this is fair and how wonderful the nordic welfare is??

Its americanized and terrible for almost twice the price

"Europe consists of many countries, and different countries have significantly different welfare models."

In general, single payer healthcare + pay-as-you-go pension systems + relatively comfortable welfare systems + high taxation and regulation to support those systems.

Yes, there are meaningful differences across the continent. But visible outliers are scarce. One of the really nasty consequences is underfunded defense, which caught up with us once Russia started acting on its imperial dreams.

"Many EU countries have enough wealth, the problem is that it is unevenly distributed."

A typical EU government spends about 40 per cent of the GDP, with the heaviest part of the spending being pensions. The worst outlier, France, around 55 per cent. If this is not enough, it will never be enough, short of mass expropriations.

We already have a massive brain drain to the US. More punitive taxation = more brain drain.

My experience is that many liberal Americans tend to admire European welfare systems as a counterpoint to the more cut-throat US systems, and really, really don't want to discuss the downsides.

People need to dream, I guess.

The US is a terrible place to live in if you are poor. But for a typical Hacker News denizen, moving anywhere to the high-taxation domiciles of Europe would mean a major loss of income and worsening of many services.

It makes sense to me that a big portion of government spending goes towards social welfare and healthcare – at the end, that's one of the most important things.

I agree that defense was underfunded in many EU countries. But hindsight is 20-20. If you remember the 2000s, everybody was optimistic about eternal peace in Europe, and global trade without tariffs was at its heights. The lower investment into defense came not at the cost of higher social welfare.

The gap between poor and rich is still increasing, and we need ways to address that.

He is probably getting downvoted by Americans who want to implement the same failing policies in the US.

> But for a typical Hacker News denizen, moving anywhere to the high-taxation domiciles of Europe would mean a major loss of income and worsening of many services.

What's a "typical Hacker News denizen"? Not everyone is driven solely by monetary concerns. I visited the US in autumn, had a good time, but would I live there? No. I think "many services" are actually better in many parts of Europe (such as public transport).

Others may see it differently and that's fine, but please let's not act like the US isn't crumbling under a weight of 100 problems at least just as much as Europe.

…and a major reduction in services.

I live half the year in big cities in the US and half the year in Berlin, capital of the largest economy in the EU.

It’s crazy to me to hear how US people idealize the situation in Europe, or how Europeans talk about the US system. Each has pros and cons but neither can ignore economic reality. Single payer doesn’t mean that money isn’t flowing and negotiations don’t happen. No government can repeal supply and demand without enslaving doctors.

"The gap between poor and rich is still increasing, and we need ways to address that."

Do we? For what?

We already have a serious problem in Europe that we totally missed the IT revolution. In the list of the biggest corporations in the world, US tech giants dominate. The first European entry is Louis Vuitton, a producer of luxury handbags.

Either we are going to have a robust economy that can support the levels of taxation which carry the welfare state, but that means that someone is inevitably going to become very rich. If someone succeeds in building European Amazon, they will be in the same category of rich as Jeff Bezos.

Or we will still have our legacy giants like Louis Vuitton and a more equitable distributon of poverty. But hey, no new digital parvenus up there.

You are concerned about the gap between the rich and the poor. What about the gap between the US and the EU economy? That is growing pretty fast.

Already we are small brothers to the big brother overseas. 20 or 30 more years of our current stagnation and we will be global nobodies; no one will bother to implement our strict regulations to gain access to our markets.

Or by Europeans that don't care for the 1000th clichéd "EU bad, America good" debate which invariably attracts low-quality comment as is immediately evident.

The comment starts with "let's face it", as if what it was claiming was a self-evident truth. It's not, and writing posts like that isn't really engendering productive debate.

A typical Hacker News denizen is someone within the US IT industry. Yeah, there are outliers again, but that is the core demographics here.

The US is pretty big. Personally, I would avoid a lot of places, but, for example, the mix of American and Cuban culture in Florida is really refreshing to me.

Public transport is one of the few things in which the US is definitely behind the times. Not just behind Europe, but behind everyone-but-Africa. For example, the new Chinese-built metro in Dhaka, Bangladesh, is nice, safe and clean. IDK what is wrong with the Americans in this regard...

That said, read the Draghi report. There is absolutely no doubt that Europe needs massive reforms unless it wants to become irrelevant, but there is a lot of doubt if the political will is here.

By far the most important voting bloc are the pensioners, and they don't want any disturbances to the system that served their generation well.

OP didn't got it right. It only applies for those with the same qualifications (i.e. given two 10x devs, the most vulnerable one is kept) so the company gets to keep a 10x dev. He's just externalising his problems to the easiest target (ie. vulnerable people). His own situation is partially his fault and he admits as much when he describes a list of what he would have done differently.

People expect things to always work the same way and they get upset when they don't.

> A typical Hacker News denizen is someone within the US IT industry.

You'd be surprised.

I never said that the EU isn't in need of a reform, just that I wouldn't trade the American problems (opiod crisis, mostly non-walkable cities, gated communities, lack of public transport, lack of architecture older than a couple of hundred years, lack of proximity to other major linguistic centres except Mexico, insane tipping culture, rampant poverty, and let's not talk about the political system, ...) for the ones we have. Others may think differently, that's fine.

The Slovak government literally wants to try slavery light for doctors.

They passed a bill that makes it a crime for doctors to "avoid work" in some conditions, and these conditions aren't just natural catastrophes etc., but any "emergency due to deficiencies of healthcare" that the government declares at will.

https://minutovezpravy.cz/clanek/slovensko-chce-prinutit-lek...

That made a lot of news. It is every bit as bad as it sounds.

Slovakia under its current government is literally the second-most anti-EU country of the EU (after Hungary - though maybe Austria will soon follow suit), so I'm not sure if that illustrates your point well.

> heqlthcare is breaking under the load.

I live in a part of the US with high average incomes and an absolutely excellent hospital system.

And it's breaking, too. If you go to the ER and you're not literally bleeding to death, it will be a 5 or 10 hour wait. I saw someone wait over 3 hours with a visibly and severely dislocated bone.

Non-emergency visits for anything more complicated than "put some ice on it and take some NSAIDs" can easily approach $1,000, and a routine childbirth is up to over $50,000, I think?

Departments are horribly understaffed, the administration pays themselves buckets of money and manages things from 30,000 feet with Excel, and at one point they employed 50 programmers to deal with constantly shifting medical coding rules for dozens of insurance companies.

Insurance for a family often runs $1,000 to $1,500 per month for the employee part, with the employer spending plenty more. And everything about insurance is a corrupt nightmare.

It all barely holds together somehow, at one of the highest costs in the world. And when our local system eventually gets around to it, they provide excellent care—but nothing dramatically better than a private hospital in Paris, and at a much higher price.

They aren't doing this because they disagree with the EU-wide consensus on general welfare / healthcare policies, though. Fico isn't Javier Milei, he is a pro-Russian populist social democrat, precisely the type of politican that promises unrealistic levels of welfare for a relatively poor state.

As it happens, almost everyone in the EU is trying to support unrealistic levels of welfare relative to their economy, but of course the weaker countries like Slovakia will feel the bite of reality first, while the richest part of the continent can continue kicking the can down the road for a decade or so if they really wish to close their eyes.

Though lately, the Germans are starting to have some really somber conversations. A sick man of Europe all again, and dragging down 10 other economically-intertwined countries with it.

It is hard to deny that the EU has had a long period of stagnation and its economic power relative to other parts of the world has been rapidly shrinking.

It is hard to deny that we have a serious brain drain and a serious investition drain, too. European money regularly looks for investments in the US, to the tune of billions. The other way round? Not so much.

But people really don't want to admit that our welfare/bureaucratic systems can't be sustained with aging populations and stagnant economies.

> Do we? For what?

Because when the gap gets too large, you get an oligarchy. Like here in the US. And I don't think you want a homegrown Elon Musk to run your country.

Also it makes the economy a sham held up by billionaires. I literally cannot start a company here in the US because even my engineering salary is not enough to bootstrap a company without licking VC boots. I'm currently looking to instead get a visa in another country for starting up a business.

Yeah the system doesn't work. Nothing has convinced me more of that fact than living in Germany has. If your system only works for a single generation in which you have an unusually large working population and relatively few children and relatively few old people, then your system doesn't work. The German system never worked, it was always just running on borrowed time.

On a global markets, there always will be huge corporations, and nowadays they usually grow huge because they provide some useful or at least highly sought-after services. And their owners are certain to become rich.

You can drive them out of your particular tax domicile, but you won't squash them globally, and the result will be that you will be dependent on them anyway. As Europeans, we have to deal with Musk from a position of weakness. European Musk would be easier to control than American one, but hey, we did our best to redirect all the future Musks, European or South African, to the US...

"I literally cannot start a company here in the US because even my engineering salary is not enough to bootstrap a company without licking VC boots."

You have to realize that a lot depends on your level of ambition. You can start a small local company anytime, tech or non-tech, plenty of people do that every day, but your market reach will be naturally limited to one city or so.

But if you want to start a globally relevant technological startup, hey, that was NEVER in the power of a random median engineer. At least you now have options, including those VCs. There aren't any such options in other places.

Please pick any semi-advanced economy other than USA when talking about healthcare. USA is well known for its corrupt healthcare system. You are picking the worst of the worst as an example.

When you start mentioning aging populations you trip over a fact that is nothing to do with our model. Short of tossing our aging population out onto the street we cannot do much more than increase immigration - something those old people don't like.

So this could be a debate about something completely other than the social model and it's so complicated that it's hard to have any sensible argument about it.

Pay-as-you-go pension system is even worse equipped to deal with the aging situation than others.

The European social democratic model introduced after war relied a lot on having a lot of working age people supporting relatively small cohorts of the elderly. It was a working assumption - before birth control, few could imagine how deeply would fertility collapse.

The German chancellor Adenauer assured the Bundestag that "Leute haben Kinder immer" = people will always have children.

No, not always, no.

A mix of capitalism, socialism and communism is the key, they complement and balance each other

Trying to ostracize one model to favor the other is the recipe for a collapse

Perhaps that's what the USA is, a disposable Empire

I'm not sure what you're expecting demography-wise : would you rather have this, an unsustainable population growth or an average lifespan of 40 years ?

But also, yes, in the "West" we've been living way above our means for almost a century now, and the chickens are starting to come home to roost.

The system that Bismarck established in the 19th century "only works for a single generation" - sure.

They're picking the US as an example because the person who started this discussion was saying that the European model is in their view unsustainable. It's possible that that person wants to change Europe into Singapore or something, but given this site, I consider it much more likely that they meant "unsustainable compared to the US".

Back when the life expectancy at birth was forty you mean? And the system has expanded greatly since then. Handouts for almost everyone except normal workers who pay the highest taxes on labour in the world after Belgium. And yes the system has stopped working now the population has stopped growing. Germany as an antiquated boomerocracy is unrivalled as far as I am aware.

Life expectancy at birth is irrelevant, people who die in infancy don't consume many resources at all. What matters is the percentage of the population that's of working age, and here Germany is fairly typical for a developed country.

> Though lately, the Germans are starting to have some really somber conversations.

Yeah, and Elon Musk is stoking Alternative für Deutschland. Not sure what's going to come out of it but it doesn't look too good for Germany either.

It matters in combination with the tax rate on the working population. There are huge transfers of wealth ongoing from the working class to the retired class of people, who are the richest generation in history. People need to wake up and protect their class interests an stop arguing for this German Ponzi scheme.