Silicon Valley working hours in Italy erode Europe’s quality of life advantage

European leaders often like to claim that the continent’s better quality of life, with civilised working hours, time for family, and even the occasional long lunch, will help it attract exhausted US, Chinese or Indian researchers and tech workers. 

The European Commission explicitly trumpets Europe’s “excellent working conditions” in its Choose Europe package of measures to lure disaffected talent. 

But in Italy, synonymous with the good life, Silicon Valley’s culture of punishingly long workdays is the norm, calling into question Europe’s supposed quality of life advantage, according to a new report that looks at Milan’s attempt to attract artificial intelligence experts. 

Of course, conditions in the private tech sector may be tougher than in universities. But still, AI workers who moved to Milan hoping for a better quality of life were universally disappointed, said Siddhi Pal, who researches AI and labour markets for the Berlin-based tech policy think tank Interface. 

The promise of the good life “is why people choose the location even for lower pay, but the tech work culture is fairly similar across different AI hubs,” said Pal, after interviewing a number of AI immigrants to Milan.

In the report, anonymous AI experts who moved to Milan complain of having to stay in the office until 9pm. “If you have family, it's really hard to live this life; or in general, if you don't want to be exploited,” one said. 

“Professionals work until 9pm in a country built on work-life balance, with the city becoming what many try to escape when choosing Italy,” the report, La Dolce Vita Paradox: How Italy's Sweet Life Both Attracts and Loses AI Talent, concludes.

This hits women in the AI industry particularly hard. There is a classic “leaky pipeline” in Milan’s AI sector, with women making up 35.4% of entry-level jobs, but just 14.2% of senior executives. 

This is “driven by unequal pay, limited contractual stability and uncompromising work-life balance challenges that particularly affect women with caregiving responsibilities,” the report says. 

Interviewees complained of the Milan AI scene as being an “Italian boys club,” said Catherine Schneider, the report’s co-author and a senior policy researcher for AI at Interface.

“There's a preference in a lot of management, even at these big multinational companies, for hiring Italian or to have people that don't have responsibilities outside of work, that can stay until 9 or 10pm,” she said. 

Italy’s AI workforce is 87.9% domestic, and it struggles to attract talent due to “low salaries, language barriers and limited career progression for non-Italians,” the report says. Generous tax breaks for returnees have succeeded in luring tens of thousands of Italians back home, but the current government has watered down these benefits. 

The Finnish Dolce Vita

But in Helsinki, another mid-level AI hub that Interface analysed, AI experts did indeed enjoy the fabled European quality of life, due to strict worker protections, the right to work from home and parental leave policies, said Schneider. 

“A lot of people [said] a really good part of working in Helsinki was that quality of life was so protected,” she said. Finland is consistently ranked as the happiest country on earth, although this sometimes provokes wry scepticism among Finns themselves. 

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Finland’s strong worker protections also mean that women don’t drop out of the AI industry nearly as much as in Milan. Nearly 40% of the country’s AI workforce is female, Interface found. 

However, Finland hasn’t been universally successful in building an AI ecosystem, the Interface report argues. Specifically, despite the presence of the Lumi supercomputer, which from 2022 to 2024 was the fastest in Europe, it still has a “modest” talent pool compared to France and Germany, with around 25,000 AI professionals. 

The broader point for EU policymakers, Interface says, is that simply placing AI-focused supercomputers in a country is not enough on its own to draw in talent. For a start, many researchers and start-ups access these resources remotely, meaning they don’t cluster physically around supercomputers. 

“Infrastructure as a talent attraction policy, without doing anything else, seems incomplete,” said Pal. 

Indian talent

The other key trend that emerges from Interface’s reports is that the US and Europe are now competing largely for Indian rather than Chinese talent. 

More than 500 Indian AI experts are now based in Finland, more than any other sending country. Other statistics compiled by Interface in 2024 show that for the US, Germany, the UK and Ireland, India is by far the most important source of talent. Switzerland and France are the exceptions, tending instead to draw people from the US and other European countries. 

“India is rapidly emerging as a primary source of AI talent for European countries and globally,” Interface concludes in the report Where is Europe's AI workforce coming from?

With the US announcing in September 2025 a $100,000 fee for H-1B visas for skilled workers, Europe has a golden opportunity to attract tech workers, including from India, Pal said.