Work life balance / London vs New York

“London’s never going to be the centre of anything. People don’t know how to get s— done.” That was the opening gambit of a particularly charmless New Yorker I met at technology event the other evening.

I finished my mandatory glass of warm white wine as fast as I politely could and shook him off. But it was harder to do the same to his remarks.

The individual – who had lived in London – regarded Europeans as lazy. Our ambitions in business are permanently stymied by our obsession with “work-life balance”, he argued.

He was appalled that many people do not answer their work emails over the weekend, or that they think it’s a good thing to escape the office at 6pm each night, whether it is to get home or to the pub.

A straw poll of the other guests suggested that, whilst he may have been alone in his gaucheness, he was not alone in his thinking. Many of them went so far as to admit that they are reluctant to employ Europeans because they assume they will have a poor work ethic, and that when they have to, they are more likely to be sold on Europeans that have an American spouse.

It is true that New Yorkers do things differently. I fall into the camp of people who get separation anxiety when they are away from their mobile phones, but even I baulk at how little regard some Americans have for downtime.

Chosen excerpts by Job Market Monitor. Read the whole story at 

via Work life balance? It’s all the same thing in New York – Telegraph.