Same in Germany, Austria and Belgium. Everyone I know there in a medium to large company has been called back into the office. Parent is taking his personal anecdote and extrapolating it to the whole continent for a cheap shot at the US when in my experience the US has so far much better remote and WFH acceptance for skilled professions than Europe due to their stronger tech jobs market where their tech employees have more leverage.
I found the Austrian/German management culture to be far more conservative and attached to measuring productivity by butts-in-seats time or your clocked-in time, than the US management which just looked at your outputs and doesn't care you've only been doing 3 hours of actual work and playing videogames the rest of your day, as long as you delivered what was agreed upon, VS my German manager who gave me a dressing down for seeing me spend "too much time scrolling on HN", despite me shipping everything on time.
Also most EU tech and white collar workers still work 40h/week. Those who work less are a fringe but very loud minority but they're not the norm. Even my friend at BMW Munich has overtime hours in his contract and never does less than 40h/week.
That is the opposite of what I've been hearing in Germany, tbh, although I think my "network" tends towards the small-to-medium rather than medium-to-large.
Even looking briefly at job listings in my area, most places are either fully or partially remote, and even those that are partially remote sometimes have a note saying that they'd accept fully remote candidates if they were good enough.
As to the 40h/week thing, I don't hugely keep track of my colleagues' hours, but my impression is that averaging 40 is the norm, but most places I've worked don't track that explicitly, so working about that or less seems to be the norm. In places where you record explicit overtime hours, I know a couple of people who do more than 40h/week, but they tend to also take extensive holidays off or travel a lot on long weekends. I wouldn't say that's the norm though.
Sure, but US tech TCs reach 800k+ vs 80k+. 10x the difference means the difference between early retirement with your own property and working till you drop without any property of your own potentially.
US tech workers are free to unionize and demand EU levels of PTO but it seems like the absurd levels of TC is a better deal for them.
Not the France I'm living in. For tech jobs remote multiple days a week is the bare minimum, and for non-tech jobs, even old school institutions have optional remote work.
Baring some exceptionally shitty companies where the top management can't figure out computers and think everyone just slacks off the whole day from home, or companies in sensitive sectors ( defense) partial remote work is the norm now.
