I always take minor issue with this.

I feel like one uberhard worker has an unhealthy return. But a group of uberhard workers have a healthy return - they compound each others hard work and build a prosperous _environment_.

My wife and I work very hard, as do our colleagues. But together we've built a pretty healthy routine, home, and (for now at least) financial situation. This has enabled us to have kids more easily than most, travel, etc.

The hardest workers /busiest folks I know are farmfolk relatives, and they also have a level of social connection and family connection that I envy all the time. It's mostly from them showing up to help with _everything_.

handwork != hardwork ;)

I'm from Poland, but I worked in multinational place in Europe and I would rank polish people on average in the middle of pack in terms of working ethic.

Behind Germans, or Scandinavians, but ahead of most Mediteraneans.

I'm Polish, working for globally remote companies. I second the communication issue. Most Polish devs are so ashamed of their english(even if it's perfectly communicative) that it makes it hard to discuss technical ideas with them. As for technical knowledge, I guess that's cognitive bias, most Polish devs I met were far better at tech stuff than most f.e. Germans I worked with.

Looking at other comments it seems like your experience is less representative.

12% for software development, 8.5% for design/management. The caveat being, you can't deduct anything from tax, only VAT(under some assumptions). If you have actual expenses it's 12/32% progressive or 19% linear tax. Of course all of those are assuming you own a one man company and work B2B. Most devs here do. Otherwise regular contract of employment is progressive 12/32% tax, plus Healthcare and employer payments. Much less beneficial to both sides hence why it's not preferred by most.

15%? With some legal footwork you can get to 10 or 5%, depending if you count general medical I surance as a tax or not.

This misses the obligatory health tax and pension fund contributions.

The pension fund is usually not considered a tax formally, but most people I know assume with our demographics and pension system we are just paying for current retirees (and our 'savings' will be impacted by inflation when it becomes impossible to maintain), so practically it's a tax.

Than there is 23% VAT (ofc much less than 23% because both the IT company and the contractor pass it to client and subtract some cost; so only a piece of it affects the contractor; it's a convoluted thing and I don't really know if I should treat it as ~22.9% or 2.3% tax on a contractor and it's client).

Poland was sort of occupied until 1989

Most educated and motivated Polish people were slaughtered by Germans and Russians in WW II then ones still alive working for or heavily oppressed by puppet soviet state.

One of the examples:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Katyn_massacre

Honestly, a lot of issues was that we needed to build up the necessary infrastructure in the first place.

And the transformation to market economy involved at least two periods of suicidal decisions in name of ideology that regressed the economy (by the same person, even)

We were. And “hard workers” is code for “easily exploited.”

Anyway the trick to explosive growth as a country is who you trade with and how you count things. We now sell things to Germany instead of USSR, of course there’s “growth.” There’s also some very real growth, quite a bit of it - but I wouldn’t put one bit of care in a “top 20 biggest economies” ranking. NL is one of the biggest food exporters in the world because it sells mediocre tomatoes to Germany instead of selling rice to Brazil and food exports are counted in euros, not calories.

Yes, but being occupied by Russia has not traditionally been a motor for growth

Motivation requires incentive. Probably hard to do when you're a communist bureaucrat offering an extra potato.