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How many hours did you work this week?
If you're reading this, the odds are shockingly good that you're overworked and underpaid, or, at the very least, not compensated for anywhere near the hours you work.
Government statisticians, media reports and popular mythology make much of the fact that American workers are more productive than ever - the last consecutive quarters of l999 recorded a 5% growth in worker productivity. This rise frequently gets cited as a major reason for the country's long, high-tech inspired economic boom.
In the late l990's, according to economist Stephen S. Roach, productivity sped up fastest in the so-called service sector - transportation, public utilities, trade, finance, insurance, real estate, and a broad array of professional and business services. Collectively, this segment of the economy employs 77% of the workforce that isn't in government or on farms. Contrary to myth, Roach says, these people aren't low-paid, unskilled hamburger flippers and chain-store underclass. Nearly half of them are knowledge workers - like many of the people reading this - now the largest occupational category in America. In fact, almost all tech workers, from programmers to administrators to developers, are knowledge workers.
The government maintains that the average work week in the service sector is 32.9 hours; no different than a decade ago, and five hours shorter than in l964.
Roach and other economists have long argued that these figures are absurd. Surveys by the Labor Department and private pollsters suggest that people in knowledge jobs work a good deal longer. That means lots of knowledge workers aren't getting paid for the work they do.
"The dirty little secret of the Information Age," wrote Roach in Monday's New York Times [you have to join, but it's www.nytimes.com] , "is that an increasingly large slice of work goes on outside the official work hours the government recognizes and employers admit to."
Roach has a very powerful point. Laptops, cell phones and beepers, hand-held computing devices, fax machines and wireless technology mean that tech and knowledge workers can now work all the time - in their cars on the way to and from work, in planes on business trips, in their own homes. Tech and service workers are tied to their workplaces, and can hardly ever escape.
Although few companies openly insist on this, workers who want to remain valuable are understandably driven to work through nights and weekends. If they don't, they know their colleagues and co-workers might be. People hard- wired into their work are commonplace in the tech workplace, a particularly challenging environment for obsessive personalities. In fact, new technology has nearly obliterated all of the traditional lines between office and home, work and leisure time. This is a phenomenal boon to employers and companies, who get more work than ever for less cost. In that context, almost all non-entrepeneurial workers in the so-called knowledge workplace are almost surely underpaid.
College students report something of the same phenomenon - technology keeps them studying, socializing, messaging and researching much of the time, much more than is acknowledged by school administrations.
In fact, this round-the-clock work ethic is an integral part of the high-tech economy. Does anyone reading this actually work 33 hours a week? Or even 40?
Postal employees, cops and assembly-line and factory workers can boost their incomes by working overtime. But how can knowledge workers, who are already working most of the time? Workers who think for a living have a hard time boosting their efficiency.
Beyond that, there are numerous social and health implications: fatigue, stress, single-mindedness, and lack of balance and recreation in life.
Perhaps the toughest thing about being a round-the-clock knowledge worker is that you can't even acknowledge it. The rest of the world, including media and government, thinks you've got it made.
Question: How many hours do you work each week? Is it remotely close to what the government says?
3!
I consult and including my travel time I average 65 hours a week. Overworked and underpaid. And Delta has a vendetta against me I think.
Last week I put in 42.5, but only because I was sick Monday. The week before was 57 hours. I'm not looking any further back than that, it's too depressing. I know I was putting in 65+ hours getting ready for Y2K. If I get off on time today (not freaking likely) I'll have 31 hours already this week. What happened to all that leisure time these computer systems were going to make for me?
How many hours did i work this week? :)
Monday was valentine's day... so I've spent more hours having sex than working this week
Current job average: 50 (security/crypto)
10 hrs/week actual work
10 hrs/week meetings
10 hrs/week reading email
20 hrs/week research
Hours varied 30-60/week
Previous job average: 80 (pc games, engines/tools lead)
Hours varied 60-120/week.
Crunch time was hell, stupid companies made this stretch for 2-3 months. Burning people out cheaper than hiring more.
One fun rule - as quality of management decreases, programmers work increases.
Last week I put in 49 hours. (not including the 14 hours I put in yesterday) But on average, I have been working 41.3 hours a week (including vacations). I CERTAINLY do not work 33 hours a week. Maybe if I were a consultant, this would be possible as an average.
who offered less than 50 were lying.
Neal
What about the pimply-faced dude who works at taco bell and then comes home and does something challenging? (coding, art, whatever...)
:(
I mean, why give away your life to The Man?
PS. Why is slashdot so slow during the day? You'd think things would be getting better with VA Linux running the show.
32.9 hours a week, eh? Sure, that's pretty much how many I work, just like the government maintains. I forgot to mention, though, that each of my "hours" is 120 minutes long! Freaking clueless government...I was specifically told by my management that, although my paycheck lists me as working 40 hours, our corporate "culture" expected between 50 and 60. In practice, I work over 70 on a regular basis.
Now information companies are evil, and need to be regulated by the evil government...
You know, Katz is a Communist.
I agree with a lot of this. At my company have spent a lot of my spare time developing my skills and technical knowledge. You would think this would lead to a higher wage or a better deal at the workplace but it seems to have the opposite effect. As I am the only one with knowledge of the systems we use I also have the responsibility for working with them. This means it's me who has to work all night to get something running for the next day. As for the "unskilled hamburger flippers" I sometimes catch last orders at McDonalds at 3am if I am working real late, the guys working there are earning more per hour than I am. Sometimes I think this knowledge is a curse, I wish I could just say "Sorry, no idea how to do that", go home, watch TV or go out for a few beers. I think you can come out on top in the end if you work as a contractor and charge an extortionate hourly rate, but to get that kind of experience the 60 - 80 hour week seems compulsory... Just try to strike a deal where you get compensated for it... Ayjay..
No, the kind of work I do, not in a million years. I work as a Private Investigator/System Admin/Armed personal/etc... I work approx. 90 - 115 hours a week. My boss has been doing it for over 15 years, and puts in 130 hours a week. Now, I know there is going to be eveyone under the sun says that this is BS. Its not. I wish it was, trust me. I rarely get sleep. But, if you want to make the "bucks", you have to put the time in. Life sucks, right ?
In Europe it is ILLEGAL to work more than a certain number of hours. Fortunately Europeans make up for this by working smarter, not harder. dmg
How do you compare contract rates with permanent rates ?
I am an application programmer. I am at work 40 hours a week. Every once in a great while I may stay a little late in case we are installing something I wrote that could mess up the system. It has never happened, but you never know. I don't wear a MF beeper and no one at work has my cell phone number. I don't do hardware or sysadmin type stuff at work (only at home). In this economy there is NO REASON anybody should be working 60 hours a week. Grow a spine, put your foot down. Tell the PHB to get some more help or you will walk. If you do have to quit, it will take about 30 minutes to get a new job and you will probably double your salary!
If I take 10 hours to do something and some one else takes 40 hours to do the same task, then I shouldn't be short changed by my employer because I am more efficent. How many hours you work a week doesn't matter except to the people whose only job is to manage those doing the real work. So businesses, want to save some money? Get rid of those middle management types (who are over paid anyway).
Its how many hours I actually get to sleep. On good nghts its about 5 hours a night. Other than that, every waking moment usually has to deal with work.
At our job site, we were told that "10% overtime was expected in 2000" (i.e. 44 hrs). A co-worker questioned this. Where's our extra 10% pay, if 44 hrs was now considered a base week? A project lead spoke up to say that 44 hrs sounded like a vacation to him and called him a whiner. The company has stated that our bonuses and ratings may be negatively affected by less of an effort. They have even suggested that our jobs may be at stake. I asked what our motivation was to work this extra time. "You like your job, don't you?" was the answer I got.
Of course, there has been nothing in writing about this, but it has been mentioned at our bi-monthly team meetings since November.
What's getting me lately is not just that my employer wants me to work every minute of every waking hour, but that they don't seem to want to give anything back. I would be much more willing to work a 60 hour week if I could get, say, comp time, or another week of vacation during the year. Sorry, but 10 days vacation for 40-80 hours of in-depth image processing just doesn't cut it anymore. I'm on my way out.
What's more is that at my current job there's no profit sharing. If I bust my ass, and the company gets the job done on time, or ahead of time - I still get paid the same. If I write some code that we later sell for millions, I still get my usual salary. I have friends at start-ups who work these hours because they have stock in the company and know that if they make the company a lot of money, it will pay off. I don't have that setup where I work.
-D
It's not going to get any better as long as so
many people (just read the posts) think they
are cool and macho putting in lots of hours.
These are probably the same folks who sneered
at the idea of reading a book (see the review
of "The Pragmatic Programmer". "Just code more,
that's how you get to be a better programmer."
I actually usually escape from the office at the end of the week with only 45-50 hours on the clock.
But on the other hand, the boss is clued, and actually understands how to schedule so that the "crunch" at deadlines is usually only 2-3 days of late nights (every 2-3 months), and almost all of that is spent doing low-stress stuff like polishing documentation and verifying that the tarballs unpack like they're supposed to. I love my job, and I love my work environment.
exactly! If I counted the hours that I spend thinking about work related stuff, its more like 20/day. Sometimes I wake up in the morning and think..."Did I just have a dream about a bug fix?"
Nuts! I already posted on this page. Someone moderate this up!
As a European with experience of working in the US, Netherlands and UK, It strikes me that there is a lot of pressure in the US to appear to be working, even if in fact you have nothing to do. This is less true in the UK, and even less true in the Netherlands.
And yet these countries have similar standards of living, (once the tax differentials are taken into account).
So the question is, why not go work for a European company ? It's very very easy for US citizens to work in the EU. Get an internal transfer, whatever it takes
You will find out that you can get a lot done in 37.5 hours, if that is all the time you have. In many ways this makes Europeans even more hardcore than Americans, since they produce similar levels of productivity, from fewer working hours.
Go figure.
The information posted here is nearly everything we need to figure out why. It clearly states that nearly half of the workers in the service sector are Knowledge Workers. That means that more than half aren't. That other 50+% includes a lot of the jobs that don't pay so well. And one of the dirty little secrets is that employers in market niches with high turnover, low skill, minimum wage jobs like part time employees. They don't have to be given full benefits. That keeps the total cost down.
Yes, when you average the official hours of all the Knowledge Workers with part time, minimum wage service jobs, the average is going to be lower.
Then there is the issue that many of the higher paying jobs are salaried with no paid overtime, or with policies against casual overtime to prevent people from paying for their new TVs by hanging around the office a little later. Overtime that isn't paid is generally poorly counted, especially if you don't ask the people who actually worked it. I am not complaining about these policies. I work for a company with a policy against paying for casual overtime. I still work an extra hour here and there to get things done. Part of being a professional is getting paid for results rather than effort.
I've been working 76 hours a week for the last 2 months to get our project done. Welcome to crunch time children.
Get a life! If you are working 60 hours a more a week then your priorities need reviewed. There is a great big world out there beyond work - visit it once in a while. Work is not life - if it is you will be dead at age 50. I work 35 - 40 hours a week and I bet I make more than most of you. Just remember this - You can be replaced. I am so tired of people actually thinking the company you work for 'cares about you' they care about money.
Two years ago, one of our VP's came down from the tower and gave us a pep talk to motivate us. He said we were falling behind and rather than hire more help, we could solve this problem by "each of us putting in just 2-3 more hours every day." One of the techs spoke up and said that since we were all putting in 10-12 hour days already and since many of us had an hour or more commute, would he be re-defining a day as 26 hours or would he be installing beds and showers in our cubicles? One of the programmers told the VP that this "2-3 hour" thing was exactly what the last VP told us, that's why we're all working 10-12 hours now. The VP got angry and told is if we didn't want to work, he'll find people who do. 3 months later the VP was gone, 2 years later we're all still here. And still putting in 10-12 hour days minimum. At least we get overtime but I'd still like to see my kid when he's awake someday. :(
If that was enforced anywhere I would expect it to be in the Netherlands which in my experience had a healthy approach to the work/life balance. E.g. Work as little as possible.
Isn't a 4-day week the standard there now ?
I work 32.9 hours a day .
Commuting is not part of working. Sure it adds to the time away from home. But it is your choice where you live. Obviously there are grey areas.
This is a hard call and I expect it is for alot of us. In theory I work 37.5 hours a week, in practise it may be alot less or alot more depending on what people perceive my job to be. As a 'technical consultant' working for a reseller, I think my job is to be as technically au fait with technology and what's going on as possible. This means that I spend alot of time surfing, which I kind of enjoy, but I do find out alot which is relevant to my job. A lot of people however might just think that I'm bumming around. On occasion I might pull an eighty hour week but that's kind of unusual these days.
/.ers, I spend alot of my own time playing with the tech as well, building PCs, installing OSs, playing with home networks etc, etc. Unlike alot of /.ers tho', I don't carry pager and I'm not on call....been there, done that, don't want to do that again thank you very much and if you want me to do that, you probably can't afford that anyway.
But I guess like alot of
When my work week is averaged with the typical welfare recipient, 35 hours is about right.
You have no idea how many are in perpetual training programs, and what a farce WelfaretoWork is.
The welfare caseload was halved in my county. Know how they did it? They go rid of the alcoholics, a federally protected disability, and are now on SS Disability. Same with the dopers who drugged their way through high school.
If you only knew who you were working so hard for. Much of this monkey business stems from the federal law stating you can't be forced to work for handouts. Even the Salvation Army can't get around it anymore.
I'm a government contractor. I "work" 40 hours a week. If I work more than that, I get paid for it.
:-)
I say "work" because most of my time in the office is spent surfing the internet. Not because I'm lazy but because in the 8 months I've been here there's been almost no work for me to do. There are various reasons given for this, but it basically boils down to poor management. The only thing that has kept me from going crazy is the fact that they've been sending me to training, which is the only reason I stay. Once the training is over, I'm gone. (Wonder why I'm posting AC?)
I have to say, though, after reading the other comments here, maybe I shouldn't leave. 60 hour weeks don't really appeal to me, & I know my wife wouldn't care for it either (who, btw, is also a knowledge worker. She normally puts in about 35 hours/week, more when there's a deadline). How do people with families do that? My wife & I barely get any time together in the evenings as it is, I can't imagine what it would be like if I were working 10 hour days.
I guess what I need is an IPO so I can go ahead & retire... these days, you don't need an actual company to have one of those, do you?
http://anonymous.coward.com/
Life as a grad student. I can relate. Get paid for the twenty, Work as much as you need to. I'm a ChemE grad student at UMass. Luckily my advisors don't abuse it too much. He figures he'll get the work out of us. No set schedule, but during crunch time(paper submissions, conferences) The work must be done. As a consolation just think of the payday when you get out. Another way to look at it is "if you have a job you love, it's not really a job anymore, just something you do."
If you really make less than some person working minimum wage at McD's you should seriously start thinking of asking for a raise, getting less hours, getting compensation for those extra hours, or getting a new job... If you're valuable to your company they'll wanna keep you happy.
It's very busy today, what with all these 2k bugs.
I'm expecting to work until 1pm. So, yes, I'm overworked, I had to get up at 10am For God's Sake!
Might even have a look at that security issue today.....nah...
If so, I am the biggest Bozo. If you are -really- in love with your work (computing, programming, science, etc.), do it on your own terms for your own profit; at home, somewhere you can make a difference, in your spare time, for the good of humanity. I see too many educated, naive, and stupid people whose ideas, body and health are exploited and used up before they have a chance to mature and make it on their own; by industry, by government. Dumb, dumb, dumb. As I age I look forward to exploiting that naivety and getting very wealthy.
An average work week for me is about 60 hours.
Last week was a 73 hour work week, and I have worked several 100 hour work weeks.
Since December 1, 1999 I have had only one day off: Christmas Day.
I have no life outside work. My marriage is falling apart and I forget what my home looks like. The company doesn't give a shit about us as individuals - all they care about is getting the projects out on time so the managers and execs get their bonuses. I have absolutely no doubt that when I finally get burned out, and my productivity drops off, they'll fire me without hesitation.
Of course, as a salaried employee I get paid the same if I work 40 hours a week or 100 hours per week.
Somebody tell me: Isn't this shit illegal or something ?
Oh yeah, my employers attitude is "If you won't work the hours we want you to, you can find another job". I think I might just go and do that.
As is usual here, the Government is completely out of touch with the real world !
Are you sure you aren't under the government's assumption. You are working two jobs. I wouldn't be surprised if both would be classed as full time. It definitely makes for a busy life for you, but the total would drop back down to a less 'heroic' amount if you didn't run your ISP on the side. Which brings me to my point. People like to brag about how much they work. They get to work easly and leave late (or get to work late and leave later) partly causee it shows they are so important/cool/overworked. They don't mention that in the middle of the day they read a bunch of web sites for an hour, ate lunch (at their desk, but while talking to the guys around them or doing even more surfing), and simply hung out for a while talking about how much they work.
My normal work hours are 37.5 hours a week. My average week is 45 hours, then I can accumulate all extra hours and take few days off then I want too. Or I can get paid overtime and get some extra bucks for the extra work hours. I get paid for every minute I spend at work. poor suckers that need to work overtime unpaid, I would never do that.
Quote: The government maintains that the average work week in the *service sector* is 32.9 hours; no different than a decade ago, and five hours shorter than in l964. That is 32.9 hrs on average for the service sector. The service sector includes the stock boys at the grocery store, the fry guy at Burger King, the theater usher, etc., all of whom work less than 20hrs/wk. If you work 50hrs/wk, great. But some kid at McD's is working 16hrs and balancing you out. Oops, I let facts intrude into the usual corporate and government conspiracy theories, silly me! Does anyone else remember that study published a couple of years ago which said that no matter how many hours people claim to work, they actually spend the same amount of time on work activities? They found that people who are at work for 70hrs/wk spend the same amount of time working as people who are at work 40hrs/wk. I will try to dig it up and post it.
I have been working full time and going to school full time for a lot of years now. That equates to 80 to 100+ hours a week. The ONLY time that I have worked 40 hrs (plus a few extra), was when I worked in a government job at the State Dept. What joke!
I am working enough for two people to have fultime jobs and a little overtime some weeks. I have been averaging close to 80 hours a week since December. For some strange reasone, it no longer bothers me. I work my ass off weekdays, try to not work so much on Saturday, and sleep on sunday. having DSL at home has made it easy for me to work in the dead of night, work when there is 3 feet of snow outside, work on Xmas, and work when I should be sick in bed. Granted I am still planning my vacation for a place where cellphones, pagers dont work.
33 hours a week? I've worked every day since March 24th. Are stock options really worth this?
As a recent college grad, I would like to thank you all for enlightening me on what not to do. Working 70-80hrs a week?! You've got to be joking! I just want to know why you do it? You certainly don't have to, with the current (and for the next 5 years at least) lack of people to fill technology jobs. This workaholic attitude must be a byproduct of working in Silicon Valley. Most of the folks I've talked to working in technology in the midwest report reasonable hours, and actually have lives outside of work. Is staring at a computer screen in a cubicle in the valley that much more rewarding than staring at one elsewhere? Remember, money isn't everything when you are too old, too overworked, and too out of shape to enjoy it.
Well, if this question had been asked a week ago I'd have responded "maybe 3-4 hours per week". That's what happens when you're on a project that has no REAL project management. Of course now we're making up for it by throwing more people at it. Oh yeah, the project is run by an SEI CMM level 2 (yeah right!) organization.
I have no way of knowing whether anyone has already said this 'cause I just don't have the time to read what has already been posted, but... I am a student at a university in the north of England who regularly works 16-18 hours a day on a technology based course for absolutely NO money and am criticised for not supplementing my income with a weekend job. Chance would be a fine thing, after spending six days floating around campus I think I have a right to Sundays off without being stereotyped as a slacker/pissed up sponger.
The surveys these numbers are based on are either
a) establishment surveys (i.e. whatever your boss wants to say) or
b) surveys at people's homes.
Question: how many people who live at work, 60 hours a week, really are home to answer these surveys? Answer: We really don't know. We go back a lot, though.
Question #2: How many of these people would give a government employee the time of day, anyway, just to answer a stupid survey after a 14 hour workday? Answer: Probably not too many (though I have no figures -- you don't answer, we don't know.)
So, if somebody comes to your door, please answer the survey if you care what these government statistics say. I know it's a pain, but it's better than national ignorance. And the Katzes of the world will be pacified.
And then what? Lose your job? My grandfather worked at Kelsey-Hayes. He was there for the start of the UAW. He claimed that the only way it worked was that the union guys let everyone know on Detroit's west side that they would be hurt if they sought to replace a worker fired because of the union. I don't see how programmers, geeks, etc. could effectivly threaten/scare their peers into not becoming a scab. In addition, they staged sit-down strikes. In other words, they went to work and while on the clock, kept machinary from running. Ford couldn't reopen the line without physically removing the workers. If I turned-off a server at one of my customer's locations or disconnected a router, then I don't think it would be long before I was physically forced to fix it or be arrested. Think about it, there are relatively few techies in an office versus lots of factory workers at a factory. It's a different world, a different group of people, and a different situation. My company gets as many good resumes a month as we have tech employees. We all know that we're expendable.
Demand vacation time
That's a sticky issue. The three main companies I work for (about 25-30 hours per week for each), could not continue business if something happened to one of their servers, routers, etc., and I wasn't close by to fix it. I know many of my friends are in the same situation, the companies they work for could not continue to operate without them. So, why would they allow that person to leave town? At the three places I do work, most employees get 4+ weeks of vacation (one is education related, so they get 3!! months off per year). I don't get any time off, because they know if something happened (at one place) they could potentially have 200+ people they were paying that couldn't do work. That's why I haven't been able to take a vacation in almost 6 years. So, from a business perspective, how do you justify allowing people who work on "mission critical" or "business-core" computing (my boss's terms) take vacations? One good friend of mine spends his vacation time (each Friday afternoon for three months) watching TV and taking naps on his couch in his office. I'm not satisfied with that compromise. I'm still looking for an answer.
I work for a large internet company. I am a systems programmer and am forced to work 60 + hrs a week. Management tells me that we have to put in overtime for our bonuses. But here, we all get in at 8 am and go home at 9 pm, sometimes 10 pm. In order for things to run properly, we must put in the extra hours. I get paid 45k a year to do UNIX perl and c++ programming. I feel the burn.
That's not work, that's studying. When I was in grad school, I had 9 credit hours per semester. The semester I was preparing for my qualifying exams, I was either in class (as student or teacher) or studying from 6:30AM-11:00PM with ~1 hour off to eat 6 days a week (ok, maybe I didn't come in til 8 on Saturdays). I once worked it out to over 90 hrs/wk!
I didn't consider that work, though... it was optional education. The part I was paid a stipend for only consumed about 15 hours/week.
My point is that being a student is inherently a different game. There's no way to avoid doing work outside of class and keep good academic standing at the same time. I, however, can leave the office at 5 pm, and not get fired for not taking work home with me.
For this reason, I feel I must add my wisdom to this thread.
The main problem with Linux is that the long-haired left-wing hippie types who support it, are never in the office. When I need them to come and reboot my Exchange server, they are usually nowhere to be found. They are either in the server room playing Quake, or recovering from a late night "hacking" session.
Its true. The pony-tailed bearded Linux "guru" who used to run our sendmail machine until I had him fired used to work very unorthodox hours, and refused to wear a suit and tie, despite it being clearly mandated in the corporate dress code.
My point ? The Linux zealots need to get serious. Cut the hair, wear a suit and tie, and for goodness sake start working the 9-5 style hours that normal human beings work. How can you possibly claim Linux is a serious enterprise operating system if everytime the CIO needs to talk with you, you are either playing Quake, or recovering from working all night.
The point is, you long-haired Linux zealots are not doing a very good job of marketing yourselves.
Fortunately for you, the agency I work at likes the whole "hacker/cracker/phreaker" image, so you have no problems getting work here (provided you sit somewhere visible, where our clients can see you, and infer how "cutting edge" and "Linux savvy" we are). However to work in the corporate sector you need to tidy yourselves up, get a hair cut, lose the visible piercings, buy a nice Armani or Hugo Boss suit or two and then you can sit back and just watch the $$$$s flowing in. If it helps you, think of it as being a bit like one of those "role playing" games you Unix guys are so keen on.
My "open source" advice is free, as usual. Thank you.
dmg
Exactly. I do about 60 hours too, but nobody asked me to. I just love what I do, and I'm working for a startup and want it to succeed. Another guy in the office goes home every day at 4:30, but nobody minds because he works his ass off while he's here. None of us could complain of being underpaid, I don't think. I know I can't.
When I worked at a parcel delivery company, we were strongly encouraged not to LOG more than 40 hours per work week. The actual work week was usually about 55 hours. Of course, this skewed the reports and made it look like their pay was in line with the industry.
And that is exactly the reason that I got my Ph.D. in physics and dropped the field like a bad habit. Of course, during my last couple of years as a grad student, I rarely even put in 40 hrs/wk.
/., worked out, etc. I could check the job each day, look at the output, and leave it alone until the job got done or re-submit to continue running as needed.
My research was mostly doing large 3D simulations. I coded for a while, submitted the job to the supercomputer and went home, read
I just laughed at my fellow experimental physicist friends who had to put in those 12+ hours a day in the lab. BTW, most of those experimentalist friends are still in grad school!
Enough gloating...
I work an average 65 hours per week for a internet startup for $48k/yr and very little stock. It's just expected that you will work 12 hours a day through the work week, and be available saturday and sunday as needed. I would love working normal hours, but the cost of living in yuppieville irvine, ca is out of control. In addition, the best (and almost all) computer jobs are in the most expensive places to live. Is there anywhere on the west coast of the US that is affordable AND has challenging computer jobs?!
Yep! I work for a major electronics firm as an analyst (basically web development)... makes those nifty little dogs.. I'm a salaried employee. That means 45 hours a week required and overtime must be approved. However, if you have a deadline and need to work 80 hours...you WON'T get overtime approved BUT you MUST finish the project, on your own time of course. I've worked on major projects that required 80+ hours weeks for months and even sleeping in the office. Those hours get billed as salary. Only when I was too 'beat down' to do anything else, and a deadline was looming, would a few hours get approved. In addition, like most of you, I work hours and hours every evening keeping up with cutting edge technology and new business opportunities. I don't know how many hours are spent reading programming manuals, industry mags and learning. These skills make me an asset to the company in every regard. Of course, this happens everywhere. I've worked for other fourtune 500's and very few are willing to compensate or even acknowledge that their IT employees are putting a great intellectual effort in staying useful and trying to best obselesence (sP) Too Laz-E to login... Nick : alphageek00 Alphageek00@hotmail.com
Yeah, but you have lovely "coffee houses" and can go down to the district for a little "window shopping". On the down side, do you still have the junkies comming up to you bumming cash and trying to sell you smack? (and don't forget the MF dogshit everywhere) I haven't lived in NL since 1989.
Prior to my current Project Manager job, I was a 90 hour work week nipple-head. Now, with this current job, I have made a very concious decision to NOT do that. If the load warrants, I'll put in 60ish, but I usually make it a point to keep it at 40 even. 32???? only if I take vacation.... just my $.02
...their ass and spin it! EVERYBODY is BEGGING for help. RUN, don't walk out! Double your salary and just laugh at their sorry asses!
I know I work at least four or five hours a day more after I leave the office, and roughly ten more hours during the weekend. None of this is paid, but it's all neccessary. Yeah for the government's stats hardly accounting for IT professionals, and dedicated sys admins.
I'm a sysadmin, and work less than 40 hours a week on average, and always have since I got out of college. For me, work is to allow me to live life, so when I start having to work much more than 40 hours a week, the boss gets pressure to hire more bodies. If it doesn't improve, I'll go elsewhere. Add that to my propensity to automate anything and everything - I'm on call all non-business hours get paged maybe once a month - and I rarely, if ever, find myself hounding the boss. On a good week, 30 hours is all it takes.
The only work ive done at home was burning a slackware cd for my workstation :)
If i wanted to i could stay here till i was done. bu ti dont think anyone expects me to work 24/7 here. but then i think me being the first to show up half the time makes people think i came in earlier.....
BTW WE"RE HIRING! send resumes to sales@angstrommicro.com we're looking for people to design linux servers to customers specs, ues of prebuilt rpms is probly not gonna work. so if you never compiled anything your out of the game...
I usually work 9-5 or something like that (although occassionally that's more like 9-3AM). I have put in a few months of 12 hour days in my time. That's not bad, the thing that gets me is being on call and pagable 24 X 7 pretty much all the time unless I'm on a vacation. I work in the webhosting industry, and interface directly with webhosting customers as a central point of contact. When you have monitoring folks and help desk folks, and customers all able to page you at anytime it can wear on you a bit after a while. Not surprising that the turnover rate in my department is pretty high, but I've been at it for over a year...
My company requires me to fill out a fictitious time sheet of NO MORE THAN 80 hours per 2-week pay period. I frequently exceed this but since I'm salary-exempt I get no compensation. It used to be much worse -- when I worked in server support I typically worked 60 hours a week when on call. Now that I do more programming-development, I just get to turn in 18 hour days every couple of weeks. But the point is, this fictitious time sheet is probably part of the government paperwork that's being used to generate these bogus stats.
What we really need is for the government to null and void the "salary-exempt" category of paid employee, and make all hours PAID FOR. I have always said that if these bastards knew they had to pay twenty or thirty dollars an hour for a 4:00 a.m. trouble call, that entire 24x7 concept would be re-evaluated. As long as it doesn't cost them anything to call us in the middle of the night, the motherfuckers will keep doing it.
All geeks fear bearing a work load disproportionately large relative to their compensation. The long, often uncompensated, hours in the IT sector and the astronomical salaries of entertainers magnify this. Are these indicators that computing technology has pushed the economic system out of a stable state? A really good, short story by C. M. Kornbluth, called "The Marching Morons", deals with an alternative equilibrium for society.
-His boss.
Should have gone for the internet startup. The consultants job is to lie...
I skipped grad school to go into the exciting world of minimum wage, but I did have several roommates who were in grad school in engineering at Clemson. You asked about abuse? I saw quite a bit of research the professors were being payed in grants to do themselves that was actually done by the students. I helped my roomates with quite a few papers that they were working on for a professor and they were not given credit (err helped, as in doing most of the work). I saw my roomates work hard for that ~$200 check per month. I would call it abuse, but almost all of my good friends with PhD's have gone back into academics. They're doing the same now to their students. It seems to be more of a payback system (you pay now by working hard without credit or pay, but you get to do it to others later). Is it abuse or "just the way things work?"
Of course it makes sense --- the people who decide the wages get the most money. How else could it be?
>> I find it bizarre that the government would base statistics on what employers report their professional employees working -- this is a class that doesn't get overtime and thus is generally easy to add "just a little more" work to.
Agreed. But being at the job 8 hours doesn't equate to working 8 hours either. Some employees aren't very productive. I was considering buying the business I previously worked at, but when the average employee is only working 6 hours a day, that's a big problem. I saw an employee who'd spend an hour of his day in IRC with his wife who was on a trip when the boss was gone. Many other cases like that. I got to run the company for 3 months while the boss was stuck across company on a R&D project that was hitting some snags. I wanted the employee issues resolved before I'd buy the company. They weren't, so I left.
/. = 25 - 15 hours/week
Why do I have a T1 at my desk if they don't want me to use it???
I only document about 45-60 hrs a week, thats all I can actually say that I worked for. Paperwork and research is viewed as wasted time by my employer, all they do is bitch about getitng billable time upto 75%. Its pretty typical for the computer service industry. I am SUPPOSED to be the service manager, but I spend 80% of my day doing scheduling, inernal service, and handling phone calls. Employers are just interested in getting every last drop of blood out of an employee, there is no such thing as my time anymore. I am the first person that is called whenever ANYTHING goes wrong. People have their caps lock down, don't enter their username, any problem that arises is always the techs responsibility, common sense and thinking on your own for the average user is out of the question. God forbid that I go on vacation where no one can reach me (go to the mountains, most cell phones don't work well if ya camp out in a valley). I have come to the conclusion that vacations are not worth the hassle. The workload is damn near unbearable if ya leave for more than a weekend...
You must not have experienced the joys of being "On call" have you? I only "want to" work those kinds of hours because I have to keep my job. Try working somewhere where you can be fired for failing to respond to your pager.
This is why we experimentalists make jokes about "The Leisure of the Theory Class"...
I wonder if the people who think this way even realize that they are trading their life for their work.
10 years from now, you probably won't even remember what this project WAS -- but you'll remember all those "holiday" things you didn't do. And the company will thank you for all your insane working hours by shoving your sucked-dry, lifeless husk out the door after you burn out.
But hey, it's your choice.
There are a lot of things to do with your background and approach to work. i.e. classist attitudes.
In my case, I don't believe that I am at the mercy of my employer, it's a two way street. If he/she doesn't like it that way, I walk.
I work about 35 hours a week, but also put in another 10 of "medium to long term" work outside: reading professional journals, relevant lectures and classes, thinking about problems, etc.
That's good for me: forward career progress, and good for my employer: I have more skills.
I have worked 60-70 hour weeks for a company, and been shafted: i.e. because I was a niave young and ambitious engineer, and that _really _ticked me off. Since then, I don't go overboard, and I'm presently thinking about returning to graduate study: lifestyle is everything.
People say 'you have to work long hours or the work doesn't get done, the company will fall apart': well, that's _your_ choice, and you're the one that continues to cause the problem to occur. Put your foot down and management and everything else is forced to adjust. A lot of people are just too scared.
I am also a creative person, and have ideas all over the place, not necessarily in or out of work. I find that I am thinking about problems in strange places (bus stop, train, etc), so work is fairly central to my life.
But if you have options, then aren't you the company?
I'd leave the computer industry too -- the only thing keeping me here is the money. At this point working at Radio Shack sounds very appealing...
I'm pretty sure I'm burned out.
Well if you break it down to all the time I take to answer the cell phone, pager, email, voice mail and snail mail that comes in each day thats nearly 8 hours alone. I'm not too concerned that because I am a "knowledge" worker I have an irregular workweek, I'm concerned that with all of the latest techno-gizmo's that the company gives me I cant find peace and quiet ANYWHERE.
My latest two jobs started out with me working really hard for a couple months cranking out code, :-)
and then coasting while my employer vainly tries to discover bugs
Yes, I'm present at work about 40 hours/week, but half that time is spent reading Slashdot or trying to figure out "Blender".
(Hmm, maybe I should post this one anonymously.)
Dispite this enviroment I only work about 50-60 hours during heavy development phases, and 40 hours during periods of testing and maintenace.
I take 1 1/2 hour lunchs twice a week with friends from other companies, because they are my friends and I like to keep a professional network going.
I think I leave some equity on the table by doing this, but I'm over 40 and have a life.
Yes. On an average good week I work about 60 hours. Bad weeks 80-100. Did I menion I'm on call 24-7 too?
Life as a grad student. Life as a medical/surgical resident.
I'm not sure if the abuse stems from "the way it was, the way it will be" or the economics. All I know is an average week on the wards as a surgical resident with my day starting at 5.30AM and ending at 9-10pm with overnight call every third day plus every third weekend adds up to about 110 hours a week.
Doesn't even take into account the abuse from Attending surgeons, psycho administrators, overworked nurses and deranged/demented patients.
I become so envious of my IT friends with stock options.
I work a 35 hour work week and don't put in the extra 5 after hours normally. I sometime travel so that adds hours. If i elect to stay on the road during a weekend to save them money, i get a day off for that later. Not a bad deal for me or my employer. I get to play tourist on their dime and they save money.
BUT My employer gives me time off for extra time worked. If i need to come in on a weekend, i get that time off when i feel like taking it off as long as that is in the next 6 months. I check my systems quite a bit from home, but by doing things i want to do, like reading personal email. They respect my time.
I switched jobs twice before this. Each time my hours worked went down and my pay went up.
-Not a programmer, but play one at work
I'm doing 90 - 100 hours a week. I am a telecommuter, and so my home is just another part of the office - 70 miles away of course with all the benefits of not having to drive in and being at home where the dogs and other comforts are. But there's no getting away from it. I answer the 'company' phone round-the-clock if necessary, I wear a pager and get up at 2am if it goes off, weekends and holidays included, I wear a cell phone, and hey even as I left for vacation I was still working. It's everything I do and it's expected. I sort of look at it like I'm compressing 40 years of work into 4. At the end of it I'll be fully vested, we'll IPO, and then I'm off to teach computers to kids in impoverished countries and spend my remainging time growing avacados....
Whaddya think of doctors and researchers (speaking of knowledge)? I happen to be both and I can tell you that it NEVER stops. Today I had to take leave of absence to visit my dying grandfather and guess what I did on the way there? Right, pull out the iBook and work. I am typing this connected to the phone line in my grandfather's hhospital room - check my mail and send some that I composed on the way. So, 32.9? Ha! 100 is more like it.
Anywhere from 60-90 depending on whether or not I am supporting an initiative that has rolled into production, production being lower than average, but on call all the time. Config Admin + Programmer
The goverment blew it again. I am a manager at a small software startup. I and all of my direct reports (who I room with, so I _know_ how much they work) work an average of 60 hours a week and over 80 hours a week during peek periods. I know a fair number of people in the high tech sector (over 200 that I can think of off hand) and I don't more than 10 or so that work less than 50 hours a week.
In the US it's a similar case. About 5 months ago I chucked my salary and what goes with it (65+ work weeks and loads of stress) for a 40% raise and 100% more respect from coworkers. I am finally making good use of my own company as well.
The biggest plus for me is if I feel like a day off, I take it without a shred of guilt since I'm not getting paid for that time.
Unlike about half of contractors I've met though, I take my high pay very seriously and try to deliver for the money they give me.
All in all I feel better about working. I'd reccomend anyone feeling like the Man is keeping them down think about going solo for at least a time.
I don't know about anyone else, but I only actually *work* about 6 hours a week. There are so many underqualified morons working for my consulting firm (and it seems the same for every company out there) that my six hours is still better than everyone elses 40. I absolutely refuse to work more than 40 hours a week because it is utterly pointless, and possibly dangerous - my co-workers would kill me if I suddenly started doing twice as much work as the rest of the 'team'. What the technology field really needs if for morons to be excluded completely. Then maybe the rest of us could actually get something done! As it stands now, the boredom level is astounding.
Just curious, how much do you people sleep? I'm still a student and my part time job is a cakewalk, so I still can get my 8 hours if I want them. However, what about the people who claim to be working these insane hours?
The best answer? Go indie - form your own company, set your own policies, and most importantly, bill for every hour you work!.
Lack of security, I hear you whine? Hah! You don't have any security now. All you have to lose by giving up your employee id is the illusion of security.
Best of luck.
This project will be one of the 80%.
I've got time logs that show I worked from 32 (excepting two weeks when I was hospitalized and didn't work at all) to 116.5 hours a week, over all 52 weeks in 1998, averaging 60 hours a week (INCLUDING the time I was in the hospital in the average). Now, that's time spent IN THE OFFICE, and does not include time spent outside the office on work-related activities. 1999 and 2000 are similar. I haven't taken a vacation in over two years (though my employer considers work-related travel a vacation, and to be fair, when one is lodged in four-star hotels, it sometime seams like it). No, I don't get paid overtime. Yes, I get generous stock options. No, my wife and kid don't like it. I don't care so much to make the company richer at my expense, but I do CARE that our customers don't get worse products than they otherwise might. - RSH (posting anon.)
"I wouldn't go as far as suggesting a union, but something needs to be done; the workers need to stand up and REFUSE to work unpaid overtime" Why is it you "knowledge workers" use the word "union" like it was something to be afraid of? I have been a union member for some time. I have frequently refused to work overtime (for which I would get paid time and half if I wanted it). This infuriates my boss but I'm going to college at night and don't have time for it. Thanks to my union contract there's absolutely nothing my boss can do about it. I think that U.S. history as taught in American schools is attempting to gloss over the History of the American Labor movement. That's too bad because I fear we may be destined to have to fight all over again for the benefits that the unions have gained. And before we can do, its going to be necessary to undo a lot of brainwashing.
Lets just outline....
I currently get paid about 66% of what my professional scale says is the norm. Its pretty much dead on too since all my friends from school currently make scale. So I'm already underpaid for 40h week.
Yesterday, had a meeting and got shit on for coming in late some day especially yesterday when I came in at 11 ( normal is 8:30 - 9 ). It didn't matter that I was up till 4:00 am working on a project for work. Or the fact that the night before I was up till 5:00 am working on it ( at home ). Nor did it seem to matter that when my Boss came to me at 3:45pm on a friday afternoon and asked my to have a report ready for tuesday on a project I told them was at least 1.5 months long -- I've had less than a week, just started the lit. review and they asked me to put it on hold for a few days until this friday thing -- so I would have to put in weekend hours on it.
So all of a sudden my not being in on time is making them question whether or not I'm screwing them over.
I used to keep weekly timesheets for them but then no one even looked at them, so I stopped. I pulled all my timesheet I had prepared for an 8 month period. NEVER was I under 80 hours for a 2 week period and in most cases I was about 90 hrs and that only for time spent at work, not any of the stuff I do at home.
So guess what they suggested. Maybe I could punch a timecard ( I'm in management and the most highly educated person here ). Uh Fuck you! I told them there was no chance in hell that I would do it ( literally ).
My company is almost bankrupt, I'm working like a slave to try and prevent it ( along with 2 other coworkers who were in the meeting with me and whom it was suggested should have a time log to prove what they were working on ).
I work at least 50 hrs a week right now for completely ungrateful $^%##^.
So what do you think, underpaided, underappreciated and overworked.
Do we, as people, have a choice at work? If one of us dares to stand up and say, "Screw these 80 hour weeks!!" then there is always someone more eager and willing to fill that position while you're out on your rump. I personally put in 60-80 hours a week and I'm on call 24/7. The company is great however my boss has a "model" subordinate that lives and breathes WORK. I'm sorry, but life is too short to spend your entire time at work but if you don't, then you get passed over for raises because of the "model employee". What's my option? I love the company, but I love my family more. Should I stand up to my boss and tell him "NO MORE!!" and risk being fired? Hmmm...I think I will as I am SICK AND TIRED OF WASTING MY LIFE AWAY AT WORK AND NOT SEEING MY FAMILY UNTIL THE WEEKENDS! If more of us would "unite" and put our foot down, I believe more and more bosses and companies would get the message that we're sick and tired of it. I apologize for venting and I've answered some of my own questions but I would love to hear your comments regarding this. Please email me at donnieu@usa.net. Thanx! Donnie Utley, Overworked, Underpaid, Underappreciated
As a system analyst and technology enthuseast, I can say with certainty that, apart from the "once every six seconds I think about sex", I spend every almost every waking moment "working".
Math:
Total: 24 x 7 = 168 hours in a week.
Sleep: 6.5 x 7 = 45.5 hours of sleep per week.
Waking: 168 - 45.5 = 122.5 waking hours.
Non-sex: 122.5 x 5/6 = 102.08333 working hours.
102 hours per week. I have no "life" to speak of, because all of my friends are "tech folks" in some way or other and our interactions are always tech-related.
How many hours do I get paid for? 40 (and that's at a lower rate of pay than 95% of my peers in the industry, because I work for rural government).
Does knowing this help? No. It depresses me to know it. And my employer doesn't really care (he's only gonna pay me for 40h/wk, regardless, because I'm a salaried position).
Life pretty much sucks.
I work 82 hours a week... And I spend them all at work.. This way, my employer is forced to recconise them... This way I get huges bonuses...
I have been counselled multiple times on reporting any number greater than 40 hours (even though I dont get paid any more money for those hours, my boss gets in trouble for any employee putting in excessive work). The problem is that the quantity of work they are expecting from my department is outragous and even 60 - 70 hours a week is not enough to keep up yet they dont want to see the reality that we are over worked and underpaid.
Recently a number of coworkers have left my department to pursue better positions, and some are experiencing much of this same policy elsewhere.
But let me tell you, the minute you work 39 hours and report 40, you can kiss your job goodbye.
Its a sad state, but I do it because I have the security of knowing that I am earning a weekly paycheck by sacrificing my life.
Think of how many programs/sys admins and what have we would have if people looked on the companies like the military. Sure, some people know what they're getting into, and some don't. Sure everyone knows that there is a chance they will die going into the Army or whatever; but how many people know going in that they may work 60+ hour weeks? However, this is not just for "knowledge workers". Construction has that same problem. I've seen guys put in 100 hours a week rebuilding freeways.
And in the military, you get frequent challenges (ask anyone who's gone through Parris Island), and chances to solve problems.
Also, don't assume that someone who is working in info tech isn't just pulling down a check.
Say it brother! My father works for a mechanical contractor, is union, and has always brought home stuff to do. When I was younger it seemed like every evening he had blueprints rolled out, planning what was going to be done tomorrow. He's always had to be in touch with the job site, on evenings and weekends, carrying a beeper since the mid-80's, and more recently, carrying a cell phone (and not one of those effete little yuppie phones either). When he was younger he probably worked like 70 hours a week, getting overtime, but still making just enough to give my a family a comfortable middle-class lifestyle. Forget paying for college, my sister and I have mostly handled that ourselves.
A year out of college and I make almost what he does, after more than 25 years of employment at the same company. And I have yet to believe that I've produced as much value in a single day as has every day since he began working.
I used to work help desk at an Air Force base, and the place was a ghost town at 4:30. If you were in a high security area, you were not allowed to take work home or even discuss details of your work outside the office. I remember staying past 5:00 TWICE, and never worked more than 40 hrs/week. There were still people who stayed late, but that was the exception.
Of course the downside is the pay wasn't great for government work (still better than ISP tech support, but that's the fast food job of the high tech world), and being a help desk peon you didn't have much responsibility and the work was pretty boring.
I'm spending 45-50 in the office these days. Used to be 60-70 when I got bonused for time billed.
I'm pretty close to the average, putting in 30 - 35 hours per week most weeks, sometimes less. I do tech support for two smallish offices, "supervised" from an office four hours away. I'm good at what I do, and I work smart. We have very few problems, because I keep our configurations clean and make sure people understand what they're doing. So for most of the sixty or so hours a week that there's someone for me to support, I don't have to do much except be available, and I figure that having a pager with me covers that. When there's a big project like a new install, I know how to automate it for the most efficient coverage, and I don't mind coming in on a Saturday to do it when no-one's in the way. I'll skip early a couple of afternoons to make up for it. If I'm reading slashdot, I'm there to answer the phone, and the computers are running hard and stable so I probably won't have to. I can ssh into my home computer and play with my linux config. Or I can go home and do that, and check my voicemail frequently. And sure, I probably put in a good 20 or 30 hours tinkering with linux during the off hours, but while that makes me a better administrator, it doesn't pertain directly to work.
But I know it's not typical, and I know I can't stay at it forever. There's no support from the home office, there's no respect from them even if I'm a hero to the clueless users, and there's no growth or advancement. My last job was very cut-throat work for a very small company that couldn't afford basic overhead.
So I look on this job as a sabbatical.
My boss (in the home office) just got a promotion, based in part on the improvements I made here last year. He has no training or experience in supervision, and he's getting to be a real pain, questioning my work and refusing to support me or keep me informed, so I guess the holiday is over.
Anybody need a good sysadmin who's ready to get back to real work?
This is exactly right. The other day, I decided I was not paid nearly enough because my work as a .com producer saturates nearly every waking moment and a good many dreams. Sometimes, I think it would be nice to have a job I could leave at the office.
I have seen numerous posts so far about not getting paid for the work you do. Now, it can't apply for every aspect of IT/SA type jobs... but I am supprised most of you don't do more contract work. I too am one of these people who work often 60+ a week, for instance yesterday I got in at 6am (I live 100km away too) and left at 7pm. Last week I worked - 2 - 22 hour days. Of course I don't bill for all of this time, my employer would think that's ludicrous. On common weeks if I work 60 lagitimate hours (that's subtracting /. time etc) I can still at least bill for 50, or 60 if I really was fatiqued from the work of that week. Of course, I do fit in with the rest alot of the time, the week is basically completely consumed by work in one way or another, and you often don't bill or get paid for half of it. I'm in silicon valley (I hate saying that) so perhaps there is alot more work for us contractor-types. Why don't more of you consider starting your own business and start doing contract work?
Hmm,
When I first started at my job I was working my butt off, finding major holes in our networks security and fixing them. With documentation and everything. Then increase time came. Everyone reguardless of what you have done or accomplished got 3% accross the board. While our managers are telling us what a great job we are doing and how much profit we have generated. I have since lost moral and actually accepted a job for twice what I am making here on the west coast. I am also the 6th person to leave from our department for a better high paying job in 2 months. I would think that would clue them in.
lets not forget [ ] Driving to/from work (usually on the cell w/ boss/co-workers/clients)
Are they friggin nuts!!? I've worked 54 hours this week already, and it ain't even close to over. 32 hours a week might be for those who don't have over a thousand domains and 800 websites to watch over sans staff, but that don't mean squat where I work.
This is actually in my job description as a Linux administrator. :)
s/Anonymous Coward/Lazy Bastard/
There is no real overhead, your tax rate will be higher, because you work for yourself. But you often get paid A LOT more than salaried. Also, you can pick up a short-term job on the side for extra dough. Like two weeks ago, I picked up an extra 12 hour job (two nights of work) at $65/hour... I'm always conservative when I take out my tax money, so say I take 40% out to be safe, that's $39/hour for 12 hours. And remember, the more jobs you do, the more people you meet, the easier it is to get work. Deserve a three day weekend to go skiing with your honey? NO problemo, no guilt, you're not getting paid. GO FOR IT!
The number of hours that I have worked in the last three years would easily put me on the high end. The longest week that I have had this year was 95.5 hours and the shortest would be a week I took off. On average, I work 57 hours a week, based on a quick and dirty of the total hours I worked last year divided by 52. Granted I am a consultant and all of it was paid. Tossing in some freebies would incease it a little.
The thing that really has me wondering is who is considered a "knowledge worker". If the average was 32 it seems to me they were including part-time people in the mix. Anyone know where to find more details of the study? It's peaked my curiosity, maybe I am working too much. :
TMCM
You're dealing with a business. Business can't snap their fingers and create more money to pay a new employee. It's a business that deals with real money, not a fantasy world where when you complain enough, you get what you want. Yes, they can. It takes money to make money. Most companies are like the government. They blow HUGE wads of dough on dumb shit and then whine about how tight the budget is. If they can't afford more people, walk. Oh, so you're a kid who has never looked for a job. Your unrealistic expectations are going to hurt your feelings when actually go look for a job. "Double your salary," my ass! Yeah. Your DUMB ass! I have been in this field for over a decade. I change jobs on average every 2-3 years. I only got a 95% raise when I changed jobs last year. I have changed my home email address twice and the headhunters still track me dwon.
I used to work for a small consulting company with a skilled staff but shitty management. The staff would bust ass working billing out at least 25 hours a week at 125 dollars an hour. I was making 9 dollars an hour. So lets calculate:
What I billed: 125*25 = 3125
My "salary" : 35 * 9 = 315
Where did the money go? The owner of the company was pulling in ~ 80-90k a year and working maybe 2 - 3 hours a week. During which he would write memos, yell at everyone and pick up his check.
Not to mention the new toys he would buy and show up with in the office. Like A GPS, IBM thinkpads,
new mountain bike, hmmm a car and oh the new house he bought up north. Sick huh? I wouldnt have minded so much if oh I made a decent salary and perhaps he put sometime into the company to propel it up the ladder instead of sucking the payroll dry. I have since quit took my knowledge
and got a job for 72k a year doing what I love.
I would't work that many hours for love or money. The free time I have with my Wife and Daughter is far more important. If my boss (I'm self employed in a non computer based business) forced me to work 80 hours a week, I'd take a bulk tape eraser to every drive and backup tape in the building! I was concidering programming as a future occupation, but now I don't know?
Damn straight. I won't say who my employer is, but its the largest financial institution in the world (whose newest web-offering doesnt support non_M$ OS based browsers). My site is getting closed down and there have been no job offers made to me or any one else in my department (who would be classified as "Knowledge workers") for a new job in the company. I am in the building at least 40 hours a week, unless i get called in the evening or on a saturday morning. But i spend most of my time reading /.! This week is a little different as my counterpart and i will be working on a production server adding disk space. Of course, most of what i am doing is cleaning up after said counterpart :-)
The high-tech industry is particularly abusive regarding compensation issues Abusive? You're the one that puts down 40 hours and works 60. Are you an idiot? Do you have trouble writing "6"'s? Is your boss holding a gun to your head? This is your own fault. Either get a new job, bill for the amount of time you worked, or go home at 40 hours. This is entirely your fault. Don't try to blame the 'industry' on this one.
Uh, people? Can you really be that overworked if you have time to break away, read /., and (gasp) respond to a Katzicle? I wonder how much work is actually getting done in all these long hours.
Who exactly is "The Man?" Do I know him? I don't recall giving anything away to anyone recently without being adequately compensated. Perhaps you could clarify?
s/Anonymous Coward/Lazy Bum/
You just described my professional life.
My father owns a construction company, and I am going to turn 20 in a matter of months. My father used to have me work with him when I was younger and I absolutely HATED manual labor.
I told myself that I wouldn't be doing manual labor NOR construction for the rest of my life, so I turned my hobby into a profession.
I don't quite feel like I work nearly as hard as my father does, not to mention my father has to put up with losing contracts because of bribes, the Coalition, all kinds of work environment hazards, and I'm poised to make more than he does by sitting on my ass and smacking keys, and here I am crying about getting a phone call while I'm having dinner with my girlfriend at a Japanese restaurant that a fucking database went down.
What the fuck is wrong with this world? I'm paid a ridiculous amount of money (along with eventualy company ownership) and don't even have to worry about scaffolds breaking under me, shards of marble breaking off of a slab and impaling me in my foot, cutting electrical wires that should've been dead that end up fusing a pair of pliers together, nails going into my knees, having to unscrew a screw that got jammed into my finger, bashing my thumb with a hammer, stepping on nails, working in bad neighborhoods, etc.
God damn.
folks like the IRS need 600 more agents. The ones they've got are tied up calculating bogus studies like this. Seriously, the only people working 33-hour work weeks are government employees (and that's before the 12 hours a week playing Solitare).
I agree completely. You and I think the same on this subject. More power to you!
So What if tech people average 32.9 hours per week? They spent a Hell of a lot of time learning what they do, and that should count for something! I think somebody's just jealous because we can get away with working 32.9 hours a week and they can't! Grow up. It's not how long it takes you that's important, but what your results are. =P****
I dont work, I have fun...Im hardly on the Internet...The Outside is nicer..."working" is for slaves..... "think and ye will learn"
Work is for Sukers, I like to have fun!...im hardly on the internet....Outside is much nicer...Who cares about watching movies or DVDs?...really! sounds like elitist crap! "think and ye will learn"
A /good/ week for me is 70, a normal is somewhere in the 90 range, and a bad one has topped at 124 (the single worst week on my record -- but then, I also slept at the office all week). I'm sorry, but I think that most geeks (front line coders, admins, etc) are working averages of 65 hours a week --it's not really possible (IMO) to work any less than 60 hours and actually keep people happy (well, except for your SO =)
Why do you feel such a need to work yourself into your grave? As you so rightly said, there was a time when we were rewarded for hard work. But that time is GONE. Hard work is, for the most part, not rewarded -- so why the hell are you working so hard?
Any business that can not withstand its employees having their own lives is not a business that deserves to continue to exist. Let. It. Fail.
I can remember one time when I did 38.5 hrs in a 5 day week. Course I was out sick M - W that week.
Yes, this is the secret behind the booming US economy. Companies are doing so well because so many workers (and it's happening in other fields besides IT) are working more and more for less and less pay per hour.
Unfortunately things aren't going to change as long as so many tech workers think they must work all those hours. "If I don't work like everyone else, I won't get a promotion!" So what? What do you value more, time or money? Personally I don't WANT a promotion, since it would suck more time out of my life. "I might get fired!" Odds are *everyone* is going to get fired when everyone around you is so burned out they can't think anymore and the whole company goes down in flames.
If you want to retire (at age 60+ -- *your* stock options are probably worth nothing) and look back on your life and think of all those projects you worked on... and how only one or two are even used anymore... or you want to look back and see how much you loved spending time with your hobbies, and your families, and actually having a life outside that beige-gray cubical... well, the choice is up to each of us, isn't it?
ditto on the 60 hr.s/week. Most people I know work that. At present, things are "slow" for me: 50hrs/week.
>Leave at 5. Read a book. Go minigolfing with a friend or sweetheart. I promise the code will still be there tomorrow.
:-) I'll never forget the day we were told "There is no tomorrow" and worked till 5AM.
A man after my own heart
By 4 I was so tired every second word coming out of my usually innocent mouth was "f**k". Sigh.
One of the most sobering statements I ever hear from a manager was this:
On their deathbed, nobody ever said, "I wish I worked more."
If you're in a job where you're constantly working an extra 10+ hours a week, it's your own damn fault and you have no reason to complain.
I saw it, and it's a damn good idea. I work for a MAJOR telecommunications provider, that has no union. In my boss' office is a manual that actually says "How to prevent a union from forming" on the spine. Scary that they have written down all the ways to screw us and keep it that way.
funny thing about you americans is that you don't even realize you are slave labor for the corporations.
I work 70 hours a week, every week. You know why? Because when my company goes public, I'm gonna make a sh*tload of cash and never have to work again.
Of course, if I joined a union, I could just do bugger-all for forty years, make a comfortable living and get a fat pension at the end.
Tough choice, but I think I'll go for door #1, Monty...
>Unfortuntately, I have to disagree with you >based on my experience. How can you leave at >5:30 when your boss approaches you at 5:00 and >informs you that a client needs something done It's easy... You just pack up your shit, mark your hours down and go home. If your boss has other stuff that needs to be done (and won't pay you overtime) then they will just have to hire extra staff to meet the workload. It is NOT worth wasting your life making someone else rich because they can't be bothered to hire enough staff to meet the workload. If stuff doesn't get done, life will continue on. If you get canned because you don't want to work long hours for free, by all means consult the labour laws in your area. They are there to protect your rights. >giving up my own integrity and letting down my >coworkers. Anyone with any sense of Why don't you just get a tattoo that says "property of company x." You must enjoy being owned.
you are corporate slave labor.
I'd get in big trouble with my manager if I turned in a timesheet that didn't balance out to 8 hours per work day with only as many work days as there were in the pay period. So, if it is a 88 hour period if I put 96 I'd get busted for blowing their budget forecasts. Pretty funny stuff. I certainly won't argue with them about the issue since a 40 hour work week is more than enough for me. :-)
I wish! I've been involved in commercial IT for 7 months now - average number of hours worked is 10.Most time intensive was unix sys admin - 12 hour days were common. Web development was a lot easier - 8 hour days. Presently I'm a developer - 9 hour days. The only time I've come close to 32.5 hours was as a postdoctoral scientist in academia
I currently work in the banking industry. I suppose I average about 42-43 hours per week. About once a month or less, there will be a big problem where I have to stay several hours late (say, 5 hours). I am sometimes called on the weekends. For overtime (less is better when you don't get extra pay, and I never have), this is the best of my three career jobs.
I previously worked in the energy industry. It was bad, but not awful. I probably averaged 44 hours per week at the office. Once a month, we updated our application and I usually had to work very long hours, that day (say, 7 AM to midnight). I very frequently did maintenance work from home. On the other hand, they were very good about giving me "comp time" for many of the extra hours I had worked.
Prior to that, I had worked for 22 years in the telecommunications industry. It was the worst. I probably averaged 45 hours per week and they still acted like I was a slacker. They even made me carry a pager when I was out of state on vacation. I felt like an indentured servant.
So, while I work a little less now than in the past, I still believe that I average more than 40 hours per week.
I AVERAGE 61 hours per week. That's nearly DOUBLE the survey. [I need to go work for the companies they surveyed.]
... with our tax dollars.
... when I was there hours before he showed, when I was there hours after he left, and, since he refused to answer the telephone, when I was there while he had lunch and I was forced to skip ...
1. This study is about as clueless as the government that funded it
2. The Federal, State, and local governments, maybe, put in that few hours. But, for them, it does sound high.
3. At my old company from hell.
When we got a new financial officer, he reinstituted timesheets. So, I turned in a REDUCED hours timesheet [I DIDN'T include the daily extra-hour-or-so after-hours at-home work] reflecting a solid 66 hours for the week.
They went apoplectic, they called me a liar, etc. Then, they said "No one works more than 40 hours a week! No one will work more than 40 hours a week!"
So, the next week, well-before noon, on Thursday, I packed up my stuff and said that I was going home for the weekend. My boss was rabid! "Are you coming back after lunch? Will you be here, tomorrow?" "No." "WHY!?!" "I PUT IN MY 40 HOURS!" "SO?!?" "It's your policy, not mine."
The next week, the maximum rule was rescinded and all employees were ordered to reflect a maximum of 40 hours a week on their timesheets. I casually mentioned that there were Federal laws against that and they laughed.
And, my boss from hell complained about how overworked he was
4. Then, again, this study probably takes into account the vroblems of the world [fair-haired employees who do nothing, put in short days, and get promoted]. They probably bring the average down.
5. This DEFINITELY applies to Federal workers. In WDC, the workers MUST be at their place of work NLT 32 hours a week. But, since carpooling takes precedent over work, this may/will be reduced. And, from that 32 comes lunch, training, pottybreaks, and such.
Closing:
The good thing about working for yourself is that you only have to work half days: six-to-six, seven-to-seven, the choice is yours.
This study is more lies.
That, or I need to go work for the companies/Federal agencies they surveyed.
Hah! I worked 73 hours last week. 32.9... that's vacation.
One large company requires employees to work 1950 productive hours. That isn't too bad if you get two weeks of vacation and aren't sick. But as you get more vacation, or if you get sick, or go to class, you have make up for the "lost" time. Not much point in taking a vacation day if you have to work longer days when you get back.
the offical count is 84 hrs/w, not counting 14 hrs driving time or the time at home with the laptop and books. the 4-6 hrs sleep belong to me. thats two weeks on and one week off, part of which i spend getting ready for the next two weeks. life's a bitch. study, study, study. glenus -The gov sux.
I worked 76 hours in the office last week alone... :-)
I'm one of the underpaid unknown part-time knowledge workers. The dirty little secret of the boom in Community Colleges is that almost all faculty are adjunct. Between curriculum development (paid), class preparation, (unpaid) and contact hours teaching (paid) I work between 16-40 hours a week, with an average of 20. Oh yeah, and I'm home with two small children, and I do the PTO thing. I have many friends who are in the benefitless underclass, because we take our role seriously as moms, and can't afford to work 70+ hours per week the way we did before kids.
Geeks rise up and ORGANIZE!
The Brotherhood/Sisterhood of UNIX SysAdmins Local 31337.
I'm a union worker in a knowledge based tech field, and I love it. I have worked anywhere from 40 hours to 60 hours. 40 hours being the norm, 60 hours when I need the extra money. Thanks to being in a union, the 1st 9 hrs over 40 are paid at 1.5 x my hourly wage, and anything over that is paid at 2.0 x my hourly wage. I work in a remote T1/T3/OC-xxx test center for a telephone company so the overtime there is pretty much unlimited. There are people I work with bringing home 6 figures just by working 65 to 70 hours each week.
...and best of all, we don't take our work home with us.
It may just be me, but I will work till the work gets done. Screw that 6pm outa here crap!
On average I work 50-80hrs a week.
hm.... CompSci degree in the UK + running own IT company + random project work = ca. 110 hours per week. I did get 5 hours of sleep last night, though. It's those 10 hours of sleep over sat/sun that I always really look forward to...
60-70 hours a week here....
I work for a small consulting firm out of Toronto, Ontario and we bill our customers our regular daily rate when we are doing documentation. If a project is going to take 8 weeks with 2 more weeks of documentation, we bill the customer 10 weeks. This is very fair, as the documentation given to the customer is a tangeable good that is part of the service and not an added bonus.
Thank you for stating that so well.
I am reminded of the Dilbert cartoon, that went something like, "I got paid $50 an hour for 40 hours this week wasting time in meetings. Saturday morning in the shower I had a design idea worth $1 million"
well.. this will sound heartless, but everything is based on supply and demand. yes, even employment. i agree, construction can be very dangerous, but just about any tom, dick, or joe off the street can do construction.. so they don't get paid much. however, the programmer is a different story.. i'm not too sure how much an average programmer would get, but i'm sure its more than a construction worker would (with the exception of a comparison between a crappy programmer and a very good construction worker, of course).. and the only reason that is is because an employer, for the most part, couldn't just go out on the street and hire someone to be a new programmer. the question is would you, keeping in mind businesses are started for profit, pay an unskilled worker, who is easily replaced, more than a programmer, who more than likely went to college and is not easily replaced, more money?
I don't think that people overestimate their hours...hourly employees get 15 or 20 minute breaks and .5 to 1.0 hour lunches. I am salary, rarely take an official break and usually squeeze my lunch in 15-20 minutes or eat at my desk. My average is usually 45-50 hours per week, but it has been as high at 60 hours per week. That doesn't include the 24*7 pager access. I am reachable at the dial of a phone anywhere in the 3 state area.
I work for a small *non-profit* and am the only one...I've got the Lucent phone switch & voice mail, NT, Linux, and NetWare to administer everyday plus user support, project management, budgets, etc. I have been with the company for a year now and want to acutually "plan" for technology instead of just fix the stuff as it happens. When??? It's hard enought just to keep up with the day-to-day "My phone doesn't work right...all calls are going to voice mail on the first ring...FIX IT!" (The Send All Calls button is active on their phone -- gee, that's why that green light is on??) or "We added a new staff member who needs a pager. ORDER IT NOW!" or "I need help putting the ink cartridge in my ink jet" (gee, what the hell are the picture directions for anymore anyway???)
Technology workers are abused and most bosses don't realize. I explain all I'm doing to my boss weekly, but she never gets that the mundane day-to-day is where the burnout occurs. She works her 35-40 and goes home!
Just my $.02
I'm a compe senior at UW and it's not unusual to have to pull 80 - 100 hour weeks towards the end of the term. It probably averages out to about 70-80, though I've pulled a few dreaded double all nighters (48+ hrs) coding. After this, 50-60 hours? What'll I do with my free time?
IT professional. Last week I worked 48 hours, including cell and beeper time. But if you include time in the car on the phone, time not sleeping because the pager woke me ( but not actively working) it's more like 55-57 hours.
In Tom DiMarco's article "Software Productivity: the Covert Agenda" From his book Why Does Software Cost So Much? DiMarco explains why deadlines are almost always false, and why developers are asked to estimate their own schedules. It makes for an interesting read.
You're probably being paid right now, so you're being paid to read slashdot. Are you working? Is your slashdot worktime worth as much as when you talk to the boss, customer, coworker, curse at gcc?
Its about working smart VS. working dumb. There are millions of people out there who can do construction, hundreads of thousands who own their own construction company. How many of them can get through high school, get through college, get through some sort of certification class? The fact is you have the capability and drive to become an expert in a feild that many do not want to or can't because of difficulty level or image problem. Its why you deserve the paycheck you do.
Well, we love your job too, coding heavy transaction database apps in C++. BUT!!! It is no use to work more than 30-35 hours a week! Really, in the long run you dont get more work done by increasing the number of hours you work.
I work 12hrs/day on a 4-on/4-off schedule in a 24/7 realtime ops situation, which works out to about 42 hrs/week. I work my ass off at work, I often work holidays, and I'm willing to help out in real emergencies.
:) If I wind up working late one day on a problem, I take the time off the next day. It took a while to make him understand that my time is NOT his time, but the concept did eventually sink in.
But I also have a limit I won't go beyond and I'm consistent about not crossing that line. I have no problems telling my boss "no" if he calls me after work hours or on my "weekend".. several times a day if necessary.
And I didn't need a union to apply the cluestick for me.
Sorry to tell you this, BUDDY, but the guy was a troll and you fed him. He was pretty obvious and bad, too. The "whatever that is" on the thing about him being a troll really gives him away. He's not very good.
But the sad part is, he convinced you. I can't imagine what a true troll would get out of you.
By the way, you must suck at Quake.
I believe that IN GENERAL workers in the U.S. work longer hours.
(2) Being "on call" and immediately available at any time.
(3) Showing up at work early or staying late.
(4) Any work done at home.
Any others?
I've been at my current job about 3 yrs.
:), and more importantly, I'm less stupid and have decided to take back my 'free' time, to do things I want.
When I started they were new and a startup, and I was young(er) stupid, and not in a relationship.
I worked anywhere fron 50-70 hour a week.
Fast forward three years:
They are no longer a startup, there are some hectic times when a project needs to be finished NOW, but otherwise its much more mellow time wise. I am now in a relationship (and she demands more time
Granted my free time is now surfing slashdot and hacking code, but thats beside the point (of course it could also explain why I worked those hours to begin with... it didn't feel like work).
If any of those three things had been different
(the stage of the company, the relationship, my own feelings) I would probably still be working longer hours (not to say I still don't on occasion now).
I'd like to tell you a little story about my situation that I think will shed light on this matter. I am currently a student at a top ten university near chicago. I work as a UNIX sysadmin. We have had MASSIVE turnover, 4 bosses in 3 years and about 1.5 years without a boss. Do the math, no one lasted more than 6 months really. So, even though I was a student I was left as being the UNIX sysadmin for the Number 2 graduate buisness school in the country. Alone. I complained that this wasn't fair, that $8/hr did not justify the work I did. I was being called at home at 6pm by professors, emailed on saturday about something and then emailed again on sunday asking "why hasnt this been fixed yet?". All in all, I'd say I work 40 hours a week -- BUT keep in mind I also go to 15 hours of school a week, and probably study at least 10 a week. It was killing me emotionally and not doing wonders for my grades. Flash forward to two weeks ago. I couldn't take it anymore. Emails and phone calls on saturdays --I decided to change my phone number. So I did. I came in the next day and was told that they had tried to reach me several times and oould not be. I explained my phone number changed. They said they were considering firing me. I couldn't help but laugh. I said something along the lines of : "go right ahead. Lets see how the system works without me." They were still under the impression that because I was a student I must (A) not know what I'm doing really (B) Not be able to get another job (C) Can be bossed around. I am responsible for, say, about 20 machines. I regularly portscan these just to see if anything s funny. One day my connection died at work. I plugged into a new port. It worked. It died two hours later. I plugged in again. It worked. I went home, saturday it died. I came into work. I plugged in again. It died sunday. I found out on monday that after *3 years* of being the SECURITY AND UNIX guy they had SHUT OFF MY PORT FOR PORTSCANNING MACHINES WHICH I AM RESPONSIBLE FOR. Reason? "portscanning is a hacking activity". I tried to point out that I already have root on the machines, but to no avail. I was unable to reach my email during this period of time and had recieved several emails (6 days of intermittent connections) - all of which had gone unanswered. I worked 60 hours that week to make up the work. I was very angry but I wanted to go to this school after I graduated and wanted to keep a good rapport with the professors. After all, a slur of recommendations from them would help. I was later informed that I would not be paid the overtime because I was a student. Needless to say, I quit. Now, professors are calling me asking me to come back. I've told them the only conditions under which I'll return is if I get paid at least $40 hour, never get phone calls on saturday unless a machine is in a critical state (no more 'My email to this listerv didn't go through' crap). I'm telling you -- the real people getting screwed are the students who work.
(1) finishing your 7 minute shower to find your cell phone reading "missed 15 calls". And **you're** the evil bastard for not answering the phone right away.
(2) Getting home from work, washing up, cooking dinner, flipping on the TV or the DVD player, lifting up that first bite of food and then **RRRRIIIINNNGGG**. "Our PCs are all jumping. The customers are screaming. Fix it now!" "What do you mean by jumping?" "I don't have time to talk, just get it fixed." Dinner starting to cool, but you have to go back to the office or boot up the laptop/PC and dial in. Then finding that the celaning people unplugged the network hub so they could vacuum and didn't plug it back when they were done. Who pays for the wasted dinner?
(3) Users in the field who fail to know what "emergency 24 hour phone support" means. Sunday @ 2:20 AM ***RRRIIINNNGGG***. "Yeah, I just finished the night shift and was inputing some new sales buttons into the point of sale register and don't know know hot to make it a 'no sales tax' item." "When do you need this done?" "By next Monday". Geeez.
(4) "My screen is all black." "Is the power on?" "Yeah I did all that, it's not working" "Did you..." "YES! I TRIED THAT. GET DOWN HERE AND FIX IT RIGHT NOW. THE CUSTOMERS ARE SCREAMING." "The system supports a manual operation method that doesn't rely on the network. Just press..." "I DON'T HAVE TIME FOR THAT. FIX IT OR GET IT OUT OF HERE (*click*)".
(5) "My PC is locked." "OK, reboot the PC" (3 seconds later) "It's still doing the same thing." (they rebooted the monitor) Arrrggh!
All this is such "light sparse work" that it is officially wrong to request any extra pay or comp time for doing this.
Exempt status is dictated by law.
(Exempt status basically means they're not required by law to pay you time and a half for overtime.)
If you're salaried and you're *not* exempt, you're woefully underpaid for any kind of tech job. The minimum salary for exempt status is something on the order of ~$20,000 a year (can't recall the exact number).
If you're hourly the minimum pay for exempt status is on the order of $24 an hour.
Note the disparity there ($24/hr at 2000 hours a year works out to just shy of $50k).
More details on how they can classify you as exempt are at http://www.gilliland.com/Salaryot.htm, of course, employers don't necessarilly know all of the details. I had a better link at some point, but lost it.
flash forward about 10 years or so, i am now the CTO of an internet startup, getting paid way more than i "deserve" by my old scale, and yet all i do is, sit on the phone, talk to the people that work for me, talk to the people i work for, and think... and for me, there is no difference between home and work. i understand now what my father told me so many years ago...
So that would make you umm, a CTO at age 16 or 17? hehe. (assuming you were asking those questions at age 6 or 7...hopefully not at age 20!) [GRIN]
-Davidu
# Hack the planet, it's important.
I totally agree. When your hobby becomes your job, the length of your work-week doesn't seem that important at all. Except maybe for your friends, who start to become concerned for your well-being :)
I have to totally agree with Jon on this one. I've been in graduate school since 1993 (MS ECE, working on PhD in genetics), and anyone who's going to work "only" 20 hours a week will never graduate, although that's what they pay you.
For myself, I end up working between 35 hours (on my vacation weeks) to 80+ hours a week, averaging around 55-60. But then again, from the perspective of the Genetics Program I'm breaking all of the speed records.
If you calculate out the amount I get paid hourly, it would come to about $5.50-$6.00 per hour. I'd be better off working at McDonalds (not that I'd want to).
Around 80-100 per week.
I officially work 37.5 hours/week and am salaried so more work != more money. As for how much I work, well... due to some emergency bugfixes I worked 20 hours yesterday. so I guess with Monday's 10 hours, and the 4 hours I put in on Sunday just because I was bored, that I'm done for the week. I'm not complaining either, I love my job and it's rare that I'm 'forced' to work overtime. I just find it absurd to think that most of us work a 33 hour week. I'm not sure where those jobs are, but sign me up for two of em, I'm used 66 hour weeks anyway :-)
----------------------------
I officially work 37.5 hours/week and am salaried so more work != more money. As for how much I work, well... due to some emergency bugfixes I worked 20 hours yesterday. so I guess with Monday's 10 hours, and the 4 hours I put in on Sunday just because I was bored, that I'm done for the week.
:-)
I'm not complaining either, I love my job and it's rare that I'm 'forced' to work overtime. I just find it absurd to think that most of us work a 33 hour week. I'm not sure where those jobs are, but sign me up for two of em, I'm used 66 hour weeks anyway
----------------------------
I would say I work 80 - 100 hours a week, counting Slashdot time. But wait! Slashdot time *is* work for me.
Last night I logged on at 11 p.m. or so to check the submissions page, and saw that CowboyNeal, CmdrTaco, and Hemos were also taking a look. Everybody who *works* on Slashdot puts in all kinds of crazy hours.
In our case, the line between work and recreation is thin. Often they're one and the same.
Does the IRC time I spend on #slashdot or #freshmeat count as work?
Hmmm...
- Robin
Also, you don't fully realise how far this problem goes. See Does Your Employer Own Your Thoughts?. Evan Brown is property of DSC Communications, for all intents and purposes, and _all_ hours of his life when employed by DSC were 'work'. That sounds implausible, but he signed off on a contract which gave DSC ownership of any thoughts he had, thinking it wasn't a problem as he was only employed to provide technical support for the Motorola Cellular Division software testing group, not to invent things. He did invent something, apparently a method to convert old computer code into new languages, and DSC first tried to buy the idea, and then fired him and sued him for it. The idea has never been written down and exists only in Evan's brain...
As of January 20, 2000, Evan Brown is bankrupt and has sold everything he has but the farm on which he lives. On his 48th birthday, Judge Curt B. Henderson of the 219th Judicial District Court of the State of Texas has ordered him to work at DSC's PB-6 building in Plano without compensation for time, travel or expenses until he has documented his idea. Evan lives 3 hours from Plano. (I don't know from reading this if he has sold his car to pay legal expenses). He has also been ordered by the judge to write out his idea relating to DSC's product hardware (Zilog Z8000) as the machine executable binary code, rather than the Intel 8080 which Evan prefers.
How many hours a week did _Evan Brown_ work? Rather, ask if, legally, there was a single minute of any day when he was _not_ at work.
I know there are many Slashdot posters who respond to talk of collective bargaining and exploitation with cries of 'Wuss! Whiner! You go be a loser because we are tough and smart and better than most people and will take over the world by working 90 hours a week without compensation.' I would ask those people- have you read your contracts? Are you property, like Evan Brown's brain legally was? Can you set a price on that?
Evan Brown was employed as technical support for the Motorola Cellular Division software testing group. That is exactly the sort of job we're all talking about here, and now there is legal precedent in Texas law that if your employer slipped in details about owning your ideas during the time of employment- they can legally fire you, bankrupt you, sue you for the ideas and get the courts to go along with it and _compel_ you to reveal anything you claimed to have, whether or not they can prove that you invented it 'on their time'. Effectively, you can sign off on a contract that makes your brain property of the company, and the US Government will back it. If you do, the company could come after you ten years later claiming that your current invention was made during the time you worked for them- and with the Evan Brown case as case law, they could win, so even quitting a job with such conditions does not necessarily get you off the hook. The company could legally come after you years later demanding the contents of your mind or seizing ownership of your inventions, based on their prior ownership of your mind and thoughts- and win.
How's _that_ for an 80 hour week? :P
But I figure: "Hey, I'm 22 now and I won't be able to pull this off when I'm 40!". Burn out while you still can.
What do you think is going to happen when you turn 40? When you're working your butt off, time flies. 18 years can pass mighty fast. I don't know very many people who are really well off enough to retire at 40 or even 50 for that matter. It's likely you'll have to do something to make a living at 40.
This tech worker overtime started in the mid 80s. It became the norm during the early 90s recession. When times got better, the overtime continued. For the past 15 years, everyone has been floor-boarded, maxxed out. We won't be able to work ourselves out of the next recession with productivity gains because everyone is already driven into the stops as it is.
Wansu, th' chinese sailor
Assuming you're in the same job market most of us are, you could probably quit your job and get another in 2 weeks. We need to stop whining and realize how good we really have it.
Yeah, if you're 20-something. In 20 years, it's very likely you'll still need to work and then it will not be so easy to change jobs, even if times are good.
Wansu, th' chinese sailor
About 32-35 hours a week. So that statistic must be right on.
Of course I'm also a full time student (20 credit hours).
Hrmm...
Does it mean you will work less hours? Well, that depends on you. However, it does solve the problem of not getting compensated. Every single hour, down to the half hour--that's my compensation. And if the employer really wants me to work more, there is a cost; if they are willing to pay it, it's ok with me.
If you haven't tried contracting, think about it. There are plenty of agencies/pimps to take care of your taxes if you are scared of Uncle Sam. Even after you pay for health care, you are still making an astonishing amount of money.
Side note: if you are one of those people pretending to know coding, but unwilling to learn, don't do contracting. You will eventually be found out for the pretender you are. Plus, you make the job harder for the rest of us. Go be a consultant instead. :-)
"Doubt your doubts and believe your beliefs." -- Switchfoot, Ode to Chin
I also think that there is no union as far as I know within tech workers.
I wouldn't go as far as suggesting a union, but something needs to be done; the workers need to stand up and REFUSE to work unpaid overtime, or have a time where the beeper will not go off, or anything else like that. The fact that 'spineless' IT workers has been the norm means that we need to fight against that. If you are going to be working 60 hrs/wk (and you might enjoy that), make sure you get paid for 60hrs and not 30. Demand vacation time, make sure they know you have interests outside of work, and that you don't necessarily live and breath their work ethic.
But as with everyone else employed, I'd know I'd be afraid to approach my bosses with such requests. That's why there needs to be some collective effort, maybe lead by those IT workers already engrained in the system so that *they* can fight for better pay and offtime for workers.
"Pinky, you've left the lens cap of your mind on again." - P&TB
"I can see my house from here!" - ST:
I'm pulling about 80 hours per week right now. Hopefully it'll drop back to a manageable 50 or so.
At least I'm paid hourly.
Yes, the demand for people with my particular skill set (Unix-TCP/IP + management knowledge) is massive. I am in the position of being able to walk out of my job at any time and get a new one with the same base salary in about a fortnight or less. Of course such a move would probably not look so hot on my c.v. but the fact that I can do it (and management knows I can) has a big impact.
:-). I'm _really_ looking forward to it!
Also, it won't last. I give it about another five years at most, before either the market floods or business practices become more streamlined and the need to hire loads of people reduces.
I'm rare, because when I was 16 and starting to choose career options, Unix was a black art as practised by a couple of distinctly weird kids in school. Everyone laughed at computer nerds. Now, the 16 year olds are hearing of cool entrepreneurs making easy fortunes. Many will have email addresses at home. The school I went to already has email for every child - where I once looked for my sports timetable on a pinboard they have it on an intranet.
So, when those children get into the market place, it'll be a whole different ball game - and of course all my skills will be obsolete by then, too
-----
That is the heart of it, really. The people who work daft hours do it because they want to, or because they start out that way and then feel guilty about cutting back.
We (skilled computer types) are a very rare resource compared with demand and can easily set reasonable hours as part of our package, especially at big companies. I leave the office at 5.30 every day, unless I'm doing something fun and I'd rather stay late to finish it in one go.
Yes, at small companies people tend to work later to meet the deadlines. But that's because the industry is incapable of good project management, and because in many small (and large) companies employees feel very loyal, and really want to ship stuff on time.
There are very few places (in my experience of the UK market) that will have a problem with someone who says 'Sorry, I have a family and I only work my contracted hours'. Of course, if they then also spend 2 hours a day reading slashdot, then sure the boss won't be happy.
And that's another thing. Alot of people work very inefficiently, so the hours stretch out. Think of all the times you started out looking for documentation on a troublesome driver and ended up spending an hour reading about the latest developments in something else.
So, yes, there are lots of people who stay in the office alot, but it's not a case of exploitation (of course in some cases it may be, but not as an industry).
-----
Wait a minute... What? He didn't use the word "geek" either? Hang on. Who are you, and what have you done with the real Jon Katz? :-)
Sorry about the dig there, Jon, but seriously, I was impressed by how relevant this article was. I think one of the main reasons you've been criticized in the past has been the perception that you're mainly writing about yourself or some nebulous, ill-defined social group that you call "geeks" that you're hoping we will identify with. This article, on the other hand, clearly identifies the groups involved and doesn't waste space (well, not too much, anyway) with useless verbiage. Furthermore, it doesn't appear self-centered and narcissistic (which some of your columns have drifted dangerously close to, IMNSHO).
Briefly: Congratulations, Jon, this is exactly the kind of article that I come to /. to read. Keep up this kind of thing.
-----
The real meaning of the GNU GPL:
The real meaning of the GNU GPL:
"The Source will be with you... Always."
Why are you reading this?
-----
The real meaning of the GNU GPL:
The real meaning of the GNU GPL:
"The Source will be with you... Always."
I know that when my company is in production, I am lucky to get out with a 10 hour day... and no weekends... most of the time that isn't the case. I also know that members of our IT staff has had to put in similar hours. When production is over though, we are able to have a few weeks at sane hours.
-I just work here... how am I supposed to know?
Where I work (IBM UK if you must know), we fill in a weekly timesheet. It should add up to 37 hours a week, and if it doesn't I have to assume questions would get asked.
Personally, I get all my work done (properly, too) during those 37 hours a week, *and* I get plenty of time to browse Slashdot, educate myself with O'Reilly books, and handle a modest amount of personal email while at work.
--
Of course it's winter in Canada, but you get it. I like my job, and I'm all for a strong work ethic, but most people have a breaking point.
;)
How many people do you know that were literally thinking of leaving the computer industry alltogether? I am, but I'm not good at anything else (um, legal
-- The unsig...
Let's make this more interesting by taking a look at Bureau of Labour Statistics data. Go to http://146.142.4.24/cgi-bin/surveymost?pr and select "Nonfarm Business Output per Hour of All Persons % chq qtr ago" and "All years."
You will get tables for annual productivity growth for all nonfram businesses since 1959.
Using this, table, average annual productivity growth during the 90's was only 2.0%. In the 80's t was 1.4%, 2.0% for the 1970's, and 2.9% for the 1960's. The 90's growth in productivity isn't very spectacular, nor are the annualised quarterly rates of the last two quarters in 1999. Indeed, the only reason productivity growth even seems very high is because Reagan bungled the American economy so badly.
Americans may be more productive than ever, but so is everyone. Productivity growth is normal, it's the rate of growth that's the useful statistic, and by that standard, things are only okay at best.
So much for the idea that productivity is increasing faster than ever because of computers.
- obviously it just ain't so.
Now, we can retrieve statistics for average number of weekly hours worked from http://146.142.4.24/cgi-bin/surveymost?ee . The length of the work-week, on the average, hasn't changed much in the last decade.
Please not that this is true for all sectors of the economy covered by the BLS.
However, this is the average. For every overworked tech there is a burger flipper getting half as many hours as he wants. The median would be a helpful statistic here - but I can't get it from the BLS.
Personally, I put in most 40 hour weeks, a few 60 hour ones, but mostly 40. I also took 3 weeks of vacation last year and days off around midterms and finals each term, so I figure its about even. On the average Americans aren't working much more than they used to, but I suspect the average covers up a lot of sectorial differences.
It may be true that long work weeks are more standard in technology, but if so, it's being compensated by shorter weeks elsewhere. Non-electronics manufacturing is slowing down, and the loss of jobs there alone might compensate for the small number of people working in technology. Certainly, there is anecdotal evidence of large-scale overwork in certain parts of the computer industry, but remember that computing employs a very small percentage of Americans.
A more interesting idea is that labour is being underreported. Employees and employers may feel pressure to underreport hours worked, especially at start-ups and non-unionised service companies with salaried employees.
But there would have to be massive underreporting in order for "this round-the-clock work ethic [to be] an integral part of the high-tech economy." I just don't buy it - I know too many lazy bums like me in every part of the economy. I quit a start-up in order to regain a 40 hour work week, and I don't know many people who stick it out with high pressure shops for long these days.
And I'm still working.
We had a Oracle/Email server go bad and had to restore from scratch (except the data) on an IBM RISC S-70. (Bad hardware upgrade)
This is a database for a production E-Commerence application. $DOLLARS$ flying out windows.
Thank GOD we switched from an NT system to a UNIX system or I'd Be here all year.
There are 10 type of people in the world, those who understand binary and those who don't.
College students report something of the same phenomenon - technology keeps them studying, socializing, messaging and researching much of the time, much more than is acknowledged by school administrations.
Huh? I think it's the other way around. I've found after five years of school now, that I do less studying, socializing, and researching because of my computer. I can get what I need to have done faster, because I can sort through huge amounts of data in a single search, can type with a spellchecker running, and turn in assignments online. It's freed up a lot of time to do non studious things. Actually, I'm an architecture student, so it's freed up more time to mess with designs, but for us architecture students, that is non studious time.
On a side note, I work in IT as well. When you're paid hourly, you work 40 hours a week or less (no one wants to pay IT overtime costs), but when you move into salary (as I did last summer), you suddenly end up working more. But you know, the important thing isn't how much you work, it's how happy you are with your job. I may have been working 50-60 hours a week, but it didn't feel like it, and it's a lot more fun than most other jobs. It's not like I was forced into it.
Let's see, since I left my last job because I was on call 24/7 for months, let's check my new job (which is MUCH less stressful), since it'd logically follow I'm working less and happier:
Theoretical Workday: 8 AM till 5 PM, 1 hour lunch
Real World: Starts at 7:30 AM (I have a 8 AM conference call to discuss the daily schedule with employees in other phyical locations, and I HAVE to have read email and checked calendars by then. How else would I know what's changed since I quit work the day beofre?).
I get about 15 minutes for a lunch, since my lunch hour is usually sucked up by other employees hunting me down and saying "Hey, since you have a few minutes...". Oh, and I generally eat in front of my computer.
Then I work straight thru till the end of the business day. Then things get interesting. I have to check emails throughout the evening to see if people in other timezones are finally replying to my emails or voice mails from earlier in the day, since I need that info for the next morning's call.
And of course I carry a business cell phone/pager, which means my phone rings anytime up until 11 PM or so as some other employee who's working late realizes they need something from me, or someone wants to complain that their email is running slow (It's NOT the email server! It's a 4 MB Powerpoint doc, and you are on a 56k modem!!!).
33 hours a week? I wish. Notice, I didn't even MENTION weekends! See, there's that cell phone, and powerpoint docs don't download any faster on weekends...
Try
this Google search. Read Bob Black's classic rant, "The Abolition of Work". Don't just ignore it where it breaks down... be sure to absorb the good points he does make. If this essay doesn't change your thinking, i don't know what will.
-dave, currently working 60-hour weeks so he can retire early.
---
Hand me that airplane glue and I'll tell you another story.
This sunday I was at work.
I don't mean this in the normal I went to work on sunday. I mean this in the Saturday night I went to work, and Monday morning I went home sense.
It seems like this is all I do anymore. Not that I mind of course. I love this stuff. Although I do get a hard time from my boss at times becomes I come in late. I generally work from 3pm or so (sometimes earlier) until 2 or 3 in the morning.
When I'm at home, I'm usually working on stuff from home. I'm oncall 24 hours a day. I'd have to say that I work 60-70 hours a week. At least. And that's just the time I'm physcially in the office.
The thing you have to realise is I don't do this for the money. I'm on salary. I do it because I want to. I get to deal with things I would never otherwise deal with. I'm constantly learning new things.
I wouldn't change it for anything
That said, when I was working in a permanent position, I was working closer to 60 hours a week. I guess that as a contractor, I just have no loyalty to anyone but myself. Or maybe I've just seen the light, and don't feel the need to work for nothing any more. Perhaps it comes with age. I doubt that I'd return to working 60 hours a week even if I did go back to a permanent job.
"The invisible and the non-existent look very much alike." -- Delos B. McKown
I'm on call for network problems 24/7. I have to wear 2 pagers that have to be responded to any time day or night, sleeping, showering, whenever.
"Reactionaries must be deprived of the right to voice their opinions; only the people have that right." - Mao
Sorry to tell you this, buddy, but most "Linux zealots" are not the dirty-hippy late-arriving slackers that you assume they are. I have a respectable haircut and I work 8am to 6pm every weekday. The fact that you met one admin who was dirty and made this assumption is a huge statement about your character. Please let me know where you work so I can be sure to stay far away.
An employee who spends his hours playing Quake deserves to be fired no matter what his haircut (unless, of course, he works for id).
Be carefull. The article said:
The average number of hours worked in the service sector is 32.9
Most people in the service sector are knowledge workers.
Computer programmers etc.. are knowledge workers.
We can neither conclude that
Most computer programmers are in the service industry
Or that this statistic in any way is supposed to represent that of computer proffesionals
Marriage is the "pseudo-ethics" that cloaks the messy truth of sexuality in the raiment of propriety -- it's "Don't Ask,
I work all the time, day and night, weekends, etc. But "who" I am working for is the question. The hi-tech firm I'm employed at is actually pretty good about hrs. I probably work an average of 40 - 45 hrs/week for them. I telecommute most of the time doing remote development and go on-site for system implimentations.
:).
But as an active developer in the Linux community I volunteer MANY more hrs per week... probably another 30 or so. This in-directly helps my employer as well, as a sponser of the project they benefit. It's hard to say...
All in the name of world-domination
I'm talking to actual hard-nosed programmers here when I say that those fancy CEO/CTO/CFO/CBO/CZO/Whatever's don't actually *do* any work. All you Slashdotters know what I'm talking about: They read email, they talk on the phone, and they make 419 times more than you. Open Source/Free Software is a perfect example of how much better things can be when we rid ourselves of these parasites...
"It's the workers who own the means of production" - Anonymous worker ant from 'Antz', although I think somebody else said it before him.
I don't know how many times I have to put forward this idea, but maybe it's time to start thinking about the General Strike.
Maybe we wouldn't be striking for more money. Maybe we'd be striking for more control over our lives. Or maybe we'd be striking for idealogical reasons, like the whole DeCSS fiasco. Or maybe we could do what the students at the UNAM in Mexico did, and demand everything.
I'm not saying we should do this tomorrow, but at some point, our collective wages are going to drop. Maybe companies will start outsourcing to India and Singapore more often, maybe the market will get glutted with programmers (who know what they're doing, as opposed to being glutted with VB programmers), maybe the demand for programming will go down due to a recession.
Industry wide strikes work, they have proven themselves effective in history (learn about Seattle 1919 and the struggle for an eight hour work day that unfortunately has become meaningless in our industry). It's a thought. I have a feeling conditions will have to get worse (worse?!? about all we have going for us now is a decent income, but sometimes that's based on worthless stock options that'll never happen) before people in the tech industry wake up and wrestle the keyboards from their managers and CEO's.
I say, why wait until that happens to start thinking about it? Why not start planning now?
Michael Chisari
flash forward about 10 years or so, i am now the CTO of an internet startup, getting paid way more than i "deserve" by my old scale, and yet all i do is, sit on the phone, talk to the people that work for me, talk to the people i work for, and think... and for me, there is no difference between home and work. i understand now what my father told me so many years ago...
And, to clarify, how does that justify your inflated paycheck? I can understand it justifying your inflamed ulcer, but why does the fact that you've sold your soul for the almighty dollar mean that you should make more than others, who actually *do the work*?
By the way, my father's in construction (and non-union, unfortunately), and trust me, his work does *NOT* stay separate from the rest of his life. He recieves faxes and pages at 10:30pm, and has to review plans and price quotes during dinnertime. And furthermore, he has chronic back problems to deal with, along with strong classist attitudes from the people he works for.
I'm a database programmer, and I've lucked out with my current job, but I've had a few previous jobs, and trust me, there was no separation. I was once paged at 11:30pm at night so I could fix a simple little bug. I'm sure that's happened to a lot of people on Slashdot.
Don't feel as though you're justified in recieving an insane amount of money while people who are living paycheck to paycheck are actually *producing* something. Chances are, if all the managers and CEO's called in sick tomorrow (contrary to Ayn Rand), the world would not grind to a halt, but instead function more efficiently and freely than ever before.
In a way, I apologize for being a bit harsh, but I'm sick and tired of people who make 419 times the average wage of their workers trying to justify that gap. I refuse to believe that there is any justification, whatsoever, not when there's hunger in the world, and more imporantly, when Tim Berners-Lee drives a beat up Volkswagen.
It just doesn't make any sense.
Michael Chisari
Back in the days when I was an hourly employee roughly 4 years ago, I used to regularly pull 60 hour weeks. The company realized my loyalty and dedication, gave me a few dollar/hr raise and stuck me on salary. Since then, I've gradually lessened my hours to the point I drive myself insane if I work more than 43, the minimum number of hours we have to work per week.
I've accumulated hundreds and hundreds of "comp" time, enough to take 2 solid months off, but I take on average 10 hours a year. With the huge amount of hours I've put in above and beyond the call of duty, I'm actually making less now than I was 4 years ago.
I love what I do. I just hate where I do it.
Manager: "Mozai, R., I know you're busy but could I meet with you? We're trying to deploy a beta test of our new product and we need it to be done as soon as possible. We've got a list of names and passwords to be added to the beta server, so we'll need you to add them to the server and make a special login form --"
Mozai: "They're logging in through the test database. R. would spend too much time trying to figure it out, so I should do it since I know the database."
Manager: "Oh, great. We've got a few hundred here, so if you could get this done Saturday that would be great."
Mozai: "... I'd rather not work on the weekend. I've got plans."
Manager: "Ah. Well, R., are you okay with coming in on Saturday and maybe Sunday to get this done?"
R.: "Well, sure, I could --"
Mozai: "No. If you're going to tell R. to come in on the weekend, then I'll get it done. It would take him too long."
So I ended up working really late Friday on an alternate solution where the hundred or so users could make their own accounts on the beta server and database. A few emergency phone calls to our other office on the East Coast, and the beta test was ready to go before midnight. I told the manager I had a problem with being expected to work weekends. He looked at me strangely, so I qualified it by saying I don't mind so much working weekends, just his assumption that I would. He got confused and later said that he did appreciate the extra time I was putting in. I feel that he's lying because he never noticed I was working the last three Sundays, despite the fact that he signs my timesheets.
Unappreciated? Yeah, I feel it.
I used to work usually between 60-65 hours a week but if you count how many times I took big projects home with me to work on and all the time I spend checking on our systems and checking on the systems that check our systems and the pages and phone calls for problems etc I'm probably working close to 70-80 hrs/week, so I decided to cut my hours at work so I do about 40-50 now but after everything I do at home its still over 60. The worst thing that ever happened to my work/personal life was Salary. Gary
======== In the future, everything will be artificial. ========
I work 35hours/week, from 9am to noon, and from 1pm to 5pm as a network and unix engineer, pretty cool :)
--
BeRoute
"Science will win because it works." - Stephen Hawking
The problem with paying based on amount of work done is that it emphasizes quantity over quality.
Looking at certain software products, you'd almost think this was the case already...
I work about 50 hrs a week, but I'm only in the office for 35 -- the rest of the time I work is done at home, where I have overall a better setup to do my job (I'm a web developer by job description, but I also do a lot of web programming on the side).
Of course, my HR department doesn't see it that way. They're based out of our parent company, which has been in the telephone business for a LONG time. They're used to "traditional" business where you wake up, come to work, work, go home, and relax before sleeping and repeating the process all over again. They DO NOT understand the concept of working when you're not at the office. Their view is "If you're not here, you're not working".
They, of course, need to get a clue about the way jobs based on creativity work. (design, programming, etc... most "tech" jobs fall into this category).
I CANNOT be creative from 8:30 AM to 5:30 PM -- I can't simply turn it on like a switch, and turn it off when the "work day" is over. Hell, I wouldn't want to anyway. I ENJOY being creative. I ENJOY thinking. That's half the reason why I'm working this job, because there's always something new to do, and always something new to learn.
I'd imagine that many people working "tech" jobs are in much the same predicament. "The Establishment" is built on traditional business, and doesn't understand the new tech work ethic, thus doesn't reward it.
Paying based on amount of work done is going to encourage shoddy, rushed jobs, just to get them "out the door". Paying based on hours worked encourages slow progress (as the longer it takes, the more you get paid) - but often better quality as well.
There isn't a simple solution to this. Companies WILL NOT simply pay out more money (IE: basing pay on REAL hours worked). That takes cash out of the executives pockets, and they'll never agree to it.
What needs to happen (and I believe this is *starting* to happen already) is a paradigm shift in the way business views "work". Instead of only putting value on hours spent AT the office, value needs to be assessed to all work done.
With more jobs able to be done remotely, and the availability of fairly powerful home computers (with broadband 'net connections) it's possible for more and more people to "tellecommute" and work from their homes. In many cases (including my own experiences with working from my home) people are MORE productive in the relaxed environment of their home than they are in the confines of a cubicle.
I think this is the way of the future as far as tech jobs go...tech workers will always put in tremendous amounts of hours and time - but industry will have to acknowledge that contribution - otherwise it'll always be the way it is now. Working from home is a good start, I think - as it reduces a lot of the stress involved with the workplace.
There are also many ethical issues with "removing the workplace" (mainly social ones) but I'm not going to go into that right now - I've ranted long enough, and it's time for me to get back to work (and time for that 2nd cup of coffee! LONG overdue there!)
there is an engineers union. They are on strike against Boeing right NOW.
... course they are dicking with the entire f22 schedule too so I guess it sux to be me too.
sux to be boeing
dv
"There's no secret. You just press the accelerator to the floor and keep turning left." -- Bill Vukovich
Subject says it all. What do I theoretically get paid for? 40 or so... (I am salaried, after all, and am expected to "occassionally" put in more hours). I have to take sick days just to get things done at home. Sad...
I've been an "information worker" for 20 years and the average work week is a minimum of 40 hours and more likely 60 hours a week.
Have you compiled your kernel today??
(If you're on a salary and working significant overtime, start keeping a log of the hours you work -- you will want it after you leave so you can pursue a back-pay claim with the Wage and Hour Division of OSHA. Don't worry about contract provisions -- most of them are illegal if they attempt to limit your legal right to be paid for work and OSHA will be happy to tell you which are and aren't applicable to you.)
The company I work for pretty much doesn't care if I come in at 9:30 or 11:30, as long as I'm in before noon (I rarely see my manager before 11:00). But I've been put on notice by the department head that I'll soon be moving to a high-profile project and other considerations mean it has go from zero to code-freeze by April 30. That's right, ten weeks from now a mission-critical project that hasn't even started yet must be essentially complete. This means a strict 40 hours a week will mark me as a slacker as it has in other places when I tried to defend my free time from the encroachment of work.
You know what we need more than anything? A retribution-free workplace. Imagine how much less stress you'd have if you could just say "Bob, I'm spending half my day doing [insert unproductive things here] and having to work overtime to get my real work done. Is there any way you can cut me loose from a couple of [unproductive things] so I can go home on time?" Wouldn't that be great? And it'll happen sometime around the day pigs fly.
-- Old Man Kensey
Always work hourly, never work salary...
Always work hourly, never work salary...
Always work hourly, never work salary...
Forget the BS with forming unions, all you'll do is ossify the workplace. Merely switch to working contracts, and keep a timesheet. Your employer will quickly learn the value of your overtime.
And if you do the math....
.03 * 16 + .03 *13.5 + .10 * 11.5 + .31 * 9.5 +.21 * 8 + .15 * n
the result is that the average slashdotter works between 6.6 and 7.7 hours a day, depending on how you estimate "less than 8 hours". Put it at 4, and the average slashdotter works 7.2 hours a day....
Roger.
Hmm... 60 hours would probably be the minimum I work in a week. It's now 9:15 on Wednesday morning, and I'm already at around 45.
As for pagers, I refuse to carry one anymore. (I'll reconsider this under appropriate circumstances.) And cell phones, I love mine. My boss has been trying for over a year to find out the number, ain't gonna happen!
When I started this job, I had a good long talk with the owner, and we came to an understanding. I'll work my ass off, put in way more hours than I'm required to, and all that good stuff. In exchange, once I walk out the door, I'm gone. The way I see it, he doesn't need my cell phone number. If it's not important enough for him to have to make a serious effort to contact me, then it's not important enough for me to be bothered while I'm on the lake.
(And yes, I do realize how lucky I am to have an employer that can actually see things that way.)
either commuting or at work for approx 14 hours a day for a total of 70 hours per week
:) And in the winter, I'll put in some pretty long hours. But when there's something I'd rather be doing, I no longer let myself feel guilty about leaving the office after my 8 (or 7, or 6) hours are up.
Aah, the things we do for quality of life.
I'm not sure how the concept of working 70 hours per week is compatible with the concept of quality of life.
I used to think that quality of life meant having enough cash to buy all the toys I wanted. As I got older (and more burnt out) I figured out it doesn't work that way (at least for me). So, I took a 13K pay cut to go to an employer that understands that "I feel like water skiing" is a valid reason for leaving work an hour early.
Of course, I still need to make enough to pay for the boat.
Well sure I used to work 70, 80 90 hours a week. But now I have better things to do. The truth is we all wear smocks. Knowledge worker or not.
If you're reading this, you're probably just reading it to see why Jon Katz bothered to post such a lame topic.
pronoblem
flash forward about 10 years or so, i am now the CTO of an internet startup, getting paid way more than i "deserve" by my old scale, and yet all i do is, sit on the phone, talk to the people that work for me, talk to the people i work for, and think... and for me, there is no difference between home and work. i understand now what my father told me so many years ago...
when you are paid to think, there isn't an amount of hours that you "work" if you are good at your job, and if you are successful at it, at least in part, you are always at work, you are always thinking about how you can make something a little bit faster, how you can set up a strategic partnership, or whether payroll checks will bounce or not.
so to answer the question, how many hours a week do I work, i argue, i work all of the hours i am awake, and even some of those when i am asleep, for my job, even visits me in my dreams...
Well, my latest job I (even though I was looking for sysadmin) ended up in programming. But fortunatly I usually only have to do 40 hours. Of course it is occasionally less...or like this week I'll probably hit more than 80. Overall I'm not complaining.
Of course some of the programmers that work for the company I am sub-contracted to work 60+ hours a week. (but I'm sure they do make a bit more than me)
I think most programmers are overworked...and seriously underpaid (at least most of them) I've done it, 80+ hour weeks...strait to burn out. Now I have a new outlook, not to mention a playstation..:)
If ignorance is bliss, the world is full of blissful people
In many cases, this may be a lot lower than all the other numbers...
--
Interesting post. I work more than 60 hours a week, and like Jon, it's cause I love it, not cause I'm forced to. Yet it's also true that many people just don't get paid for the work they do. It isn't exploitation, yet it does put pressure on many people who don't really want to work that hard. Or does it?
jonkatz@slashdot.org
Back in the 80's when I worked for Radio Shack,
I was often asked to report fewer hours on my timesheet than I actually worked, so that the store's "dollar per hour" statistic would be inflated.
When I got tired of this request, I contacted the Texas Employment Commission. They were *very* interested in my story, and told me that my employer was committing a federal crime by asking me to work hours without reporting them. It was a serious matter, because it cheats Social Security out of some money. I hadn't even thought about them being the party that was harmed.
I don't mind giving names, dates, etc., because I'd still enjoy seeing my former managers doing hard time in the sodomy^W corrections facility for what they did to me.
This was my main reason for quitting Radio Shack, not that it was a good job or anything. Now that I look back on the experience, I look back with great contempt, as I was definitely a victim of workplace abuse, perpertrated systematically by an organization that shamelessly operated under that policy.
-fb Everything not expressly forbidden is now mandatory.
If tech workers were paid by the hour (w/overtime & holiday pay) the numbers would be very different. For that matter, if employers reported their tech workers hours honestly they would fear the government would have to step in. It is one thing for corporate officers and business owners to put in vast hours--their pay is tied directly to results. Salaried tech workers, OTOH, are increasing productivity by putting in more hours, as much as by improving efficiency. There was a time when tech workers were on-call - you could add about 5% to the number of hours they were in the office based on this. Then came pagers and modems and that number went up to 10%. Now we have cell phones, high speed access, and non-tech employees accessing work during off-hours(and requiring support from tech workers). Add another 10%. So before we even look at the increase in hours logged for being at work, we are looking at a 25% increase in the number of hours worked by technical folks over the last 15 years.
Forget statistics. Trust what you know. Do you know many techies who work less than 40 hours? I don't.
"I love my job, but I hate talking to people like you" (Freddie Mercury)
I've worked anywhere from 100 hours to 40 hours in a work week, and I think if I were to take all of my work weeks since leaving university, it would average to around 50-55 hours average.
Now, if I added in the time I spend THINKING and working in my head (which I contend is something like 75-90% of all good hacking) I think that figure would jump up to a steady 80 hours a week.
You know, I don't think there's much time when I just leave the office at the office and am completely free to go do something else. Maybe I'm one of those obsessive personalities challenged by the work place, but then so are most of my co-workers. Hell we work out algorithms on fricken bar napkins sometimes.
Granted, part of it is the love of the game-- er I mean craft. But still, a little realism is needed here.
I have *never* worked 32.5 hours in a week-- except when the company I was working at close the office and laid everyone off before the week was done in order to avoid a full final paycheck.
And although there's love, that doesn't mean my employer should get to bask in my loving rays for free or for the price of a pizza delivery boy. No joke. On one project, I worked 100 hours a week for 3 weeks. I figured out my theoretical hourly rate from my salary and worked out that I'd make more around the corner delivering pizza.
...(not even counting weekends!) according to Nitrozac. I gotta get me that job. :-)
--
There is no K5 cabal.
I am not the real rusty.
I don't know what the government bean counters are smoking, but they need to start sharing.
/.! I've been with them for a year and a half, took a job from them out of university with a BS, had a couple previous degrees and spent the majority of my time in uni working for a lab that did contract work for them. I'm salaried, so I don't punch a time clock, but I do ocasionally keep track of my hours in a week just for the "fun" of it.
;> ). There is also the work, I do like the portion of code I own, I wish I had more time to work on it, rather than do highlevel analysis and sketch out a design for vendors to implement. I've often joked that it's amazing how the two managers I interviewed with took a sum total of two and a half hours conversation (a fair amount of which overlapped) and managed to put me in just the right spot on a product that strectches from one extreme of computer science to the other, but they did and I thank them every time I spend more than a day or so working closely with the people at the other end... they're nice people, but I wouldn't trade their work for anything.
I'm a software engineer for a major global I/T company, one every single one of you reading this know - we even have our own catagory on
Last week I worked 64.7 hrs.
Yesterday I worked 13.5 hrs.
Last spring/summer I worked every day for over two months solid a minimum of 9 hours on weekdays and 3 hours on weekends (federal holiday excluded).
One particular week late last summer my parents were in town to celebrate my birthday (2K mile flight to get here) the plan was that I'd work a half day wednesday and have thursday off... nice plan... I went in at about 8 wednesday worked all morning as normal, then went to the lobby to let my folks in for lunch and show them around afterward then leave and show them the town... well partway through lunch the pager I was carring went off. (I do not normally carry a pager, had this one because we had developers on site for a customer go live situation, they hadn't needed me all week.) I looked at the number and said, "it'll wait till after we finish eating." three more pages durring lunch said otherwise. so we cut out the tour I said I'd check with them and be home in a half hour. Well it turns out it was a different customer who had already deployed and was down fatally... I was in the lab untill midnight with a copy of their config database trying to get them back up and running. I got two more pages that day, both from my own home phone number... when I finally came stagering in my mother said, "now I understand why you don't have a life, glad I'm not in any hurry for grandkids." (I did manage to get out of the office in under three hours the next morning so that by 11 we were on the road driving so I could show them the area, started with the city I went to uni in)
I'm not the only one with these kinds of stories, there are a small handfull of people I work with who put in the same kinds of hours, one of them has been at a customer sight monday through friday for the last three weeks he's putting in the same kinds of hours their people are, not uncommon for them to be at work well after midnight.
Let's take a look at last weekend, very close to *every* weekend since the new year for me:
left work friday night about 8pm.
got home and threw together a quick dinner, relaxed in front of the computer while eating it, in bed by 10pm.
woke up saturday at about 6... PM!
shuffled around the apartment for a few hours... didn't have the energy/enthusiasm to go grocery shopping, even thought the refrigerator and cupboards are empty... futz'ed around on line for a couple hours before ordering a pizza, then hacked on an oss project I'm involved with while eating pizza for a few hours...
went to bed about 3am sunday
slept 'till about 4pm sunday
did laundry and watched tv for the rest of the day, then hacked that evening while eating left over pizza. before heading to bed about midnight.
stared at the ceiling untill shortly after neighboor's alarm went off at 6am... dozed sometime thereafter untill mine at 8am, was at work by 9pm.
some may question the amount of hacking time in there... since it's about the only time I get to actually write code I call it the most relaxing part of the weekend.
a couple people who've seen the kind of hours I work, and the excuse for a life I live have said, "So you're working your ass off... you must be making real good money right?"
every morning when I badge in I walk past a sign telling me what the minimum wage is... when I see that I think about my pal in uni who was torn between becoming a elementary teacher or a McManager... the McManager pays more. When I was hired in I believed the statement that they couldn't offer any more, and after holding out for a while and telling them about other, better, offers they still wouldn't budge so I accepted. 7 months latter durring the annual salary adjustment phase my manager was rather blunt when he said I wasn't being paid near what I was worth, then he gave me the bigest raise he could get past his manager's manager, also the largest raise in the area, percentage wise. This week I had a meeting with my (new) manager who said he was requesting that they "do right by me", which I guess means he's going for the same percentage.
Now last fall I spent a lot of time talking career with a guy that I was kinda following in the footsteps of, he kept very close tabs on the market for our skills (for reasons that became obvious just recently when he left) and I had worked for him extensivly for about six months or so, so he knew very well what I could do. His expert opinion was that I was hired for about 55-60% what I should be getting for my ability. Even if my raise this year is equal to last years' I'll be at about 75% of that figure from a year and a half ago, and most people would say my "value" has risen quite a bit in those 18 months. note: I've not used real numbers here because if I actually posted my salary people would laugh; but I live in an area with a very low CPI and cost of living (about as far from silly-con valley as conceivable) and also much less competitive job market (unlike austin for example where I know a lot of people who have quit, walked accross the street and gotten hired for 20% more money, although some smaller companies have started to realise the target rich environment captive in this area and are moving in) so all things are relative and have been scaled. (math major's are encouraged to do the reverse formula and solve for my salary for extra credit)
Then I see a new guy come in a year after me and is hired at a salary that already beats mine after my first raise. (by a few percent!) And I refuse to even go into the recent pension fiasco.
Recently there are four or five companies that have come in and capitalized on some internal politics and strife over bad upper-middle-mis-management decisions, the defection rate amoung some of our top technical people is becoming alarming, but it has also put me in an interesting place... I'm on my managers "big truck list". What you ask is a "big truck list"? it means that if I get hit by a truck tommorow they're screwed. it also means it's in his best interest to make sure the company does in fact "do right by me".
So here's the question I say we put forward as the next one: "Why? We've seen how bad the conditions in the industry are, why do people stay?"
for me, it's the people and the work. I'm surounded by geeks... now there are fewer than there used to be, and I'm afraid the ones that left are the ones most like me, but I'm still a geek amoungst geeks. I have a manager that I trust has my best career interests in mind (that wasn't the case for a few months last summer/fall... but my friends credit me with driving that guy out of management...
I don't think it's fair to ask "how many hours do you work?" without asking "are you happy with these hours?" It's entirely likely that many geeks are more then happy to work an incredible amount of hours.
I used to work as a corporate drone for a very large technology company. I was given a number (p28901) and took my place among the other 150,000 soul-less autonoma. I was bored silly every hour that I was there... and you're out of your mind if you think I would work on MINUTE more then 40 hours at that job.
Fast forward to the present. I get paid to work on my hobby -- a leading Open Source project. I set what I want to do and when I want to work on it. As a result, the line between what is my job and what is my hobby has completely disappeared... they are one and the same. I "work" during the day and significant parts of the night and during boring shows on TV and during commercials and on Saturdays and Sundays... probably around 60-80 hours a week (depending on what project I'm working on). But I'm loving it! This is incredibly fun stuff!
Moral of the story: I'd only worry about this issue if the majority of knowledge workers worked more then 40 hours a week because they "had to" not because they "wanted to"
here .
Is it mere coincidence that the fortune at the bottom of the page read, "the only person who got his work done by Friday was Crusoe"?
There are several aspects the make IT an around the clock experience: 1) training. When I went into electronics 25 yrs ago they said, "this is such a fast changing field that you're going to be in school the rest of your working days". 2) Access to mission critical servers and workstations: in many cases the only chance you get to do maintenance on servers etc. is at 4AM in the morning or early Sundays. Most of us just can't 'leave work behind' when you exit the building - we're often working on long projects and I get lots of insirations in the middle of the night or early morning, and keep a pad by the bed to jot down ideas. Yet, with all that, I resent the fact that we're often treated like factory laborers! I can't stand supervisors who want you to punch in a 7:30, be focused and creative for precisely 2 hours, take a 10 minute break, then back to the "THINK!" tank. Maybe if these managers could actually organize with effecient specilization and division of labor one could crank out code like a machine shop all tooled up for a production run, but anything that's already that mechanized is already obsolete and not worth persuing, it ain't bleeding edge!
Bozorro the swashbuckling clown
try { do() || do_not(); } catch (JediException err) { yoda(err); }
Including all the time spent doing independant study for certifications and such (The new educational system isn't excluded to the universities anymore after all) I easily spend between 50-75 hours a business week working. Including weekend hours that generally don't get logged it's probly more like 75-80 hours...
---------- Hot Rats!
...and here's the link.
It all depends on your priorities. I am the Account Manager for the outsourced Data Center Ops for a big firm. The pay is good, and I love what I do and all. Still, I spend easy 50 hours a week doing the job because it is what it takes to get the job done.
Sometimes people don't have the luxury of cutting back their hours or god forbid they want to keep moving up the tech ladder Jr admin becomes the Sr Admin in charge etc and get off of doing all the crap user maintenance and log viewing and into other aspects of Admin work for just one example. Some people do want to get up in the world and people are sometimes to quick to criticize.
Anyway, if it is what makes you happy, go for it. Sometimes I feel people fuss too much when they really are doing jobs they love like the network admin that spends 60 hours a week but stays excited about it 55 of those hours and bitches the other five. Come on folks you aren't fooling anyone.
On the other side of the coin, I have not seen presented is a lot of people do not know how to manage their time at work. In my job, I could easily camp out spend 60+ hours a week on this position. I don't and I know how to maximize the downtime. Sure, I could spend the slow days with busy work but I admit that I muck about on the net when there are no projects on the table doing as little as possible to keep things going after a big project and leave early on top of that. Why? Because I could easily spend the next four days working from 7:30 am to midnight. I do this and people see I get projects in on time and they like my style, intense when needed, casual otherwise.
It works more tech workers should try it.
ACK
The other part of the knowledge worker employment picture that they don't talk about (apart from 27-hour Thursdays followed by 12 hour Fridays, followed by x-hour Saturdays & Sundays,) is that the moment that your knowledge becomes obsolete, they feel that they have to let you go.
Retraining is not an option. It costs too much and impacts the competitive bottom line.
MSBPodcast.com The opinions expressed here are my own. If you don't like 'em... Think up your own stuff.
I am actually make a living scamming tech companies to let me play on their phat ass enterprise boxen. They need code written, which is what I do for play, so I write their code, jammin to cool tunes.. getting paid mad dollars by the hour, and then I go home and play on more phat boxen.
Ahhh.. Hack the system.
I am a sysadmin for a university so I already work about 60 hours a week normally however I also happen to live across the street from my office (literally I can walk to work in a minute and a half. I've timed it) So I am also part maintainance man because everyone knows about me living there so they call me at all hours with stuff like, I left my door open could you go close for me? thanks bye. So in reality I work almost 24/7.
--"Karma is justice without the satisfaction"
I always record at least 40 on my timesheet. Sometimes more as I will work a little extra when a project is due, or the 'ok, leaving in 30 minutes' and 2 hours later finlly looking up at the clock and going: 'SHEESH, It's THAT late?'
But even given that, what isn't counted is all the time spent away from work that I am working, just like this article talks about. I check my work email at home while I check my home email. Probably at least once a night, twice on weekends. and I will spend time (1/2 - 1 hour) replying to work messages simply so that I don't have to worry about them otherwise.
It also doesn't count the time that I am thinking about code while in the shower. Which at least for me, is where most of my breakthroughs and new insights come from. Plus I take 30 minute showers every morning, so add that onto my workload.
So ask for fewer hours during the day. Or get another job.
Assuming you're in the same job market most of us are, you could probably quit your job and get another in 2 weeks. We need to stop whining and realize how good we really have it.
I don't understand why people say this. Do forty-somethings not have the skills of a twenty-something? Do forty-somethings not have savings? I can understand that having a family and kids makes things more difficult, but my father is a programmer in his 40's and he's changed jobs twice in the last 5 years (it was his choice in both cases).
Yes, 40-somethings may not have the time to keep up with the latest technologies the way 20-somethings can, and yes, a mortgage is a pain. But on the other hand older workers have valuable business experience and a proven track record. I see no reason why older geeks should resign themselves to keeping a job they hate.
So, apparently, the increased level of staffing in marketing is necessary if shoddy software is being produced. This makes some sense. If only 10% of your potential customers buys the shoddy software, and you need 20% in order to make a profit, then the only way to double your sales is to hire twice as many people in marketing so they can call on twice as many potential customers. It wouldn't make sense for the marketing people to work the longer hours since the people they need to talk to work more or less normal hours (and when they're working late they're crzay about being interrupted by a sales call).
I think the more interesting question is why doesn't management see that if they hired more and better programmers and better programming managers, they'd turn out software that wasn't shoddy. It wouldn't be so hard to sell software that wasn't shoddy, eh?. Taken to its extreme, you could get by with only a handful of people in marketing as the software would be so-o-o good that your company's reputation grows to the point that customers would be calling and wanting to buy. Don't most cold sales calls end up in no sale?
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Just my opinion, mind you, but your boss is an idiot. This is one of those comments that, for most people, would start them thinking that a better job is out there.
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I'll bet they your employer thinks that they can call you and get immediate response now that they've gotten that foothold into your home. Not bad for a measly $20-$25 per month. Bet it got your boss a bigger raise.
I was the IT representative to an internal user group that spent an hour or so each week going over outstanding problems and/or projects, discussing progress, etc. (My main job was to see that they didn't pull something like dump two dozen projects into our lap that required a gazillion man-hours.) They used a rating system where each task was given a weight ranging from 0 through 99 (where `0' meant ``We should not do this.'' and `99' meant ``Why wasn't this done last quarter?''). It was a constant source of amusement that each week on a the 5-6 page list of tasks, all were ranked at 99 with, perhaps, 3-4 tasks ranked at 0. I never once saw any tasks that fell somewhere between those two ratings. I could easily see several tasks ranked at 99 -- perhaps each person has a 99 task but when everything's given the highest priority you begin to see real deficiencies in management. If everything's at the highest priority then nothing has priority. (Oh, sure you can choose one to spend the majority of your time this week but expect to get nailed for not putting enough time into the other 37 tasks you were given.) I once tried pointing out the problem with the rating system by asking which tasks were really the top priority. I got to see firsthand those ``blank stares and slack jaws'' you mentioned. Nothing changed except their opinion of me as a team player was probably reduced.
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In a perfect world, perhaps. Maybe where you live all housing is affordable and your personal time is worth nothing.
If I were working in downtown Chicago (and I did for several years), it would be nice if I lived in the city or one of the close-in suburbs. But there are so many drawbacks that you don't really have the choice that you seem to think. If you have children, most people would not want to live in Chicago (the schools are not so hot). If you want to live in a nearby suburb... well you can't afford to; housing costs in the closest 'burbs are out of sight. If you want to live in an apartment all your working life and take the tax hit, then perhaps you can move at will. If you own a home, moving in order to minimize your commute is not practical. The same killer commutes and housing costs exist in the S.F. area. I'll bet it's not unusual in any large market.
At the salaries that most IT jobs are offering in the city, most of their workers can't afford to live nearby. The commute is a cost that you have to take into account when you consider accepting an offer from one of these companies. If 2-3 hours per day on the road or on public transportation is something you want to do, then fine. And besides the time element, there's the cost of transportation (train ticket, parking, or gas and maintenance of your auto -- not insignificant when taking the train, which is heralded as the most cost effective means of getting to downtown Chicago, runs you nearly $2000/year). Luckily, I did find a nice position that's 15 minutes from home. My commute to downtown Chicago would be around 90 minutes door-to-door (not the sort of response time I want to provide when there's a big problem at work) and, on top of the normal 9 hour work day, that's 60 hours devoted to work-related activities. And who really only is at the office for only 9 hours? When I was working in the Loop, I was spending around 14 hrs/day commuting and working and, believe me, getting home at 8:30 PM gets real old, real fast (and doing this on about 5 hours of sleep a day).
Bottom line is that most people live where they can afford to or where their family has the fewest hits on quality of life. Living a few minutes away from work is one choice. Living where the schools are crappy and your children wind up running the gauntlet of crack houses and gangbangers is a choice. Living in a nice town with decent schools is yet another choice. They're not equal choices though.
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Counting the hours i spend in the office, i work an average of 38 hours a week with about 10 hours of overtime.
I work as a network technician at a major web hosting company during the night shift (there it's 9pm-9am), i switch off nights with the other night tech so we work 3 to 4 nights a week. so i'll work 36-38 hours one week and then about 50 the next.
I know this isn't much compared to how many hours other people work, but i'm a lowly tech, i'm never on call, and i just monitor the servers and restore tapes sent to us by clients.
the senior techs on the other hand are always there, the first week i was there my supervisor had worked abount 100 hours that week.
my favorite was on my first full week at my current job, we had some major problems with the project we were working on and i had to stay to help. I went in for my regular shift thursday night at 11:30 and came home around 10 in the morning on saturday.
got to love those 33 hour shifts.
Oh well, atleast i get paid hourly, mmmmmmm overtime
There is no difference between home and work.
What, I have a home?
1. I slept at the office four nights last week.
2. I showered at the gym, when I could.
3. I ate at my computer.
4. This was over the biggest holiday of the year.
(Chinese New Year....)
And I'm still thinking that the project isn't good enough and I have to make it better. There's an art to balancing commitments, but it's hard when you've got a tough project and a tough deadline and there's nobody else to pick up the slack. It's an art I have yet to learn.
(Mmmm..... Vacation. I'd say they owe me a week now. Xi'an or Shanghai? But I must improve my project! Aieeee!)
I work for the largest company in the field they have a hold on (NOT SOFTWARE). As the I.S. guy for my region (Yes region.. I support 4 offices that are about 1 hour on average from the main office) I get paid for 40.00 hours a week. Actual work? Well that's what I decide to do. I make the decision to work through my 1 hour lunch, to work on something at home, to stay till 6:30pm to finish a task. I can go home at 5:00. In fact upper management has told me on several occasions to "Go HOME! your health/mental state is more important to us than some silly busywork" and in fact most of us "techies" bog ourselves down in "busywork". Granted, there are some dolts out there in upper management that demand that the toner in the fax machine get changed now and you are the one walking by at 5:05pm so you are deemed the "techie guy" that changes the toner. There will always be idiot bosses that chase their best employees to the competition. But the most of the time it is US that make the work week to extend to 60 hours. If you count the time you came up with a solution to a work problem while skiing then go ahead and be a nit-picker. If you are working your butt off to "get ahead" then you are very wrong. Management isnt impressed with "wow dave did 90000 things today. Let's promote him". that's the quickest way of making you stay exactly where you are. Management is impressed with delagation and time management. "Dave, did this project well, he finished on time because he used all his resources instead of doing it all himself"
If you're trying to beat out the other guy. Think smarter, not harder.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
That's trippy. I've been doing MS stuff for some 10 years now--maybe longer, but I'd have to think about what the first thing I did was. As such, I don't find it that hard to keep up with the current technologies and how they change from generation of Windows to the next. I find most of the new technologies are based on older ones. OLE/NOLE -> COM/DCOM. Much of the same thinking is there. Most of it isn't a marketing tactic, but rather they're redesigning the object models so they're more general and can adapt to more things. Take the ODBC -> OLEDB thing for instance. OLEDB can access Exchange data stores and databases and IIS Indexes and a bunch of other non-similar things all as data sources. vs. ODBC which was primarily for database data (though there were drivers for flatfiles and other things like that).
Like you said though, it's not a big deal. I'm happy to know that things will get easier as time goes on and I get better versed in the Linux community and culture. I didn't realize that the two worlds were so isomorphically similar. (eek--hope i didn't commit a blasphemy, heh)
/will
I've worked for two consulting companies. In both of them you were severly looked down upon for even thinking about working a nice solid 50 hour week and then doing something else with your 118 other hours. One of them I ended up working some 80-90 hours a week, but spending some 60-70 hours in the office.
The biggest problem is the learning curve. You have to spend loads of time just keeping up with trade rags, web-zines, industry news, security issues, and then playing with all the stuff you're supposed to keep current on. Often I don't have time to do this at work. I do a lot of this at home and elsewhere.
In the MS world where things get released every 2 years or so, it's not incredibly bad. In the Linux world where updates come every few weeks, it can get a bit amazing that I can keep up at all.
And to top it off, it's amazing at how many folks _don't_ do the homework and end up being totally incompetent. So now I have to go learn their stuff too because I can't stand bad code and bad design. By the end of the day, work -> life.
Though I've noticed that this is no different from farmers or agricultural workers. Wake in the wee hours of the morning, do a lot of chores, check the fields.... Sleep 6 hours and start the cycle again.
/will
Lucky that, since that would be pretty hard to do ;)
The old fashion way through modest, steady savings
and investing. No speculative trading, or significant stock options. The 50 hours a week
I work now are because its fun. A million doesn't go
as far as it used to. It should be quicker to
do this in this economic climate.
I'd believe a government worker putting in 32 hours, but not an IS type in the private sector. I do 45 to 50 (when everything's working right) at my "day" job (network engineer), then spend another 20 to 30 a week at my ISP.
Those government figures aren't worth the paper they're printed on.
One of them (let's call him Smitty) is working for Yet Another Upcoming IPO (lets call it Bunghole.com) for a salaried 37 or so hours a week. He generally spends upwards of 70 hours a week at work; a couple of weeks ago, he stayed at his workplace for five days straight, sleeping in his office and putting in something like 90 hours.
Smitty's employers have actually complained to him about not working "satisfactory hours," when he had the gall to work something like 45 hours for a few weeks.
This is the weird world I'm looking at, from my college dorm and Quake-happy LAN, and I'm realizing that while I had no idea, when I was 16 or 17, what a CS job would be like, this ain't what I imagined.
http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=nomic
Let's see. The pager went off at 6am yesterday morning, and I was on another crisis (ha) call until 2230 ... 16.5 hours yesterday. Not a typical day, but not atypical, either. I'm usually up at 0700 checking for overnight crises and watching for them until 0000...
The worst part is that there's no break - not even weekends. I'm a developer, but our IT staff is so clueless that we end up running the system, too, so we're always "on call", even if not actually sitting at a machine hacking.
While I agree with Katz (Whoa!!) that technology makes it possible to work outside work, and that this is sometimes abusive, I have a different perspective.
/., I check out a bunch of developer sites, I flip through books, heck - sometimes I even do my grad-school homework.
How much time do I spend 'working' at work? Less than 40 hours. I pursue personal interests as well and professional duties. I read
I spend most of my 'free' time doing the same sort of stuff. I write some code, read a few articles, argue with friends (who are in the same field).
Often-times I'll wake up in the middle of the night, with my head cranking away at some problem, either work related or personal-interest related.
It's all the same. The lines have blurred to the point where work is hobby and hobby is academics, and academics is work. The symbiosis of interests, the new paradigm or leveraged synergies (well, slap me with a halibut - I could be an MBA) is the matter of fact lifestyle of the technology worker.
In the course of a week, I probably put in 80 to 120 hours of mind-time into things that are somehow relevant to what I do for a living. If I were to broaden the definition more, I'd also count eating and sleeping, since it enables me to work and learn. The lines really are THAT fuzzy.
We LIKE what we do. We're not piece-workers whose productivity is measured by the number of boxes we stuff on an assembly line. The 3am revelation on a work-related data structure isn't time I charge for, and I don't clock out to write this post.
We work hard, long-hours, beacuse we ENJOY what we do. I think I speak of more than just myself, but, if I were independently wealthy, I'd still do what I do - the way that I do it. I might be a little more cocky with the boss, but that's a matter of choice in today's job market.
Those of us who feel they work 'too hard' have the option of throttling back, slowing down or going elsewhere, thanks to the market being as it is.
We've come full-circle to the times before the industrial revolution, I think. We're sort of farming/home-steading IT. It's what we do. It's what we love. We work to live AND live to work, both at the same time.
This is not to say that we do not have non-tech interests or lives, but WHAT we do is part of WHO we are. IT's not just a job, it's a choice of life-style.
-- What you do today will cost you a day of your life.
I am WAN architect and engineer. Ususally I do contracting work because it gives me the opportunity to always design and build something new.
Currently i am under contract for a large financial company based out of Manhattan, and I am running a worldwide network upgrade for them, so their is a fair amount of travel involved. I make 85$ an hour, with billable overtime limited due to contract restrictions. Alot of people think that this is alot. It certainly sounds like it is alot. But lets take a look at my hours, and my quality of life.
When I am at the office, I stay here for at least 12 hrs, often 14 or 15, and then I take my work home. I sit at home and go over capacity planning and pipe sizing and SONET configs till my eyes bleed out of my skull. If you work out my acutal dollar to hours worked ratio, I would be about even with the gentleman who flips burgers in McDonalds'
I have forgotten what the expression "Personal Life" means. I have a wife who hardly sees me, and when she does it is only to watch me work until 2 in the morning. I had to cancel a vacation I was planning to take next week with her, because of work. So shes going with one of our friends in my place. The day she gets back, I leave for business.
Now don't get me wrong, I really *REALLY* love what i do, and wouldnt trade jobs for the world, but this business of 33hrs a week is a joke. My shortest weeks are about 60hrs, my longest over twice that. I am always on call, so you could say i am *always* working.
It isn't that the company's i work for dont recognize the amount of time I put in, its that they don't care about it. They think "He is getting paid to do a job, whatever it takes, on schedule" And in today's market place if i wasnt willing to do this, someone else would, and then I really would be flipping burgers at McDonalds.
In the theory that even Universities need quality technical help too, I took a low paying job at my alma mater, expecting to get a raise after proving my worth.
:o)
That was two years ago. Right now I have 700 machines that I personally am responsible for, and 2 other people to "help" me. One of those people still believes that Windows 3.1 is the ultimate OS for everything, and the other has a great deal of difficulty installing software if Autoplay doesn't work.
I love my job.
Then on the side, I work for a little website
///Will Smith
If $$$ and InternetStartupdom is your #1 priority, then the 60hrs.week is part of that. If not, resist it. I started at a startup last May, and soon was getting pulled into the 'need to finish things up over the weekend' / could you do this VPN'ed in at home tonight?' etc.
My quality of work took a nose dive. The CEO recognized this immediately, and we talked about it. I work 40-42 hours a week.
My strength comes from my doing other things with the other hours of my life, whether it be getting Linux talking to the VooDoo card, going out swing or salsa dancing, jamming on the jews harp, etc. etc. etc.. If I don't have time for these activities, Bad Things happen.
I know my priorities in life. My CEO knows my priorities in life. And I still get raises. Don't be afraid to stand up for your free time and time that is disconnected from the office. If you are afraid, well, it's a good job market out there...
Returned Peace Corps IT Volunteer
Folks, I really don't think that time at work that you spend reading slashdot really counts as work.
Holy shit! In that case, I only work between 6pm and 9pm. But for some reason they keep insisting I show up at before noon...
Recursive: Adj. See Recursive.
33 Hours a week? That's definitely a joke if you work with computers (or any kind of technology). Not even counting the beeper time that a lot of folks don't deal with, that's an unrealistically low figure.
I officially work 37.5 hours a week -- that's what I get paid for. In reality it's more like 50 or 60, what with never eating lunch and leavin an hour or two late every day ("just one more thing!").
I find it bizarre that the government would base statistics on what employers report their professional employees working -- this is a class that doesn't get overtime and thus is generally easy to add "just a little more" work to.
Not that I'm complaining, I enjoy my job and it pays better than most of my friends in college have (except those who are just now graduating law school! (g)). But we shouldn't officially pretend that everyone in America is getting home at 4 in the afternoon...
Recursive: Adj. See Recursive.
I would say i work about 60 hours a week, but if you count "slashdot" time, i would say that number is closer to 50 :)
"Tension is the great integrity" -- R. Buckminster Fuller
Normally at 8:06 I take the train to Amsterdam.
At 8:45 I take the metro from Amsterdam CS to where I work.
Around 09:00 I arive here, and with a lunchbreak from 12:30 till 13:00 i'll work till 17:50.
I'm arive at home around 19:00.
This is a normal day.
But most of the time I leave at 18:50.
And because of the time difference between LA and Amsterdam, I get phonecalls after 20:00 from LA when there are some problems with our Metaframe and database server.
Second, because most server maintenance has to be done after working hours, I find that at home I spend a lot of time on working from home in the evening (sometimes till 23:00).
If you count the travel time on average I haven't much sparetime.
What I also found out is that I have 26 holidays.
Last year I had 11.5 left.
This means that theoretically I can take 37.5 days off.
This isn't possible because I am responsible for the network and all servers (sysadmin).
And because it is very hard to find an extra sysadmin here in The Netherlands I think that if i'm lucky I can get 5 days off this year...
Managers have figured out how to hack hackers. They know what little perks to offer in the interview to make it sound like the dream job. The reality is you end up being a slave.
I can't even bring myself to work as a programmer anymore. I'll do it on my own, but not for anybody anymore.
-blarg
-- familiarity is only skin deep
An old boss of mine used to say that if we HAD to work more than five hours overtime a week in order to get our work done, then HE was doing something wrong in his project planning. It's a philosophy that I wholeheartedly agree with.
There is always going to be a requirement in our industry (technology/software development) for workers to put in limited bursts of super-long hours in order to get past approaching deadlines or unexpected hurdles. However, the work return on hours diminishes rapidly if these periods of extended overtime last longer than a few weeks. In fact, I've personally witnessed long hours causing negative work. The levels of fatigue and stress cause a much higher incidence of careless mistakes and design mistakes, not to mention the decrease in motivation suffered by the workers. This ends up costing the project more than if the manager had just made sure that his or her workers were properly rested. Some project managers 'get' this, others don't. I've been fortunate to work for more project managers in the former group rather than the latter. I would be interested to hear others opinions.
Of course, as far as I have seen the 32 hour average working week is a complete fallacy. In every software engineering job I've held so far, the minimum required working week has been 40 hours. More often than not, I work 45 to 50 hour weeks, and I know that I'm neither the first into the office each day nor the last to leave.
--
The gift of death metal does not smile on the good looking.
...which is why he said "probably".
Weblogging Considered Harmful:
07:30AM - 12:30PM Work / School
12:30PM - 01:30PM Lunch / News / CNBC Midday report
01:30PM - 03:30PM More Work
5:00PM (or so) to 10:00PM with a 20 minute dinner somewhere in there (different job. Freelance Graphic Design. Go by my site for more info about that.
Michael C. Hollinger
Michael C. Hollinger
I moved out of my apartment two months ago, I live in my office now.
So, yeah, I work slightly more than 30 odd hours a week. I rarely leave without my laptop/cell/palm and an oreilly book...
It's sortof strange sometimes, but for the most part I ENJOY what I do, the challenges, the push to learn more, and to apply new knowledge. Yes I don't get enough sleep, yes sometimes things get stressfilled, but the reward is well worth it.
why worry about how much time you work? If you are, you probably aren't working someplace you want to be, and you should be looking for a new employer.
CIA Industries - Running the world for fun and profit
Yeah, I usually put in right at 40 hrs/wk, but I have only been working for 4 months (just out of grad school) and am programming business applications. Not exactly the high-stress portion of the "knowledge-worker" demographic.
In a way, I guess I am working on a remotely similar level, if by remotely you mean same order of magnitude!
Eric
Yes it dose.. Your keeping up with the industry. :) and Slashdot dose that nicely :)
:) It's research....
Ok I'm not a knowladge worker but my time on-line still counts... I'm a night watch person. Anything that keeps me awake is part of my job
Anyway Slashdot talks about technology and tech issues things you people have to keep up on to stay at the top of the game. So yes time spent reading Slashdot dose count as work
I don't actually exist.
At this time (>400 comments posted and counting), it's very likely that no one will read this... but I shall chime in nonetheless. Here are the numbers:
"Official" work (hours/week, avg):
Classes (school)......33
Classes (IMPA)........12
Lab/programming.......10
Study.................15
------------------------
TOTAL.................70
Pay (R$/week; R$ 1 =~ US$ 1.7):
Scholarship.........80.00
Odd jobs, avg.......50.00
------------------------
TOTAL..............130.00
Grand total: R$ 1.85/hour
If it seems crappy, it is - even for Brazil. But at least I've got free housing, food and bus fare. Ah well.
To the editors: your English is as bad as your Perl. Please go back to grade school.
As a grad student in the sciences at the U of Minnesota, we are officially half-time employees, paid for 20 hours of work. The official policy is that time in excess of those 20 hours is unpaid independent research. What happens, though, is grad students are routinely exploited: my job now involves computer and equipment maintenance, lifting and moving, and random toadying. There's some research, too.
I'm not bitching about it. I knew what I was getting into. Anyone have tales of advisor abuse out there?
Good post.
Too bad more people can't take this advice to heart -- we could have a healthier community.
~dlb
My contracted hours have been set to 50, though for the last year or so it's probably been averaging closer to 60.
As for my pay, it's much less than you'd think....
-- Sometimes it happens. People just explode. Natural causes. -- Repo Man
I been doing UNIX software development for almost 17 years, both as a contractor and as an employee, and I've rarely had to do over 40 hours a week. Yes there are exceptions when during critical project phases, but you (and your employer) are asking for burned out, defect-generating zombies if the staff is continously working 60 hour weeks.
Most suits don't get this since all they see is a never ending stream of schedules and deadlines for technology projects they don't understand. Just don't fall for it yourself. Remember you're in this profession because you like it and presumably in it for the long haul. Burning yourself out for a suit that doesn't understand or appreciate the difficulties of challenging technical work is simply self-destructive.
If you're thinking "This lazy old slacker can't compete and obviously doesn't understand new technology or the 'speed of the internet'." you'd be dead wrong. Our startup company *can* compete and our projects are extremely challenging and fun. Don't buy into the falacy that working harder, smarter, and faster is a matter of putting in extra hours.
Working better is a matter of thinking clearly and no one can do that under constant pressure and physical fatigue caused by too many hours. Take a walk during work hours. Do some excercise when normally you'd be coding. Take your kids to an afternoon ball game. Reflect on why it is you're here in the first place -- to slave away in a zombie existence or to live a full life every day.
mkg
Moderation in everything, including moderation.
For me, at least, how many hours a week i'm working depends on where in the product cycle I am. For example: in January, I averaged 75-80 hours a week, and managed to work every day except two. But that was late in the cycle; the last two weeks i've averaged 30-35.
My point is that whenever your work consists of problemsolving you are at work 24 hrs a day and you better make sure your employer knows this. If you don't you'll be stuck in front av a terminal at least 8 hrs a day and, at least for me, that is definiatly not the most productive place in the world. Take a walk, have a coffee. Then later when the ideas are in place, enter codeflow and a big session infront of the computer. But make sure you're paid for both parts of the show!
Most of my weekdays involve me getting up at 6am and driving to work. I arrive at 7:30 and catch up on my email and Slashdot and the other 3 sites I visit regularly. This lasts until I find something useful to do, or until I go home. This is what you refer to as a "deadend" job. Nothing to do, can't do anything interesting in other departments (such as marketing) as you are "tied" to your structure. Feh I say.
The other part of my time I spend at my first job working for the new job in a media startup. Setting up server configs on paper, doing market-type research, sketching web designs and the like are common tasks. I don't feel bad about doing this, since the other job doesn't pay me yet, and I want to do something to avoid passing out from ennui.
I then drive 1.5 miles to my other, newer job. This one I hope will pan out. I spend about anywhere from 5-7 hours there and go home. Lately I've been there for at most 3-1/2 since I'm burning out fast.
In total, I usually spend from 7am to 9:30pm away from home. Sometimes I get home by 8:00 if I'm really tired. I can't be die-hard for a job I don't get paid for, but I kinda like it anyways.
My primary job rarely gets into my personal time, and my other job is almost a focused obsession. If I get paid regularly for the second job, I would quit the Old job in an instant. However, I have an apartment, a car, and other sundry payments to make. I miss going to my martial arts classes most of all. I feel week for it. However, they are early evening classes, and the distance from Cranberry Twp. to Pittsburgh is about 30 miles, making things all the more complicated.
Add it up, and I am either commuting or at work for approx 14 hours a day for a total of 70 hours per week. Aah, the things we do for quality of life.
Lowmag.net
I work long hours, plus, I'm on call with a 10-15 minute resopnse time 24-7 including holidays. I think the on call part is insane and there are times when I even take it off for privacy, but the hours I don't have a problem with. I work well in bursts, some days (weeks) I put in 14 hours, no break, and no problem. In fact, I don't want to leave, I love what I'm doing and I'm 'in the zone.' However, other days I need off or I screw around in meetings, being incredibly unproductive. This is how I work and my company doesn't have a problem with that. Basiclly, I get comp time 1:1. Some people can't work like that, but I do and I don't have a problem with it.
For my Real Job, anywhere from 40 to 50 hours/week. For my Play Job (see URL), anywhere from 20 to 30 hours/week... and growing. I expect my Real Job to diminish some, while my Play Job grows a bit more real.
] D
Ok, well I am an administrator for THE telco in Canada, now I am not union nor am I a contractor, but needless to say I am required to put in a 37.5hr work week, and over the summer I was working from 7am - 3am. and I have had jobs where I have put in 90hr work weeks, and in every single case of extra hours where it has been unpaid, that has been my choice, I have yet to truly encounter a position where I get ragged on for saying umm no sorry can not do it I have a life you know, or just confining my work to my work hours.
... does it make him look better ... maybe ... does it get him further ahead ... good question, its all a personal choice, to those of you working 90hr work weeks, do you have to do this? Do you have to be the keener always plugging away at home on a project, do you have to be the one who stays the extra hour or two to look good to his boss?
... if you are not happy with it say *no* see what happens when you get a spine. Sure you might be able to counter with "oh well if i dont put in the extra time the work won't get done" well if thats the case get paid for it, and if they won't pay you for it then maybe it is because you are not capable of doing the work in the time alotted and maybe you need a career change.
I have a friend who constantly insists on working from 8am - 11pm, does he have to do this? admittedly no
You work the extra time because you choose to not because you have to
I don't see why you complain about it, fact of that matter is if you are not happy with something change it
this is exactly the situation i've found.. big companies are remarkably inefficient. and it is pretty frustrating to spend most of your day trying to strike a balance between looking busy and just surfing or chatting or whatever. especially when you don't know whose ass is on the line, you, your 'project manager,' your agency, etc.
-- Adam
I have been telling people for a long time that, if you count the time I am solving problems, genreating income, or improving my skillset, then I work 168 hours every week (for the math impaired, that's 24x7). I do my very best analytical work while I'm asleep, and even while I'm watching Titus, the ol' brain is chugging away at the current problem set. If you count as work only those things I would not do if they didn't pay me to do them, I work considerably less than 10 hours per week.
Except for the rare times when I have to listen in horror as management insists that the development team deliver garbage (oy, you wouldn't want to have heard the meeting last evening), I marvel that I get paid for having so much fun.
Folks, if you feel that you are being overworked and/or underpaid, now is the time to do something about it. Economic times will never be better, and right now you have the ability to pick your working conditions during a job interview (though don't be surprised to find out they lied during that interview- folks are desperate for talent right now). At some time in the future, this will no longer be true. So work for a better future right now. And believe me, you don't get that better future by busting your hump and hoping that management will be grateful.
Always and inevitably everyone underestimates the number of stupid individuals in circulation
Information is not Knowledge
I'm a resident in orthopaedic surgery - I typically put in 100+ hours /week. I've hit 130+ a couple times during the busy trauma season (Sping and Summer).. Crap I wish I didn't have to work so much, but oh well...people get screwed up.
..........FULL STOP.
The article doesn't specifically speak of tech workers -- it's "knowlege workers" their talkin' 'bout. In other words, programmers don't count. The people who DO count are tech help/support staff, the people you call when you need to get your HMO to cover a medical bill, your friendly (if sometimes automated) telephone operator, etc... Yes, this probably also counts people like consultants, but they are far out-numbered by the other kinds of knowledge workers I mentioned.
Most IT workers are better considered craftsmen, not knowledge workers.
-NooM
If you're going to report a statistic like this, could you identify a specific source?
The "government says" is little too vague in my opinion. Perhaps it could be narrowed down to a dept, a specific document or person?
I know that students aren't really employees, but there are *huge* parallels between being a science student at a major scientific research university.
:)
I personally "work" ~14 hours a *day* M-F: 8am-11pm (an hour in there free somewhere): classes-research-studying. ~15 hours over the weekend, too. 85 hours a week, anyone?
My girlfriend, a grad student (technically an employee), keeps similar hours.
Granted, these hours are at the far end of the spectrum, but I don't imagine most serious science or engineering students put in less then 60 hours a week. (Note: I'm not attempting to slight non-science/eng students; I just have no idea how much time their fields require.)
Part of the reason computer startup employees are willing to put in "insane" (by corporate standards) hours, is that they were used to doing so when in school. Other reasons of course include love of the work, money, accomplishment, etc.
I don't think that those in the "real world" know how good they have it.
-- Tom
--==Hail Eris!!==--
I found this average wrong, at least here in Italy: the real average here is around 40 hours/week, which means 8 hours a day from Monday to Friday;
the bad thing is that for employers is better having 1 person working 60 hours than 2 persons working 30 hours each, because they pay less taxes this way!
personally I think that spare time is quickly becoming a luxury, especially now that you can do your work online almost everywhere and everytime.
As a system administrator, I refused to work outside the usual work time (9:30 to 17:30) and to use pagers or similar for emergencies unless they tripled my salary, and obviously they didn't...
All this because I find my private life much more important than work, which gives me the money to live and some sort of gratification when I do a good job, but nothing else!
After all, working less hours and having more free time should be considered a kind of social progress... and in Y2K we should be a little more advanced in this field, considering that we're stuck into that 40 hours since 1960.
--
"The crux of the biscuit is the Apostrophe(*)" - FZ
I usually put in a solid 40 hours a week. Of course, my employer tries to be an employee-friendly workplace. However, I recently fell behind on a project because of bad scheduling on my part, mostly because I was a rookie handling an entire project myself. Because of this, I ended up working upwards of 60 hour weeks. But its over now, and mostly occurred because of my inexperience with scheduling. My employer doesn't expect more than 40 hours, but they do expect we get the job done when we say it will be done. Is anywhere else like that?
ObLegalese: Go ahead and sue me. I'm sure I'd make a great charity case. These are my opinions. If you want to quote me, PLEASE email me before doing so!
Nobody has it like us SysAdmins. 30 hour weeks, telecommuting, and one of thie highest pay rates in the industry.
BULLSHIT!
My job title is "Unix Technician" - my job duties are those of an overworked SysAdmin. Over 100 unix systems I'm reponsible for. I'm paid about three or four grand more than a McDonald's manager - that's by annual salary, mind you - and they have a better benefits package. (Pick one coverage: Dental, General.)
I'm probably in the office about 50 hours a week - legally, after 44 hours, they have to pay me overtime, even though I'm salaried. They have refused to pay the due overtime. Most state laws dictate that after 44 hours, salaried or not, you are due overtime, unless you are scheduled for more hours. I'm scheduled for 38 hours.
I'm also on call. I haven't slept at all the past two weekends because I worked through them, at home. Yes, I worked through them. Both days. Paged at 9p, 11p, 12a, 1a, 3a, 4a, 6a, 9a, 11a, 2p, 5p, 7p, 10p on Friday and Saturday. Paged at 12a, 1a, 2a, 3a, 4a, 5a, 7a, 9a, 1p, 3p, 5p, 6p, 7p, 8p, 9p, 11p on Sunday. At 11:30p, I simply ripped the battery out of my pager, so I could sleep. Then I was summarily yelled at for trying to put my own health before The Company. Now, excuse me, but this is a Fortune 1000 company. And they refuse to hire more underpaid "Unix Techs." So I am supposed to risk my health, my life, and my sanity for them so they can save a few bucks.
This isn't the FIRST time I've been though this - my last job was for an incompetent startup. There, I had all the sysadmin responsibilties, as well as Network Engineering and Adminstrator responsibilities for well over 150 routers, access servers, and switches in the field. And they paged me just as much.
I don't know about any of you, but I am seriously considering changing fields - I have NEVER worked for a company that does not abuse, destroy, demoralize, and then threaten to FIRE their SysAdmins because they'd like to put their health before some idiot who can't remember to type his password.
I am ALL too often paged UNNECESSARILY - I'm paged when a SINGLE customer in a 15,000 customer system, can't get his email because tech support can't fucking troubleshoot. I'm paged when tech support can't figure out their OWN password. I'm paged when someone at the NOC thinks that one of the servers is a little slow because it's a workstation trying to handle 20,000+ customers with an average email box size of 5MB!
I don't know about any of you, but this is total bullshit. You know what my employer's response to me starting or joining a union was? "We'll fire you on the spot." Now, I'm pretty sure that's flat out illegal, but I have NO intentions whatsoever of staying with an employer with an attitude like that.
IMO, the time has come to show these managers and supervisors who think they know their shit because they can 'cd ~' or 'rm -rf ~luser/public_html' that we are NOT their personal playthings. And the employers while we're at it. The conditions many of us are forced to work under are flat out INTOLERABLE and INHUMAN. I believe we must form a more coherent and cohesive union - even moreso than SAGE - or things won't get any better. (Interested in helping? email me.)
Somebody needs to remove the government's head from it's ass so that they can see that the employers could care less how much employees are doing from home or on the road - and thusly refusing compensation - and how many hours they're really working. Hell, most SALARIED employees aren't required to keep timesheets or anything. We're the only ones who can stop this, and until we start working to do so, it's only going to get worse.
See ObLegalese at top.. my opinions. Email for permission to quote. Not words of employer or union or anybody but me. Don't like it, deal with it.
=RISCy Business
your company here.
shelby != ford
I'm averaging 90+ hrs/wk these days. Who can top this? If you can, what are you doing, and do you like it *that* much?
-- ken williams
> I finish projects so quickly that I'm often left reading Slashdot for a good portion of the day, sometimes all day for days in a row.
It seems like this has to do with the amount of pressure placed on an individual at work. I am in the same position as you, and I have a very low-key job. People here rarely put in more than 50 hours a week and most people seem to do exactly 40. I intensely like what I do for a living, but management "protects" me from the stressors of customers and SAM. My guess is that you're in a similar situation, with enlightened management who has learned that employees who aren't stressed out usually are more productive.
Adam
I used to work for a huge telecommunications company as internal network support. It was my job to support the Netware network for about 1200 users that made up one of our call centers. While it is true that I spent lots of overtime setting everything up and getting all of the kinks worked out, once everything was running smoothly it was a cake job. My two biggest priorities in life were occasionally restoring files deleted by a user and changing passwords for people. I would say that my average work week, including the very rare emergencies that cropped up, was only about 15 to 20 hours, and that's being generous.
So maybe most of us (like I do now) work terribly long hours and find that we hardly have time to think. We find ourselves wishing that we had more time to read Slashdot from work instead of waiting till we get home. But don't forget that there are a lot of big companies out there with a lot of cushy jobs filled with people that do about 30 minutes of real work per day, and spend the rest of the day trying to keep from falling asleep. I know, I used to be one of them. And maybe, just maybe, it's *those* people that bring down the average to 32.9 hours per week.
Just something to think about...
Darrell Swoap
darrell
I currently work, if I'm lucky, about 10 hours a week. My time sheet says 37.5, but I only actually work about 10 of those hours. Now, don't get me wrong. I WANT to work more. I ASK for work, I beg for it.
/. all day long.
... where I actually learn things instead of forgetting.
The problem where I work is that management doesn't understand the fact that I'm competant at my job - when they give me my work to do, they expect it to take x hours. I tend to do it in x-50 hours, then I sit around and read
I long for a job where I have to work from home
From what I've seen, this is the case in many large companies. Management dumps a the work on a workforce that is too large in some depts, which spreads what is to be done thinly. The fact that I'm a contractor doesn't help either. The FT staff tends to get to do the 'fun' stuff like building servers and installing new toys, while I get to the boring background stuff ('What was your ID again?').
So, in closing, I say this - SOMEONE, GIVE ME SOME WORK!
We emerge from our mother's womb an unformatted diskette; our culture formats us. - Douglas Coupland
See, officially, I put in right about 40 hours a week. That's in the office. What I find that eatsd up the most of my time is the keeping up to date. Now, the line here gets blurry, because I like to keep techonolically up to date anyways, but am I doing it for work or pleasure? Recently, I have seen myself doing it more for work and spending less time doing things that are clearing not work related. I have recently had several weeks where, if you counted my off hours that I worked on research for work, I was pushing 80 hours. Normally, though, it would be right around 60, including the offhours.
Really, if you love learning about tech, and you would do it anyways, and often work and pleasure overlap (I am a unix admin integrating linux into our environment, and I love linux), where is the line? I don't like to stop learning, even when I am not being paid for it.
-- Who is the bigger fool? The fool or the fool who follows him? --
Well, I must admit to a bit of guilt here; I'm one of the reasons why knowlege workers work long hours.
I'm a manager.
Mind you, I work long and hard, over 50 hours a week, but I also set up a group of my engineers who rotate an on-call pager, and often ask people to work outrageous hours -- internet installs at 2am on a Saturday, circuit testing from 7 pm on a Friday until mid-day Saturday, that sort of thing.
As their (and our customers') point of escalation, I often get paged at odd hours myself, and I try to keep from messing up my employees lives, but I sometimes can't avoid it.
On the other hand, our customers demand installs at those hours, and demand that we work their circuit issues through the night. I'm only trying to make them happy.
Oh, and the after-hours and on-call stuff is all voluntary, and we do reward those who do it.
--doug
According to our time system, I worked an average of 44.5 hours per week last year, based on 50 weeks (assumes 2 weeks vacation). I took off six weeks. That means I really worked 48.3 hours per week, on average. And that doesn't count the time spent working at home.
32.9 hours? Who do they think they're kidding?
-- "Never underestimate the power of human stupidity." - R.A.H.
At my work place, I generally find that it's not uncommon for my coworkers to complain to me of 60, 70, even 80 hour work weeks some time. They are salaried and so they are getting paid for their 32.8 hours or whatever, and this is not "just part of the job". They're not happy about it but we keep getting the line "the company is growing, so we have to try to cope and work together". Well, I hate to tell you, but in this industry salaried == bent over. I'm working hourly for the company and do some long hours, because I get more money for it. People are in such demand now that if you are afraid to ask for a better hours/wage ratio then you're not playing the market right! A lot of these businesses are going to eat you for what you're worth, so consider doing the same!
Cryptic Allusion - New Mac and Dreamcast Games!
Amen to that. 32.9 hours must come from the 3 days a week that gub'mint workers are on the job. I consider it a good week if it is 50-ish. Last week I had a 19-hour day, which unforunately is not very rare.
Technology has definitely enslaved the information worker.
Geeks rise up and ORGANIZE!
The Brotherhood/Sisterhood of UNIX SysAdmins Local 31337.
;-)
You're exactly right, Xtal. If a person is working 20 hours of overtime a week, they're getting screwed.
Another thing that folks often don't consider is hourly vs. salaried. Here's a general rule of thumb: if an economic transaction involves an unlimited quantity of something being purchased for a fixed price, someone is getting screwed. If this involves an "all you can eat" salad bar, you may want to go ahead and spend that $5.00 even though you won't be able to eat $5.00 worth of the stuff they put out at that price. At least you'll get your choice of stuff, and you can go back until you're full.
When it comes to your time (which, as Heinlein said, is the sum total of your capital), it's foolish to sell an unlimited quantity for a fixed price. Charge them by the hour. If they won't accept that, go somewhere else. Only accept salaried positions as a last resort, and even then only until you can find an hourly position.
If we take this tact, we'll all be better off. We might even be able to improve the lives of folks in other white collar professions.
-Joe
I generally work about 40ish hours a week, give or take 3. I make a point of not spending every waking minute at work. I also make a point of having my productivity and reliablity at a higher quality than everyone I work with. If you want to get paid like a rock-star, you have to work like one. But getting paid isn't everything.
Realize that your hours off in a day are very valuable to you. You are paying for those hours by not being at work, so if you get paid $30/hour, you pay $30 for every hour you do not work. Spend your free time wisely, and also consider spending money to increase your free time.
If it takes you two hours to do your laundry every week, but only cost you $30 to have someone else do it, PAY TO HAVE YOUR LAUNDRY DONE. Same goes for many other things. If you are a knowledge worker, chances are you're making some good scratch, so live a little and pay to have done the things you don't like to do.
Now that you've taken some free time back from life, take some from work as well. Most bosses worth working for are willing to accept the fact that productivity is more important than showing the flag. Get your goals for the day from the boss, and finish them. Then maybe get something else, and finish it. Then tell your boss that you've finished everything that you need to finish and are taking off. Just leave. If they have a problem with it, then you're going to have a heart to heart.
Time off is as good as money, so when you get your next raise, ask for a couple more personal days. Be satisfied with only a 6% raise and maybe a few "I'll look the other way if you want to take off early's". Free time, in my mind, can be as good, if not better, than cash. It clears my mind and often makes me MORE PRODUCTIVE. I make a point of getting much time off, and off the books, and it has been very good to me. My suggestion is that you, the reader, do the same.
Of course, opinions are like assholes...everybody's got one.
I manage a tech support team. I get to work at 8am, along with most of my staff. I leave work at 7pm, along with most of mys taff. This is the easiest and least time-intensive job I've ever had, and everyone here, regardless of the industry they came from.
"Who is more foolish, the fool, or the fool who follows him?" -- Obi-Wan Kenobi
It is heartening to hear of the reasonableness of your schedule in the "skilled computer types" (SCT) business. Unfortunately, as a postdoctoral physicist in the USA I feel I have no such luxury. The perception among most of the physics postdocs I know is that anything short of 12 hour days (we're paid for 8) and working at least one day each weekend is slacking. Aside from our having more formal traning than the SCTs, the only significant differences I can see between our two fields, at least in this country, is the relative scarcity of career positions among physicists and the culture of "work until you drop."
In your estimation, is the level of demand for CSTs the primary factor that contributes to their empowerment in the work force in setting reasonable work hours, or is the difference cultural as well? At the risk of generalizing excessively, most Europeans I know seem to lead more balanced lives than we do here in the colonies, and I'd speculate that cultural factors may weigh more heavily than the level of demand in your particular case. I'm curious to hear what your thoughts are on this matter, and what you'd consider to be the most significant factor in your enviable freedom.
How many hours do you really work?
Would that be before or after you deduct time wasted on slasdot?
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
add
[] The hours you spend reading Slashdot at work.
I've found my ability to tolerate Jon Katz has remarkably improved since I started imagining his stories (or at least the summary) read in the voice of Mike Myers playing Linda Richman on SNL:
So how many hours do you really work, anyway? Discuss.
"If one is really a superior person, the fact is likely to leak out without too much assistance" -- John Andrew Holmes
Yeah but you're probably paid to **be there** not really to work your ass off for the entirety of your x hour work day. If your company (ebay, etrade, amazon) is getting a ddos attack, they need you there right now. But the majority of the time you're there just in case something happens. My father is a doctor, and while he slacks off much less than the slashdot crowd does while he's working, he gets paid to be in the hospital. If someone gives birth to a premature baby he needs to be ontop of that situation, just how cowboyneal or hemos needs to get on top of the situation immediatly if slashdot gets a ddos attack or a hard drive fails.
/.ing per day, and then 10 or 12 hours programming over the weekend. and that's right, i don't get a red cent for any of it.
So in short you aren't working all the time, but having you there is an insurance policy for your employer.
Now the sad thing is that I'm 14 and I'm working about 60 hours a week as it is. 6 hours every day for school(not that i'm nescessarily paying attention, most of my classes are so easy listening is optional), 2 hours of home work, about 2 hours programming or
Interesting to note some of the probable correlations between some of the aspects of our lives. First of all, the 35 hours number is a complete joke. I'm working for a consulting company (who is working for a dotcom startup) - and consistently putting in more than 60 hours, usually around 75, and sometimes up to 90. The real kicker is that I commute and don't even live in the city I work in (I live in a corporate apartment in NYC, reside in DC).
The interesting part of this is that I'm young, I grew up on the internet (and don't mind, even like, plugging away at the puter all day), and DotComFever is paying a stupid amount of money for what I do (I don't see it as that difficult..). I don't work with a lot of older people, and the people I _do_ work with share the same living habits as me (arrive at 8, go home at 12 or 1).
Has anyone not seen this correlation? I think this whole huff is going to change drastically as we, the 'internet generation' become older and stop wanting to work all these hours. Have some kids and get out and play golf or something. The main reason I don't see a high percentage of older people in the internet workforce is largely due to the advent of the internet and how drastically it changed our lives - To us kids, it was a toy turned into a job. For the older non-internet people, it was a toy, turned into a nightmare (how the hell am I going to get along without a website, how the hell am I going to pay for one! And I have to hire these KIDS to do it too?).
I've personally cut back from 50 to 40 or 45 hours a week becouse I was getting burnt out and tired. My boss can kill himself by staying up until 3 am and come in the next day at 9, but I'll be damned if I will anymore. I burnt out in college and my first couple years in the work force. Surge, Cherry Coke, and poptarts don't have the effect they used to, not to mention I've developed Tech Worker's Ass ("The rearend is like a goldfish, it grows to fit it's enviroment" -- Alive, from Dilbert), so I'm not in the shape I used to be and it doesn't help that even at 40 hours a week I still don't have time to get back there.
Ohwell. Such is life I guess.
-----------
"You can't shake the Devil's hand and say you're only kidding."
Having said that, I am. I'm also a full-time student. I'm at school 16 hours a week, and working 24 hours a week. But I do draw a fine line between my workday and the rest of my day and I rarely do anything work-related when I'm not on the clock.
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"You can't shake the Devil's hand and say you're only kidding."
Give me a break. (And yes, I know you're joking but I speaking to the PHBs looking for some reason to restrict employee web access.) I have no problem keeping up with Slashdot et al during compilations, (batch) program runs, and similar dead times. I also have no problem discussing it - and getting one or two "aha!" insights per week - with my coworkers during the dead time waiting for meetings to start, for elevators to arrive, etc.
There is a *lot* of dead time in our life, but we generally don't notice it because it comes in 30- and 60-second bites. Personally, I think it's better to click over to the web browser and check a headline or two then click back to the compiler than sit there drooling into your keyboard. Besides, slashdot is at least job related - unlike Joe who always has Sports Illustrated on his desktop, or Susan who is always daytrading.
For every complex problem there is an answer that is clear, simple, and wrong. -- H L Mencken
I think about half way through the article (not sure if you got that far), he has some data (admittedly secondhand) that around half of the service sector are "knowledge workers," and somehow I don't think he's referring to knowledge of hamburger flipping.
I work in the UK, and am also on exactly the same hours. I also value time more than money. I'm not on a bad salary, and I get overtime, but my manager works ridiculous hours, performing database upgrades at 2am(!). I don't mind a bit of overtime, but I want to see my girlfriend and have a life - what's the point in earning loads of money if you don't get the chance to enjoy it!
(I doing overtime now, but reading Slashdot in between upgrades...)
If they want to hire someone they should do so in the proper way
They should. And they should also develop, IMHO, higher standards for getting "handouts" in the first place. Too often, people get handouts that don't need them. Welfare is like affirmative action, I believe: it's something that was started with good intent(s), but something that is so frequently and so easily abused. People need to find a job! Surely, somewhere out there is a job.. even if it's something that you wouldn't want to do.. well, wouldn't you rather have a job and dignity than no job at all? And, if it's a case of inability to have a job/work/etc., then it's time for welfar to kick in.
But, back on topic... I know a lot of people work too much. But something I found funny was this:
"
If you're reading this, the odds are shockingly good that you're overworked and underpaid, or, at the very least, not compensated for anywhere near the hours you work. "
I don't work at all! Oh, wait.. I have homework... does that count?
Insert mind here.
I'm on call an average of 31 hours a week and have weeks where I work closer to 60. Fortunately, those are rarer than they used to be.
With this same employer some years ago, I would get called at all hours of the night with no compensation whatsoever. My housemate hated several of our operators personally, since she typically answered the phone.
So, my situation has drastically improved in recent years. At least I'm paid for being on call now. (I'm a system administrator, previously a programmer/analyst).
Geeky modern art T-shirts
There was a study done in England during WWII on workweek and productivity. During and after the blitz, England had dire need to absolutely maximize output. And they were highly motivated.
As the war progressed, the workweek for the war factories was slowly increased. 45 hours, 50h, 55h, 60h, 65h. The first few steps up increased total output in the factories. The workers were 100% commited, and people gladly worked the longer hours. England was fighting for her life. But the step up from about 55 to 60 (I am not sure of the exact numbers), actually produced a drop in production. The total number of manhours at the plants increased, but the workforce was so overtaxed that they were not able to keep productivity up.
I've noticed similar trends at my own workplace. Over one particularly bad 3 month period I worked 70 hours every week. By the end I was significantly fried. I hated work (and I've stuck with this job for less pay than I might get elsewhere because of how much I like it), and even after going back to a 40 hour week I still was taking twice as long to get things done for a month and a half after that. Of course, I am exempt from overtime, so I haven't really seen any return on that investment. We'll see when bonus/stockoption time rolls around whether I get compensated.
Of course, I am posting this from work, but the old perfmeter on the wall says my CPU is still maxed out, so I am not really wasting THAT much time...
Watching progress bars is work, isn`t it?
if ($it != $onething) {$it = $another;}
Thinking of all the of-working-age, able-bodied, non-farming individuals in the United States, I have to agree that the number is near the 33 to 35 hour range.
Sure, you have the break-neck houred people who work 168 hours a week, but you also have the part-timers, moms (or dads) that take a job while the kids are at school for a couple hours a day, a couple days a week - for maybe 10 hours a week for "spending money."
There are the salaried people who don't care if their job isn't done at the end of 8 hours. They'll start it tomorrow when they get it promptly at 9. If they get in before 9, they'll leave before 5. (Assuming 8h/5d week. There are some who do 10h/4d weeks as well.)
And I can only believe I left out a great deal of people who work less than 40 hours a week to fulfill their job.
I work only 40 hours a week. Everyone here works 40 hours a week. The whole company works 40 hours a week (rotating shifts where necessary). Then again, the company for which I work has been around since the late 1800's and is not a technical company.
-m
I agree completely. I've worked for 3 different companies over the past 6 years. None gives out overtime- always a 'salaried' employee. So any extra hours I work, I'm not compensated for (though fairly, 2 of 3 were cool about 'flex time').
I arrive at 8:15 and leave at 5:15, and sometimes actually use the full hour for lunch, but rarely.
I do my job well. My bosses realize that. If they're bothered that I don't stay past my 8 hours, then institute an overtime policy.
Otherwise get over it, and don't hassle me unless I'm falling behind in my work.
Of course, there are emergencies. "The client needs that TOMORROW". Ok, so then I stay late til 'that' is finished. But the bosses realize they then OWE me for getting THEIR company out of a fixx. So maybe I don't come in til noon the next day.
Today, everyone is hiring. I don't WANT to skip jobs every year, and am willing to show the company loyalty. BUT they gotta give back. IMO, work is ALWAYS a two-way street. I am NOT your servant, Mr. PHB. I will do my work, I will do my work well, but you get what you pay for pal.
Kinda like Moe, but just a little more Kool
But then things are a little slow right now.
At home, maybe 10-15 hours a week working on my computers, my network and writing.
That's not counting independent time when I'm reading Linux books.
George
I'm interested in hearing how people who pull 60+ hour weeks and have families manage to get in enough family time.
I don't see how they do that.
I work 40 hours a week, and rarely stay late or go in on the weekends or holidays (except y2k) because I want to spend time with my wife and daughter.
I end up doing a lot of my writing late at night, after 10, when my wife goes to bed.
So how do these 60+ hour a week people have a family life?
George
I work (counted as time spent at work) exactly forty hours every week, almost to the minute. Why? Because as a contractor, I am forbidden by management to work overtime. If there's more work than I can go in forty hours, as far as I'm concerned, boo hoo for them. For what I make, I don't play the unpaid overtime game. I got to explain this to a manager once.
I didn't used to be this way until I realized something. I used to come into jobs that, realistically, didn't take up all my time, but had been one person's full time job. So when I was asked to take on extra responsibility, it was no problem. Then it was more. Then they eliminated a job in the department and split the work between those remaining. Now I was using all my time, but when they asked me to take on a little more work, I said yes because I didn't want to make trouble, and each duty was such a small thing. This kept up until I was doing what had before been a job for two and a half people, and they'd eliminated another position. My response time slipped -- there wasn't enough time in the day. And I was being yelled at for my "drop" in productivity. It got to the point where the prospect of going in to work was making me physically ill.
I'm not at that job anymore, but I see them (different mamagers, same BS) trying to pull the same thing. For every person they can get to do the work of two or three people, that's a person they can let go and not have to pay. Me? I'm willing to do the work of two - I know a lot of shortcuts. But I draw the line at doing to the work of three. These days I explain that if they want every job done right away, they need to fill that headcount they've left "temporarily" empty for months on end (hoping to prove the position isn't needed). They can't fire me, because they know they can't replace me with one person - my replacement would quit in a minute.
The only way not to be exploited is to refuse to be.
-- I'm not evil, I'm
I was refering to hours plumbers work, not the price they charge.
I didn't bother quoting that because I know it's bullshit.
http://stats.bls.gov/news.release/ empsit.t11.htm
The above link points to the recent employment statistics in the United States for the entire economy. Unless he defines "knowledge workers" as including people like legal secretaries, the entire motion picture industry, and people who work behind the front desk at various hotels across the country, and if he narrows the "service sector" down to "services/miscellaneous" (or 'services2' in the table), we don't even come close to that 50% mark.
The fact of the matter is that people who do software development or work for IT departments, or other "knowledge workers" who work in the computer industry comprises of slightly more than 10% of the entire service-producing economy. (That's the total of all engineering-related services and all business related services, verses the entire service-producing economy, which employs around 104 million people. And that significantly overestimates "knowledge workers", as the statistics I added up in the above categories also include secretarial support and the like--as the statistics are compiled by looking at employment at various companies verses it's NAICS category.)
The long and the short of it is that Katz's second-hand hearing about 50% of the people in the service sector are "knowledge workers" is a crock, and not supported by the statistics from the US Department of Labor Statistics.
The government maintains that the average work week in the service sector is 32.9 hours; no different than a decade ago, and five hours shorter than in l964.
/. who work similar hours, won't make a dent in that aggrigate number, just as the self-employed people in the 1960's who worked their ass off in marketing consulting or similar highly-paid, high hour count jobs in the 1960's didn't make a dent back then. In fact, the decline in this number from the 1960's can be attributed to the rise of fast-food restaurants and their use of part-time workers.
I've got a newsflash for Mr. Katz. The "service sector" is not just computer-related jobs. In fact, computer-related jobs, such as IT jobs, are an insignificant percentage of those jobs.
Other jobs which bring the average down include part-time hamburger-flippers at McDonalds (which are considered service sector jobs), the plumber who comes over and fixes your drain (another service sector job), and the woman you hire to sit your pets when you go on vacation.
Basically, the "service sector" is jobs which involve providing a non-tangable "service", as opposed to manufacturing (where you make concrete things like cars), or retail (where you sell things like clothing to people).
Because the "service sector" includes part-time fast-food hamburger flippers and self-employed pet sitters and the like, I would be highly supprised if the average for the entire service sector of our economy was much above 40 hours a week. The number 32.9 sounds just about right.
The 60+ hours I worked last week, not including the time I spent last week working on free software stuff (another 10 or so), multipled by everyone on
What makes this misunderstanding spectacularly sad is that it formed the keystone of Mr. Katz' article. Without the fact that the number '32.9' is the average number of hours worked across the entire service sector, including part-time fast-food hamburger flippers and the like, Mr. Katz appears not to have an article at all.
If you are content where you are, put in the 40 hours. I'm not advocating 80+ hour weeks...balance in all areas is necessary. If you work too much, you will probably not have what you want in family or social areas. If you only work enough to get by, though, your career and financial goals will likely not be met. It's tough to find the right balance between your personal development and your goals outside of career, but it is possible. I'm grateful to have an employer who recognizes and cultivates that.
Its interesting that people get upset when they are asked to put in over 40 h/w. They are already working until sometime on Tuesday (or Wednesday if you're a high-achiever) for someone else and not themselves, but that doesn't seem to bother anyone as much as a few extra hours do.
This is something that I've thought about for awhile now.. most of the places I've worked have been chronically understaffed in the technical department (this does not seem to carry over to marketting, however). It's my personal belief that shoddy software coming from a lot of places is a direct result of this - but that's another issue.
How many people have stopped to think about what they make per hour? Especially if you don't get overtime? If you're working 15-20 more hours a week, then there's obviously either a problem with you, or the tasks you're being asked to do.
Some employers get it - IBM is one of them - that long hours != high productivity. I personally think I'd be a more effective programmer if I was only in the office for 4 hours a day - most of my planning for programs I do in my head while I'm doing other things, then, when I go to write code, I sit down and go hardcore. The only exception is debugging a serious problem - that could take a few weeks in a large system.
Take a look at what you're taking home and see if the lack of a life is worth it. I like playing with my own stuff, and what's the good of having money for cool toys if you have no time to play with them! :)
Don't let bosses take away your life just because they think they can take advantage - and if you're working 20 hours overtime a week, you're getting screwed. If you need money, ask for more money & less time. Lots of places are cluing in.
Kudos!
..don't panic
Surely the program staff meetings, where every minute is an eternity, and I am begging for the caress of sweet death to end this bleak, agonizing hell, ought to count for more than the "actual" time that has passed? Please?
Become a FIST.
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/Fists_of_Righteous_
I would agree... I work on average 60 hours a week....
But that is just because I am a lunatic and enjoy working like crazy.
That's why I try to spend my time working at work rather than reading slashdot all the time :)! I don't want to work any more than I have to. Maybe that is a fault, but I like to be in shape and healthy in body, mind and spirit. I don't see too many of those folks who spend 60 hours looking too healthy. 32 seems a little low. So in essence what this is saying for every hour you these people work they spend 1 hour screwing off! I don't believe it!!
Sure maybe I work more than 40 hours a week. But how many hours of that is reading Slashdot, surfing the Internet (that's doing research thank you very much) on that high bandwidth connection at work, or reading e-mail?
And I agree with the poster who said that often more hours are worked because of inefficiency - something that should take 20 minutes winds up taking several hours. Gotta hate that.
But overall, if your job entails something you enjoy, then the hours you work are irrelevant. If its something you would be doing anyway even if you weren't paid, then any extra hours spent at work without extra pay aren't really a big concern. On the other hand, I doubt many people have a job they like quite that much.
I'm not a journalist, but I play one on slashdot
My concern is that having a wife (which I will in October) and kids (not yet) often seems incompatible with having a tech job. I'm interested in hearing how people who pull 60+ hour weeks and have families manage to get in enough family time.
"So many ways to skin a cat, and still everyone uses a great big knife."
I have got to believe the average's closer to 60,if not higher, from my own experiences, and those of the overwhelming majority people I know.
In the Uk more and more people in the IT sector are becoming contractors (working for a one person company, CEO = themselves), there is a minor tax glitch comming up (called IIR35) but even so the tax situation is pretty good. You get paid on average around 50% more, and most of the time you get overtime. With 000s of unfilled jobs its about time people in IT started dictating their conditions, remember you can get a job with your companies competitor, they'll have a harder time getting a replacement than you had getting that new job.
An Eye for an Eye will make the whole world blind - Gandhi
Still, I'd have to say that my typical work week must contain at least 40 "real" working hours. Even when I'm learning PHP and mySQL on my FreeBSD server, it's still enhancing my knowledge for stuff I do at work, too. And heck, reading Slashdot has been beneficial for work, too -- I just need to figure out why...
I hope none of my employers read this...
--
http://www.aikiweb.com - AikiWeb Aikido Information
My position is as a key-clicker for a contractor for the gov't. I put in 40 hours a week. No more, no less. OT has to be approved beforehand. It's easy and I'm happy.
This post encoded with ROT26. If you can read it, you've violated the DMCA. Handcuffs please, sergeant.
This is amusing. So there's the Q&A article a little bit ago, where Katz got railed on even more mercilessly than normal, and then the 'shortest katz article ever' which was relatively self-deprecating and not contreversial and produced more of a banter of laundry lists than a discussion, and then this. Katz is obviously trying to bait us with this article and make us go 'awww.. katz cares about the fact that we're overworked and underpaid.. he must be on our side after all'
.. hmm.. alright.. so he never really had us to begin with.. you're not going to make us like you any more with this kind of useless ass-kissing. Write thoughtful articles about interesting subjects and we will like you.
Come on!
Katz.. you're not going to win slashdot back
//Phizzy
"Most European technology just isn't worth our stealing," -- Former CIA chief James Woolsey, referring to Echelon
It'll not argue that many tech workers are getting shafted; I think we (SlashDot readers) are in agreement on this point.
I believe that for the most part, "geeks" tend to be very hard workers with a strong work ethic. It is also my belief that many of the people who are drawn to technology jobs are of the personality type that is a bit insecure.
When I was in my teens, working at Wendy's and McDonalds, I worked my ass off. It was physically intensive, uncomfortable work. It was hard work and it FELT like it. Fast forward to the year 2000; I make a meager 42k as a Unix/NT/Network/PC Support admin. I work roughly 50 to 60 hours a week; I deal with customer problems, endless streams of luser problems (caps lock anyone?), maintain and "cultivate" our servers and network and am responsible for everything that runs on electricity in my office, save the lights and Coke machine.
I know I work hard. I know I work DAMN hard, but it just doesn't feel like it. I've got 20 or so projects and requests on my board at any one time, but I still feel like I'm not working hard enough. I've got 6 high priority issues I'm working on (given to me by multiple managers) that are all supposed to receive my UNDIVIDED attention; yet no matter how late I stay, I still feel like it's not enough.
I think it's part of our nature to work hard; it's a shame that so many employers are exploiting people with a solid work ethic. There was a time when you were rewarded for hard work, now companies have learned that if they play the game right; they reap the reward for your effort.
"He's a pepper, she's a pepper........aw, to hell with it!"
~Any apparent grammatical or typographic errors are caused by defects in your display device.
If you work in the USA, I suggest you inform your HR guy that you are a salaried worker and not an hourly one, and that therefore he can't dock your pay in that way. The alternative is that he is reclassing you as an hourly worker, and owed time-and-half overtime not just for this week (and Friday off notwithstanding) but back OT as well for rather a long period into the past.
Believe it or not, there are rules companies have to follow about paying people.
The amazing thing I have found is that shops that hire contractors are much more likley to have 40-45 hour work weeks, since they have to pay for all of that overtime.
Let me echo this by relating a true story. I used to work for a major consulting firm. Two years ago I was busy with one project when I was told that I would also be responsible for creating databases, installing software, and setting up a development/test environment for a new project that we had just sold. I was given a deadline of less than 2 weeks to get all this done.
My first thought was that I would be working many late nights to handle all this additional work. I was not at all happy with that prospect. I could stand my ground and refuse to work the crazy hours, but that would be perceived as a negative thing to do. Suddenly, I was struck by an idea. I was responsible for getting the job done, but perhaps not for doing it myself. After all, I held the title of "manager", right? So I contacted an outside consulting firm and found someone who could do the required work in a day or two. Cost was estimated to be around $4k. Then I contacted the Senior Manager in charge of the project and said: "Good news! I can meet your deadline. I found a contractor to do the work, I can oversee it, and it will cost you $4k." Now here's the funny part. Suddenly the deadline was not so important. Suddenly I was told that we didn't need the new environment for 2-3 months (as opposed to 2-3 weeks). Heh. Heh.
The amazing thing I have found is that shops that hire contractors are much more likley to have 40-45 hour work weeks, since they have to pay for all of that overtime.
Let me echo this by relating a true story. I used to work for a major consulting firm. Two years ago I was busy with one project when I was told that I would also be responsible for creating databases, installing software, and setting up a development/test environment for a new project that we had just sold. I was given a deadline of less than 2 weeks to get all this done.
My first thought was that I would be working many late nights to handle all this additional work. I was not at all happy with that prospect. I could stand my ground and refuse to work the crazy hours, but that would be perceived as a negative thing to do. Suddenly, I was struck by an idea. I was responsible for getting the job done, but perhaps not for doing it myself. After all, I held the title of "manager", right? So I contacted an outside consulting firm and found someone who could do the required work in a day or two. Cost was estimated to be around $4k. Then I contacted the Senior Manager in charge of the project and said: "Good news! I can meet your deadline. I found a contractor to do the work, I can oversee it, and it will cost you $4k." Now here's the funny part. Suddenly the deadline was not so important. Suddenly I was told that we didn't need the new environment for 2-3 months (as opposed to 2-3 weeks). Heh. Heh.
Oh, and if you think that working hard, late nights, weekends, etc. is going to make you 'more valuable' than the guy who works 9-5 every day, you're fooling yourself. When it comes time to 'cut costs' you and he look just the same to the guy with the axe. Ask anyone who's been around a company when hard times are coming. The smartest people are those who are looking for other jobs while their 'loyal' cow-orkers are 'proving how valuable they are,' and when all of them get fired, the former has a job lined up, and the latter is out on his ass.
I'm twenty one. I'm a sysadmin. I have no degree.
I walk in some time between 8:30 and 9:00, take an hour lunch, and leave promptly at 4:30.
So, I might work somewhere between 30 and 35 hours a week, really. And a lot of that time is spent reading, researching, and not actually applying skills directly to the needs of the company - because things *work* and I don't have to run around fixing them all day.
But when crunch time hits, it's whatever, whenever. Need me at midnight? Need me to drive to an office to install all the Cisco hardware for the new T-1 and LAN?
While daily tasks might not be that demanding, the crunch time can be a killer. I get the feeling most of the time I and the other IT people are waiting for something to break, and we are payed well to be available, and very accessible, when something breaks.
We're the modern insurace policy.
I am a self employed consultant. I left the standard corporate world about 2 years ago with 8 years of my sentence served (doing 45-55 hour weeks). I like my life now. I get up and work on whatever I want to, and I manage to get paid for about half. An average week for me has me preparing and teaching at a local tech college for about 16 hours, doing some small business network support for about 16 hours, and engineering consulting and programming for about 24 hours. I usually spend about 4 hours on paperwork and overhead to satisfy the government and keep orgainzed. So, I work about 60 hours a week, spread out over 6 days (I teach and work on Sat). I usually am billing for about 30 hours per week.
So, although I am working (by my definition) more than at a standard corporate job, I am getting paid less (although the deductions offset that somewhat). The real factor in my decision, was my overall happiness. I am happy now, and I wasn't before. There is always something that seems like it would make me more money, but I'm slowly teaching myself that more money doesn't always make me happier.
This oddly coincides with the fact that I have to come in to work at 2am friday/saturday in order to work on a critical production system that can't be shut down at any other time. I'm salaried, so I don't get paid for the 6 hours I'll be here working on the thing. But at least this isn't the weekend I was going to JohnCon...
Have fun everybody! I'm going straight from Work, to a magic the gathering tournament, and back to work! >:)
Kintanon
Check out JoshJitsu.info for Brazilian Ji
Other jobs which bring the average down include part-time hamburger-flippers at McDonalds (which are considered service sector jobs), the plumber who comes over and fixes your drain (another service sector job), and the woman you hire to sit your pets when you go on vacation.
Where the HELL do you get your plumbers? I need to call that place! Every plummer I'VE ever seen makes like 3 or 4 times what I do. Most plumbers make UNGODLY hourly cash.
Kintanon
Check out JoshJitsu.info for Brazilian Ji
I work for a high-tech in Austin, TX, and I'd say my average is between 48-56 hours per week. 45 of those are probably in the office, but since I carry a laptop, a two-way pager, and a palm vii, I'm never more than 10 minutes from access to work.
Our company acknowledges how hard we work with bonuses, stock options, and free food / recreation all the time (not to mention yoga, massages, tai kwan do, etc). We don't get paid overtime, but we don't feel that we're being taken advantage of, either.
It's a balancing act that seems to work for us. Job satisfaction is pretty high, and turnover is almost nonexistant, in spite of the fact that Austin is a booming tech town.
So yeah, we work our butts off, but it's no secret, and we get compensated for it (in one fashion or another.)
32.9hrs!!! On a good week I'll do 55hrs(paid), otherwise, closer to 80!
On top of that, myself and other included find themselves learning new technology (reading journals etc) on the train into work! If we don't put in those "extra" hours, you'll just find yourself slipping behind the technology - and hence out of a job.
I work (on average) 10hrs a day + weekends. And I'm certainly not the only one in the department that does this. I'll admit that some of the married guys go home early, they've got laptops with modems, and hence work from home (unpaid).
With the hours that I work, I'm glad I'm contracting now, but I used to work the same hours at my previous job where I was permanent (as do most ppl).
My 2 cents...
-- "To ask a question is to show ignorance; Not to ask a question means you'll remain ignorant."
Being a salaried web developer, the hours I work a week really varies. I'll put in close to 70 hours the week a project is due, and then completely slack the next week. It probably all averages out to around 45-50 a week. But how many of us would be able to go home, get a drink, turn on the TV and RELAX knowing that there was a bug in their code? Much my overtime is self-enforced by my very nature of being a programmer. I wouldn't be able to sleep unless I fixed that "one last bug" before I went home. I think that this speaks to our nature, and our very reasons that we are programmers, sysadmins, DBAs, etc. We _LOVE_ what we do. Being rational people, we would have become laywers or doctors or politicians if our goal in life was to be wealthy and play golf. I know this was a conscious decision I made... to forego wealth to do what I love. For those of you stuck in yucky jobs, get out! There are PLENTY of good tech jobs out there. If necessary, improve your skills at the expense of your soon-to-be former employer, make yourself marketable, and get a new gig. I was stuck in a crap job for six months and it was amazing how much happier and healthier I felt when I left. With a job market like this, there's no reason for whining!
Wow, someone needs to smack the people who came up with those numbers with a very large, preferably spiked, clue-by-four. Still, I can see how they
came up with it. Take my last job. I came in at 9am, I left at 6 Pm with an hour for lunch. I was a salaried employee working 40 hours a week. So there you go. BUT, like the article says, I had a pager. And a cell phone. And dedicated ISDN access at home. As a sysadmin for a large ISP I
was always on call. Very rarely did I have 2 hours togethor where my pager didn't go off at LEAST once. If I was "officially" on call, I wasn't allowed to leave town. I had to be able to reach the NOC in 10 minutes or less if ANYTHING occured. Every week I put in an extra 15-20 hours
answering pages, talking to other sysadmins on my cell phone about problems, etc. All of which was
IMLICITLY MANDATORY and COMPLETELY uncompensated. Not to mention that my salary was a damn joke. Me
and my fellow sysadmins were doing things like driving an hour and a half in a blizzard to bring a generator to a remote site. Then, we'd bed down in sleeping bags in a 10x10 room full of computer
equipment to babysit said generator. Taking one hour shifts sleeping and then getting up to check the fuel. Compensation for this? Not on your life brother!! That's just "Our Job" we were told. The best day of my life is when I told that
company to take a hike and quit!
It's interesting how many high-tech workers fail to understand that many kinds of workplaces/workers put in the same hours they do.
/. contributors seem to realize the situation of many "creative" professionals, ie designers, editors, writers, illustrators and reporters ("content providers") parallels theirs.
/. response, "Why put up with this shit? Take a walk!" Well, matey, easier said than accomplished.In our field/s, that's often the sum total of how it is and _what_ there is.
However, *not* all enjoy the same benefits.
Maybe it's a function of arrogance, youth or just short-term thinking. The situation of stereotypical service workers (cashiers, catering staff, Third World workers) is _clearly_ woeful. But few
Those not located in the epicenters of techno-bucks, however, labor under different circumstances than you. Yeah, we all put in those 60 to 70+ hours, including weekends and evenings, etc. Especially if any of us are self-employed. The difference: no high salaries or dangling stock options.
We LOVE what we do too. But it would be nice to have medical insurance (& I don't mean crappy, cheap HMOs). It would be nice to have employers who can tell good work from bad - evaluation of creative work is more subjective than evaluation of code or systems maintenance! It would be nice if our employers actually CARED when we have RSI or work-related problems. After all, they help create those.
It would be nice, too, if they upgraded our workplaces: so we wouldn't all have to keep up with emerging tools and information on our own nickel. But DO they plow those profits we help make back into where we make them? No. Not any more than they give employees a share of them. Still, if we're not up-to-date, we're not "competitive". And there are always plenty of eager interns out there, living at home and ready to fill our shoes for next to nothing.
Wonder why us other people *do* have some interest in unions? Because we are just as expendable as any "service" worker, no matter how much we love our work and labor to do it well.
I hear a chorus of the traditional
There's no shortage of *us*, but there's shrinkage in our (paying) market. After all, it's not content which is driving things; often, any old content will do just fine for employers.
You probably *want* good content: good reportage, well-informed journalism, state-of-the-art design. But you're not paying and, believe us, the majority of our employers don't care what YOU think, either.
Geek purists don't own the view that what you do is part of who you are. But it's a lot more complicated than phrases like "it's not just a job, it's a lifestyle."
Right. That "union socialist view" is just "so out of fashion". And of course there are only _good_ managers in every profession. Get a grip! Or rather, take a look around, ya little Republican.
Perhaps you should have a word with a Boeing engineer. They're right down on the picket line, today, carrying those signs that say "No Nerds NO BIRDS" and "Dilbert on Strike".
Your "I've got mine so I'm not worryin'" view is the one that's gone "out of fashion".
Lets see. That cuts my work day down to 2-3 hours, I work maybe 12 hours a week?
True, Even the time spend doing the routine (but tediously long) paperwork and procedures is considered 'non-billable' time, regardless of whether its to do with the project, the client, or the consultant's company.
"the difference between myself and a madman is that I am not mad" -Salvadore Dali
We get paid for 37.5 hrs a week, altho the standard is to work 40hrs /wk. On the other hand, we get paid to go on training courses every now and then, which is kinda where the unpaid hours come from. Think about it. Most IT ppl like their jobs, plus we get paid when we go on a week long course on whatever development tools we need to learn. The company also pays the few K for the course. I'm sure hamburger flippers don't get any of this.
I worked more than 30 hours a week, plus full time high school and several college classes. My pay? Salaried, it computed out to less than $5 an hour. Needless to say, when i quit and everyone else did as well, i was hired back at $11 an hour for 10-15 hours a week. If you're a teen looking for a tech job, dont let them tell you its not worth much-tell them to go pull some Joe off the street if they want to pay that little. Work for what you're worth.
>Knowledge is what I gained from reading between the lines.
http://thechubbyferret.net - Ferret pictures and informative links.
I easily put in 40 at the office during downtime between projects. But once a project gets rolling, its not uncommon to come in at 8, eat lunch at the desk, and the next time I look at the clock its 8 again and the night crew has arrived. Not to mention going home and VPNing back into work to keep right on going.
www.linux-skunkworks.com
I never realized how much I was working until the HR department called down the other day to my boss to ask how it was possible I was turning in 10-20 hours of overtime every paycheck. To be honest I never really think about it. Once I get going on something I usually don't stop until I've got it figured out. I bought a watch, but never use it. None of my computer clock are even remotely close to having the same time. To this "Knowledge Worker" let the weanies in HR worry about overtime and people working to much, that's their job, not mine.
A lot of us are on call 24/7. By definition, this indicates that we have to be 'available' at all times. Similar to the role of a Firefighter, we are constantly available in the event of an emergency...we can take that to it's logical extreme. In addition to the 'on call' status, we also are required to spend the daylight hours (9-5) in an office. Now, tack on the after hours maintenace, upgrades, troubleshooting, back-ups and transfers that we are constantly called on to tackle.
Employers emphatically agree? LOL. Ask any employer in the free world...According to them? NONE of their employees do anything.
If anything, I manage to get about 32.5 hours of sleep per week anymore...I'd be curious to see how our fine staticians would react to the living arrangements of a struggling net geek.
Don't you just love being out on the weekend in the middle of doing something and the cell phone goes off, "Somethings wrong with the database!@#@!#!" "What kind of something?" "I dunno but its all gone to hell fix it NOW!" "Ok Ok", go back or bust out the laptop to find out the problem is they had their caps lock on while trying to login.
Anyway we can bill from the social stress it causes by the fact we can't be totally smashed out of our minds 24/7 on weekends like the rest of America because we got clients or bosses that will call at 9am on a saturday?
I'm required to work 45 hours minimum. and I usually do a few more than that. this is every single week all year long. The government has no clue (as usual).
As well, when I have something that I must do in one sitting, I work from home to make sure things get done on time.
Is
The price we pay for immortality... is death. Narnia The Great Fall
That is the same with me. I am at work for 8 hours a day, not counting lunch, and I am actually working maybe 5 per day. There are occasions when I have worked late, but that is because I get involved in something that, although I could leave until the next day, it would be more efficient to just finish while I am thinking about it.
Many people (especially employers and perm employees) like to belittle contractors as greedy and unloyal. The last perm job I had, I was working 60-70 hour weeks, for 6 months on end. My reward for all that hard work was a 5% raise and an Atta-boy. Since then, my attitude is "an hour's pay for an hour of work."
The amazing thing I have found is that shops that hire contractors are much more likley to have 40-45 hour work weeks, since they have to pay for all of that overtime. The managers no longer try to squeeze "just one more feature" into a release, if they are told that will cause hundreds of billable hours to be added to the current financial quarter. They have a budget, and they can only get the work done that the budget allows them to pay for. All of a sudden, simple economics is keeping requirements from creeping and delivery dates honest.
Employers are more likley to add an extra 40 hour/week contractor, than try to squeeze 10 extra hours out of 4 existing contractors. If they truly need they manpower, then they can justify the budget and hire the bodies. An added bonus of this is that if a real crunch does come (and they always do), the staff is not already so strung out from working 60 hour weeks they they are able (and usually willing) to put in the OT.
This is a very good point, obviously from all the posts on here, we are not all "working" while we are at work, so even if we bring work home it might even it out a bit. I do high level tech support for a major Computer company, and I'd say I've got it made, I "work" probably 30 or less hours per week (counting time on calls and time spend on after call work) a lot of that is due to working on Sat and taking maybe 5 calls. But I spend my time doing computer based training or other types of training, so that I can get a good sys admin job. Now I think maybe I should just stay here.
It's the 21st Century Do you know what your government is doing
The trouble here is that employers are still measuring work effort by how many hours you spend at the office, not how much work you get done.
Therefore you get paid the same amount for a 40-hr week no matter if you in reality work 30 or 60 hours.
The solution might be to try to measure work done and pay for that, or simply say that you get paid for 40 hrs no matter how much or how little time you spend at the office.
"Total destruction the only solution" - Bob Marley
Considering I work for IBM supporting the Lucent account, on their billing systems which is world wide, I am definitely way over the 40 hours that we "officially" bill the customer. But when they expect you to do both development and Customer Care for the system, there is no way you can get 35 hours of development in, and still take care of all the problems. When you work on something that is up all the time, then you have to work all the time. AT&T's Network Services Group is like this, at least that is what they say in the interview, that someone is sitting in front of the computers 24/7/365(gee what an encouragement to come to work for them) but at least they are truthful about the fact that you will be spending most of your time working during the week. I think this has just become a byproduct of the way we live and expect things. If you want everything working all the time, then someone has got to watch it all the time.
An armed society is a polite Society
If you just count the time at work then I work (and most in my organization) about 50-60 hours a week depending on workload. But then you add when I'm home and I can easily add at least another 10 hours (probably more, but I'm trying to be conservative). Now, if I start to think about the time that I spend studying, researching, thinking and/or planning, I don't know how many hours to add to what I would consider my actual work time. All I have to say is that I love it. I would have to in order to spend this much time on work. I look at it this way; I would still spend as much time learning and studying even if I flipped burgers. It's a part of me. I think most people in this industry have to love it in order to spend as much time working as most of us do.
Hiya rfob!
How's the band?
Where is my mind?
mfspr r3, pc / lvxl v0, 0, r3 / li r0, 16 / stvxl v0, r3, r0
Check out Project Upper/Mute, an all-around awesome compiler fra
32.9 hours a week!!!
Not a chance, More like 55-60 on a easy week.
And what about those nights sleeping in the machine room when everything goes to fsck.
(hee hee, not a bad pun there)
Man, I've went off on this more times then I can count. Many right here on Slashdot.
People look at me like I'm crazy when I say I only want to work 40 hours per week. When I interviewed for my latest job, I said this in interviews, word for word: "If you're looking for somebody to work 45 or 50 hours per week, don't hire me. I have to get home to my real job, being a husband and a father." Result? I'm sure I lost out on some positions. Instead took a job with a consulting firm that now (3 months later) does what? Pressures we to bill more than 40 hours a week!
As for after hours work? I've done it a few times to get something done, but I bill it and try to take comp time. Mostly, I'll surf or play games or study for a certification test if I get on the computer.
We work more hours per year here in the USA than in almost all industrialized nations. And then we wonder why our divorce rate is so high. Why our teen suicide rate is so high. We don't spend time with our families, that's why! When we do get home, we watch something like 30 hours of tv a week, plus we have to work out, 'cause God forbid we're not skinny and perfect!
A freind of mine recently said to me "You're just gonna have to realize that professionals work a lot of hours. That's what we do." This is from a guy having serious marital problems!
I tell ya, my employer clears over $1500 a week beyond my salary easy with me billing 38 hours. They're not hurting. They need to get over it.
---
DO NOT DISTURB THE SE
...yeah, I wish. I'm a "knowledge worker" (programmer) in the "service sector" (brokerage firm). I usually pull 45-55 hours in the office, plus I'm on call 24/7 for roughly one week a month, which means I usually lose either one or two nights of sleep or a Saturday working. And I'm salaried, which means no overtime pay.
Unix: Where
I've spent the better part of the last four months looking for a new job. I'm moving from Ireland to Oregon, so even though I have pretty good skills, it took a while to find the right place and get all of the phone interviews out of the way.
I ended up with three decent offers in the end, and one thing that I found VERY helpfull when deciding was the following question I asked all three:
"I realize that the official company policy is probably a 40 hour work week, but in reality I know that it's probably 50-70 hrs/wk. On average, how many hours do people usually work at your company?"
The internet startup said 50-60. The teleco said 45-55. The small consulting company said 40-45.
Guess which one I took? I took the consulting job, even though it offered less benefits and less stock options than the other two. I value my quality of life. If you really care about the length of your work week, then make that known to your employer or find a job where they respect that you need personal life too! In my opinion, most people are just too anxious to sacrifice their personal life for money. If you have good skills and do quality work, you can find employers that will pay you well even for 40 hour work weeks.
I don't know. I once worked in a factory position and would usually get about 50 hours a week, sometimes as low as 40 or high as 60. At this job I am at work usually about 60, but I'm paid for 40. However at this job, I don't feel nearly as overworked as I did there. Sure, this is 60 hours at the office, but look at me now, Im posting on Slashdot, at my previous job I didn't even slow down to read the wrapper on my microwave burrito. I know all about the stress of meeting deadlines and being on call, but its really nothing compared to hard manual labor all day. All of this cynicism about technology workers in the workplace is getting a bit out of hand. Really, how stressful or hard could your job possibly be if you are reading Slashdot everyday? I think people tend to take any situation that is a little unsavory and make it worse for themselves than it really is, Slashdot is no exception. The truth of the matter is, times are better for the average worker than they have ever been.
Sigs are awesome huh?
I work my contracted hours and no more!
I arrive at work 9am, leave at 5.30, which, with an hour for lunch works out at 37 1/2 hours a week - quite standard for the UK.
For some people (like myself) enjoying life is more important than progressing fast in the workplace. Big deal if my colleagues are putting in more hours than me - I have a wife who I'd quite fancy seeing for a couple of hours before the end of the day.
People don't have to work such long hours - they choose to, and if they don't claim for overtime, then that again is their choice.
--
Listening for the sound of the coming rain...
I am a web developer, and am in the office about 45 hours per week. When it gets to be around 7, I leave. And I don't come in on the weekends.
I play indoor soccer once a week.
I play in a drum circle once a week.
I play my guitar almost every day.
I read books not published by O'Reilly almost every day.
I spend time with my fiancee.
I go away to the mountains many weekends.
If you don't *make* this time, you won't have this time. A friend of mine works 70+ hours, including weekends, every week. He has no time for any of these things. And he is miserable. He gets paid more than I do, (but less per hour if we're being realistic) but has no time to enjoy it.
Employers will take every ounce of energy from you that you allow them. Decide what matters to you, draw a line, and don't cross it. I can't imagine looking back on my life 50 or 60 years from now and thinking "If only I'd put in a few more hours on that project."
Spend your youth and health wisely.
- A Happy Developer
La via sola al paradiso incommincia nel inferno
Just to prevent more of my brain cell die, whenever I fill out my timesheet I put in
Category: Coding Hours: 8 8 8 8 8
Although I works 50 hrs a week at least.
I guess that's why gov. statistics show that we work 32 hr a week.
--- You make things foolproof, and they'll find you a damn fool.
"Folks, I really don't think that time at work that you spend reading slashdot really counts as work." Why not? I am a programmer, and the IT news, programming languages and technologies discussed here relate directly to my job.
${YEAR+1} is going to be the year of Linux on the desktop!
"You know, Bob, I figure I put in about fifteen minutes of real work a day." - Office Space
I might do half an hour on productive days. Or when there's a deadline. Being unmotivated and in a dead-end position has that effect on a guy. Throw in a poor work environment (both inside and outside the office) and the drive to bust ass, both on and off the clock, drops precipitously.
Rafe
V^^^^V
Rafe
Opinions expressed by the author may not actually exist in the wild.
Now that the technology is nearly as fast as light people are starting to burn out under the strain.
threadeds blog
It's wednesday now, i've still got 4 hours to go,
and I've already worked 32...
On the other hand, when deadlines aren't hanging over my head, I work only 30 hours/week,
Seems like a good trade off...
It only hurts when you survive
I used to work for a gov't contractor who made us forge our timecards (if we wanted to keep our jobs) so that we (they) only reported 40-45 hours per week on the contract. Reality was we worked as many as 100 hours per week. No overtime, no perks for it. Since I quit working on gov't stuff, it's down to 60+ per week, although a while back I worked over 60 hours in 3 days, doing server upgrades. I don't know any sys admin who works less than 50 per week.
It was Judge Woodlock, in the US District Court for Massachusetts, with a gavel.
Well, you asked about this week. I had a bunch of time due to me, so I took Mon, Tues, Weds off, so it'll only be 28 hours (Thurs Fri Sat). Of course, Last week was over 60, and so will next. The week that's going to be the kill is the week of March 6th - I'm scheduled for 108+ hours
i make $9.00 per hour
if this isn't overworked/underpaid i dont know what is
//Insert Meaningfull Quote Here
What with continuing my education, I don't work as many hours as I should, but I'd say that the
number is still higher than 32h/week.
At least I still have time to nab first post...
Currently, I am an hourly employee and I regularly work 12 hour days. I have the protection of state laws that say that working a 13th hour is *MY* option, and under no circumstances can I work more than 13 hours. I'm also earning 1.5 and 2x time for hours over 8 and 12 respectively. If I get a promotion into an engineering position, I'll become salaried and will be expected to work the same time, or longer, with no compensation over my base pay. Its no wonder that contractor positions are so popular because becomming an 'exempt' employee means you sign over your entire life to serve the company. It used to be that salaried workers came in at 9, had an hour for lunch, and left at 5. There's the government's 32 hours right there. There is no one in my company that does that.
If I was salaried, I'd also be on call 24 hours a day if a problem arose with a system that I was responsible for.
In terms of simple $/hour I would be better off staying in an hourly peon position. At least now I'm being compensated properly for selling my soul.
_
These are breasts; this is source code.
Why do you have a problem with those two things belonging to one person?
Let's look over the past decade (and we're talking ages 37-47, so it's not as though I'm some fresh young blood):
Must be a whole lot of 'knowledge workers' taking it easy somewhere. ..bruce..
Bruce F. Webster (brucefwebster.com)
Part of the problem is the airy definition of "Knowledge Worker." Most of my waking hours seem to be spent doing something related to gaining or eexchanging knowledge. Which of that is personal time and which is in support of my employer is an area ridden with subjectivity.
I'm a knowledge worker essentially for the government, which asks that I know enough about everything to be one of those government interchangable parts. This means that the border between sitting at work, producing piles of postprocessed tree and sitting at home, intellectually digesting same is very, very blurred.
While I am salaried, we're required by law to report "true hours worked" on our timecards. The auditors take it very seriously if you don't report properly. Hence, the government is very aware that they're getting 70 hours/week out of my paid 37.5 hour position. I get a raise every year for my efforts.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
It's a personal preference.
That being said, it's often extremely difficult for an IS/IT professional to protect their lifestyle in the face of continuously changing demands in the workplace. The key points that I've found that work involve 1) allowing your customers to have open access to your project queue, so that they understand what other demands are out there, 2) keeping them up-to-date as to what's going on, so at least they know that when you've left for the day progress has been made, and 3) standing firm that there can only be ONE "number one" priority project. Sure, this will draw plenty of blank stares and slack jaws from some, but it's a fun exercise to put them through.
Stop by my site where I write about ERP systems & more
I think one of the reasons the data seems strange is because the survey counts government workers. I work for the State government (California) and if I actually work more than about 12 hours a week it drives the people around me NUTS. The rest of the time "at work" is spent "tinkering" with things, or just researching new technologies. The 12 hours I consider "work" are spent doing the things I wouldn't do if I wasn't getting paid to do them. The time I spend "enhancing" code or rewritting the GUI are not actually required, they are just what I like doing. On the other hand, what makes me valuable to this organization is NOT the 12 hours of work I do, but the knowledge and ability to do the RIGHT 12 hours of work. Regards, Dave
Generally my week is around 60 hours. At peak it hit upwards near 100, and the worst it ever got (two week period and 6 all nighters) was just over 120 hours/week. So now my great job pays around $7.50 an hour. whoopie. Is it good? No. Does it pay well? Occasionally, but not often. Does it make a difference in the end? Ultimately no, I don't think so. In respect to my health, definitely not. And my family life... no help there either. Do I enjoy it? The content and results sure... the time involved, no way. Do I plan on changing it? If I can guarantee the same income elsewhere with less responsibility... (that'll happen, not) And yet I press on. It doesn't help that I actually am interested by most of what I'm required to learn about and report on... nor that I'm driven to prove myself and provide for my family... and provide well. Bottom line is, my wife misses me, my daughter misses me, my ass is getting larger daily, and the longer I go, the more I feel stuck there.
Well, I am a programer/sysadmin. Here a full
work week is 35 hours, I work between 35 and 40.
(not paid by the hour so I don't keep too close
of track)
However, we are probably the exceptions. My
father and a friend are both working Field Circus
and regularly work over 50 hours. In fact, 50
is the smallest week they have had in the past
year or two. Sometimes they hit 70 or 80
hours a week.
course...they are paid by the hour.
"I opened my eyes, and everything went dark again"
I arrive at work 9am, leave at 5.30, which, with an hour for lunch works out at 37 1/2 hours a week - quite standard for the UK.
Exactly the same hours I work, and I'm also here in the UK. While I'm not married or anything my job is not the overriding factor in my life - there's also the little matters of friends, my girlfriend and oh yes, just sitting down and relaxing. These things are essential to maintaining a normal life IMHO.
I don't get paid to work overtime, and so I generally don't - there have been exceptions when there's an important deadline, but those were more voluntary than forced. On the other hand, I get paid fuck all here which probably contributes some to my lack of willingness to work extra. But even if I was getting paid six figures, I'd still want to keep my job and my home lives separate, with time for each.
At work. Then there's the other 15 or so hours I work on other general Linux stuff: writing HOWTOs, working on my next book, stuff like that.
My boss once told me "You can be either successful or happy". I choose happy.
-- Ever notice that fast-burning fuse looks exactly the same as slow-burning fuse? I didn't... (Edgar Montrose)
If you are working more hours than you are getting paid for, you are a SCHMUCK. The law in most places, certainly here in Oregon, states that an employee can claim, and must be paid, for hours worked, even if salaried. That's right, if you get $1000 a month, and are supposed to be in the office until 5, and you are there untill 6, you can request further compensation from your employer. If your employer does like this, you don't want to work there anyway. The job market is great right now, there is no excuse for being a schmuck and getting pushed around. Most employers will either pay you the extra, or forbit you from working overtime. In either case, it is a lot better than to give your time away. (Program your life, not just your code.)
jon:
Personally, looking at my job description, I find that my actual duties, and or stuff that I work on range to almost facet of the company I work for. Although, my workload is not one you might call "heavy".
The government is basically, a bunch of overpaid pontificating farts. The actual time, i spend, in my building, at work, ranges from 50-80 hours a week. During that time, i can be working, sleeping, or screwing around. I actually have no measure of how long I actually WORK. Hell, even when i go home, I spend another couple of hours on the Net, doing both work and play.
I literally have to measure my time as a whole, rather than work, and/or play, because the two are tandem to each other. My work is play, my play is work. And I can no longer measure it in hours, I have to measure it in days.
Looking at it, however, I am underpaid. For both my experience and knowledge set, not to mention the quality of the work I pump out, i am severley underpaid. But, on the flip side, i don't answer to anyone, I don't have a boss in the conventional sense of the word. I can come and go as i please, and do anything I want to, within the normal bounds of reason.
Example? Last week I came in at 8am on a thursday. i did not leave until 7pm friday. i didn't mind, although the hallucinations were getting pretty bad, and the 60 minute commute home was terror personified. I basically wandered around in torn jeans, sandals, and a Vandover t-shirt I got at the
In closing, there is not particular manner with which to measure our type of jobs anymore. If we measure time at our place of employment, we have to examine how much of that is work, and how much of it is us on IRC, or playing pool?
No standards of measurment created by some dusty old fart sitting in a cube in some government ran rat maze can adequatly measure our time anymore.
-jesse
"What would be meglomania, in a lesser being"
-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=- I am Jack's throbbing caffiene-withdrawal headache...
I've fallen into the pit of endless work at a fixed income,... aka, the salary. Basically, my overtime has to be approved before I can be compensated for it. If I come in a half hour early without my boss's permission, I don't get to tack on that extra time. so I found a way to circumvent it.
I have a wordpro document sittin on in my computer. Every time I work over a little bit, I put it down. Every time I learn something new, or finish a project for the man, I put it down. I put in my day-to-day complaints; suggestions; and ideas, and when it comes time for my year-to-year review, I pull up the old document, edit her up, hand it over with a statement as to why my increase in performance and loyalty justifies a large raise.
I'm sure your boss like mine is going to say something like "Well, most of this is what you're supposed to do anyway". Then pull out that piece of paper you got at your interview explaining your responsibilities. I bet the list you kept is longer.
Disclaimer for prospective employers: I'm actually on my lunch break. Hire me.
-Legion
At my last job I worked 37.5 h + paid overtime. Here I work 40 h, without paid overtime.
The big improvement is that here it is not the hours in the office that counts, but the time billed to our clients. plus creative ideas.
So as long as I meet the goal of 80% of those 40h billed, and come up with some useful ideas nobody has anything to say.
At my last job there was a feeling of "Just get this done, you get paid for overtime don't you?" Here there is less pressure to work long hours since there is no personal gain from it. (We have a collective bonus, not a personal).
Those hours not billed, I spend the way I see fit. If I feel that I need to go away (skiing, fishing, walking) to think about a problem than I can do so. Everybody here seems to think that this is good for productivity.
I guess I am lucky. The point again: This works!
All opinions are my own - until criticized
As a consultant/programmer/software engineer I work 40 - 45 hours a week. This is mainly because I'm paid on an hourly basis. The more I work the less the customer wants to pay for that overtime work, so the problem self-corrects. ;)
"All the darkness in the world can not quench the light of one small candle."
What would I do without my weekly 100 hours of Linux hacking? Seriously, I don't know. ;)
I guess you should really leave people like myself (job==hobby) out of surveys like this.
This message is provided under the terms outlined at http://www.bero.org/terms.html
In 1999 I worked 900+ hours OT. I honestly didn't remember how to interact or have fun with my wife anymore after this. I never helped her out at home or took her out to dinner (maybe a few times. However, THAT IS THE LAST TIME THEY'LL GET ME TO DO THAT. I don't care if a project is critical. My wife is more critical. If companies want 900 man-hours more, hire somebody else. If you ask me, the government has got it all wrong as usual. I don't know anyone who works less than 45 hours/week (except for me now.) Great article!
Zed's dead baby. Zed's dead.
I live and work in Canada.
My work day begins at 4 am, when I get up to feed the Huskies. At the same time, I have to chase off any polar bears that have been wandering around my igloo.
By 5:30 am, I have eaten my smoked bacon and am ready to begin my daily 40 mile commute (by dog sled) to work.
After I get there at about 7:30, I need about 2 hours to get any sensation in my fingers so I can type properly. In that time, our boss holds very productive discussions about last night's hockey game. This keeps the employees happy.
At about 9:30, when the feeling returns to my limbs, I work for about 15 minutes and then take a coffee break.
After that, it's time to slaughter a seal and cook it for lunch. We alternate this chore daily between all the employees at the company. (Company pays for the lunch every day - keeps the employees happy, again).
After lunch, we do about 3 hours of work, and then head home because the sun is setting and it's not safe to be out in the dark in the winter.
I make my way home by 5 pm, have a beer, watch the hockey game (I like to be ready for the next day's meeting) and go to bed by 8 pm.
Life is good in Canada.
Bart
Just in office time, not including outside learning/hacking or time I spend dreaming about a project (yes, I code in my sleep).
I'm a computer programmer. I find it quite unfortunate (for the unskilled laborers of the world) that I probably put forth far less effort than an unskilled laborer, enjoy my job a good deal more than most, and probably earn a good deal more. Even by doubling my current salary I don't think you could convince me to switch to an unskilled labor job. How ironic. Yes I do make more money than I feel I deserve *compared to the average laborer*, and no I don't think I even put as much effort into it. It's just the luck of the draw I guess.
:-). It's not that I don't get work to do, just that I've never found it necessary to think or work beyond (or even up to) the supposed regular 40 hours a week (8 to 5 minus one hour for lunch).
On the topic of the main post, I must be unusual. I for one almost never have to work late or even think late. I finish projects so quickly that I'm often left reading Slashdot for a good portion of the day, sometimes all day for days in a row. When I leave work, I *leave* it (behind). I spend the rest of the day on my *own* projects, almost never thinking of anything related to work. Ususally it's TV or music composition, sometimes a personal programming project. That's arguably related because it might be considered practice, but business programming is not very related to game programming.
Even the extra time, effort and money spent on a 4-year college education (same one as CmdrTaco, BTW!) doesn't account for all that discrepancy that will likely last a lifetime. (BTW, the education was finished early too -- 3 years.)
I make it a point to be at work 40 hours a week as precisely as possible, since that's what I figure I'm paid for as a full time employee -- no more, no less. Is my job or skill so unique? I haven't yet figured out why my situation seems so different. Am I supposed to find myself a more challenging job? I'm quite happy with what I've got already
Mr. Katz seems to have ignored the large number of contractors and consultants. As a consultant, I get paid for every hour that I even think about working. When I wear my contractor hat, I get to deduct my business expenses.
VERY LOW SODIUM
The article states that the average hours/week in the service sector is 32.9.
It also says that knowledge working is part of the service sector.
So why does katz seem to think that the average knowledge worker is working 32.9 hours?
50% of humans are female, programmers are human therefore 50% of programmers are female. I don't think so.
It seems work hours depend on
1) The volume of work
2) The way in which said work is planned (i.e how big a lie the client was sold on, and how much the 'managing partner' believes his moon-pie promises... another gripe for another time..)
Is the work cycle this way in a lot of "tech" jobs?
I can't remember the last time that I worked a 40-hour work week (37.5 hrs for those that succumb to that urban legend known as "lunch time"). I think it was about 4 years ago, when the company that I worked for at the time didn't approve of co-op students charging for overtime.
These days I probably work about 50-60 hours in a slow week, and I'm about to go back to school, so bump that up to 90-100. That's going to hurt, but it's the way of the world if you want to pay for rent, school and taxes...
The time demands of the high tech industry are going up. As people get used to having everything -now-, they are beginning to demand everything five minutes ago; this is both unreasonable and unfair, but who can't criticize their employers/clients for being unreasonable or unfair at least part of the time?
The only way to get around this is to work for yourself in an environment with few clients and little real-time client presence. Even then, though, expectations are still high, and you have your own finances to do, your own shipping, your own deliver, etc. etc. etc.
"What a wonderful world" indeed.
meisenst
Green's Law of Debate: Anything is possible if you don't know what you're talking about.
WTF ? That is sure as hell not true for IBM Australia !
I used to work with a guy who would leave after 10-11pm every day. He was not atypical. That car park was at least half full 24/7.
Oh yes....He was simultaneously studying for his M.Finance.
I quit....took the parent comment advice.
Life is so damn fast.
Life is just a bowl of All Bran - Small Faces
I work for a large corporation. My background is mainframe programming but currently work on SAP/ABAP(HR).
We have a defined workday of 7.5 hours. We just came off a large project where many people were working about 9 hours. People in "level 5" are expected to take compensatory time off. People in "level 8" get overtime. I'm an 8, so don't know the 5 rules very well. Time between 7.5 and 11 hours in a day are time and a half (as compensatory time or as money - our choice at the start of each year). Time beyond 11 hours is double. A phone consultation counts as a minimum of an hour of pay. A call-in counts as 2 hours if they solve it before I get there, and as minimum 3 hours if I work even a minute. If I work both days on a weekend, the second one counts as double.
I have never encountered the slightest bit of resistance to recording real time in my timesheets. If the budget is tight, then they ask me what work can be skipped, not whether the PAY can be skipped. For a while I carried a pager, but it was considered "ignorable" if inconvenient. There would have been a major ongoing bonus if I was considered "on call".
My base pay rate is rather low for my qualifications. But I like the terms they provide around the edges.
My average since the end of the big project is probably just over 8 hours. (42/week?) If I wanted to drop back to 37.5, they'd be good about it. As a newlywed, they encourage the overtime to give me the extra money.
My background includes 7 years at another multinational. At that one, I was a unionized programmer. Again, O/T was paid as appropriate, and there were good terms for call-ins and phone fixes.
Well yeah, they get various hourly rates. But the discussion here is how many hours a week do they work. The note you replied to said nothing about them being cheap. Just that they likely worked less than 60 hours a week.
What's this about doing 30+ hours in University.
- --------
When I was in University I done less than 20 hours - in a whole TERM! Got through it anyway. Lucky Me, touch wood.
Now I'm on a years work experience from my degree (in Programming) and I would be surprised if I done that many hours a week even in the run up to my finals (I'm starting final year in September).
My laziness aside, I love to get home to my Linux box after work. Does spending most of your waking hours in front of a computer even if it's not directly work related count as part of this.
If I'm working on Un*x stuff in my next job then I won't mind working late (for a short while anyway)
----------------------------------------
"If I can shoot rabbits then I can shoot fascists" -
I'd say between coffee breaks, various water-cooler conversations, merciliess pestering of coworkers, wait time between builds, and general boredom-related idleness, I probably put in a good 5, 6 hours a week! And you know what? I'm probably the hardest working person in the office.
But during the day, I'm at work a half hour early at the least. That let's take care of some of the important stuff, coffee, breakfast, a quick smoke. Then the 6:30 am official time (I have to work around wall street hours which is an hour ahead of me) hits and we start up. Market closes @ 3 pm here, I'm SUPPOSE to be out @ 3:30. I generally leave closer to 5 or so. A quick stop @ a small company I do side work for for about 2-3 hours, and then online working as a sys op for gamestorm for about 3 hours and that puts me right around the 15 hour mark. Now I know why I didn't think about it before. This is depressing.
GIHM -The light at the end of the tunnel is only the oncoming train.
Obviously you enjoy what you're doing or you wouldnt be thinking about it when you get home. I havent had the good luck to work that sort of a job yet, but I do know that the work I have done (warehouse work, office work gradually moving towards programming) the less I got paid the more difficult and less enjoyable the work. As for hours, pretty much the same in both, most people have to work 60-80 hours weeks at times, though in the less paid jobs people were much more careful about getting their overtime.
The goverment's work average for service is 32.9 hrs. They never said full-time or part-time.
Most likely it is both averaged together, but I am sure that most full-time workers work anywhere between 40-60 hrs average.
If you think about it, we've been set up to lose at most companies. If we're not competitive with the other geeks, constantly putting in overtime, spending our precious free time studying up on the latest technology, we might be passed over for promotion, or worse yet, laid off.
There's a word for this technique of doing business - sweatshop. Management creates unrealistic expectations of IT professionals and then expects them to miraculously create a product without half the tools they need or even a quarter of the time. We're constantly running late, and it is made to look like our fault that it is happening. Employees are kept until they burn out...and then afterwards, they leave for another company that's going to treat them the same way.
Perhaps what is needed is unionization of IT professionals across the board. When factory workers are faced with similar conditions, they have the ability to go on strike until management meets their needs - after all, a group always has more power than an individual. Such a union could revolutionize the industry - stop the salary games between companies and create a more stable work environment.
But we're probably not going to see that happen. Many standard contracts that are signed by IT professionals today include that they are not allowed to unionize - and for damn good reason. Otherwise, their caring company might actually have to foot the bill for all those times they're woken up at 3 am to fix a minor problem...
Just my $.02.
-LConover
Damn. I've gotten into this discussion far too late, so no one's going to see this post. Oh well. :)
7x24=168 hrs./week
:)
Cus my job is music and I've got music in my head all the time
Dilbert: I have become one with my computer. It is a feeling of ecstacy... the blend of logic and emotion. I have reached...
In the commercial world, if we don't make the marketting window, we might as well not have written a line of code. Paying for overtime blows the budget.
Just try to get management types, with their type-A, "just get it done", obsessive personalities that you should be allowed to have a family, hobbies, or any other outside persuits. They got were they are by dedicating themselves completely to their job. Of course, they're now divorced and their family life is an occasional Saturday with the kids. They just cannot understand those of us who want to keep our families.
It seems important to consider what the government counts as "hours spent working." I wonder what measure the government uses in comparison to what most people count.
Let's have a new survey. When you say "I work X hrs each week", what do you count?
[ ] Only the hours you get paid for.
[ ] Only the hours you spend in an office / home office.
[ ] Only the hours you actually do business related tasks.
[ ] All the time you spend thinking about work.
[ ] Include all the you spend enhancing skills that relate to your work.
[ ] Other hours: ____________
In consulting firms, bonuses are often related to the percentage of hours you bill to a client during the year. Wouldn't it be nice if I could count all of the time I spend on my computer at home working on personal projects!? (Gaming makes me a stronger asset to the company!)
Here is my actual billing for last week.
These hours do NOT include driving time, cell phone calls, paperwork (billing).
I have averaged 62.3 hours billed per week since October, 1999.
Note: to all you budding programmers, I carry more than one contract at a time.
-- Andy
* "Uncle this droid is malfunctioning" -- Luke Skywalker
In addition, we have this sick version of the Prisoner's Dilemma that Katz mentions -- even if I did only work 50 hours a week, everyone around me is putting in 60-70, so I could end up looking unmotivated.
But, on the upside, I can seriously make plans to retire before I'm 30. So, we might expect that my total hours worked in my lifetime is something like (assuming 3 weeks vacation each yr):
60 hrs/wk * 49 wk/yr * 8 yrs (i.e., 30-22) = 23,520
Imagine that I'll live until I'm 80, and the average per week becomes (assuming we keep those 3 vacation weeks per year at 0 hrs/wk):
(23,520 hrs / 52 yrs) / 49 wks/yr = 8.70
So, in the long run, it's not such a bad break, is it? Pay your dues now, and enjoy the outcome in the long run.
If I had to guess, I'd venture that the government is finding a way to include all the 0s from retired people to bring the average down. Everyone should read How to lie with statistics to understand how people can spin the numbers however they want.
One other thing -- Suck did a similar feature over the summer...unfortunately I can't find the piece, but the killer quote from it was "Now, of course, status stems from how hard you work; if you have time for recreation, you're not truly in demand, and if you're not truly in demand, you can't be very important."
We at http://www.paneris.org/ believe that you can go freelance and sell yourself back on your own terms. I hope we are right :) Tim Pizey
The actual constituent for full-time labor in Canada is 40.. I work that, but I'm not even technically full time yet. Amazing eh? The funny part is if I make a fuss about it the matter just gets heard by upper managment and I get canned... I could screw my company over big time right now with the LRB but of course who wants that hanging over thier head when you're trying to look for a job in a field where your work rights are never looked after (non union)... I'm sure there's other people in this same fix.
Course, my direct managment and supervisors are sympathetic to this and don't kill me at my job.. heh.
In any case, there is no way they'd get me to work outside those hours, and they don't try to.. but outside of that, I'm also a DJ and promote and throw raves. I put those hours into that entirely because I want to, no one's forcing me to work them. I'm hoping one day to go back to school for sound programming and stuff like that, and this might as well be my second job.
So really... outside of 2-3 hours in my waking day, I'm pretty much working.
Socail life? Time off? What are these myths?
I am the senior unix admin at a mid sized services company. I am _at_ work about 50 hours a week. When I am not at work I am thinking about it, reading books related to work, reading trade magazines both online and in print, evaluating new software, reconfiguring old software. The company does not see these things as something to pay their employees for, they're expected to already know it! Occasionally I find time for a few beers that will hopefully distract me from work. In two years I have not even taken a week off. Essentially, I am (like the original post states) always working.
Now here's the kicker:
This may sound great to a lot of people. Hell, I actually like it. But I know temps that make more than I do! And on top of that, I am the ONLY unix admin working on the infrastructure.
So why don't I (and people just like me) find a new job? In my case it comes down to age and education. Like a lot of people I know I am young (early 20's) and I did not go to college (sure, work will pay for it now, but who has the time?).
So what does this say to me? Over worked, underpaid, not much opportunity for advancement because of corporate lables and a lack of time, and very little social time.
It seems that in the tech world of today we are increasingly becoming more the drone of corporate society. Sure we try and stay the individual by talking online to friends, going to meetings like BoF, but it all now boils down to things we can probably use at work.
Look out 1984! We're a few years behind, but we're making real progress.
It's funny that this post comes just as I enter the 24th hour of what will probably be a 35 hour work marathon. This week I'll probably work 50 hours, and this is a 4 day week for me. The HR guy has informed me that even though I'll be working my normal number of hours, I won't be paid as such because I won't be here on friday.
However, lately I've taken a slightly different approach. In the last few weeks, when my bosses bitch at me, I just tell them they can fire me. That usually shuts them up, because they know that getting someone new would be costly and a pain in the ass. And I've got to say, it really feels good.
I think that a lot of "knowledge workers" as the post calls them, could benefit from this kind of approach to their employers. The demand for skilled technical workers far outstrips the present supply, and the upshot is that you don't have to take it any more. Chances are you're much more valuable to your employer than you realize. Think about what they would have to go through to replace you (hiring, interviews, weeks if not months of getting someone new up to speed) and I think you'll see what I mean. So don't let them exploit your labor, push unrealistic deadlines on you, or anything else like that. Just realize that you're the one with the leverage.
_t
None. But my resume is on my web site.
At the job that pays me I work about 40hrs a week. 4 ten hour days. Which is nice but I am working on myself and things I like that involve technology and advancing my skills far more than that. I am on a computer about 12 to 14 hours a day. Some of it is play but most of it is related to some form of knowledge enhancement. From reading about the games I am playing to researching components for the next system I am going to build to reading /. for the news of the world. (My world that is.) So I easily spend 60plus hours a week "working" on something. Be it what I get paid for in cold hard cash or what I get paid for in a deeper and braoder understnding of what interests me.
If you don't have any other requirements than to work until its "done", you have no idea when its actually finished. By "lack of requirements" I don't mean the lack of a formal document, I mean the lack of any type of document at all!
Since no one ever bothered to estimate how long it would take to implement the features that were supposed to go into the product (whatever those are, since there aren't requirements) the only date you've got is when management wants it finished. This means everyone works overtime for the first four weeks they gave, and 60 hour weeks for the next year until its actually finished.
Since the project is due in 4 weeks there's no time to do any design, so just start coding. By no design, I don't mean the lack of a formal spec, I mean a lack of any type of design at all.
As long as you can't tick off the list of features as they're implemented, or have some objective measure of progress, the only measurement you have is are people working long hours. At one company they actually moved all of the programmers and testers into a large room with glass windows, told them they couldn't leave, and then walked upper level management/customers by to show them how hard we were working!
Unfortunately I've been on a couple of those types of projects, and it always ends the same way:
- The project always lasts many times the original deadline.
- The programming staff is kept is a continual emergency state.
- The code never works very well.
- The product either never ships, or works so poorly customers sue for their money back.
I can understand the desire to get software out faster, but the various short cuts taken such as having everyone work long hours doesn't work.Remember the old Clemmens line: Lies, damn lies, and statistics.
I'm one of the lucky ones for a technological field i suppose. I actually only spend 40 hours a week at work, but the amount of time spent actually working, well, to say 20 hours a week would still be streching the truth...
Also the shop i'm in rotates pager schedules, so none of us are on call 24/7. Usually only a week or two a month.
The truly fortunate thing for us, is that we don't really have to work all that often. Unless something is broken, we don't really have anything to fix, unfortunatly that can make for a really boring day as well.
Like a few of the other posters to this thread, I'm in what is essentially a managerial position. My workday runs from 9-5:30. Generally, I leave the office at exactly 5:30 and head home. I drop in most weekends for 4-hour days of planning, but this is not the largest portion of my job. My office hours are those hours because I spend them communicating, and I really don't need more than 7.5 hours of communication per day.
But when does my workday stop? I do object models on my PC at home, ponder staff requirements at the pub, contemplate projected growth in the bath and just generally think about every facet of what I do no matter where I am or what I am doing.
I do not think this is anything new, though. There is a reason that "All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy" and "Let's not talk about work" are such trite phrases. They've been in use for awhile, and applied to exactly people in our position. People who have to think, and who as an extension of this express their thoughts to the uninterested -- who are then quite rightly irritated at the downturn of conversation.
I work 37.5 hours a week.
I work 80 hours per week.
The one is time spent at the office, the other is time where my mind is focused on work.
There's nothing new about this. Statistics have never tracked it, and yes people have disagreed with them before -- I remember articles in the paper from 10 years ago about how our 'young executives' were burning out quickly despite a 'shorter work week' than in the past.
Here's a simple formula: More white collar jobs (knowledge sector) = More People working the "Unofficial Workday" (from waking to sleeping), and as a result of there being more people there is more public interest, because those people (us) are now the public, not the fringe.
As a side note, though, I remember time spent on a development team with quite often an in-office workday of 12 hours. Weekends, too. We kept caffeine pills in a candy jar on the receptionists desk. Good days!
-l
My actual time spend working is in the range of 50-60-70 hours a week. No OT, no choice, really. I've had projects in alpha or beta stages that had to be pushed through...which means all night, all weekend, up til 6:30am, shower, and work all day until 4pm and go home and crash. Sometimes it just has to be done. Often it has to have been done yesterday. Is it right? Is it fair? Is it healthy? Unlikely. But's it's life a new media worker. -- A.
Yeah, just because we're 'in the office' for 32.7 hours a week, that certainly doesn't mean it stops there. The key is to work as much contract as possible. Make them pay you by the hour, that way they're much less likely to choose to usurp your time. I pretty much work constantly (sometimes not sunday) but I make an effort to get paid for as many hours of time spent on a project as possible.
How many hours did you work last week 0 1 32.9 other
I work on average 72 hours a week, sometimes as high as 80. Don't complain to me about working 45 hours or 50 hours a week thats nothing.
Nathaniel P. Wilkerson
NPS Internet Solutions, LLC
www.npsis.com
Nathaniel P. Wilkerson
www.haidacarver.com
-Man cannot survive except through his mind. --Ayn Rand
It is not only the amount of time most tech workers work, but also the quality of the work most tech workers do.
When I worked at McDonalds (when I was in high school), there where managers and employee's standing around, talking, taking smoke break, eating and drink (stolen) food and drink. When I worked there, it was only for 7 1/2 hours, but for about 5 of those hours it was nothing but slack off, doing nothing, chilling in the break room smoking. Only have to make food when the customer order it, if they aren't ordering, there is no need to do extra work. Even the managers slacked off majorly.
After awhile I got a job doing tech support for an ISP, out of an 8 hour work day, proably 1 hour total was spent towards giving tech support, everything else was playing with their linux and unix system, surfing the web and doing personal email.
When I hit system admin though after 2 years, everything hit the fan. Sure I put in 10-11 hours on an average work day, but the thing I have noticed, is not the time, but how it is spent. In those other jobs, the majority of the job was "Hurry up and wait", system admin though, all 10-11 hours and spent doing system admin and that is it. Seriously, I take 5 minutes when I first get here (ussually an hour early) to check slash (techinally this is before the work day starts, but I do it from work, so I count it). Take a 5 minute lunch (enough for a pepsi and cig), 5 minutes to post to slash dot.
The company policy is 3 breaks of 15 minutes each for every 6 hours worked, 1 30-1 hour lunch break.
Doing personal stuff (like eating, relaxing, taking a break) I probably spent 15 minutes per day, all my co workers eat 15 minutes per break.
I don't mind it, if I took and hour lunch and more breaks I would be leaving work when it is dark out. (Not that I mind the dark, I just have other things to do at night)
I personally feel that the quality and amount of work that gets done in the tech feel is more compressed and compact. I haven't meet or worked with an Unix admin yet that takes lunch. When I first starting as a Jr. Admin, the Sr. admin told me "Make sure you take lunch, even if you don't want to"
"Sure, you want to go grab something in a bit"
"Nah, I got to get this web server re-configureed"
"Yea your right, what you using, apache"
Also, no matter when I leave and no matter how much work I do, I also get the feel that the job "still" isn't done. I could work here 24-7 for a year staight and when I left for sleep, I would probably feel like there is still more to do and that I shouldn't be heading home so soon, anyone else feel this way?
Well my 5 minutes for posting on slashdot is up, actucally more like ten, I'll probably skip the pop and cig today to make up for it : )
"`Ford, you're turning into a penguin. Stop it.'" -THHGTTG
In many cases (not all, granted) people who are in development aren't quite as plagued by work via mobile phones and beepers as are people who are in maintenance. And these are just two extremely broad categories of "knowledge workers." Also, don't forget that many of us are independent consultants and bill by the hour. Personally, I work for a consulting company (45-50 hrs/wk) and I do get paid overtime.
At least 55-60, but I quit counting. Too much knowledge about that kind of reality is painful.
I must work close to 70 hours a week. I'm paid for 40 but I end up putting in 12 hour days mon-fri and at least another ten over the weekends.
That does not even come close to including the time spent absorbing more and more technical mumbo jumbo to keep myself competitive with my colleagues. Being a competitive person, I'll be damned if someone will have the edge on me. My passion of technology has become a requirement. Now I wonder why I need to know the name of the next chipset to support the athlon, or stability issues of different hardware with different server software.
I spurt out knowledge off the tip of my tongue faster then I race to work (late as usual), to my friends who stare dumbfounded at me and ask me to explain but to please slow down. SLOW DOWN??? Don't they understand that if I do, I'll slowly wither and die? or will I...?
My first post to slashdot...
I don't have a sig, how ironic!
We just had a plumber come out to save our flooding kitchen, and since it was after hours (but on a weekday) he charged $180/hour. Wish I could pull down that kind of money!!
"there is eloquence in screaming" - Patrick Jones
I can put in 60-70 hours a week and bill
it at $65/hour. Weekends are $75/hour.
If I am required to work more hours then
I make sure I am getting *paid* baby.
JM
I'm a computer science major at my college, and I have quite a workload.
19 hours of class.
20 hours at my part time job a week.
A design project.
Labs due almost every day.
Huge homework assignments.
My former roommate was an asshole who messed up a lot of other things for me.
I don't even get enough sleep because I spend so much time doing this stuff.
But on paper, it looks like I have all of the time in the world. Such that outsiders wonder why I don't have time to do laundry except at like, 2 AM, or why my house isn't spotless all of the time.
Eh...
I start work when I enter the building. Stop when I leave (Which means posting this counts as work).
I think the overtime, weekend work and suchlike is reserved mainly for management rather than Engineers. I will not work when I'm outside the office. Strangely enough, despite this attitude I've still got a job.
Reading those comments, i got a litte sad! ...)
... (sleep is VERY important! perhaps the batch/cron process of the brain?)
... nearly noone needs that ... and absolutly noone in germany! so i gotta do this at "SPARE TIME") ... even if i am with my girlfriend, this indirectly gives, aeehm ??? english word ... ??? lets say HOLD - STRENGTH, a power, which pushes you further in the normal day life (normal=work!)
... or just read slashdot
:) - but that needs real distance from the normal work, to get enough concentration for such tasks.
... the direction i now go "seams" to be the one, i want - i get more skilled, which gives me much self confidences and makes me strong to hold on my opinions. i am now more skilled than the most people around here - but i know, i am a very little light compared to real good people (did i meantion, i live in germany :)
... someone, who speaks about things, he heard, without ever made it hisself (what is enough for most situations) - someone without a real (ähm - i need a dictionary here ...) strong opinion ("überzeugung" for the geman ones), which makes his day/life
...
:)
...
I had another thought about slashdot readers (YES, i didnt read all comments, only the higher rated ones
I live and work in germany - a country, where the opinion I have isnt very usual.
I have a couch in my office, so, if i work the whole night (nights are soooo neat quiet:), i fall to bed, when i am finnished - just writing a email to our telefone central, that they should only wake me up, when it is REALLY urgent
If i work alone in my office, i mostly work with my laptop - IN MY BED (or couch or what ever)
I like it! For myself, i find this VERY normal.
We all work in, of even live for, the IT industry (hey, if you do not, why are you reading slashdot?) And IT is the most fast developing area i know of.
My personal goal is to know as much as possible about computers (with focus on systems, networks and -tada- PROGRAMMING). And that is really much stuff. That means, learn all the things, which ALREADY exist - and stay up to date with new developments. My aim is NOT earning money in first place (even those two things can be VERY closely in right setup)
To reach this aim as close as possible, i dont often go on party the weekends - i programm my own projects. (hey, try to programm a compiler for business purposes
So, when do i stop working ? Never ? I nearly allways do something - anyhow concerned to computers. read news, programm a new pwd command (:), play quake (and think, whats behind it, and observer the bot-movement, and think of AI and 3d), configure our linux box, check freshmeat for new developments, read someone elses code, or program
So, why should i do something other ? if i wanna relax, i write some little test games for fun, or try some demo effects, i saw on a screen saver or so
What i do in my long spare time (2+ days), is trying/testing/developing real c00l things (not, that anyone could use them
even those things have a feedback effect to the "normal work" - i can solve bigger problems and have a expanded knowledge - and understandment of the things
so, all my life gets around computers
what would i be, if i go home exactly at five, and stop thinking - nothing real - not a computer freak, not a non-computer-person - something in between
To put it right here - i do not FORCE myself to do those things - i just love it! i want that! computers are the only thing, i understand! the only intelligent task in this dumb world
and perhaps someday, i can give the community back something real usefull - in advance for the great open source stuff, and this great os linux - which is soooo programmer friends - this is also not a force for me, but as a nice thought - (does anyone need another screen saver
EMERGENCY STOP HERE - otherwise NOONE will read this
now - am I crazy, or is it "all the others" ?
am i the only one who's reminded of that one dilbert strip (darn, wish i had it before me)? where the guy is sitting there and thinking, "why do i continue to work here? i work ungodly hours, am underpaid, the boss is a moron....i know! it must be because i _love_ this job!"
Work weeks are rarely less than 45 hours, and average somewhere north of 50. During the year, I'm a graduate student; during the summer I work in Santa Clara, CA. A 32.9 hour work week takes me to Wednesday at the end of the day, or sometimes Thursday morning.
I believe that there is one point missing from this article. In my workplace, at least, there seems to be a paucity of people able to deal with the technology they are faced with. As a result, I have found myself in a unique position of empowerment within my workplace. I believe that if more people felt this confidence, they would no longer feel the need to worry so much about remaining connected while not at work.
I work for an insurance company in metro Phoenix, and i'm "on the clock" for 50 hours a week, but i end up with another nearly 30 hours a week from coordinating meetings, going over everyone else's work, and updating our aging system. And that's not even mentioning the commute.
I have a co-worker who's always stressed out. He constantly complains about his job and claims that he wishes someone would fire him, but then he comes in and works on weekends. He makes me sick. I only work normal business hours, and never take my work home with me. Even when I am at work, I don't stress too hard over it. I find time to take a break now and then, and do things like post to slashdot. And yet, I probably get about as much actual, useful work done as my co-worker does. That is because I can approach my problems with a relaxed mind, and take the time to find the correct solution. Knowledge workers who are in a hurry make mistakes, which end up taking more time to fix than doing it right in the first place. Besides, life is too short to spend all of your time working anyway. What is the point of slaving away in hope of earning lots of money, if you die of a heart attack before you have a chance to spend it?
http://www.msnbc.com/news/370692.asp
I live ( and work ) in Portugal - That's in the westernmost part of Europe - and work in the IT business. In here things are like this: - You officialy work 40 hours per week - In practice, in most companies you work around 50 hours or more. - Sometimes you have to work during weekends and holidays. Of corse all those extra hours are done because you want to do them. So things are not very different from the US, except that here you earn half of what you get in central europe, one-third of what you get in the UK and one-fourth of what you get in the US. Just a view from a different place!
There really can't be a yardstick for average hours in the tech industry, as it's all a matter of where you're employed and you're hobbies:
Startups will work hellacious hours to get themselves established in the market. Managers will push developers into overdrive to make the crunch time before a major release. Government contractors may have their hours rigidly controlled by the funding of a contract. Some positions require major amounts of travel around the world. The main output of some organizations are meetings, meetings, and more meetings.
What about all the tech's wearing camoflage? Does physical training and military training time count towards their primary tech specialty? I put in months of consecutive time while deployed to Somalia. Donit get out of the computer shelter.. stay in the computer shelter.
Some people take work home, but some of us take out hobbies to work, or our hobby became our work. Does the time not count if I'm having a blast rooting around in a machines internals? Is it only work if you're not loving it?
I know I work long hours quite a bit, but work comes in waves for me. I have down time in which I work a "normal" work week or even cut early, but when I got a project it needs to be done. I wonder how many tech workers experience the same thing. Maybe its just a symptom of working below the money I could earn.
I also wonder if a lot of tech workers, especially programmers bring the long hours on themselves. A lot of coders just jump right in an start coding on a project without planning. Heck, I do it a lot myself, and get burnt by it. When I take the time and examine the project, make flow charts etc. I'm always surprised by how fast everything goes. There's a lot fewer unexpected problems, and the pieces just seem to fall into place. So, how much do y'all think the long hours represent an unfair demand, and how much of it is caused by poor planning? I'm betting there's some hard data we can draw from. After all, coding is basically a sub-discipline of systems engineering, and I know there's been time usage studies in this field.
When at one company, I used to put in close to 80 hours a week. We had a couple of p/t students that put in over 40 hours a week.
You have to watch out that by putting in all the hours now, that you don't destroy your wrists.
Fight Spammers!
The last couple of weeks have been a bit mad, so I've averaged around 100 hours/week (yes, 15+ hours a day, 7 days a week), but I know that once this project is over, it'll kick back to a more moderate 40+ hours/week. I've got University work to worry about as well, but somehow manage to get that squeezed in somewhere. All without the use of any stimulants. :) The point is, what other industry can I work in at the age of 21 where I get paid more than my parents combined, get to play with new toys all day everyday, travel places, meet interesting people and not have to worry about being fired?
:)
/. and similar... :) The only thing I do miss is time spent with family... it's a bit weird putting off going home at the weekend for dinner with mum, because you've got code to write, or servers to install to give you more time the week after...
We live in a time whereby it is feasible if you work from young enough and hard enough to be able to retire at the age of 30. If that means I have to work 100 hours/week without damaging my health, I'll do it... it's not as if it's really work when you're enjoying it this much...
Besides out of that 100/week I'd suppose a good 5-10 of them are probably spent messing around on
The point isn't that you're making less/hour than the McDonalds guy. The point is that someone else is getting rich off the un-compensated extra hours you're putting in. Unless you own/have equity in the enterprise, putting in extra hours is gravy for The Man. I work ungodly hours too, but I have equity. When times are slower I'll take it back. This is the pact. Anyone who does more than a day's work for a day's wage without a net/plan is a chump.
{Deth Onastick}
Since I'm a math person I get to torture you all with a detailed analysis of the average teacher's schedule (here, anyway-- snotty prep school environment).
Most full-time faculty have a four-course load and each course meets about 4.5 out of six days a week. Each class is an hour. So actual weekly in-class time is 18 hours, let's say.
It takes anywhere from an equal amount of time to no time at all to prepare each class outside of the classroom. We'll split the differnece and say 9 hours of prep time a week.
Usually 4 hours of meetings (department meeting and faculty meeting, all-school assemblies) each week.
Two out of three terms you must coach a sport for two hours a day, four days a week, so we can call that 8 hours.
About 1.75 nights a week you have dormitory duty, which is four hours a night. Seven hours there. You also have dining hall duty on the nights you have dorm duty, so we'll call it another 2 hours a week there.
Additionally there are various committees and extracirricular activities you may participate in. Anywhere from 0 to, say, 5 hours a week for that.
So at best you are doing 40 hours a week (assuming no sports and no extracirriculars) and at worst 53 hours. Feel free to toss in a few hours here and there in private meetings or responding to faculty email or helping students outside of class or what have you.
Granted you have three months of downtime over the year, but our salary technically only covers the nine months that we work.
First, the timesheets that I turn in to my employer [they don't determine compensation, but how much time should be credited to various departments] have no relationship to the actual number of hours I work ~60/wk. It's easier to just make everything total out to 40, because I know that I'm not getting any overtime anyway.
I think that these findings highlight the irrelevance of overtime laws and other worker protection legislation. The high-tech industry is particularly abusive regarding compensation issues. How many of you have asked about the time commitment for a prospective employer and been told 60+ hours a week or "work till the job's done?"
The Mercury News had a series of articles about exploitation in the Valley. Unfortunately, those are in the pay archives now, but they detailed the use of home assembly (piece work) among other abuses including lack of overtime pay.
The most insidious trend that Katz identifies is the blurring of the line between work and home. Every time I read a glowing profile of a company that provides in house (dentists, game rooms, nap rooms, whatever) I shudder. If you read the trade press (Business 2.0, Wired, Industry Standard, etc.) the image is of one big happy family. Guess what - there's a reason the saying goes "You can't choose your relatives" - why would I want to buy into the fantasy that by virtue of being employed someplace I have suddenly gained a new home away from home. Ack! You may as well go to work for EDS or M$ if that's what you want. Can you tell I failed my "team building class :)
There's another article on MSNBC about how high internet use isolates people. There are a few sections that deal with Katz's post, here's a sample " If personal interaction - not to mention time with such old-fashioned media as newspapers and, particularly, television - were losers, employers benefited. A quarter of the respondents said the time they spent working at home had increased, while their hours at the office had either stayed the same or gone up as well."
Not to Dilbert here, but if you figure out what my boss works with what I work then IT/MIS people work 32.9 hours here!
This
I work about 45 hours a week at work. Then I work at least another 30 hours a week for myself with my own personal business ventures, consulting, design, etc... Then there's also several long time faithful clients who usually need at least a couple of hours of work done each week... And even then any free time I find is spent gaining more knowledge in hopes of better pay down the road. I could truthfully say I have at least an 80 hour work week. Where are they getting their numbers? I personally was never polled... Maybe big brother is deluded by looking at his own short work week... He certainly isn't describing mine... I have a friend who works for the state. He has way more paid holidays than I do, and only works a 7.5 hour day. He said it was pretty standard for state employees to only work 7.5 hour days. Maybe that is where the low figures are coming from...
Anyways, I work reasonable hours, pull reasonable money, and if my client needs it and I want the cash, extra hours happen. Hourly pay means not getting exploited. I used to work 75hr weeks in my last permanent job because it needed doing, not because I was forced to. The crappy amount time-in-lieu I got convinced me to go contracting.
If you're doing all this travelling, your home is located in the wrong place. Move home. You'll save yourself a staggering amount of time and improve your quality of life.
Don't have cellphone. Neither want nor need cellphone. ditto laptop, palmtop, whatever.
Yeah, I have a PC at home, but I use it for writing, internetting and occasionally games. I never do work stuff on it.
I work 37.5 hours a week and I'm not doing overtime without being paid for it...
If people are stupid enough to work themselves into an early grave and not have any life other than working, that is their look-out.
I prefer to leave work behind me in the evening and enjoy a social life with my friends or do something interesting, entertaining or possibly creative in my spare time...
You work 12 or more hours a day if you like. I'll knock off work and go down the pub with my mates.
An active, healthy life is more important than money...
"Information wants to be paid"
However imprecise it would be, it still should average to about right. Or a poll with options that suggest methods of changing the situation where knowledge workers are "underpaid" like that.
I wouldn't want to insist on raising the salary for knowledge workers, I'd rather pay more money to people who didn't have an opportunity to get good education. But a recognition of some sort would be quite welcome if only to boost morale.
www
Sure most "knowledge workers" work many hours but if I were a janitor or gardener I would have someone breathing down my neck all the time making sure I was some place at a particular time ... there are always good and bad aspects ... what I don't like is that all of my ideas belong to the company I work for ... independent of when I have them or what they are about ... this is not an uncommon thing.
In my opinion, the reason so many people in the Tech Field are working more is because people outside it want the work done fast fast fast! And you just can't churn out content and code as fast as they want it, not to mention the fact that the insist on meddling with every little thing. Its a pain but it pays the bills.
There are strange things done, under the midnight sun by the men who moil for gold - Robert Service
well, OK. Taco Bell is a whole 'nother story... And yes I conceed that the creation and challenge i was alluding to is not exclusive to those employeed in those proffesions directly. My point is that more ofen than not, we all collectivly make a choice. You want a 9-5 job in this industry? There is a place for that. Go work for that big corporate monolith that will allow you to skirt out the door at 5 on the dot. You want and like to work your ball's off, than go work somewhere in that type od environment. Point here is that we all make choices. You and i *choose* that job. Remember the interview? Remember when your now boss said..."There may be some overtime required" or more likely when in that interview u realized that they had no concept of the task at hand and what u would be doing, well, everything... This is a great employement market. Just like the poster form the UK said, take control of your situation. Be indepent, dependent, whatever... just make the choice, stick with it (for a little while) and stop complaining.... We have all lived through those times when 5 roll's around and half 98% of the building ocupants leave and u get pissed off because u have too much to do and not enough time to do it. Live with it... The good news is. If u don't like it? I'm sure Taco Bell is hiring.
OK, so I work a lot? Most of you prob. do to.... As it turns out, this isn't a 9-5 gig we have here and that is something we all knew going into this. Are sopposed to feel some sort of empathy for each other because our blood-shot eyes are staring at the same screen for 18 hours in a day??? I feel sorry for the people who do in fact work that 9-5 job where the have no connection with what they are doing. They are simply earning $... OK, if you figure it out, you work 18 hours a day, probably 6 day's a week.... Yeah, I see your point. The pimply faced kid @ McDonalds makes more per hour than me! So what? I get to solve problems everyday. I get to be challenged, everyday... seems that is more important.... Sick of this one...
Everyone in my department puts in 60+ hours. 32.5? Not since high school...
I think that saying people work an average of X hours is a little vague. If we all punched in every morning, punched out at night, took an hour for lunch, and went home and didn't think about work until we punched in again, this kind of statistic would be valid. In reality, nearly everyone's definition of "work" is different.
Many of you claim to work 60+ hours a week (which I believe). I'm guessing that a large percentage of that group really enjoy what they do and would probably do the same activity as a leisure activity if you weren't getting paid for it. Is that "work" the same as the "work" that the college kid is doing by cleaning septic tanks between classes for tuition and beer money? Sure if s/he would be doing the same as a leisure activity.
Also, does the time you waste during the day waiting for your Windows machine to reboot because you installed some new software which didn't actually install because it blue-screened while writing to the registry and will now and forever boink on startup and prevent you from re-installing because it says you need to uninstall first which you can't because it never installed the uninstaller files count as work (a little bitter after boinking on startup this morning)?
Also, I worked at Pizza Hut at night and for the university during the day while I was in school. (I kinda regret forgetting to get an education.) I didn't have much outside reading to do to keep my Pizza Hut skills up-to-date. Actually Pizza Hut HQ would just send us a new spec sheet on how to make every new pizza they introduced. On the other hand, the tech-ish job at the Uni had me reading all the doorstop material just to feel remotely confident that I knew what I was doing. Did that count as "work" or simply self-improvement?
Does the time I spend at work posting to slashdot count as work?
Obviously the number seems low to us in the tech field. It's the nature of the beast. We should have known that before we took the job (that's what that interview buzzword "flexible schedule" means for those of you looking for a job). We don't have much right to complain. We just need to work smarter not harder! BWAHAHAHAHAHA!
So, all I'm saying is that I don't think work hours are really that quantifiable. However, the average person is 62% pretty.
Peace. Sway
icq 5202646
Peace. Sway
Peace. Sway
I totally agree with most of the people posting in this discussion. We all know that we work way more then the 32.9 hours that the gov't thinks we do. As well as being a grad student, and a research assistant on that, I totally see the student aspect of it as well. Sleep? That's counter productivity. What I say that needs to be done, is to start billing like a lawyer, but easy on the jokes.. ;] If you think about a job, bill for it. If you work on it from home, bill on it. If you read about something to help your job, bill it as research.. etc..
First, my minimum work week is 45 hours in the office. I have a 2 hour each way commute from long island to N.Y.C. .Since my commute is anything but "time off" I'm breakin it at least 65 hours per. 32.9 is obviously derived from averages including sick personal and vacation time,based on a 40 hour work week (the most any employer puts on paper)so the number seems right. I think the question is more how you look and feel at the end of the week. Do you have the look of a man who just worked 5 six hour days and is laughing about all the money he just got, or are you a run down 12 hour a day slob whose getting taken advantage of. I fall into the second category. I'm looking for a way out. HELPPP
I have been working in the computer industry for close to ten years. For about half of that time I have been a Engineering Project Manager. For about the last 2 I have specialized in streamlining the productivity of Engineering teams. Indeed many of the teams I have intially examined do indeed put in 60 hour weeks, but what they do through about 30 of those hours could hardly be called work. One of the 1st tricks that I almost always do is to get the teammembers to leave the building when they aren't being productive. Because the important thing isn't how long your in the building, it's how well you meet your ship dates and project schedules. I find that about half of their 12 hour days they spend dreading the work ahead, browsing the web, and playing games. Now granted I have actually been on teams that have to work 60 hours per week to ship a project, but thats almost always a bad schedule. Yet another very correctable problem. Once the programmers know when they are working (which is much more than being in the building), and are indeed encouraged to leave the building to relax during their down time, I find they are much more productive even with a 35 hour work week. Usually shipping project much quicker than similiar teams who sit in their offices 12 hours per day but work only 4. So even though many of the people complain of work without compensation we should reevaluate how we work, and how we draw our schedules at least thats my experience. In Rebutal to the flames denying my experience I simply respond, "Find a job that doesn't treat you so lousy then."
Where I work we average 45 to 60 hours per week I don't know how the .gov gets their information (probably the same pollsters that tell us what we all really want) but they couldn't have polled the techies that are in the trenches.
My employer has a new mgmt staff who came in and made all these proposals for sweeping changes to the parent company, without doing their homework. Now, we have mandatory 12 hrs/wk overtime, without ANY compensation, in addition to any extra time that we may already be giving them. Then, they have the nerve to give out raises to IT that are on par with the inflation rate. Even with the extra time, we are being given directives that will result in us breaking the rules and prcoedures of the job, resulting in sub-standard work. It is no coincedence that there has been at least one or two people who call out sick every day in my department since they implemented their OT directive.
I think the onus is on the over-worked employee to take charge of his/her hours. If someone feels they are overworked, spend too much time at home doing office work, or feel they spend too much time away from home, then its time to move on or change your hours or position.... From my own experience , I found that changing my workplace perceptions was the best thing I've done. I haven't been happier in years. I made a deliberate move out of the management fast track and into a family-friendly company. My last job expected me to work 50 hrs minimum. Was even told that by the boss. My current boss asks for 40, but knows it sometimes isn't possible. My company allows us to take sick time (unlimited) to do family activities.... Now there was a price to pay, I did have to take a salary cut (not as hard as it seems) and I had to readjust my thinking to forget the "corporate mentality." Neither was simple, but in just 6 months I could do it. And be happy about it.
managers...why god invented purgatory
When I first started as a programmer (back in the stone ages 15 years ago) I was working 60+ hours as a matter of routine. Now I consult 32-40 hour weeks, and charge a lot more for my time. Am I less productive? IMO no, in fact I'm more productive. I've been doing this long enough that I've figured out most of the usual pitfalls, I now know where to look for the information to solve my problems, etc. I'm still 'working' about the same number of hours, but now I'm not at the office the entire time, rather at home doing the fun 'work'.
Since I've seen plenty of posters with jobs that keep them working for way over forty hours, I thought I'd chime in. Since graduating this past year, I've had a lovely time working a 32-35 hour a week job in the city where I graduated. The pay is lacking, (at least for a real computer-programming job) but in return I have been granted absolutely no stress (the boss takes all, and I mean ALL the heat) and copmletely flexible hours. For instance, on Wednesdays I like to show up at 9 and leave at 2:30 to go have lunch with my college buddies. People are always complaining as they grow old that they've put too much time into their work, and not enough into family, friends, and just living. I don't want to make that same mistake. Oh, I'll be leaving for a higher paying job come next year, and probably start working 40 hours, but I simply will not work longer than that, even if I have to get turned down for a better position. That simple. Finishing up, a final thought. Having no stress means that I don't have to think about work at home at all. Heck, I still feel like programming when I'm at home, so I usually put an hour into my own personal projects, instead of being bone-tired and able only to watch T.V. without a brain cramp. I guess you have to make a decision sometimes. Do you want to be able to afford the fancy life, or do you want to be able to enjoy the life you've already got?
Since it seems we're conducting an informal survey of our own here. I'd like to toss in my hours.
50 Minimum.
My last day off was 1/30
The last week
Wed 8 Hr in office
Thu 8 Hr in office
Fri 8 Hr in office
Sat 1 hr from home
Sun 4 Hrs in office
Mon 9 Hrs in office
Tue 13 Hrs in office
Typical!
Union anyone? Garment workers have more rights ya know.
"I'm a slave of Karma, Spin the Wheel and I'm a king reborn."
I haven't worked a 40 hour week in 10 years. I have either had a pager or in the last year, a cell phone. I have a laptop that goes every where with me, when I'm not dialing in, I'm catching up on my reading materials (currently standing at 1200 pages). I have averaged about 3000 hours per year (with @ 2000 hours equaling 40 hours/week for 50 weeks). In my definition of work I include anything having to do with work, even thinking about work (we are the knowledge brokers).
My shortest week is probably down to 50 hours. I probably average around 80+ hours..... Where do these idiots get this information.....guess that is really not a question..... to ludicrious to answer.......
My two cents on this is to look at who is putting out this info. Maybe that's the average for govt. workers. I should be so lucky. I'm wired wherever I am, cell phone, two-way pager, laptop, home machine. I get payed a decent buck but I still put in 50-60 hours a week.
I have yet to meet anyone who underestimates their hours worked per week. In fact, everyone who complains about their hours, tends to overestimate by 10-20%. Subtract the goofing off, and the overestimates run 30-50%.