Slashdot Mirror
How Many Hours Do You Work in a Week?
Gnight asks: "After reading a recent article at ABC News stating that U.S. citizens work more than any other industrialized country, I have started to wonder more about the subject. So my question is, how much does the average slashdot reader work in a week? Where do you live? and What do you do?" Slashdot did an informal poll on this a long time ago, but it was more from the workday standpoint, though it looked like the majority of us were working 9-10 hour days. Is it still the same today as it was almost 2 years ago?
if working for someone else, keep your hours short, but if working to learn and accomplish things, there is nothing wrong with long hours.
I barely work 8 hours a day, if that, when various distractions are included. I don't make as much as those who work in the private sector, but I do get to go home at 5:00 and have a life outside of work.
Of course watching the state-sponsored work ethic has done more than anything to influence my political beliefs toward Libertarian.
So, your database guy can't read or write then? Or is it, you can't be bothered to DOCUMENT how it is you do things around there? It is SOOO easy for someone to complain about thier 'importance' to the company, when the fact is, they simply create more work for themselves by being disorganized.
Don't feel bad, you are in good company. Most IT 'profesionals' keep everything in thier heads. They are also the ones bitching about 'no vacation time, I'm too important'.
This goes true for most any 'service' type job, the guys that are REALLY good at it, make it look easy. The hacks complain about how difficult the job really is, and look for sympathy.
I still manage to command top dollar for my services, and my number of actual 'work' hours has declined steadily for the last 4 years (before, I was 'too important' to take vacations.)
The pay is for knowing where to hit the machine with the hammer. (for those of you who know that story, you will 'get it')
Which one are you, reader?
...~40 hours a week at "real" job ...~15-30 hours a week shooting for F1RST P0ST.
I'm at work 40 hours a week. I work about 5.
Which is like what, six American hours?
----
Every year during my review, I just pray the words "slashdot.org" aren't mentioned.
There is such a device; I call it "The Cat 'o Nine Tails". Works wonders in the arena of employee relations.
----
Every year during my review, I just pray the words "slashdot.org" aren't mentioned.
The only dissappointment to me is that she won't play Grand Turisimo with me.
Have kids. I play FIFA 2001 with my six year old. No doubt we'll be playing Need For Speed 7 over our home wireless network in a couple of years, once he learns that occasionally you have to lay off the accelerator and brake...
Ooh, a sarcasm detector. Oh, that's a real useful invention.
This fits in Parkinson's law, although maybe under a special corrilary. Work expands to fill the time alloted to it.
Hmm, 2 points for Parkinson reference, 10 points for an Erma Bombeck reference anyone?
~^~~^~^^~~^
Note, some moderator moded the parent down for being off topic.
So what does having 1 job and three side buisnesses that take pretty much most of my time off topic? I don't know either. Thats why I spend most of my moderating points these days fixing bad moderation. This is blatantly off topic.
1) With rare exceptions, no funny post is better than an informative post (rare exceptions). Only people who get their political commentary from Bvs&Bthd (as opposed to the Simpsons or PPG which has intelligent commentary) thing funny is better. Funny enough, the same people that understand B&B are the same ones that understand Democrats. Go figure.
2) Moderators are to be at -1 to watch for abuses. Thats not to moderate someone to -2, thats to keep moderators from pushing down good posts that might conflict with prejudices or their inability to comprehend. I like saving those people.
thats my rant, take it for what its worth.
~^~~^~^^~~^
I in general work 40-45 hrs a week. And will not work at all on the Jewish Sabbath, (Friday sundown to sat sundown). I don't care what blew up don't call me. Life is too short to work 70 hrs a week.
Erlang Developer and podcaster
My *Canadian* 11 year old writes better than him. And she's the product of public schooling. I thought home schooling was all about a better quality of education? Well, either that or fundies trying to make sure their kids don't learn about evolution.
The next Cmdr Taco duplicate will be ready soon, but subscribers can beat the rush and see it early!
It's worse than that - cow orkers was in common use in alt.peeves and then alt.religion.kibology and then alt.folklore.urban long before Dilbert even existed.
The next Cmdr Taco duplicate will be ready soon, but subscribers can beat the rush and see it early!
Fool! That is proper Canadian English and spelling.
Nice try, but I *am* Canadian. But then again, I never was a very good one - not polite enough. And I lived in Quebec for 5 years, which makes me instantly suspicious to anybody living west of Brampton (where, God help me, I lived for a different 5 years).
The next Cmdr Taco duplicate will be ready soon, but subscribers can beat the rush and see it early!
Do you count the hours I'm at work? Do you subtract from that the hours I spend reading Slashdot and The Register? How about the Half Life games? And the time spent talking to my cow orkers about non-work stuff?
Do you add back in the hours when I've woken up in the middle of the night with a brilliant idea of how to solve the latest problem? And do you count just the time awake writing it down so I don't forget it, or the time I spent mulling it over in my mind while half-asleep or watching TV? Do you add in the time I spend going over the code in my mind while driving to and from work?
Do you add or subtract the time I spend at home working on my free software project, because while it's time I *don't* spend mulling over work problems, it's also time that keeps me sharp and remembering when software development was fun.
Face it, the concept of hours worked is meaningless, and mostly used by people who mistake action for progress.
I once worked on a job with a bunch of droids from Andersen Consulting. Andersen had a corporate culture of working 24 hours a day during crunch times, and it was *always* crunch times. I bought into it on one project with them, and used to wonder if it was worth getting undressed and into bed when I stumbled back to my hotel room at 4am realizing that I had a breakfast meeting at 6:30. But the second time I worked with these guys, I was working with a guy on this problem and we were going around in circles. I recognized what we were doing, and said that I was going home at 11:30pm. I got back into work the next morning, and the Anderoid was still working on the problem, having been there all night. And it appeared that all he'd done was try the same ideas we'd already tried twice before I went home. I, on the other hand, had realized what the problem was while showering and on the drive in had formulated a solution which had worked first time.
The next Cmdr Taco duplicate will be ready soon, but subscribers can beat the rush and see it early!
does a prostitute get paid for mastrubating?
These are my friends, See how they glisten. See this one shine, how he smiles in the light.
. . . as if it wasn't already bad enough having to live in Canada.
These are my friends, See how they glisten. See this one shine, how he smiles in the light.
I too am from Canada. I usually work from 9-5:30ish (1/2hr lunch officially but I usually have 3/4-1hr). Work starts at 8 but I haven't been in on time for ages. I suppose that's about 40 hour weeks for me.
I also do contracting (electronic design, systems design) on my own time but that is usually only 10 hours a week (20 if I'm really busy). So now that's up to 50-ish hours, peaking at 60-65.
My day job is really good and I have a lot of fun with it, but that also means I tend to think about work even when I'm not working. New ideas come at any time (I'm in development) and solutions to problems come whenever as well. It's difficult to track that time.
Of course, a wife and three kids under 5 years of age really limits how much time you want to spend on work and indeed limits how much physical strength you have to get things done. About once or twice a year I do feel myself starting to burn out and I scale back everything. I try to go down to 7 hours a day at work and maybe 5 hours a week on my contracting. It seems to self-regulate pretty well but there are plenty of times I wish for the 36-hour day. :-)
My previous job was a bit tougher. 80 hours/week, no benefits, no overtime, no sick leave, no lunch break - in fact, no breaks at all.
Arguably, the previous company I worked for broke more employment laws than most companies have shareholders. About the only redeeming feature was (and is) that the people running the company have alienated so many people, they're unlikely to sell another product again. Sometimes, greed is expensive.
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
This last 3 month engagement I traveled roughly 14 hours a week (flew in Sundays and out Fridays.) Worked 45-50 onsite for the customer then spent about 10 hours a week on expense reports and other administrative overhead. I slept 5 nights a week in a hotel room. So counting travel, but not counting the hotel... 69-74hrs. This is typical. The problem is, I don't seem to have any other options. It's either 100k/year doing this or 10k/year washing dishes. And I understand that I'm paying off a mortgage and contributing to my daughter's college fund. Although it's sometimes difficult to remember where the house is, or what she looks like. My wife and I talk more over IM than face to face. I will say, I have absolutely no interest in the money. I just want a good project and 3 squares a day. I just haven't found any way to get that in the same package.
[-- Trust the Monkey --]
I'm a programmer living in Sweden. According to my contract, I work 40 hours a week at any hour that I prefer, and receive 5 weeks payed vacation. Overtime is not mandatory, but will give you more money. That, and I get to spend some time every year for further education. This is simply great: I'm allowed to start working when I'm awake and ready to start coding. My employer loves it too, since it makes me very much more effective.
War is one of the most horrible things a human can be exposed to. And one of the worlds largest industries.
I work at the IT Lab at the medical university in Charleston, South Carolina. My work schedule is very sporadic. One week I may work 50 hours and then next I may work 30. It just depends on what I am doing. My boss is great becuase all he cares about is if we get the job done and if we are happy. I am sure lots of you have similar bosses. Or I hope so. I have not read most of the comments yet. :) Anyway, I say on average I probably work 40 hours a week.
Can you see Iron City here?
For me, it depends on the project and what the customer wants.
Currently, 8-5, M-F, Network Engineer. I do systems integration/consulting.
Co-founder and designer at Music Nearby: http://musicnearby.com
The article states that the US works more than Japan. Actually, this isn't too new, a similar report came out in 1998. But, many people in sociology and international politics tell a different story. Work hours in Japan are institutionally under reported. Japan has been in an economic recession since the early to mid 90's. As a result, the government mandated that all Japanese major corporations reduce the number of hours their employees worked.
The theory was based on two assumptions. First, shorter work weeks would mean companies need to hire more people. This would help the rising unemployement. Second, Japanese business men were starting to get known for dying of heart attacks despite their general good health. The stress of work was killing the Japanese population.
In order to comply with regulations, many companies started blacking out their windows at the traditional closing time. They started under reporting their hours. Et voila. The official story shows a decline in the average work week of Japanese.
Americans are working more and more. But we still don't beat the Japanese.
It used to be that I worked an average of 50hrs a week. Filling time sheet is a pain, and therefore always put 8hrs/day, as it wont affect my salary anyhow.
Sometime last year, the company moved, and it became impractical for me to commute with my car. Parking being horrendously expensive downtown, and the 1h30m drive didn't sound appealing (and now, the gas price).
Although, taking the commuting train to work has significantly reduced the amount of stress in my days, the train hours force me down to 40h a week.
On the plus side, I'm usually less fatigued at night, and have found that the amount I get done in a day has remained unchanged.
An other plus side; there's something to be said about working downtown at 25-30 celsius and having a outward-slanted office window on the third floor, overlooking the sidewalk...
Karma karma karma karma karmeleon: it comes and goes, it comes and goes.
I have lots of issues with this, and the 40 hour workweek is simply a mental trap for making good students into good consumers. Consider this for a moment... if there was some device that you could use at work that would increase your productivity by 20%, why do you still work 5 days a week. Why not be happy and work 4 days, assuming that the cost of the device were recovered.
My take on this is that the length of the workweek has nothing to do with the work that has to be done. There is always more work that can be done, and there are always ways of shirking off the task of getting stuff done. I know both from experience. ;)
My point here (and I do have one) is that this is a reflection of American values to work and consume. It is a value system I don't like very well, but I'll confess that I buy into it implicitely. This is an interesting topic though.
-- Solaris Central - http://w
9am to noon :o)
1pm to 5pm
monday to friday
I don't do overtime, as I'm paid for 25h even if I make 40 (or 30
BTW I live 5 minutes from home, so it's pretty cool!
My job is network and unix engineer, but most of my work is coding (C on QNX) and I like that
--
"Science will win because it works." - Stephen Hawking
Being a consultant for a company, every week seems to entail going to a different customer, so the hours vary. Lately, though, it's been:
- 8-10 hours/day at customer
- 2-4 hours/day commute
- 3-5 hours/day at home catching up on corporate e-mail and changes (200+ messages/day, and I don't think I'm on all the lists I need to be)
Then there's the weekend where I routinely spend another 3-4 hours a day catching up on corporate email.
So, that's 11-15 hours/day working, plus commute. God, I hate LA traffic.
--
"The urge to save humanity is almost always a false front for the urge to rule." --H.L. Mencken
Is time really money? =-P
.sig a .sog, .sig out loud, .sig out .strog"
".sig,
".sig,
"Work less, spend less, live more fully"
Right now, I work 8 hours a day. However, my material needs are few and I just end up saving most of what I earn. Of course, I don't want to wake up in 20 years having worked my youth away. So, I've been thinking about cutting my hours in half. I'd much rather be out running around getting into trouble and stuff than working, anyway. The nice thing about working in IT is that I could probably afford it, although it would make my life rather spartan.
Has anyone reading this tried it? Were you able to really use your time wisely, or did you find the lack of structure led to laziness? Was the cut in pay more drastic than you had anticipated? And input you folks can offer would be helpful.
A slave clause, surely, but that's their side of it...
--
You know, you gotta get up real early if you want to get outta bed... (Groucho Marx)
"But remember, most lynch mobs aren't this nice." (H.Simpson)
-- Joe
I'm surprised my trollish post garnered a response (or was even read, given it's post #488!)
My wife and I live in a modest condo in a small town. We own a ten-year-old car. Except for a mortgage, we owe *nothing* to anyone.
Because we've made these lifestyle decisions -- ie. the decision to *not* purchase a $40k truck, a palatial house, or the other materialism-for-the-ego crap -- we are able to live on part-time incomes. *And* still save money for retirement at age 50. And go one four weeks of backpacking vacation every year.
We've never worked a 60-hour week in our lives, and we're never going to. It's far more important to us to have a great relationship and time together, than to earn money so we can spend money.
Those who focus on accumulation of money as quickly as possible, should consider a couple things. First, you could be dead tomorrow, which would rather moot your bank account. Second, if you train yourself to slave 60hr/week, you will never, ever be able to stop working: it'd kill you. Your entire life will be wasted slaving away for some boss-man.
That's just sad.
--
--
Don't like it? Respond with words, not karma.
So move to another town. Why choose to live where it's too expensive to have any other life but a worklife?
Yes, if we popped out some kids, we'd need to work more. That'd be one of those lifestyle choices I'm talking about. We wouldn't need to work 60hr weeks, though!
Take the late shift, if that's what floats your boat. I said nothing disparaging about working nights.
My entire point was this: people need to wake up and make healthy lifestyle choices. If working 60hrs a week excites you, drives you forward, makes you *alive*, man, *alive!*, then by all means, go for it.
But if those sorts of hours are a drag, if they're making you unhappy, if they're overwhelming -- for chrissakes, quit working so much! Make lifestyle choices that give you the ability to work in ways that makes you happy.
--
--
Don't like it? Respond with words, not karma.
New-Age mantra my ass: there are many people living in your own "rapidly expanding town" who are living quite well without overworking themselves.
If you're overworked, it is by *choice.* Have the guts to accept ownership of your *choice.*
Anything else is just pansy-assed self-victimization.
--
--
Don't like it? Respond with words, not karma.
Life is too fucking short to screw around with bullshit like work.
When it's time to die -- say, tomorrow, after the bus hits you -- are you gonna say "geez, I wish I'd put in an extra 10 hours last week"... or are you going to kick yourself for ignoring your wife and kids, because you were too damn greedy for the almighty-fucking-buck?
Now, if you're truly in love with your work, and it's more of a thrill for you than any other aspect of your life, then by all means, work your ass off! You're one of the lucky few for whom work is the pinnacle of life.
The rest of you: getaclue! You don't *NEED* to live an expensive lifestyle. You are *CHOOSING* to sacrifice the enjoyment of living for the greed of mere having. Downsize your life. Learn to live.
Frankly, I think what many of you need is a near-death experience. It'll put a proper perspective on the value of life. Sixty-hour work weeks won't be high on the list of "musts"!
--
--
Don't like it? Respond with words, not karma.
Im working for a .com startup (wish me luck) and putting in around 60 a week. ~6am to anywhere between 4:30 and 6pm...
Government regulation in Norway states that a maximum of 40 hours extra per month is allowed. And for that you have to apply. Without applying it's like 20 hours or something.
If you do work more - the company might get fined if there is a review.
And there I was working 135 hours extra without knowing this...no wonder my boss got into trouble.
As long as you don't push your luck you're fine. Keeping it to a reasonable level is best for PHB and for yourself. Always remember - "you work to live!" and not "live to work"
i'm a salaried programmer, so if i'm trying to meet a deadline, i work like crazy. 11-13 hour days, 7 days a week, until it's done. so around 80-90 hours a week.
:)) makes up for it.
however, if i'm working on a slower/less important project, or if i'm doing design instead of actual code... it's more like 6-8 hours, 5 days a week, or 30-40 hours a week.
it kinda sucks not getting paid for all that overtime, but i guess all the slacking off i do during the slow periods (e.g. reading slashdot
---
At another, I had a quite interesting work schedule:
10:30 Get in. Boot machines, fetch gossip.
11:00 Boss gets in. Listen to all the problems of other cow-orkers.
11:30 Help boss fix cow-orkers problems.
12:00 Leave for lunch.
13:00 Look around technical bookstores, or go sneak out/xerox books from the university library
14:00 Look at an historical building or at gadgets in stores
14:30 Get back to work. Listen to all the problems of other cow-orkers.
15:00 With boss, fix cow-orkers problems.
16:00 Cow-orkers leave. Start working
20:00 Wrap-up things and go home.
In the last 4 hours, we worked uninterrupted. That's how 2 guys were able to support 18 people in the whole company... (But my boss quit after I was there for a year. Wonder why...).
--
Along these same lines, we see news articles etc. about the perils of people who work too hard, who take their work home with them and ignore their families, etc.
Well, duh... isn't that what they were taught in school, in the form of homework?
Make sure you get in to a good college. Shortly thereafter, it is unlikely that anyone will even ask, ever in your whole life, what your high school grades were anyway.
I work as a unix manager in Dresden, Germany and I usually put down 50 hours a week. 60 hours when it is more hectic. Not counting the hours I do work from home ofcourse.
When you have DSL connection to your home you usually do more work also since it is like sitting there.
there's a lot more to it than that, i'd suggest reading the book entitled "Guns, Germs, and Steel" (do a search on amazon for it or somethin). it's got an outrageously accurate brief summary of the history of human societal evolution with an eye toward answering the question of why are certain nations/people affluent today and others not.
-dk
-dk
Dream with the feathers of angels stuffed beneath your head.
Now, I'm making more money and have little stock. And, I do the typical six hours of work a day. I show up between 9 and 10. Go to lunch for an hour or two and leave at 6 or 7. I gotta say, Corporate America can be nice. When I can play Age of Empires in the office at 4pm with a bunch of our other workers and just relaxing it makes me glad to be out of the dot-commie days. I still work for an internet company, but it's still corporate.
And, I learned one thing through the dot com fad:
If they ever say, "We can't pay you well, but we offer great options!" it means, "We have no money, and our stock is worthless but we may be able to make it", which means "We're screwed, and just dont know it yet". Not only from my experience, but from all my friends who were at dot-coms too.
P.S. Love your sig :)
there is another quote, I forget what it was in latin but it translated to "If you can read this you must be a scholar"
Dacels Jewelers can't be trusted.
First, consider the fact that in a given day, I have three projects due. I think the official average for my work week is 19 projects per week. As a company (with roughly 400 employees), we produce well over 200 complete packages per week. And as one of the four landscape architects here, I get to touch almost every project here (at least all the ones that require a landscape design).
So, what do I typically work? My work week is about 50 hrs per week. I still don't work weekends though.
I wanted nice, sturdy, and comfortable chairs for my backyard. I had a few options: $15 for a chair and ottoman (adirondack plastic) at Wal Mart, $23 for the same thing at Bed Bath and Beyond, or $85 per set for untreated wood chairs at Pier One that would probably rot away in a year. I chose option 1. People obsess over having nice things, and form has become far more important than function. People pay, not only for brand names, but even where they bought the item. Go to Staples and look at a translucent office chair for $25, and find the exact same brand at Bed Bath & Beyond for $50. It's pretty fucked up when sports stars who advertise products are paid tens of millions of dollars, and scientists solving real problems get far less. Personally, I'm more worried about the ecosystem than what sports "hero" likes my brand of bleach.
Corporations are interested in making money, so they make us interested in spending it. Imagine your life without anything invented past 1980, and it would be pretty much the same, except you might go outside and realize that other people exist, and you are not the most important. Want and need are two different things. It seems people want to work for more things that they don't need. It's the American way.
That 4-day idea is great in theory. I wonder if I could sell my boss on it...
My opinion on the remote access is this: Great for the middle-of-the-night issues (which take five minutes to resolve). I live about 35 miles away from my job, and it is *not* a fun drive at 2:30am. Fix the machine whilst still wearing Underoos.
It is not so great (or some would say sucky) when the pointy-haired manager spews, "Oh, I need you to install Oracle on this box today. I know it is your day off, but blah blah blah blah." Grrr.
Jethro
Quidquid latine dictum sit, altum viditur.
Good stuff. It seems that we aren't alone after browsing this topic. Ah, well. Misery loves company!
And, I learned one thing through the dot com fad:
If they ever say, "We can't pay you well, but we offer great options!" it means, "We have no money, and our stock is worthless but we may be able to make it", which means "We're screwed, and just dont know it yet". Not only from my experience, but from all my friends who were at dot-coms too.
Very well said. New mantra: bird in hand, bird in hand, bird in hand... 8^D
Jethro
PS - Re: Sig - Saw that in fortune, and had to have it. There is, indeed, truth in it. heh heh.
Quidquid latine dictum sit, altum viditur.
Before, when I was working at a dot-com startup that I really cared about and got to wear ten different hats: 11-13 hours/day
/. all day.
Now, after the lack of funding and falling victim of the overspending of the business folks above me, I am back in "corporate America". I sneak out after six hours and read
Please don't trace my IP and tell on me. 8^)
How I miss the wild, carefree dot-com days. I didn't mind spending time at work, because it was fun... sigh...
Jethro
Quidquid latine dictum sit, altum viditur.
I work ~40 hour weeks. Some more, few less. I work at a startup. I work as much now as I did during the 'boom'. I get more done in my 40 hours than a lot of people would get done in 80 hours when I'm fully engaged.
I need balance in my life. Having weekends and evenings free lets me keep up with friends, keep my dancing up to spec, and generally have a life. My boss realizes this requirement, and all is cool.
And you might notice that our startup still has funding...
Returned Peace Corps IT Volunteer
I am in the us and work more than 40hrs/wk
hence I protested on may 1st as we are losing
the rights fought for on 1 May 1886
Too many if you ask my wife; too few if you ask my boss.
My hours per week will change greatly depending on what projects I'm working on. I would say my avg hours per week would be 55. I'm a unix administrator living in central PA.
Depending on the week, it can range from 35-80, not including the time I spend working at home.
I work in Massachusetts in the USA doing web development for a small company. My average day is between 10am - 7:30 pm (9.5 hrs).
"Freelancing."
:)
In other words, I did 0 hours of billable work this week, because the Web bidness is slow.
Next week may be different.
However, I have managed a couple of lucrative gigs this year, so I'm still able to pay rent and pay bills and all that, but them student and computer loans aren't going away any time soon...
Pope
Freedom is Slavery! Ignorance is Strength! Monopolies offer Choice!
It doesn't mean much now, it's built for the future.
I've worked on both sides of the pond (Cupertino, California, U.S and Copenhagen, Denmark), and while the hours in the U.S. are definitely longer, the pace is slower, so in my experience the end productivity is about the same.
There are a lot of factors that contribute to the hours I'm required to work each week.
I'm an IT manager for a business services company, with a HQ facility and a newer remote processing facility. In our HQ, which has been around for about 12 years, there are a lot of support issues - legacy equipment, workstations that have been pressed into service as servers, systems that have been upgraded or reinstalled a dozen times over. The staff there easily works 60+ hour weeks, just trying to keep up.
I'm in the new remote facility, built from the ground up 18 months ago. We've got server-class systems as our servers, all new equipment, standardized desktops, network shares for user data.... When I designed this facility, I tried to learn from the mistakes made in HQ, and ended up with a much more stable environment, so my workload is correspondingly lower. I still put in 50 hours or so per week, but a good portion of that is doing remote administration of HQ systems. If I only had to deal with my facility, I could be at 40 hours easily.
In general I work 40 hour weeks. However this fuzzes a bit when you add in my self-training and comapny-funded training, which is another 2-10 hours a week depnding.
I have pulled some pretty excessive timeframes before, but only for a limited time.
"The Sage treasures Unity and measures all things by it" - Lao Tzu
Well, I'm sure I'll get flamed to cinders for this, but... I agree with you, and I'm thinking of making such a transition. I'd love to talk to you about freelance writing, but you have not contact information. If you wouldn't mind, please email me.
Science without religion is lame, religion without science is blind. --Albert Einstein
I'm a CTO of a startup doing Remote Network Management for small businesses. My partners and I made a pact from the beginning that our families came first. I rarely do more than 50 hours/week these days.
Let's see... Yesterday was 15 hours. Today will be about 14. It comes and goes in waves; from 8 to 18, depending on the current software demo/crisis. Average is 55 a week, I'd say. It's tough when you're in a startup because sometimes there's just no more money to hire people to do more work, but we need to do more work to get the money. Catch-22.
--- witty signature
I always thought this was a myth... at least in the web development industry. I work 35 hours week. At work at 8:30AM, hour lunch (sometimes more) leave at 5:00PM. Of course, clients come up with crazy requests from time to time that keep me at work till 10:00PM. But that's not often.
--
InstantCool
I work 3 12-hour shifts a week. 6pm to 6am Sunday, Monday, and Tuesday. My weekend starts on Wednesday. Working graveyard sucks a bit, but it's quiet in the call center, I got lots of preventitive maintenance done, and I'm not as stressed out as when I was working 9-6 days.
From what I understand, though, my shift's changing to 4 10s soon, early day shift (5am to 4pm, 10 plus 1 hour lunch). I'll live, but it won't be as good as what I've got right now.
I'm in favor of a 35 hour workweek. There are plenty of people to fill jobs these days, and if they're happy, they'll work harder and be more productive.
--Bernie
'nuff said
Sorry about your father, that is a difficult loss. There is nothing you could have done to change that and simply sacrificing your life for the good of his isn't the best answer, only a sympton of guilt and sandness brought upon by the unfortunate circumstances.
You are you. Keep it that way! Don't change for your boss, your friends or your family. But always remember who is there for you!
Day 1
Sunday night, drive to Philadelphia Airport.
Fly to San Francisco (5 1/2 hours)
Catch flight to Portland Oregon (1 1/2 hours)
Take shuttle to hotel, Sleeeeeeeepppppp
Day 2
Wake up 6:00 a.m. Do the three SSS's.
Walk to client site by 7:30 a.m
Work till 8:30 pm
Check out town for a while
Sleep
Day 3
Repeat Day 2
Day 4
Start off like Day two, leave work about 5pm
Catch taxi to airport
Fly to San Fran
Fly to Philadelphia
Sleep on those flights
Arrive in philadelphia at 6:45 in the morning
FRIDAY!!
Have friday, saturday and sunday to be home
Its a tough life, but someone has to do it! I get to learn, see the world and meet the most interesting and talented people in the world.
Do i regret it? NO.
Is it hard? YES
I wouldn't do it the rest of my life, but since i'm only 24 i have nothing to loose and frankly sitting still is too boring, you just watch the world go by!
I get paid great, i get bonuses, and i get billions of miles from Frequent Flyer programs and i have more free hotel stays then i know what to do with.
But i get to take my friends to exotic places, i send family tickets to meet me at places, i give my parents hotel coupons for there vacations, and i keep in touch.
Keeping in touch is what counts.. not how much you work for somebody, but how much you make your life YOURS no matter what situation you are in.
I typically avg 90-110and in a crunch time hit 130+ (Yeah that's right 130 hours in a 168 hr week)
I work in a major East cost city - I'm an Orthopaedic Surgery resident.
- crunch time is-
-when a gang war breaks out
-bad weather
-sunny days
-Fri night after the welfare checks get cashed
Sleep is an option.Recognize me by the white plaster in my nails and the black circles under my eyes. I can flash gang signs - strong as a bull and half as smart..
..........FULL STOP.
Please, keep in touch, and give us your view on the subject after 7 years of marriage.
I work about 0 hours a week at my last job. Layoffs are a bitch as is evident by . I've been out of work two weeks now and the job market sure isn't what it was a year and a half ago. Pretty soon I may have to start reverse-spamming the spammers asking them if they need any help.
It could be worse. I had to follow up my own post because I replied to the wrong person!
You are in a maze of twisty little passages, all alike.
I've been married for 8 years and the best part of my day is the warm welcome I get from my wife and kids after work. Don't be so cynical.
Rick
You are in a maze of twisty little passages, all alike.
Too late, I'm 36. See, finding a good job is a lot easier when you have a clue and brain. Try it sometime.
You are in a maze of twisty little passages, all alike.
Whoops! Sorry Targetman, due to the filter I thought you were replying to me! Many apoloogies and just consider the reply to your post's parent.
You are in a maze of twisty little passages, all alike.
Who's whining? Did you hear me complaining about turning down well over 6 figures (U.S.) a year because I don't want to consult? Furthermore, if my employer has a problem with the hours I want to work, he can either not hire me or pay me less! Why should it bother anyone who works with me or you, for that matter. That's between me and him, so mind your own business. Besides, I did the same thing when I was single. I am both productive enough and well-rounded enough to not need to or want to spend my life perfecting a phosphor tan for 80 hours a week. You or any other single person don't subsidize me for anything since I almost certainly pay more taxes than you anyway. Anyone who hires me knows my requirements up front, and still it only took me a week to find my current job.
Entitlement indeed! Just because I am not some sorry tech industry loser who is enslaved to some dead-end job for all hours of the evenings and weekend is not your concern, unless of course you are jealous. There's more to life than work, and there are more useful things to be done than sit around and turn out code (even if few are more fun), so quit feeling sorry for yourself and make better use of your own time. I do.
And lastly, my children are not brats. Their taxes will be paying for your sorry butt when you're collecting Social Security.
You are in a maze of twisty little passages, all alike.
Yeah. It's not possible he just made a typo. That's almost as stupid as leaving the subject out of a sentence... something I'm sure _you'd_ never do.
You are in a maze of twisty little passages, all alike.
My wife understands that _very_ well. But my kids have a hard time with that concept. :)
Rick
You are in a maze of twisty little passages, all alike.
It's not just you. Furthermore, some of us even figured that out before the "bubble" happened.
I've got a wife, 4 kids, and lots of hobbies, and while I enjoy work, I don't enjoy it more than the rest of my life. I left my last job in part because my peers were almost all single guys who thought little of 60 or 80 hour weeks (and the chaotic, poorly-managed environment made that necessary way too often) whereas if I'm as little as an hour or 2 late coming home, my kids are disappointed and my wife has to do extra work (feed the kids, get them ready for bed, reading stories, etc), so I place a high priority on a job which requires relatively few long days. Fortunately, I have found a place which doesn't (for a change) operate in perpetual crisis mode, with great pay no less. Also, the company has been around for several years and isn't walking a razor-edge of venture capital and market hiccups to stay in existence.
Rick
You are in a maze of twisty little passages, all alike.
Bah, I work in Ontario too. People like me are still in high enough demand that if an employer demands more than 40 I'll find a new employer. The main thing this bill does is allow me to accept a job that requires 50 hours a week for more money if I want it.
Harris is an ass but I generally prefer the freedom to take a 50 hour-a-week job if I want it.
So is work only about writing code? Or when you go home and lie in bed for 3 hours with visions of UML diagrams dancing in your head, does that count? Surely not as billable hours (wellll, for most of us :)), but is it something that you personally consider to be part of what constitutes your own workload?
www.HearMySoulSpeak.com
I worked about 80 hours a week untill I sold it a month ago now I plan on takin the summer off and to really learn Linux and BSD
heres a picture off my former store that some slashdoters might like
http://www.lenny.com/store/store1.jpg
http://Lenny.com
I used to be a 3 day employee, part-time, but have since become a full-time 4 day employee. I'm supposed to work 4 nine hour days, but I usually work more like 8 hours a day. That works out to be a 32 hour week. I do work the fifth day if I'm needed, and that ends up being about once a month. And every once in a while I work till 8 or 9 at night to finish something up if a deadline is tight. I'd say on average, I work 35 hours a week. I'm a Web Applications Developer in Northern New Jersey.
Of course, that's just time actually _spent_ at work. I probably spend more like 20 hours actually working every week. Man, that's pretty sad. I have a really bad habit of surfing between slashdot, shacknews, geeknews, tech-report, and betanews, as well as actually writing code for my own _personal_ website. That's _really_ bad. Technically, my company probly owns about 20% of the code used on my website because I wrote it on company time. I've seriously got to work on my self-discipline and whip myself into shape.
As a consultant for a state-organization in Texas, US I'm given pretty leniant "in-the-office" hours (between 35 and 45 hours per week), but this number doesn't take into account the fact that I go home, and test scenarios out on my home LAN for viability at work, or the fact that I can't *not* think through work-problems on home-time ... this I suppose is the curse of "intellectual-workers" and part (along with the "on-call-status" of most of us) of why we're salaried as opposed to hourly. (optimists point of view).
Hmmmm, i dont remember reading about that....
All Troll + "offtopic" mods are meta moderated as "Unfair", because you abused the system.
The rest of the time is either spent doing real work at a more relaxed, lazy pace, or goofing off, surfing the web etc. Although I have to say that the majority of my web surfing from work is technology related, and occasionally something I found on the web a few months ago suddenly turns out to be relevant to my project at work. It's always nice to have those instances to justify goof off time. I save the non-technology web surfing (interpret however you like, probably not what you were thinking) for home.
I always wonder what people did to goof off before the internet. Anyone have any insights/stories? Did people goof off just as much, but in different ways? Or did we get more work done back then?
Getting back to the question posed in the article, I "work" 40 hours a week and not more unless overtime pay is preapproved - I value my life outside of work. Southern CA Software/System Engineer for an aerospace company. Posting this from work. ;-)
Say hello to zMac.
Usually the larger the company, the more likely they are going to want a stock 40 hour week. in fact, some have moved to the 37.5 week. But these are usually non-IS houses.
In the middle of the spectrum, you have the larger Internet companies that require at least 40, sometimes 50, sometimes 60. These are the established places that can sometimes be kind of hectic.
Then on the far end, you have the startups. They *require* ten hour days, 7 days a week, with extra time for server outtages (which are frequent) so you end up billing a 85 hour week. which... kind of sucks. `8r/
All just IMHO.
--
Gonzo Granzeau
Gonzo Granzeau
"Nothing the god of biomechanics wouldn't let you into heaven for.." -Roy Batty
I work for a private (years 7-12) College (as tech support, not a teacher). There's a lot of work to do, but noone minds if I don't work overtime to get it done. Generally I'm not expected to do any more than the hours I'm payed for, and there have been times when I've told them I'm not coming to work on a Saturday. It pays poorly compared to other jobs. But the upside is this:
I'm forced to take 6 weeks holiday a year (4 weeks annual leave and 10 rostered days off). I'd like to move on and get payed more, but you have no idea how hard it is to leave those lovely holidays behind!
I also just HAVE to say this. One of the most under apreciated people are those who support their oranisation well in IT, and put up with school kids every day too!
L8r.
"How much truth can advertising buy?" - iNsuRge - AK47
"How much truth can advertising buy?" - iNsuRge - AK47
Fortunately, I have found a place which doesn't (for a change) operate in perpetual crisis mode, with great pay no less. Also, the company has been around for several years and isn't walking a razor-edge of venture capital and market hiccups to stay in existence.
I think those might be related.
Following-up my own post, AND doing so as a result of an unclosed tag.
This study (sorry, dead link, maybe you can find the right one) discusses the effects of sleep deprivation on short term memory loss. On the other hand, this one claims sleep deprivation increases activity in certain areas of the brain. And here's yet another story talking about the effects of sleep on brain development. And here's another article claiming naps could increase worker productivity. And, also, this article on the correlation between sleep and learning.
(Sorry for all the Yahoo! News links, I was trying to find the first one, and I came across the latter articles)
There was another study done in the U.K. which linked lack of sleep to a drop in I.Q. levels, but I can't seem to find the appropriate link...
If you're curious as to what other people had to say, the slashdot articles on first two links are here and here, respectively.
-------------------------------------------
I like nonsense, it wakes up the brain cells.
-------------------------------------------
I like nonsense, it wakes up the brain cells.
-- Dr. Seuss
I 'work' 35 hours a week as a Solaris Admin/Backup operator/PC troubleshooter (I hate NT). Most of my time is really spent just being there. I never tell them that often all I have to do to fix a printer or 'solve' a Win98 problem is re-booting or turning a thing off then on again so I actually am respected (they seem to be less impressed with my network debugging skills). My average work week really ranges from 3 to 35 hours. I live in Washington Heights (not the so called nice part) so my rent is cheap, but I'm not payed as much as IT people in the private sector. But I'm hardly ever stressed out, it still pays better than my previos professions (Social Worker, Truck Driver). I'm quite happy with it.
So you are right in that there is much we don't know - we don't really even know what sleep is for - but we *do* know that too little of it is usually a Very Bad Thing.
Boss of nothin. Big deal.
Son, go get daddy's hard plastic eyes.
Expanding a vast wasteland since 1996.
As a Systems/Network Analyst in Georgia US, I work an average of about 45-55 hours durring a normal week. If it's a week that I'm on call it can be anywhere from 45-55 all the way to 70+ pending on what kind of problems occure (server crash/router failure/switch blows a blade). The hours arn't the real killer, it's something that has been covered here many times and thats the lack of pay for the extra hours. As a salaried worker, I see nothing past 40 hours in my paycheck :-(
Trying to be different, just like everyone else.
asked earlier here this week about "does on call == at work?".
Many might be at the office 40, 50 or so hours now but how many hours a week are you actually involved in your job? I get good blocks of time to code at home so sometimes I take advantage of it. Sometimes at the office there is zero work being done.
I can tell you that when I get less than 7 hours per night I have a hard time remembering things, and I feel like a zombie. THAT is realistic.
.e.
www.perceive.net
People see the world as they are, not as it is.
Modern society also requires you to do a lot of work-related stuff that isn't really on the company's time. E.g., you have to get to work and back. 1) car 2) gas 3) parking 4) time 5) hassle. Also, you are more and more tethered by this wonderful communications technology. The same technology that allows you to get stock quotes on the latest .com burnout on the toilet allows your company to keep you on alert all the time and grab you when it wants.
The less time you have the worse your health, the more you have to purchase other things like sitters, quick expensive fast food. For most of us, it's not so bad because a lot of us "geeks" are privelaged with a love of our work (we'd do this stuff even if it wasn't our day job). But there are tons of Americans that break their backs chasing a phony circa-50s dream.
It's 10 PM. Do you know if you're un-American?
I'm in the midwest, and I work for a medium-sized privately owned company.
8-5, M-F. Except for that night I was hear till two a.m... ugh.
I've been meaning to write up a FAQ on "office living", being that I'm here in the bay area for 6 months and at $1200/month for a studio appartment, I would rather sleep on the floor in my office wrapped in a sleeping bag.
How we know is more important than what we know.
If I'm not learning something and enjoying learning it, it's work.
If I could have been spending the time trying to get Abby or Gloria or Nikky or Angel to go out on a date, but instead I'm having to clean up the system after someone with superluser privs horks it up, that's work.
You cannot apply a technological solution to a sociological problem. (Edwards' Law)
As an aside, my last programming boss told me when I signed on that if I was working a problem in my head during a 15-minute drive to work, then that was 15 billable minutes. Some managers do appreciate these questions.
Anyhow, your experiences with Andersen sound like a conglomeration of Death March projects. I think /. did a book review of it last year, I don't recall. It's written by the same guy who predicted major doom and gloom for American coders right before the big positive wave, Edward Yourdon (sp?). _Death March_ is a really good book, however.
The evil conslutant technique I feared the most was the crunch-time manager brought in to rescue a project who would create an artifical crisis as his way of seeing who would burn out "easily" and who could hack 80+ hours a week.
You cannot apply a technological solution to a sociological problem. (Edwards' Law)
I have not had a consecutive week off since 1995 (I was still a student, and was studying abroad). And, until my medium-sized company grows enough to hire and internal IT staff greater than two (me and the database guy, and neither of us know a damn thing about what the other does), I can count out more than a token day off here or there for the near future.
If I get the same kind of review this year as I did last year (that would be "none"), you can count on Omar sending resumes out pronto.
Every night and day,
-Omar
The point I'm trying to make is that you make sleep deprivation out to be this huge evil, and although it may be, the simple truth is that we just don't know. My goal is to consistantly get 6 hours a night, and so far I haven't crashed my car, performed poorly at work, or dropped dead, so I don't really see what the problem is.
From my personal experience, as well as observations of others, people always tend to overestimate their "average" hours per week. They'll(I'll :)) have a solid week of 10 hours per day, then spend the next month telling people they work 10 hours per day while they are actually pulling 7 or 8 ever since. People are bad at estimating quantities like this because they overemphasize the outliers.
:)
Also, they don't want to look lazy
Then of course while people are "at work" they often "don't work", adding a further amount of useless variance.
But for the sake of completeness, I'll respond. I work 12 hours a day, 7 days a week, no holidays and I never get sick.
Does this count travelling time? I work a 40-hour week, but that doesn't include 3 hours travelling to and from work every day. Gross value: 55 hours.
And even 40 seems too many - both my previous jobs were 35, and I'm still finding 40 hard going... perhaps I'm just a wimp, but I have a life outside of work! And I refuse to be ashamed of that!
BTW, what is the difference between a job and a 'career'???
Ceterum censeo subscriptionem esse delendam.
Or 3: someone who went to highschool and then worked through four years of (shitty) real-world jobs and had self-taught technical skills. For any but the most academically technical of positions, i'd take the real-world experience over the quite possibly meaningless diploma. Most American universities basically just sell diplomas and a four year camp away from mom and dad.
In Capitalist America, bank robs you!
I'm going to be finishing highschool in a week. I went to a pretty small "preppy" private school that prides itself on assigning crazy amounts of work. Taking four AP classes, I was supposed to be putting in 4+ hours per night. At the beginning of the year, they took the seven of us who were taking three or four APs aside and told us that we should seriously consider not getting a job and cutting back on extra-curriculars. All I can say is that four nights out of five, I found a way to put the work off until study halls and during class. I'm graduating with a 4.0 weighted average, I'm going to a good college with a scholarship, and I've had a pretty easy and relaxing highschool experience. I won't be valedictorian, and perhaps I could have been. But then again, I don't care.
So my advice to fellow highschoolers is: lighten up. Kids (and parents) seem to have a crazy notion that undergrad is so important that unless their super-student goes Ivy-leage or top 5 tech school, then they're going to be flipping burgers for the rest of their lives. Do what you feel comfortable doing. Don't let your self worth be determined by grades, test scores, and a resume filled with activities you don't even enjoy. This is a time of life to have fun. Make friends. Meet girls. Watch TV. Drink. There will be time enough for schedules and seriousness later on.
In Capitalist America, bank robs you!
Hell, if management skipped a $1000 raise for an improved quality of work experience, fine. You spend at the very least 1/3 of your waking hours at the office, and once you've paid off rent and food, you're just buying comfort and happiness with your money right? Why not forgoe a little salary and enjoy your day more?
In Capitalist America, bank robs you!
mod up!
A couple of years ago, I was an intermediate-level programmer - not a guru, not a beginner, I had decent experience working for organizations and also as an independent contractor under my belt. I worked about 10 hours a day.
/. readers who have moved through the ranks will understand the comparison - when you reach the top of the developer food chain, you're expected to bring down the big game as well. Those that haven't, well, you will.
Now I'm a senior programmer at the same place (a software consultancy). I'm assisting project managers (PMPs, for the most part - and I've learned that almost anyone can call themself a project manager, but very few can competently manage a project) and hope to become one myself in the next 2 years. I'm a subject expert for the technical staff on at least a couple of things. I work about 10 hours a day - but it's an entirely different 10 hours a day.
I used to be able to program for ten, twelve hours at a stretch. It wasn't especially arduous - the focus was difficult, but as long as you have your tasks laid out in front of you and a good knowledge of what has to be done, it's doable.
Now, when I reach eight-ten hours, I'm totally exhausted. A lot of the things I hit on now are new to me, they require a lot of effort to figure out, and they're almost always at the top of the priority pile. Most are high-risk engagements.
Those
I think that my present ten hours a day are much more taxing than my old ten hours a day. But, if you want to reduce it to a very simple kind of measure, ten hours is ten hours.
--
--
There is no premature anti-fascism. -Ernest Hemingway
I'm working for a new company since that slashdot poll. It brightened my day to see that I'm no longer a workaholich, now I just need to work on my drinking issue... and my spelling...
Um, this is my sig.
When I started with this firm, I was a ~45-50 hour a week guy... That grew into the ~70-75 hour a week when I got placed on salary and had my "responsibilities increased commensurate to my salary".
Now that my wife has left me, and now that my responsibilities have been increased further, I work ~85-90 hours a week at this job (generally 6 or 7 days a week), and around ~12 a week at my "for fun" job... and I still have time to sleep, sometimes.
My wife leaving was a big bonus for the company, I guess-- I loathe going home and seeing her things the she has yet to come pick up, so I stay at the office and sleep on a couch in the back some nights.
Yeah-- I'd rather have my wife back than have this job-- but that's not gonna happen. Yeah, I made stupid fucking choices, and now I trapped in a shitty job w/ no future, alone. I know it's my fault, and I'm not really bitching. Hell, I like my ~80 hours in a slow week.
*grin* Sucks to be me, doesn't it... Being 23 is supposed to mean working for a dishonest slavedriver bastard over 80% of your waking hours. Of course, I still have time to read Slashdot.
The Attitude Adjuster, I hate me, you can too.
Maybe your working an 80 hour week becasue you are using the wrong tools or trying to implement the wrong solutions, etc...
I would agree that a measurable number of 80-hour weeks are caused by just what you say. I would also make the statement, though, that in many companies, it is expected that IT employees are expected to do far more work than employees in other capacities. That's not to say that there aren't a significant quantity of do-nothing IT personnel in the world-- but there are definitely a significant quantity of IT personnel that are expected to support (with no regard for the unreasonable time commitments, often) systems that they might not have implemented.
Ultimately, if the 80-hour a week job is a problem, quit. If the company's stupid decision-making process caused the "make work", quit. If being an "all Windows shop" causes the work, quit... or just kill yourself. Pick one.
The Attitude Adjuster, I hate me, you can too.
I wonder how much of those 9-10 hours were spent actually working. These are not the factory workers who are monitored quite well.
How much time does a typical office worker spend on extra long coffee breaks, chatting with co-workers, surfing the web, talking on the phone to friends and family, going for an hour lunch when the union time is thirty minutes?
And then at the end of the work day, they have to stay late because they are falling behind schedule.
The worse part is that it normally affects other workers who get 'priority' work handed to them at 4pm when their boss should of had it to them much sooner.
I came from Intel where people generally got docked or rewarded based on their work hours because the management model was so broken that work hours were just about the only metric they could use to rate employees. I went through two death marches at Intel. The first was particularly bad and the overal moral of the employees never recovered.
The most infurating thing about the notion of hours at Intel is that the management viewed long hours as a sign of a good worker. In my mind long hours are a sign of poor planning, period.
I am now the VP of technology at a small startup company with a technical staff of six. I tell my employees right off the bat that we don't do long hours here. I take time to very carefully plan our projects and tasks about two months ahead of time. This way, there is never any reason to go into crunch mode. Currently we are six days ahead of schedule. Knowing this helps my staff work more carefully; and more importantly, it lowers the stress we are under so we work harder and maker fewer mistakes.
Finally, if my co-workers are staying past five, I encourage them to go home and I look at my planning to see if something I missed is creating an artificial pressure to work long hours.
All of us here work around 40 hours per week.
I am currently contracting as a web developer for a large company that deals with home loans. This is one of several jobs, in the DC Metro area that I have worked at over the last few years. Generally, I work 9am - 5pm, though if it were up to me I would come in around 11am. I always try to get out by 5, with a good half-hour to hour lunch. So I'll put in 7-8 hours of work per day. Well actually thinking about it, this is minus the time that it takes me to browse Slashdot and read my personal e-mail several times, read some other news, look through Perl Monks, etc. So maybe I actually do 6 hours of web development per day. I am not a lazy man, I just don't care. I find it very important not to get stressed out, especially if I am coding. Also, I am a contractor, so I work harder, I get .. well .. NOTHING. In fact, this company is so large, that even if I were employed, the probability of me gaining anything material out of excessive hours is fairly low.
--
microsoft, it's what's for dinner
bq--3b7y4vyll6xi5x2rnrj7q.com
it's a sig, wtf?
It's a common phrase:
I doubt I'll be on my deathbed wishing I spent more time at this desk.
But I'd rather be on my deathbed than in my death-cardboardbox wishing I'd spent more time at my desk
It's planning that's the problem. Many people are scared about what's going to happen when it's time to retire.
So they work long hours, trying to build up the funds, so they can relax when they're 60, assuming they get that far.
Me, I enjoy computers. My hobby way back at the beginning was computers. Now I get paid for it.
John
Shit better not happen!
All I can say is that I know people who make WAY more than anyone I know who finished college ;)
//RaZ
I've found that my choices for a dinner entree are much more likely to be in line with those of my fiancee than my dog. The dog would much rather have kibble or a dead racoon than any variety of noodles. The dog and I do usually could agree on steaks, but like hell I'm sharing that with the dog. It's hard enough for me to share steaks with my fiancee.
________________________
I don't want free as in beer. I just want free beer.
At first, I thought about looking for a second job to fill the extra time, but now I hardly notice it anymore.
I've seen the same trend in a few of my friends as well in the last year or so.
I study all the mornings (roughly 30 hours/week), then go to work during the afternoon. And I try to get the most of this.
My country, Chile, has one of the highest average rates of work hours per year in the world (around 2200 or so, I don't remember), but the problem is productivity; they use more work hours, but most of the time is lost on distractions and routinely stuff that is worth nothing.
Of course, I try not to do that; that's why my boss don't want me to leave the job. The problem are my studies. I need the time for study, but I also need the money and I like my job... What to do? I dunno... Need sleep...
--- Sueños del Sur - a webcomic about four young siblings
1)we're more likely to work 9-5 (okay, maybe 9-6 but NO weekends)
we're working 9-5 at our day job, while working 5-9 at our startup (and ssh'ing into it during the 9-5 whenever we can)
2)we expect more compensation and but have a greater realization we're not going to be millionaires (no options for me, thanx, I'll take the cash)
we're taking all the cash we can get out of our pathetic, underpaid current job, sitting with hundreds of thousands of upside-down options we'd be insane to exercise, while we fund our own thing
3)we enjoy our work environment much less than we did before the bubble burst
we're giddy about a worthless, unchallenging work environment during the day. it leaves our brains fresh for other things
4)we continually update our resumes and have our eyes open about better opportunities
and business plans...
5)we take much more down time away from our work and from our computers now that we're burned out from the past few years and haven't seen the reward we deluded ourselves into believing we were going to receive.
we've tossed out the palms, smart watches, and even locked up our kids gameboys because we can't stand the sight of another LCD. we spend our time instead rollerblading or *gasp* with people hanging out
And who says geeks can't be social?
People may claim to be spending far too much time in their offices, but is it because they're being overworked? Or because they have access to high speed net links and computers where they can procrastinate and still appear to be working?
Personally, I'm a geek. I like having access to this stuff (Whenever I walk into the server room I have to resist the urge to say "Hey! Nice rack!"), so the fact that I spend a great deal of time in the office is not a problem for me.
One way to avoid getting sick is not work so much, and take long holidays! I find that two weeks holiday is just not enough time to unwind. You need around a month to really recharge all the creative juices. :-)
--
Paul Gillingwater
Paul Gillingwater
MBA, CISSP, CISM
Is the question how many hours you spend at work, or how many hours you work at work?
Actually, your short-term memory goes away, too, among other things. After that, your cognitive skills go downhill, especially the parts dealing with complex judgemental issues. If I weren't so bloody lazy, I'd post a relevent link to some studies that I should be citing :-P
--
> there are non-somniacs who can effortlessly go >for weeks at a time without sleeping
They are called 'genetic short sleepers' I believe....
It really depends on a number of things, the company you work for, whether you're salaried or paid hourly, whether your single or married, with children or without, two income couple or one, or even if you're saving for a house.
To better qualify the question: for you folks whose companies are requiring more than 40 hours a week, how many hours to you work?
Heck, you might work 80 hours a week between 2 jobs but are you doing so because you want your kids to go to an Ivy League college? Is your standard of living higher that your 40 hour paycheck? Who's responsible for extra hours?
I come from the automotive undustry where there is a good deal of inertia to get out of the office as quickly as possible. Meaning, most people would rather spend 30 minutes working (to get home sooner) than playing pool and staying at the office longer. When people say that they are working longer hours, I wonder if they are getting more done in each day/week/month.
The company where I work has embraced the XP model quite closely, and thus have a rather strict policy forcing their employees not to work overtime. It works great, and although it happens that I do 42 or 43 hours, 60 hour work weeks are very rare.
I live in Sweden, but I can't really say whether this is the standard for the country or not, I'm afraid.--
May we live long and die out
Yeah. I found that understanding babe on my second try. The only dissappointment to me is that she won't play Grand Turisimo with me.
"There is no reason anyone would want a computer in their home." -- Ken Olson, 1977
but I'd be willing to believe that the majority of us follow this general model comparred to 2 yrs ago...
1)we're more likely to work 9-5 (okay, maybe 9-6 but NO weekends)
2)we expect more compensation and but have a greater realization we're not going to be millionaires (no options for me, thanx, I'll take the cash)
3)we enjoy our work environment much less than we did before the bubble burst
4)we continually update our resumes and have our eyes open about better opportunities
5)we take much more down time away from our work and from our computers now that we're burned out from the past few years and haven't seen the reward we deluded ourselves into believing we were going to receive.
Yep, sleep depravation is real. Here's a quick test: Do you have to use an alarm clock to get up? If so, you didn't go to bed early enough. I never use an alarm clock unless I am varying from my routine. Like my son has an early soccer game on Saturday, when we usually sleep late.
---
DO NOT DISTURB THE SE
I am salaried where I work as a "software engineer". Hours around here are pretty much flexible, getting your work done on time is the rule.
On a slow week, I might come in around 10:30 and leave at 5pm. On a heavy week I would 12-14 hour days, 7 days a week.
So my work week can range from 30 to 90 hours, depending on the workload. So I guess I average out to a 60 hour work week.
five fingers make a fist amalgamate and resist
I am salaried where I work as a "software engineer". Hours around here are pretty much flexible, getting your work done on time is the rule. On a slow week, I might come in around 10:30 and leave at 5pm. On a heavy week I would 12-14 hour days, 7 days a week. So my work week can range from 30 to 90 hours, depending on the workload. So I guess I average out to a 60 hour work week.
five fingers make a fist amalgamate and resist
As a U.S. expatriate living in Sweden for 22 years, I would like to ask: Would you return to 2 weeks vacation per year after getting used to 5?
There's just no telling....
I'm about to start a job that's long hours/some travel (devel. at an investment bank), and I am pretty much aware of what's going to happen when I'm there... But I think that some exposure to the environment will be a good experience, and lord knows that I don't want to be doing it when I'm 30.
So what do you think? is the experience valuable? ("value" doesn't specifically imply "worth money")
there is no thing
what else could you want?
there is no thing
what else could you want?
This is just a side thought - does it surprise anyone that the most prosperous nation on earth has the hardest workers? Just an idea.
If prosperity was directly related to hard working, Southeast Asia would rule the world.
An Indonesian works up to 70 hours a week. A Frenchman works 35 hours a week (down from 39 hrs/wk until recently). Of course your definition of "propserity" may differ from mine, but I wouldn't call Indonesia more "prosperous" than France.
Thomas Miconi
The fact is, as a Tech support rep, my CEO doesn't really directly care for me as a person, except by giving me a paycheck. He's a nice guy but we don't know each other. However, my direct manager does care about me. I respect her and I she always listens to me. She's not authorized to give me $2000 on the spot but she will buy treats for my group. She will help out in any way she can.
:)
Part of it is just good management... CARE. However, you can't train caring into someone, you either care or you don't.
This is why the government has such problems with the little details of life. They can't treat everyone as an individual because that would take too much time.
But thats why we need more people in middle management who are intelligent and care. I got lucky
"All great wisdom is contained in .signature files"
you're absolutely right, and i agree with you that your company doesn't care for you -- it's a business relationship. that's fine of course, but you have to realize that business is money, period, not friends or people you appreciate. that i agree with.
i don't agree with you however, that you should just treat work as a "service." i think it's very important to try to enjoy what you do, at least to a certain extent. if you're putting in a big chunk of your waking hours into it (and by that i mean anything over 30 hours a week) you should be getting more than just money or you won't be happy in the long run. you don't have to love your job, but treating it as just a service isn't the way to look at it. we're people, not machines, and we need more than just money.
let's face it, after you have enough to have a place to live and the necessities you require, everything after that is just gravy. it's better to please yourself than to acquire more cash. it'll keep you happy and make you think better of yourself and your life. as it's been said, how many people sit on their death bed and think "wow, i should've worked more overtime." :)
- j
Really there are 2 kinds of work. Real work which generates some sort of profit for your company. And at work which is just being in the building.
Most people (including myself) probably are only really usefull to the company a few of hours a week. The rest of the time you are reading email, surfing the web, and dealing with time wasting company burocreacy.
Then there is also recorded hours vs actual hours. Recorded hours is what you put on your timesheet or project tracking system. Actual hours is how many hours you are actualy at work. The difference in these 2 times can be quite different.
FoonDog
This is just a side thought - does it surprise anyone that the most prosperous nation on earth has the hardest workers? Just an idea.
How Calvinist of you.
The US is the most prosperous nation on earth because we've got an abundance of natural resources, a growing population, and we're not afraid to exploit either one.
The US is the most prosperous nation right now. We certainly weren't always so, and likely we won't always be. It's a matter of historical accident, not the fact that our workers are over-worked. Many studies have shown that productivity actually increases with shorter work-weeks. Diminishing returns.
-carl
. We've got computers, we're tapping phone lines, you know that ain't allowed - Talking Heads, "Life During Wartime"
Of course, I have a wife who understands that some days I just need 30-60 minutes alone after work to play a game, take a nap, or read a book or magazine. (No, I'm not saying you have a bad wife/husband - please don't take offense)
there are non-somniacs (sic) who can effortlessly go for weeks at a time without sleeping
I think you mean very little or almost no sleep for weeks. One thing that we definitely do know is that going completely without sleep for much longer that 36 hours at a time produces symptoms in humans remarkably similar to schizophrenia. The human mind needs periodic shutdown/maintenance periods (sleep) far more that the rest of the body. And it has to be certain types of sleep for full effectiveness, most notably the infamous R.E.M. periods and dreams whether remembered or not that play a significant role in the mental housekeeping.
If you are a person who can hit the important sleep states within 6 hours, then more power to you, but try staying awake past a couple of days straight and you will be one sick puppy.
Can you get me a job at IBM?
Rangers Lead the Way!
It is generally recognized that management is clearly 'Exempt Administrative'- but these days most large employers include programmers, admins, and other skilled workers as 'Exempt Professionals', a controversial move.
Being exempt, If you leave work two hours early on friday , your pay cannot be docked
If you work 12 hours on Wednesday (say, because of a production problem), you do not receive overtime, and you do not get 4 hours off on Thursday. In fact, if your company offers any hour-for-hour compensation (pay, bonuses, comp time), they risk losing your 'exempt' status.
I do not deploy Linux. Ever.
So come on guys, let's try to stay showered up this time, and we'll all be better workers!
Mike Roberto
- GAIM: MicroBerto
Berto
I currently work about 60 hours a week as a programmer/analyst/architect in the telecommunications industry. On the one hand I could gripe about the hours, but I've seen both sides.
I left school at 15 and worked in many jobs, including some really shitty factory jobs that had me working 38 hours a week. I went back to uni, and gave four years of my life to switch careers to get to what I have now, and I know better than to gripe about longer hours. I have a privileged and well paid job, and I wouldn't take %99 of the jobs that involve working 40 hours or less a week.
When you start to complain about the hours you work, you should think about your job as a whole package. If you do, I bet you too will realise you lead a privileged existence in this industry, and are very well paid. If you don't, then for christ's sake don't whine about it, make the change to what you think will be better. It's far from impossible, at almost any age.
I have a full flex time option and can work any schedule, just so long as I work at least 168 hours per week :-/
I'm skeptical of the figures about the Americans because of the many variables, including the need to rely on self-assessment for salaried workers. What the American figures do indicate is that they just might be reaching the point of work saturation, where no matter how much you increase your efforts and time spent at work, you're only going to be counterproductive.
I'm paid for 8 hrs/day. I'm at work 9-10 hrs/day (plus 2 hrs/day for commute). I work between 2 and 8 hrs/day, with 6 being about average.
1. Stay away from big cities or technological 'hot-spots' like Silicon Valley, L.A., Redmond, etc. Even though the dot-com bubble has burst, there's still a lot of companies out there that get by with half has many people as they should have doing 3 times the work they should have. There's jobs in places like the midwest and south that will use and hone your talents just as well, and won't keep you in the office 60 hours a week.
2. Go with a large company, owned by a big division, which is owned by a huge corporation. The more people in your IT department, the better Everyone has what they want to do and what they must do. Chances are, you're "must do's" are someone elses "want to do's", and vice versa. The more people, the better the work can be moved around so everyone is happy and working less hours.
3. Take a good look at the company's IT people when you interview for a job. Talk to some of them and see what their disposition is. If they're overworked and burnt out, you will be too.
4. Get a good feel for the "state" of the company's IT department during the interview process. Find out how up to date their technology is, and how well everything is set up. The more out-of-whack everything is, the more hours you'll spend fixing it.
5. Finally, if you don't want to be at work 60 hours a week, find out why the position is open. If they're hiring 20 people to bolster the size the IT department, chances are there's enough work for 40 people to do. If they're just replacing someone who resigned, you're safe.
--- Rectum?! Damn near killed em'! - Confucius
What an appropriate topic, coming after worker protests for May Day (Myezhdunarodnyj Dyen' Rabochikov, whatever...)
As a consultant, I work usually 50-55 hours a week. However, it is in my best interest to work more because my compensation is based on how many hours I bill. It also varies widely - some weeks I have 70-90 hours of work, some weeks I have 15 hours of work
This does not, of course, count the 45% of each minute spent pressing "Reload" on /.
Many countries (the US included) have workers rights laws, just the US law is a bit wussy. French law, for example, guarantees a 35-hour workweek and five weeks of vacation per year. It is not, of course, as widely flouted as the US law, hence why it works. Of course, the entire northern two-thirds of France closes down during August, but them's the breaks when you have enforced laws like that.
Zaphod B /bin/cp
When duplication is outlawed, only outlaws will have
Zaphod B
Zaphod B
When duplication is outlawed, only outlaws will have
My work hours vary greatly. During normal times (no immediate pending deadline), ~40-50 hours a week. When deadline is pending, ~70 hours a week (7 - 10 hour days). I prefer to work weekends instead of longer days. What can I say? I have no life.
While high speed internet connections and the ability to link up to servers at work is sure convenient, the distinction between "workday" and "my day" seems to be blurring lately. I don't know if I spend all that much more than a standard eight hour day at the office, but I often find myself continuing to work on stuff at home late into the evening... maybe so I *can* only spend eight hours at the office.
Maybe it's because I get a hell of a lot more done at home? The work day has become meetings, face time, hand holding, crisis management, etc. while the evening is "getting shit done" time.
-A.
What did the walrus say to the penguin? "No soap, radio."
Well... we have no set work schedual.
Its a university, and the standard workday is
9-5 with a 1 hour lunch. We don't do that. We are sysadmins and the like - we are all over the map depending on what is going on.
We shoot for the 35 hour work week, since its standard for the institution (and it provides us with time to have real lives outside of work - which IMNSHO is a very important thing)
Sometimes we work more (sometimes some of us work alot more) when there is a real need. However, working much more than 35 hours/week as an average is just too much (40 isn't bad, ive done it at previous jobs).
No time for leisure outside of work AND a full nights sleep (not that I always take advantage of it)? Im sorry, you just can't possibly pay me enough for that.
I don't want my work to be my life. I LIKE leisure time. In fact, if you ask me, leisure time is a much more important factor of "quality of life" than high tech gadgets and lots of money (not that I don't have plenty of either - listening to mp3s on my pjbox as I type this, and waiting for 6 to roll around so I can hop on my motorcycle and ride)
There is a great slogan among motorcyclist commuters (btw a bike is a great commuter vehicle - can carry a hell of alot more things than the average commuter needs every day, is smaller, faster, and more manuverable than a car) "Ride to work, work to ride".
It doesn't just mean that you should ride the bike to work, its a reminder. There is a reason for working - so you can support yourself AND enjoy yourself. If you work so much that you can't ride (or do whatever else you may want), then whats the point?
Whoever dies with the most money, still dies.
-Steve
"I opened my eyes, and everything went dark again"
If I understand you correctly--that after you pay taxes you take home $15,444 USD per year--then that isn't very much at all for the work you do. But salary doesn't matter as much as the salary to cost-of-living ratio, I guess. If you say that's a decent salary, then the cost-of-living in Belgium is probably fairly low. Which is a good thing.
I work 52 hours per week and I take home around $45,000 USD per year after taxes in the field of switch maintenance for a large telecom company. And from what you said you do, I think I have less actual responsibility (i.e., I have one specific job--helping field technicians upgrade switch software--and I don't stray very far from that job description). But then, the cost of living in Colorado is pretty high compared to other places in the US and overseas. :)
-Legion
I work in the UK for a Blue Chip company.
I'm contracted at 37.5 hours a week and work around 40 hours in a normal week, usually about 9.30am-6.00pm, the extra time comming from working extra hour (or two) about once (or twice) a week, about once or twice a month I work an day or so on a weekend.
Whilst I'm salaried staff, I am paid over-time if asked by my manager, but not if I just hang around a little extra.
This is fairly typical of all my team, I've worked in smaller software houses and they tended to 'require' longer hours, but on the whole these are farily typical for UK Software Engineers.
Now just to make a liar, So fa I've worked about 68 hour this week and I'm just killing a little time before I walk out the door for a well earned rest this week-end.
I work in the UK for a Blue Chip company.
I'm contracted at 37.5 hours a week and work around 40 hours in a normal week, usually about 9.30am-6.00pm, the extra time comming from working extra hour (or two) about once (or twice) a week, about once or twice a month I work an day or so on a weekend.
Whilst I'm salaried staff, I am paid over-time if asked by my manager, but not if I just hang around a little extra.
This is fairly typical of all my team, I've worked in smaller software houses and they tended to 'require' longer hours, but on the whole these are farily typical for UK Software Engineers.
Now just to make a liar, So far I've worked about 68 hour this week and I'm just killing a little time before I walk out the door for a well earned rest this week-end.
I am unemployed...two years ago I was unemployed....Why? I am a slackass and I read /. all day...would you like fries with that?
People who bite the hand that feeds them usually lick the boot that kicks them
When we are in a deadline crunch, I still work late and on weekends (like the beginning of the NBA playoffs, recently). But that's not the norm. In fact, since starting the four day work week last October, I've come in three times on Fridays, and only one Saturday. I've had a few long days, though. I am enjoying my extra weekend day a lot. I go shopping, take my kid to the zoo, whatever, without all the crouds. Plus, for some reason, Friday is the worst commute day of the week. I can't tell you what it does for mental health. Also, since I go in early and leave late (actually 11 hour days - no paid lunch), I avoid most of the traffic, too. It's really great coming in on Monday knowing you will only have a four day workweek - and they usually let holidays slide (technically, I owe them two hours extra for a holiday since I only get 8 paid holiday hours).
I do access my mail and so forth from home on weekends, but it's mostly out of habit. Sometimes I check phone messages, too, but not very often.
As has been mentioned ("diminishing returns"), they probably get more work out of me now than they did before.
Answering the question, though - I probably work about 44 hours a week (lunch at my desk).
Stupid sexy Flanders.
Age: 23
Career: Strategy Consulting
Place of work: London, UK
Average weekly hours: 55-60
Max weekly hours: 90-100
Salary: Underpaid (£40,000)
Downsides: Highly variable working hours
Benefits: Great variety of work, Learning experience, Travel, All expenses paid, Great CV points, Fun people
I give it 8/10 right now.
Oh, we Americans live in such burdensome wretchedness! We are downtrodden and persecuted by the ills of capitalism! To make matters worse, some stuttering babboon with his wily strategery stole the election, and now we drink poisoned water and have no electricity! *sobs* At least we can import water from Mexico. oh wait..
Remind yourself that the capitalists now have control of the schools, and that they are training you to be net slaves.
Really? Why do the capitalists insist that college students who are studying to be scientists or engineers waste two of their four years taking liberal arts courses? 99% of what I know about the net I learned on my own. Most degrees are worthless because they're full of liberal arts fluff and new age business drivel. Good for leftist evangelists, bad for capitalists.
It is precisely anti-capitalists who control and teach at the schools, which (ahem) are owned by the government, not capitalists. In fact, most colleges and universities are bastions of socialism, anti-Americanism (strange isn't it?), eco-extremism, and fascist political correctness.
OK, it's not that bad at all colleges, but this is all beside the point. Capitalism is good because it allows you to choose where you want to work. If you think the bad outweighs the good, then I'm sure Comrade Castro will let you join little Elian in the sugar cane fields of Cuba with the other government slaves. Perhaps you can unionize them and petition Castro for ergonomically-correct sickles and machetes. And paid overtime. oh wait..
For all the bashing of capitalism, let's not forget that the opposite side of the coin is much, much worse.
It's just mind-boggling to see how ungrateful U.S. citizens are for the unprecedented opportunities and comforts we have, which were not afforded to the greatest rulers and most advanced civilizations of times gone by and most still today.
Come and see what I found.
I have to fight with my wife sometimes about who's going to play the game after work!
Wife+gamer+intelligent+funny=Heaven!
bun-fhuinneog agam!
but only work 30 :)
Free Techno/Jazz/DNB/MI Music by guys obsessed with monkeys!
I read about this guy who stayed up for almost 2 weeks straight -- for a charity telethon -- and it caused permanant physological damage to his brain [they examined it when he died] ... I'll try and dig up some documentation if anyone is interested
Free Techno/Jazz/DNB/MI Music by guys obsessed with monkeys!
I put in 6 hours a day @ highschool, plus God knows how much time in homework. While I'm doing the homework, I'm usually hacking something or other at the same time, effectively making both less efficient. All told, I get about 5-6 hours a night of sleep, making my avarage "work day" if you will about 18-19 hours. I do however sleep more on the weekends ;-)
-----------------------------------------
-----------------------------------------
Perversely greped and groped by PowerPenguin
As a web developer with my own business, I was used to working 10-12 hours a week and making just enough to pay for rent, bills, toys, and go out drinking every night.
Then the bubble burst, so to speak, and I found myself working zero hours a week and earning same.
Surprisingly, work has picked up considerable in the past few months, and I'm making pretty much what I was making this time last year, but now I have to work normal hours (normal hours being 10:30-5:00 with an hour for lunch). I suppose a healthier work ethic would be good for me, but why be stressed out when you can coast?
I'd say I work about 40 to 50 minutes a week. Oh, wait, did you mean the amount of time I spend working, or just the amount of time I spend at work?
I know people who work 60+ hours a week. I even can think of one or two who get a lot done.
For the most of them, however, they are just unorganized. They don't make efficient use of their time at work. They don't have any sort of plan to indicate what they hope to do and how it will be accomplished. They are in the office until 8 PM or later and wear it like some badge of honor.
They can have that "honor" all to themselves. I rather like going home at 5 to have dinner with my fiancee, play with my dog, and whatever else seems interesting at the time. I doubt I'll be on my deathbed wishing I spent more time at this desk.
As for the US, consider carefully some of the reasons why people choose to work insane hours for a while: many of these (opportunity to make a lot of money in a little time, startup company must succeed before venture capital runs out) are more common in the US than in other countries because of the amount of money available there for new IT development. Simply put, the more good reasons there are for people to work crazy hours, the more people will do so, and it's the prevalence of those good reasons that is behind the large number of people in the US working crazy hours.
I used to work about 40-45 hours a week. But now that my entire IT department got laid-off with the exception of me, I work 45 - 60. Oh, and now I am Tech Support, Sys Admin, Net Admin, IT Mgr, Webmaster, and Technical Consultant to our development team; all for the same salary that our office administrator gets. I find that although it is only 45-60 hours, it is a very full 45 - 60. People stop by my office to talk and I have to interrupt them or close my door on them just because if I take the time to chat I know that I will end up working a 12 - 14 hour day.
(I only have time to post this because I am waiting on our tape-backup system to get done initializing a fresh set of tapes.)
I guess it could be worse. When I was younger I pulled a 33 hour 'day' with only a 90 min 'lunch'.
In the Aussie tradition, I'd say I work about half the time :)
...but spread out differently. Six hours each on Monday and Tuesday, 8 or so on Wednesday, Thursday and Friday, and make up the difference on Saturday morning. I'm programmer-consultant, so I work more or less when I please, as long as I get my work done and get around 40 hours per week. I avoid overtime whenever possible and refuse to work on Sundays.
Here's my schedule for this week alone:
;-)
Monday: Day off
Tuesday: 3PM - 6AM
Wednesday: 3PM - 11PM
Thursday: 3PM - 7AM
Friday: 3PM - 4AM
Saturday: 7PM - 1AM (short one!)
Sunday: 3PM - 7AM
Unfortunately, I don't work in the (mostly) lucrative IT industry. I'm just a lowly line cook, and the majority of the hours I work are by myself (we're supposed to have 2 people, but help is hard to come by these days). Maybe worst of all is that my base wage is USD $7.25, and overtime is 1.5x
On the other hand, its a rare occasion that I don't get to sit on my ass or otherwise slack off for a least a few hours a day
Maybe the real Ask Slashdot question should have been "How many hours are you actually productive per week?". In which case, I'm probably productive for approx. 45 hours out of 60+
The funny thing is my boss tells me I'm due for a raise any day now... the same thing he's been saying for the better part of 3 years.
I suppose most will probably scoff and say I'm insane for working so much for so little (but hey, I get $20 to myself a month after bills are paid). Yes, its true, I could get make more money working only 40 hours a week somewhere else... but I would _HATE_ the job. Maybe I should go see if the local school needs someone to wrangle thier network/teach the kids how to use Linux or something... hehe..
What could possibly hurt the security of the American people more than giving our own government the ability to hide its
When I was working for a dotcom in NYC, I worked about 70-80 hrs/wk. That lasted for all of six weeks. I became a consultant after that. Now I work 60 hrs/wk but I work half of it in the comfort of my own home.
Ummm, Jon, aren't you supposed to be dead...? - Otter(3800)
Recently an office in London has decided to forgo all timekeeping devices, all the way down to watches being banned and little pieces of tape being placed over the Windows clock on their machines. The idea is that without a sense of time, people will work when there's work to do and stop working when there's no work to do. It's too soon for them to have reported results, but the experiment itself is interesting. As for me, I *theoretically* work 40 hours per week, but I tend to show up around ten and leave somewhere between five and six. All that really matters to my overlords is that there's someone manning the help desk during work hours and that our jobs all get done. All in all, a very healthy attitude, I think. And one that allows me to read, play Starcraft, or go for a walk when I feel like it. Of course, there are the occasional all-weekend voyages through NT Administration Land, but those are more than made up for by the extreme flexibility of my "9-5" hours.
*******
"What good is science if no one gets hurt?!" - Professor Chromedome
I'm a junior partner at a CAD consulting agency. They put me on salary a few months ago, and I bill out about 37 hours a week to our clients. Add maybe .5 hours to that each week for administrative stuff.
I've spent a long time working by butt off so I could get to a point where I'm working less than 40 hours a week. Hey, I work hard for my Slack!
I work about 15 hours a day, every day. My wife reminds me that my salary, computed hourly, therefore equates to a new hire at McDonalds.
-- @rjamestaylor on Ello
engineering/georgia/usa
Last year I worked for a multinational company. One of the things I became really aware of when we were founding the company was that the staff in our German offices would get something like twice the vacation time our American staff would, because German law mandated it.
Our American employees all got a minimum of three weeks of vacation, plus eight floating holidays.
My new employer gives me three weeks of vacation with no floating holidays.
Also, my old employer had unlimited sick days, so if I really felt sick and didn't have anything VITAL to do at work, I'd stay home and rest and get well. My new employer gives, I believe, 6 sick days, so when I wake up and feel sick I'm inclined to go to work anyway in case I get seriously sick later in the year. This means people come to work and spread their colds, and when you get one you tend to stay sick longer because you're not getting enough rest.
My old employer figured out that with vacation, holidays, personal days, training, sick time, and administrative overhead (timesheets, staff meetings, etc), if the average employee works a 40 hour week, we could expect to get about 60% efficiency from them. So, we strived to get that full 60%, and that was fine. My new employer wants 80%, and they're going to achieve it by making us do all administrative tasks as overtime.
How do you think that would go over in Germany?
Weekly hours are not the only measure of how hard we work.
I'm the systems manager for the operations division of the newspaper in Charlotte, N.C., the Charlotte Observer. I'm on call 24/7, and can expect to be called in off hours at least once a week. I generally do 45 hrs/week in the office, and another 5-10 working from home, or being paged in.
- "That's just the kind of fuzzy-headed liberal thinking that leads to being eaten."
Of course, Weber was discussing the implications of the already existing "Calvinist" viewpoint, wasn't he?
and your point is ...?
Ah. No point, really. Just observing that "Calvinism" didn't originate with Weber, who was something of a Johnny-come-lately to the whole PWE thing.
Do you feel better, now?
Any sufficiently well-organized community is indistinguishable from Government.
As for Calvinism, a funny little man named Max Weber advanced an argument along that line some years ago ...
Of course, Weber was discussing the implications of the already existing "Calvinist" viewpoint, wasn't he?
Any sufficiently well-organized community is indistinguishable from Government.
For a new couch every year? For spoiled kids? For a 'l33t machine? A big house to show off to aquintances so that they know that you're smart, and make the bucks to prove it?
It just doesn't seem worth it to me. Seems that so many people resign themselves to the fact, which they are fed since birth, that the only way to be a productive member of society is to work at least 40 hours a week. We wonder why we're an unhealthy (mentally and physically), unhappy society!
"I told myself in '27, If I can not dictate the conditions of my labor, I will henceforth cease to work... I learned when I was young that the only true life I had was the life of my brain., so what sense does it make to hand that brain to somebody for eight hours a day for their particular use under the presumption that at the end of the day they will give it back in an unmutilated condition?" -Utah Phillips quoting Frying Pan Jack
Working toward a usable PDA environment in the spirit of Newton OS: Dynapad
Critics pooh-pooh such studies, saying self-estimators are exaggerators, although most of those studies echo the same general trend as governmental figures -- a bit of a rise through the '90s with a slight dip recently. as a school teacher i always love it when parents think that all you do is teach your contract hours from 7:30 to 3:30 and that we do nothing else school related... a newstation in minneapolis had a reporter go into the classroom and teach for a day... after she finished she said she never wanted to do that again... she was lucky... she didn't have to do any grading. :) so am i a pooh-pooh-er?
--- I never lie when I have sand in my shoes.
I came back... and voila! I was just gonna resubmit, but it was there anyway, despite telling me that it was not accepted...
So let's see... roughly seventeen hours of school per week, a good ten hours of "home" work, another twenty hours of employment, not to mention the little bit of time spent with my "siginicant other" and other friends or doing random school assignments at home...
Sixty hours per week, maybe?
Oh, and how can we forget the ever-important weblog maintenance...?
This flex time also made it very convenient for me to slip out of work early to interview for the job I would eventually move on to...
It is also important to consider vacation time. The average paid vacation time (used, not given) in the US is around 10 days. Holiday time is important too, with about 10 paid holidays given to most people. I know in Europe the numbers for these are a good bit higher.
which I consider interesting, in that there are more points of reference between Canada and the US than any other two countries.
.com as a developer/designer, and don't have (or don't feel) alot of pressure to work insane hours.
I work for a
What I like most about my job is that the company I work for gives me flexibility on when and where I work. A few extra hours is A-OK when you're working half the week at home.
I've heard someone say here that managers should only expect 4-5 hours of really good high-mind-utilization time from their workers. I think that number goes up when it's crunch time, but can be significantly less than that if the manager lets the techies 'get away with it' and there's not a lot on the burner.
Web access at work is a big culprit. While there are times it's a crucial information gathering resource, there are even more times when it's a tool for procastination enhancement. Possibly in the big picture, the best coders *need* this kind of offtopic stimulus to stay sane and focused and un-burnt-out.
Anyway, it should be lunch *hour*. None of this 37.5 crap. And an expectation to work extra in crunch times should be balanced by leniency at other more relaxed times.
--
SO YOU'RE GOING TO DIE: The Comic for Dealing with Death
I did take two weeks off when I got sick... I spent one of them in the hospital. Other than that, and the odd day off, I haven't been able to take any vacation (I do take Christmas off and the odd day whem I have to run a personal errand).
Some of this time is spent making sure that we do not violate the GPL when distributing beta versions of our new product software.
You could've hired me.
When I am really into a problem it is close to 24 hours. Its not that I don't sleep, but the dreams come and I find myself thinking of code, then when I am awake I am thinking of sleep (and the code in my dreams, and whether or not it will actually work). Yes I am serious about this, and yes I have actually solved problems this way. But no I doubt anybody cares, or will read the ~500th post anyway.
MS2k
I guess you are counting only high school students with your estimate of 50 hrs a week. I'm in college. I spend 15-20 hrs a week in class (for 5 classes). Each class expects you to spend about 10 hrs a week studying. I have a job for about 10 hrs a week. Yeah, that's about 80 hrs right there, only 10 of them for pay. Have fun while you can, boy. There's no free time once you get to college.
-- A disillusioned student, anxious for the semester to be over
A much better question would be: How many hours to you work in a year?
With a straight 40-hour per week job in America, with the normal two weeks of vacation per year, that's 2000 hours. In the rest of the civilized world, it's more like 1920 or even 1840. Less when you factor in the number of paid holidays.
With my latest performance review, I didn't ask for more money, stock, or fringe benefits like an Aeron chair. I asked for more vacation time. Once you're making "enough" money, it's nicer to be able to spend a few weeks touring Europe than to be able to buy an extra toy or two.
If you count those hours then about 70 hours.
If not about 55.
I get paid pretty well and no one really understands my job so I can do pretty, much whatever I want, like the time I made the file server Linux just 'cos I thought it would be cool. (It wasn't that cool)
---
This
I'm not saying you can't, I'm just saying that there are a lot of companies out there who make it a goal to get as much out of a programmer as possible, regardless of the cost to his life, happiness, or health. People need to realize that the company is not usually on their side when it comes to these things...
When I was in college for CS at CMU, there were times I couldn't sleep for a few days, or didn't get much sleep for weeks...
One time, I had to get up in the morning for a test, and my girlfriend was trying to get me up. I couldn't understand what she was saying to me. I knew they were words, but I couldn't connect them to any meaning...
I started to see everything as numbers -- her words as sound waves that were varying in amplitude and wavelength, the sensations from my body as electrical pulses of different strengths... Basically I just saw numbers everywhere, and couldn't get to the meaning behind any of it, so I started to freak out... I was actually crying, I think... It took me at least half an hour to get back to normal.
That really sucked...
(BTW, I don't take drugs. ;)
Needless to say, it really sucked (web consulting company). So I started contracting, and now I get paid by the hour. Much nicer. ;) I really wonder why more people don't do it...
But the thing that really concerns me is how many companies take serious advantage of their programmers, by forcing them to work egregiously long hours, with no bonuses or any extra compensation. I've watched people burn out and experienced it myself -- it sucks.
I think that there should be an upper limit on the number of hours that a salaried employee can be required to work, simply for mental and physical health reasons. It doesn't make sense that programmers can be forced to work arbitrarily long hours with no compensation...
I, however, went to college. Go ahead and tell me I waisted my time. IT was MY time and I think it's paying off right now.
Teehee...
Looks like you did waste your time...
"Helping to keep you two steps ahead of the Thought Police!"
I probably spend around 45-55 hours at work every week. Bust that doesn't mean that i work for that amount of time.
I'm in the fortunate position of getting paid to study, and as such my only demand is a biannual assessment of my progress. But that's not really my point.
The point is that even though we spend many hours at work (some more than others) i find it hard to believe that you get much more than i.e. 30 hours efficient work in per week. Some may be working continously for 45 hours, but at lower efficiency because they get tired!
New surveys indicate that many national websites peak during work-hours, and thats not work-related sites. So fact is that you've got to feel good and relaxed about your work, have the right "climate" and you'll be more productive. The more productive you are, the sooner you can go home. That's what i'd like to see.
-.sig sauer-
Sorry, but you're wrong on all counts. There are plenty of nations that have an abundance of natural resources--Russia, Brazil and Iraq, to name a few--that are not "prosperous." Conversely, there are also nations with few natural resources, like Great Britain, Japan (hence WWII) and Hong Kong (pre-1999) that are relatively prosperous.
There are also nations with growing populations, such as India and Mexico, that aren't prosperous. So it can't be that. And every nation tries to exploit its resources for what it can get. Japanese fisheries. Romanian gold miners. Brazilian loggers. Zambian copper miners. Take your pick. The US doesn't have a monolopy on exploiting their own resources.
The US is the most prosperous nation right now. We certainly weren't always so, and likely we won't always be. It's a matter of historical accident, not the fact that our workers are over-worked.
There's no such thing as a historical accident. History just is. There are no particular "accidental reasons" for how events have unfolded over the course of time. Don't minimize the importance of small factors hundreds and thousands of years ago that influenced where our planet is at today.
--
Have fun: Join D.N.A. (National Dyslexics Association)
Or 4: Someone who went to college and worked 2 jobs (in IT) to make ends meet. The jobs might not have been glamour, and may not have a ton to do with a persons' current carrear path...but it shows dedication, motivation, hard work, and many other personal characteristics that employers like to see.
Let's not forget that HR departments sometimes make these decisions, and will not pass the resume on to the manager. Many times these decisions are not made by the people who are actually hiring the employee.
I, however, went to college. Go ahead and tell me I waisted my time. IT was MY time and I think it's paying off right now.
I suffer from apathy, but I just don't care.
They that can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety.-Franklin
on the average your not actually working 50 hours a week, lets be a little more honest with the numbers here. If your "at work" for a 10 hour day, your probably on the average putting in 7-8 honest hours of work. The rest of the time is spent jagging off. From my experience it is typical for those people who are in the office for 50, 60, 70+ hours a week usually they've either at the gym or getting their hair cut or off to a 2-3 hour lunch, or perhaps just running that errand that is more convient for them to accomplish near work. So be honest, and stop whining that your at work forever. If your jagging off at work shut your hole and get back to work. To those who this does not apply -- get another life.
(Slightly offtopic)
It doesn't surprise me that Americans work more hours then any other industrialized nations. Or that, as an addendum to this, that the majority of Americans are probably sleep deprived.
It seems to be that many Americans, even those in the medical field, don't realize how serious sleep deprivation is. Do you think that we, as a society, would think that about half of our citizens going hungry most of the time would be acceptable? Probably not. Yet when that many Americans lose sleep regularly, no one sees it as a bad thing.
Take this for example: a college junior goes around bragging to her friends and family about how she hasn't eaten anything but water and carrots for the past two weeks. Would people think this was a sign of maschismo? Or would they think this was a person who was endagering themselves, and needed medical attention? Now, take the same college junior and say that she has been going around bragging about how she has been pulling all nighters and has averaged 4 hours of sleep for the past two weeks. For a lot of people, this would be a normal sign of collegeiate bravado.
The point of all of this is, is that many people, including doctors (who have to go through their own intiatory period of losing sleep, but that is another subject) don't seem to realize that a wealthy society where the majority of the people don't sleep enoug is just as ludicrous as an industrial society where people don't eat enough.
Hopefully I didn't put any [] around my words.
When I was a professional developer, it was easy to track. Now I work for Macromedia in more of a salesy position (Evangelist) where I do a lot of product demonstrations, training, and consulting, which requires a lot of travel. Sometimes I'm working about 20 hours a week (that's the first two weeks of the year), and then there are times like the past two months, where I was home one day a week - maybe, and racked up over 30,000 miles on a single airline. I'd say during those times I'm working about 60 -70 hours a week.
Karma: Non-existant. Due mostly to the fact that you smell funny and nobody likes you.
This is not newsworthy. I have read of the same study, and while it does show we work more than other countries, it doesn't show any change over the last 10 years. Hey, I'd be complaining if I WASNT working 40 hours a week! Point is, we've always been working long hours. Have been for the past 30 years now. You people really need to read the source article before posting comments on it.
witty sig goes here
Bibo Ergo Sum.
I have always valued my freetime above work, so I avoid (like the plague) jobs that require more than 40 on a regular basis. Not that I mind the occasion overtime, just not as an expected part of my job. Not to mention, my productivity goes down fast after 40 hours, and I find myself posting to /. .
I used to work at a webdev company that required production staff to account for their entire day in 15 minute intervals so it could be billed to clients. Also morale wasn't very good and they've been haemorraging staff for over a year now.
Now I'm at a company that produces a single product instead of bespoke systems, so none of my time is "client billable". I find myself working longer hours (and being more productive during those hours) now that I don't have to account for every frickin minute.
Officially 40hrs a week but I probably do 45, fwiw. It's salaried so I don't get paid extra for extra hours.
No, I did not read the f***ing article!
i used to work in the states, and my god, we would work 10 - 12 hour days, we were however paid to take large breaks, and a big lunch, which went like so:
7am - 9am work
9am - 930 break
930 - 1130 work
1130 - 1pm lunch
1pm - 3pm work
3pm - 330 break
330 - 430 work
430 - 5pm break
5pm - 6pm work
while this looks like an 11 hour work day, i was really on break for a good 3 hours, that didnt include all of the tea breaks, bathroom breaks, internet time breaks, personal call breaks, etc, etc, etc. I figure i was probably working for about 5 hours and screwing around for another 6. i would often stay late, and that meant another hour or so of work, but an extra three hours on the timesheet. since ive moved to canada, im on the clock for 8 hours, and i probably work for about 7.5 of them (i sign out for my 30 min lunch).
.brad
Drink more tea
organicgreenteas.com
flesh eating ants records
Statistically speaking, people who have a Ph.D. in math certainly make a hell of a lot more than high school dropouts. Yes, there are plenty of exceptions, but this is the rule.
However, people with a B.A. or B.S. tend to make, on average, about $500 a year more than those who took a year or two of college and then dropped out.
If you're going to, for example, U.C. Berkeley, which costs roughly $20,000 a year, then by dropping out, you've saved $40,000. If you're losing, on average, $500 a year, then it'll be a wash eighty years after you drop out. In other words, you break even if you live to be 102.
"Beware he who would deny you access to information, for in his heart he deems himself your master."
I have a shotgun, a shovel and 30 acres behind the barn.
1q2w3e4r5t6y7u8i9o0pqawsedrftgthyjukilo;p'azsxdcf
So here we have the reason why all my techie funds are worthless at the moment. Maybe you all should go back to work and use those long hours you make to be productive.
There you go, you've learned a lesson today. Never depend on anyone else for your financial success.
Waltz, nymph, for quick jigs vex Bud.
I have formed a value system that actually considers the impact on the quality of life and tries to balance it with the need to become a multi-millionaire by 30. It's hard to maintain these values in the face of dotcommers speeding by me on the freeway in their jags with bleach-blonde babes at their side, but I figure it all balances out in the karmic universe. I get to drive my Yugo home every night. The prevailing attitude of engineers around here that we are expected to put in our 42 hours (in fact, we were told that it is expected of us - hey, I only signed up for 40) each week, and it's some sort of badge of honor to say that you have already put in 60 hours by Wednesday infuriates me, frankly. What sort of mass self-hypnosis have you bought into? What a stupid, unenlightened, lemming mentality! Now, I have never said that you shouldn't be allowed to work however long you want, and I have been known to stay until 1am if I am enjoying myself (I love debugging my code, go figure), but this work ethic only serves the corporation, and not the individual.
In my business we analyze rocket trajectories. I asked my boss the other night, over beers after softball "How many trajectories could you analyze in a workday, twenty years ago?" He told me "We used to be able to do 3 kilofeet in a day (about 1/30th of a flight)!" So I told him "Well, I can do 200 trajectories in an hour, can I have the rest of the week off now?" hah, hah, hah...
Seriously, though, I often marvel at the thought that all this automation, which presumably was supposed to free us all, has actually enslaved us, as we serve the machines we create, day in and day out.
So, please don't brag at how many hours you unwillingly have to slave over your keyboard. All I can think of is "what an idiot."
As a final note, I can only attribute this to the ills of capitalism that we should all understand by now. Remind yourself that the capitalists now have control of the schools, and that they are training you to be net slaves. If you don't fight the power today ("I'm a human being!" versus "If you don't work 80 hours, we'll find someone who will."), you have only yourself to blame, guys.
SDMI: Finally! Music that won't rip or burn! Brought to you by the fine folks at RIAA.
I have formed a value system that actually considers the impact on the quality of life and tries to balance it with the need to become a multi-millionaire by 30. It's hard to maintain these values in the face of dotcommers speeding by me on the freeway in their jags with bleach-blonde babes at their side, but I figure it all balances out in the karmic universe. I get to drive my Yugo home every night. The prevailing attitude of engineers around here that we are expected to put in our 42 hours (in fact, we were told that it is expected of us - hey, I only signed up for 40) each week, and it's some sort of badge of honor to say that you have already put in 60 hours by Wednesday infuriates me, frankly. What sort of mass self-hypnosis have you bought into? What a stupid, unenlightened, lemming mentality! Now, I have never said that you shouldn't be allowed to work however long you want, and I have been known to stay until 1am if I am enjoying myself (I love debugging my code, go figure), but this work ethic only serves the corporation, and not the individual.
In my business we analyze rocket trajectories. I asked my boss the other night, over beers after softball "How many trajectorites could you analyze in a workday, twenty years ago?" He told me "We used to be able to do 3 kilofeet in a day (about 1/30th of a flight)!" So I told him "Well, I can do 200 trajectories in an hour, can I have the rest of the week off now?" hah, hah, hah...
Seriously, though, I often marvel at the thought that all this automation, which presumably was supposed to free us all, has actually enslaved us, as we serve the machines we create, day in and day out.
So, please don't brag at how many hours you unwillingly have to slave over your keyboard. All I can think of is "what an idiot."
As a final note, I can only attribute this to the ills of capitalism that we should all understand by now. Remind yourself that the capitalists now have control of the schools, and that they are training you to be net slaves. If you don't fight the power today ("I'm a human being!" versus "If you don't work 80 hours, we'll find someone who will."), you have only yourself to blame, guys.
SDMI: Finally! Music that won't rip or burn! Brought to you by the fine folks at RIAA.
This is not uncontentious. If by 'prosperous' you mean 'GDP per capita according to official accounts' then the US comes either second or fifth (in 1999) depending on how you do the currency conversion. Luxembourg comes first.
Either way the big problem with this discussion (and with the representation of economics in the media) is the idea that economic output is a measure of how well the economy is doing.
The purpose of the economy is not to produce as much output as possible but to satisfy people's preferences. Output is important - people typically prefer more goods to less - but its not the whole thing. If you would prefer to work 30 hours instead of 40 (or 60 or whatever) despite receiving a pay cut that adequately compensates the employer then the economy is working inefficiently if it doesn't let this happen.
Economics as an academic subject has recognised this for many decades. Why are the media, politicians and the population at large so slow to catch up?
I'm a consultant, so my work week varies, dependant upon the client and the project deadlines. In general, though, I work a 40-50 hour week.
I know other consultants who have been faced with huge workloads and tight deadlines. Sometimes this is the result of poor planning, other times it's strictly due to client demand. In either case, these consultants have put in 60 hour weeks when "necessary."
Fortunately, at this firm, projects like that seem to be the exception, rather than the rule.
but this would have been forethought in action.
Is this just a little much to hope for?
Check out the Vinny the Vampire comic strip
"It is a greater offense to steal men's labor, than their clothes"
As a DBA I used to work 9-10hours a day weekdays and probably 10-15hours every other weekend. Plus being on-call 1 week a month - I'd get called out maybe 1-2 a week.
:)
Then it got crazy - not long after I did a 60-hour weekend I quit. (Ok it was Friday morning through to Monday night so technically it was more than a weekend)
Now I work in DBMS Vendor Tech Support - 9-5:30, Mon-Fri. We're a global company so support follows the Sun - so I get a life.
>Here in fascist Harrisland (Used to be called >Ontario), there is a 60 hour work week
;)
Yeah, but that's in Canadian hours, not US hours, right
So here we have the reason why all my techie funds are worthless at the moment. Maybe you all should go back to work and use those long hours you make to be productive. Then, perhaps the stockmarkets will pick up and break record highs again.
Oh, and by the way,
Here in Amsterdam (EU) I work for about 36 hours a week, with 23 days off a year plus banking holidays.
HAND
---
---
"Multiple exclamation marks are a sure sign of a sick mind." (Terry Pratchett)
Umm, read the thread ... lots of people saying they're working 30-50 hours now, not so many who have the nightmare hours anymore. Interesting!
sulli
RTFJ.
I live in the netherlands. The standard workweek for most people is 40 hours. I used to work 40 too, but recently I have reduced it to 35. 7 hours per day now.
As the subject say's I pretty much do a standard 40 hour work week. We run from 8 - 5 w/ an hour for lunch. Last year I had about 55 hours of OT total.
Gawd.... I'm almost embarrased to say so.... But sharing an office with the client who pays my bills, he knows anyway.... I have a 37 h/w contract... Add to that 2 hours of traveltime (also payed for by my company), about 10 hours of overtime (that's when I ACTUALLY work), I bill about 40 hours/week to the costumer, 48 to the company, but I only really do the 10 hours overtime, and MAYBE a full 1 hour a day when I'm sitting in the office waiting for something to happen... Guess that's why I have the time to read /.
--- To err is human... Am I more human than most ?
i work in "the industry" and have since 1991.
:)
the longest week i ever worked was 129 hours in 7 days including a 60 hours in a row stint. it was pure work. there was a major crisis that had to be resolved. in 10 years that has happened 3 or four times. there have been several periods during which i was working 80 hour weeks steadily.
these days i'm somewhere between 40-50 hours but i've since gotten married and have a kid now too.
i worked at netscape for 3 years (from 1995-1998) were there was a MINORITY of folks who worked really fucking hard and all the time.
but the truth is that the MAJORITY of people there were riding the coat tails of those who really worked those hours. yeah, maybe they were spending 12 physically at work, but there was a lot of goofing off. my guess is that the average netscapee's work day was 6 hours of actual work despite that hard working minority (of which i was a part of for the first 2 years before i got all bitter
this had a negative effect on the job market in that startup CEOs expected their employees to physically be at work for 10+ hours a day. one of the CEOs i worked for actually "fixed" the schedule i gave him by making everyone work saturdays...
the problem is some of us are getting older, starting families, and can no longer pull this shit off. an unnamed community/review site actually made a public statement that "families are a liability"...
this is all bullshit. the number of hours is often irrelevant. i expect my employees to be at work during an overlapping period of say 6 hours each day. the rest is just about does their shit get done.
now obviously this doesn't work for every industry but in the industry of most of the slashdot readers it's as irrelevant as when a recruiter asking you "how many lines of code have you written".
the people i admire the most are the ones who work a 40 hours week, have a family that they take care of, and still get more work done than these 60 hour working geeks who play everquest each evening or read slashdot all day... (i'm not saying don't play and fuck off at work, but not at the cost of your work not getting done, i know this sound obvious, but believe me, there are many people who got away with this). the bottom line is that the work gets done in a quality way and that my employees can communicate and work well with the others. that's how good work happens.
in the current climate, we are seeing something new (okay, not new, really a return to older ethics). people actually working hard again because there's so much competition on the street. i still believe, however, that in general someone who knows how to separate life and work effectively is in turn more effective than the so called workaholic.
--
in this age of communication i'm just not getting through
They should probably clarify the question. I mean I'm at work about 40 hours a week, but I probably am actually working closer to 10.
I live in Canada - I typically work 50 hour weeks... I found a good 10 hour day beats out some of the fools who try to do 18 hour stints every other day. They look run-down, burned-out, and at generally, have made critical mistakes because of their fatigue. On a few occasions, a breakthrough has happened, but usually the code had to be reworked again to clean up really ugly hacks.
And to be honest, although I used to do some of those 18 hour stints, I listened to an older co-worker who asked, "So how productive are you now after working 18 hours?" I answered, "Not really I guess - stuck on a stupid problem." His response was simple and clear: "Go home!"
I did, got plenty of sleep, found a decent balance between work, sleep, homelife, hobbies, reading slashdot, and I found 10 hours to be great.
I take a .5 hr walk at now noon to really clear the cobwebs out of my head...
I donate all spillover Karma to the charity of my choice... Ada was still a babe despite what people may say...
40 hours a week, full time college student (night school.. Yay night school)no coding, moslty Linux tinkering, & about a good solid 8-12 hours a week gaming(PC, PS2) Homework is mostly done at work. What I do is tech support at Investmment bank for $53,000 a year. Pays the bills....
THE ABOLITION OF WORK
By Bob Black
http://www.zpub.com/notes/black-work.html
See Also:
http://www.whywork.org/
Related article:
Lethargic living can add years to yawns
Jennifer Harper
THE WASHINGTON TIMES Published 4/19/01
Lazy is good. Lazy is happy. Go on. Be lazy.
That is the advice of one Peter Axt, a researcher with the Fulda University of Applied Sciences in Germany, who announced yesterday that "aimless sloth" was the secret to health, happiness and a long life. A very long life.
He pities virtuous joggers, frantic workaholics, determined dieters. The tidiers, the cleaners, the fussers, the preeners -- they are only running toward an early demise, he says.
"People who would rather laze in a hammock instead of running a marathon, or who take a midday nap instead of playing squash have a better chance of living into old age," Mr. Axt said.
His newly published study, "On the Joy of Laziness," is somewhere between Zen philosophy and an old wives tale, extolling the virtues of serenity, sleeping late and ignoring the garbage until it "builds its own eco- system."
Mr. Axt, who has already authored the books "Just Stay Young" and "Eat Yourself Slim" is convinced that humans have only been allotted so much energy. Why squander it on, say, aerobics?
"Research shows that people who run long distances into their 50s are using up energy they need for other purposes," he said. "They suffer memory loss. They risk premature senility."
And for heavens sake, sleep. Mr. Axt said that people who bolt from their beds at an early hour remain frazzled the day long. A leisurely stroll meets his approval, though, as does gentle dieting. He offers a prescription, in fact, for the general population. "Waste half your free time," Mr. Axt said. "Just enjoy lazing around."
(snip)...
How can they "guarantee" x hours of homework? I mean, you can say that you are absolutely going to have 1 hour in class each day and make that stick (providing they worry about attendance) but for homework, doesn't it sort of depend on the individual in question? When I was in high school, there was no homework--if I couldn't get it done during school hours, I didn't do it. After school and weekends, I was at work. I had plenty in college, but then, I only showed up for class half the time. But during those same periods, covering the same coursework, there were plenty of people who spent all night buried in books or slept through class, and got pretty much the same grades. How can you have a legal limit to hours of homework when you can't put an absolute measure on such? I'm truly curious about the jurisdiction you're in--if you could point a link or something to the code in question, I'd appreciate it.
No relation to Happy Monkey
I'm also a TA, and that pays about $8 an hour (not starting wage), for 10-12 hours/week. So my unpaid time is really between 50-60 hours. No health insurance, no real vacations during the semester (duh, homework) or during the "breaks" (on financial aid --> summer earnings required for tuition... and financial aid figured out how much CS students make, too).
I'm really looking forward to the day when I can work shorter weeks and be "appreciated" like the rest of you :)
I used to work 70-80 hour weeks. About 3 years ago I started reading the works of a fellow freak named Richard M. Stallman. Now I refuse to work more than 40 hour weeks, to pay the rent and keep me in , and dedicate the remaining 30-40 hours to "sticking it to the man", GPL style. :-P
Well, your fingers weave quick minarets; Speak in secret alphabets;
std::disclaimer<std::legalese> sig=new std::disclaimer; sig->dump(); delete sig;
Well i did 230 Hrs in April (where we should have 144 only) :/
btw. i live and work in Germany.
Greets.
I get paid based on 37.5 hr/wk. (7.5/day) I'm at work from roughly 8-3, so 7 hours/day, but of that I spend maybe an hour sifting through email, reading backup notifications etc. Sometimes when I feel like it I sift through our scripts and do some tweaking. On average I WORK about 10 hours. But when it gets busy, or something breaks, I can finish it/fix it in record time so I guess that makes up for it, oh, and I dont usually charge the OT when I get paged off hours.
Well for us IT workers (coder/network admin/support staff/etc.) in Malaysia we work an average of about 11 - 12 hours a day with an average of 5.5 day week so that works out to be about 60.5 to 66 hour week.
-----
7a - 4p m-f
plus an hour or two a night
and who knows how many hours on the weekends
I'm tired of all the people "trying" to be witty (and I'm supposed to be working right now :) ) so I'll just answer the question.
30 hours a week at work (i'm an underpaid network engineer) and ~15 hours of school a week (depends on how much I decide to skip) S.
"Laws are like sausages, it is best not to see them being made" Otto Von Bismarck
Wrong poll!
Relevent side question (how many hours do you actually work at work?)
8 hour days, 5 of them. Mountain bike after work, enjoy a beer or two, watch sunsets.
4 years ago, 16-18 hour days, crap food, beer-no time-sorry, there's a sun?
--
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
Oh that's so damn funny. VB Developers Journal, oh that's too much! It's got me all verklempt. "Important concepts," oh, it hurts. But I'll give you my topic: Visual Basic is neither visual nor BASIC. Discuss amongst yourselves.
I can understand what you're saying but I think that working long hours is just a matter of having to do too much work in too little time. You might be an owner of a consulting company and may be in the position to decide how many hours you (or your employees) will require for a certain project using certain tools. So then if you're nice to yourself (or your employees) you just don't plan deadlines that will require ridiculous hours for yourself or your employees. I think however that a lot of people are in the position that their managers are not so nice to them and give them so much work to do (probably without the choice of tools) in such a short time that they have to work stupid hours.
Two years ago I was working two full-time jobs.
At my old job year ago it was about 60-70 hours a week making about the same as the two jobs I had the year before.
Now, at a new place about 45 hours a week and for more money.
At this rate I figure in about ten more years I should be paid to stay home.
Goran
Carpe Scrotum - The only way to deal with your competition.
We did things to make it fun (like the 2am ice-cream break etc. and a trip to the pub in the city center on Saturday evenings, followed by coding under the influence...) but looking back on it, it was just too much.
I decided that I never, ever want to do that again. It was definitely detrimental to my health, and I felt as though I lost a bit of my 23-year-old life. So I made a promise to myself:
1. I would only work unpaid overtime in exceptional circumstances. (Fortunately we're a lot better at scheduling work now than we were then, and a lot better at managing the customer's expectations, and marketing don't try and do sizings any more thus commiting us to 80 hour weeks).
2. I would take ALL my vacation. I would of course give my employer lots of notice for when I take off a couple of weeks - but the deal is that I tell them when I'm taking vacation, I'm not asking for it.
3. If it becomes clear that I can no longer do (1) and (2), I'll go to a different company where I can. If that means leaving software development altogether, so be it. I'd rather be happy than wealthy any day.
It just isn't worth throwing your life away for your job. Don't give me that "I love my job though!" stuff. If you think you love your job, ask yourself this: would you pay for the privelige of doing your day job? If not, I suggest you don't really love your job ;-)
If an employer is trying to force you to do unpaid overtime, before committing, think of it this way: think of how much money you are effectively donating to the company - which is a for-profit business, not a charity! (Unless, of course, you work for a charity...)
Oolite: Elite-like game. For Mac, Linux and Windows
I'm as always impressed when I hear some (most) of you trans-atlantic people saying how long they work a day, and for how much. (like > is ...)
I'm a fresh from college/high school with an IT diploma (that's 3 years more than mandatory public education (from 6 years old to 18)), and I've been working here in Belgium as an employee since September 2000 for a big $$$ international company.I'm currently doing a cross-flavor job between pure u*ix admin (HP-UX mainly) and COTS (customer of the shelves (for the most fortunate who don't know, as if HP-UX was not a COTS :-)), like oracle, entrust pkica and netscape LDAP directory) installation and custom configuration.
I'm working and being paid in Belgium, roughly 700,000 BEF in-the-pocket-every-taxes-paid a year(~ 15,444 US$, 17,353 (euro), according to www.xe.com).From a hours/day point of view it varies from -1h from the minimal I'm paid for ,7h30 a day=37h30 a week (apparently the week of 35h isn't far, see France lesiglation(is this an english word ?) to sometime 11 hours a day, when people are short on schedule. (not my team, of course, we're not just mere coders :) (flame me, oh yes ...)
I don't know if it pays like a similar job in the U.S. (or anywhere else...), but for me it's quite a bit of money.
To come to the point and from what I can read from my time-sheet , I've been working rougly 38h47.17min a week since September 2000.
I didn't claim compensation for supp. hours yet, which I'm lawfully should be able to claim. But as I'm starting my work day anywhere from 9am to 11h30am I don't plan to do it soon. (Note that in my contract I'm supposed to work from 8h30am-9h00am to 5h00pm-5h30pm.)
Off schedule hours should be paid 50% more between 6h30pm to 8h30am on weekdays and Saturday and 100% more on Sunday and public holydays.
Note also that I have 27 paid vacation days (100% salary) this year, to be taken between 1st Jan 2001 and 30 April 2002.
How does this compare to a similar job in other countries ?
root@lame:/var/log# grep DENY *
My wife was right ... I was stupid to work long hours for so many years (60-80 per week) and just pull in a regular salary. I did this because I enjoyed the work, liked the respect, sought the challenges. I did not care much about money.
I was stupid in the sense that I could have earned more money (working at burger king) if I got paid for every hour. But that only matters if the money is the main thing and you have something better to do. (I didn't have anything better to do.)
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
~~ the real world is much simpler ~~
--- -- - -
Give me LIBERTY, or give me a check.
*smile*
dk reference good....
Guttermouth is a really good band.
about 40 hours, but only because I refuse to follow the orders of the masterlords here and work from 8-11:30 the drive an hour home only to awaken three hours later and do it again, then come in on saturday and work from home on sunday and make my children write code and have the dog do testing and make my wife give oral pleasure to the engineers and aack....*takes shotgun to the mouth*
Guttermouth is a really good band.
i work zero hours per week... i've been laid off. thanks, new economy!
--saint----
Having worked in IT on both sides of the pond, I've noticed Americans spend more time during the working day in the coffee room bitching about how many hours they worked yesterday...
need a free COBOL editor for Windows?
i don't agree with you however, that you should just treat work as a "service." i think it's very important to try to enjoy what you do, at least to a certain extent. if you're putting in a big chunk of your waking hours into it (and by that i mean anything over 30 hours a week) you should be getting more than just money or you won't be happy in the long run. you don't have to love your job, but treating it as just a service isn't the way to look at it. we're people, not machines, and we need more than just money.
I think you're right. Ideally, you should enjoy what you do. But often, work is just that, work. Not everybody gets the chance to enjoy what they do. I doubt that anyone working in retail 'enjoys' doing what they do. It would be nice to enjoy what you do, but you shouldn't expect it. I think it would be fantastic if everybody loved what they did and got paid a decent wage. Unfortunately, somebody's always gotta do the crappy jobs. So, I think it's something to shoot for, but if you go into the workplace expecting to always enjoy your job, at some point you're gonna be let down. I know it's a cynical viewpoint, but hey, I've been there...
I'm sorry to have to break it to ya' guy, but you've got a lot to learn about working, especially in the tech industry. First thing, you gotta forget about 'being appriciated'. It doesn't matter. The paycheck does. You may do a GREAT job and never be appreciated. You may do a shitty job and people may appreciate the hell out of you because they don't know better. If you're waiting for appreciation, you're only going to be let down. Respect? That's another one of those things that's worthless. Take a bit of advice: See your work as just that, work. You get paid for doing a service for your company, period. They do NOT care about you, no matter how many foosball tables they bring in, or how many sodas they buy you. They care about the product. Just like in any other relationship, if one person cares about the other, but it's not reciprocal, the person doing the caring is gonna get hurt. So, realize as soon as you can the most companies do NOT care about you as a person. You know you're being appreicated by getting a paycheck. Leave it at that, and go home, and enjoy the rest of your life. I hate to break it to ya', but it's true.
I'm a software developer, and I find myself working about 55 hours per week on average. That works out to (usually) 5 ten hour days with a few hours on the weekend.
That compares favourably to a previous life as a project supervisor for construction projects, where that work week would have been considered a slacker lifestyle.
Of course, all bets are off at deadline time - 14 hour days are the norm when trying to resolve issues at the end of a project...
What should really be getting tracked is hours per household.
Residents of the U.S. don't realize how much their standard of living has fallen over the last few decades. It was possible to own a house in a nice neighborhood, two cars and assorted other adult toys plus afford to send your kids to college on one factory worker's salary from about post-WWII through the sixties. Now it takes at least two incomes and then you may only get to rent.
What has become of slashdot ? First, they give echo to the dirty bullshit of a m$-nazi,now they let the MPAA speak ! Next, they'll say microsoft is good... Wait... they already do !
I refuse to give my employer over my required 40HOURS, I just feel like it's not healthy. I have no problem giving extra hours to my own personal ventures, but will not 'hourly' myself to someone elses business more than 40 hours a week.
life is too short for overtime
"The Most Fun Possible on 4 wheels" is at SunBuggy in Las Vegas
I work about 45 - 55 hours a week at my real job, and then about 20 doing freelance. While I do get paid hourly, I make four times as much doing freelance as I do at the job... Hmm. hard choice. As said above, being in NoVa is almost as bad as San Francisco bay area prices. Being on a team of 8 in a huge company (1200+ worldwide), each of us working enough overtime to pay three more people entirely. but no, they just ask you to stay late again and again. And the resumes keep flowing in the door. Also - we're all massively underpaid for the nationwide averages as multimedia people. but since it's an architecture firm, they justify that we'd make much less as architects (while convinently ignoring that we bill 2 - 3 times what the architects do per hour.)
// john athayde
# x@boboroshi.com
# http://www.boboroshi.com/
// john athayde
# x@boboroshi.com
# http://www.boboroshi.com/
I'm a 16yo school student, and after long and arduous calculations I've worked out I do 54 hours at school, excluding travelling and homework (which I never do so I'm not going to pretend I spend an extra three hours a day working on top of that). Of course we do have lunch (an hour) and breaks (totalling 45 minutes between the two) so it's not quite that much.
And all you guys do 40 hours a week! I thought school was meant to be the easy option...
7 days a week
Watching Cowboy Bebop in my jammies, eating a bowl of Shreddies.
Hey, you've got to put in your time. We did it, you'll do it, and your kids will do it. It's part of the game.
I work about 45-55 hours a week most weeks, with the occassional 80 hour week just to throw the internal clock off balance
Compared to when I was in the Army (40 hour work weeks most weeks, then the occassional month of 160 hour weeks) I'm liking it a lot.
I dunno what I consider work anymore, The way I see it the only time im not working is when im sleeping, and thats almost not too often after that dream i had of those satanic cyborg penguins from the year 2424 that was sent back to stop $bill$ from world circuitry domination.
EOU
Now, as a network/desktop service tech, I still work 40 hours per week, 8:00-4:30, with an hour lunch, a half-hour of it paid. I get no holidays, no sick time, no bonus, no benefits, shitty pay, and rack up the miles (on my expense).
But, I'm lucky compared to my fiance who works a minimum of 60 hours/week (5 days a week), often climbing to 70-80 hours (6-7 days), and has worked the last 15 days straight. She's an assistant restauraunt manager, and is salaried. You wouldn't think she'd have to put in 15+ hour days, but she has a few times in the year she's been there.
Then, there's my dad, who, as a truck driver, works 60-70 hours a week according to his logs, but was actually driving for 80-90 hours. That doesn't include time spent waiting for loading/unloading, on layovers, snowed-in, actually unloading the trailer, etc. With that, it would probably climb to 100+, and he has to sleep in a cab the size of my closet for 3-4+ weeks at a time.
My mom just opened a small retail shop, and drives a 4 hour round trip commute to work 10 hours/day 7 days a week. Factor in time for making the things she sells, getting supplies, and selling at craft shows and the like, and she's probably pushing 110-120 hours per week.
So, I wouldn't be too quick too complain about the state of affiars in IT. It can be long, hard work, but there's always someone else out there working 5 times harder for 1/3rd of the pay. BTW, my parents barely make enough to afford a $650/month mortgage, $250/month car payment, and necessities. And, as they would say, that's what happens who you don't have a decent education and are 45 years old....
Dear Mr Grammar Man:
I hate grammar.
Thank You for Your Time,
-Volrath50
Or as an average 13 year old would write it (seriously):
hay grammer dood
i thik gramer reely gay k
u suk leeve mygramerr lone or die 4 ever k
-looser456@aol.com
And as sad as that seems it was completly serious... Though I'm disabling my +1 bonus so I don't get modded offtopic too much...
And yes I'm usally better at grammar/spelling. I had just spent the last 3 hours writing Perl. I'm sure you will understand.
--Volrath50
Well I work about 4 hours a week for about $20 Canadian a week delevering Snail-Spam.. The Lake Shore Shopper... Though I guess I wouldn't exectly count as I'm 13....
Thinking about that though I'm pretty sure the average Slashdot reader spends most of his time doing Boring-School-Work for No-Pay. Though I'm homeschooled so I get-to learn Perl but also for no pay :-(. But anyways if you counted school I'm guessing the Average Slashdot Reader would be something like: 30-40 Hours a week, depending on homework, for no-pay. If you ad in a job on the side possibly 35-50 Hours a week for $10-30...
Thinking of it that way, being a 13 year old geek must suck... You must work alot and get no-time for Learning Perl or anything... Glad I'm home schooled...
--Volrath50
But we were well taken care of. Free food during those weeks, free hotel next door if we lived far away. And if we did our job well, the rest of the year was spent answering occasional service requests, a few high adrenaline, exciting emergency repairs, and hours upon hurs of napping, flirting, or watching DVDs on our plasma screen (mind you this was five years ago....)
Moral of the story is, sometimes a company can make those long hours worth it. If you enjoy your job and aren't constantly in crisis mode, sometimes blowing 80+ hours in a week is not such a bigg deal. Just don't try and do it forever. We got to work outside in the sun and fresh air. You'd never stick me in a cubicle for that many hours.
This comment is patronising and only reflects a subset of employers. To be honest, I can't believe this was moderated as 4/insightful. For the 5 years that I've been working in IT in several places here in Australia, I've always been well treated and respected. Sure, I know there's some companies out there where the management doesn't respect their employees, but there's a lot where they do. A lot of companies are starting to embrace the benefits of real teams, instead of paying lip service to it. I've always been friends, proper friends with camping and drinking and all the rest of it, with my managers, and those managers ARE the company. And so am I. I hope the people out there reading this can know that working life can be enjoyable just like the rest of your life.
that those of us that worked for a dot-com are spending a LOT less time at the office now.
Seriously though, when I was working at a startup, 50 hour weeks were the norm. After destroying my social life and physical health, I'm now looking for something where I can go home at 5:00 with everyone else. It turns out that there's more to life than work, after all.
This
I work all the time!
<scooby>Huh?</scooby>
Well, I got a brilliant idea today while I was having a beer with some friends. This idea was not concieved of at any workplace using any of the tools that my workplace provides, but it will definitely help me at work.
I love my job, 'cause I'm a writer (all I ever wanted to be), and I am thinking about writing at least a little bit all the time. In a sense, it's not work at all, but more an ongoing project of becoming more effective at my skill and art. Likewise, I am working all the time, and get tired of my work very rarely.
I think this is a good goal to have for work. Independence is a big part of it for me- it's essential that I am self reliant and able to work without a boss over my shoulder.
Goat sex free since 2001
i read an article somewhere that said the average person that worked at a full time job, if you add up the smoke breaks, snack breaks, gossip, chit chat, talking on the phone (unless thats your job), and just plain slacking off. You would get about 2-4 hours of "work related" stuff done. After all, how many of us /. people are at work right now reading this post and gettign paid for it. I'll see if i can dig up the article and post it.
Here in fascist Harrisland (Used to be called Ontario), there is a 60 hour work week Bill to be legislated. Note that here in Harrisland, laws are simply passed without argument. Really (Americans get to vote on these municipal things... you're SO lucky).
Here's a little future for America to worry about. It's happening here thanks to NAFTA, etc. So beware!
By Judy Rebick (yea, Judy Rebick! What's wrong with her?)
Ontario Premier Mike Harris is giving Ontario employers a great big Christmas present by ramming through third reading of a bill that turns Ontario labour standards back two generations.
Bill 147 permits a 60-hour work week. Even worse, it allows for the averaging of overtime over four weeks. An employer does not have to pay overtime if the average work week over four weeks is 44 hours. In other words, someone could work 60 hours this week, 55 hours the week after and then 30 hours for the next two weeks and receive no overtime pay.
Since the Second World War the maximum work week in Ontario has been 48 hours, with overtime pay after 44 hours. There were lots of exemptions but at least there was a formal process and a tough requirement for overtime.
The rest is on the CBC site. http://cbc.ca/news/viewpoint/columns/rebick/rebic
______
jeff13
College is a not a waste of time I'm almost finnshed with college and I'm an intern right now for a software company. I'm making a shit load of money (more then a years worth of college in 6 months) and the company had a party at least once a week. Today our party included donkey relay races!! YEA. How many out of high school jobs have paid partys with donkey races and kegs of beer? I've had more to drink at work then at school. Not to mention I make my own hours... usually around 40 a week. but they don't care if it's more or less Go to college it's worth it
Currently I am employed as a SysAdmin/desktop support/network tech. I work for a large company at a site that only has about 85 employees. I handle all the IT work for our site, and I am also a contractor. I normally do 40-45 hours per week, assuming that nothing breaks. I am on call 24/7, but my systems run smooth enough that I rarely have to do anything during off-hours.
Before I became a consultant I was a manager for a transportation company. I usually worked 75-80 hours a week then, and was also on-call 24/7 (and something ALWAYS happened during off-hours).
Overall, the IT job pays about 30% better, and I'm much happier with my life and the way that I spend my free time. I still haven't had a proper vacation/get-away in years, but I did take 3 months off back when I changed jobs. Call it an epiphany, but I decided that after working like a madman and then having 3 months to do absolutely nothing I would never work those insane hours again.
As an eXtreme programmer writing solid code using the art of computer programming until the code complete date, I'd say I work about 40 hours a week. More as Dec. 25 approaches.
Dancin Santa
I would guess a lot of people are in the same boat as me - I work for a non-profit and I think I bring a lot of value to the organization. At a previous non-profit job I let myself get ground down for "the cause," working 50-60 hour weeks for a relatively small paycheck. I laid down the law right up front at my current position - I was not going to burn out on the long hours, considering the pay cut I was taking for working in the non-profit world. Now I work 40-43 hours a week, every week, and haven't worked a weekend in 2 years. It's a reasonable exchange for me.
It Is the Nature of Information to Transgress Artificial Boundaries
I try not to work at all. But I type a lot, and bring up important concepts gleamed from the pages of Internet Publishing World and VB Developers Journal.
Hey freaks: now you're ju
I think there's missing something.
;-)
If one work more than 10 hours a day, he will probably have no time to spend his money. Look, when you take holidays, you spend a lot more than if you were working. Get some equilibrated life is good, you can spend time with your family. If you take holidays and if you stay at home, you could do some activity (sport, shopping...). You will spend money ! If you stay at work, you'll not spend more than your lunch...
But money and possession are American values. There's missing the time to enjoy the possessions...
bye
guarantees my schedule is always changing. While I have to bill 40 hours per week, this week is almost totally charged to admin (overhead). Consequently, I am actually spending more time in the office because it is relaxing, I have a faster 'net connection, and I can work on a hobby.
Compare this to a short but intense project that may take 35 hours for the week, but is mentally tiring. Then it's 9-5.
And sometimes I work weekends, 2nd and/or 3rd shifts, and other weird stuff. But I'm still young with no kids, so this kind of thing is ok for me.
In summary= it's always different!
Vote monkeys into Congress. They are cheaper and more trustworthy.
Stupid slashdot triple posts my post....
And I get modded down for being redundant...
whoops, there goes that karma again!
Vote monkeys into Congress. They are cheaper and more trustworthy.
...but then I quit my job to go on Phall Phish Tour 2000 (the last Phish tour for a while, you know). That was a full time effort, but now I'm unemployed!
Then the tech market tanked, and the employers stopped hiring stinky hippie techs who have real work experience in favor of shiny, new MCSE's with years of experience counting beans.
Now I've cleaned up my act, taken a shower, and made an honest attempt to rejoin mainstream society (no, really).
I still refuse to get that MCSE, though. And I still think it was worth it...work sucks.
*
It's all Hood
In Mexico more than 40 hours per week is technicaly ilegal, and if you are unionized it is really enforced.
As an aside: in Mexico most people take 2 hours for lunch (oil industry 3 hours!, but that makes sense in samll towns because you can go home, take a siesta or bring the children from school,etc.), so they are around for good 10 hours per day (9:00-19:00 is pretty much the norm).
So how it comes NAFTA is to blame for The Canadian situation?
IANAL but write like a drunk one.
Age: 35 /. is NOT blocked by corporate firewall (yet).
Career: Unix Sys Admin
Place of work: somewhere
Average weekly hours: 35-40
Max weekly hours: 40.
Salary: equivalent to 55000 GBP (to compare with previous poster)
Downsides: http://www.internetchess.com blocked by corporate firewall. Damn!
Benefits:
Now, smile please.
IANAL but write like a drunk one.
I live in Northern, VA (DC Metro area). I am a porjects manager, I manage 2 engineering teams and a dev deam. I am currently the lead developer and one of 3 lead engineers. Even with all that I still don't typicaly work more then 55 hours a week.
"It's better to be a pirate then join the Navy"
I'm a freelance developer, I get out of bed around 12, while the first cann of coffee I read my mail and 'surf around. later on, I aproach the projects with the most pressure, the customers bother me with their calls until around 5-6 pm and after that time I start getting productive for 5-6 hours or longer depending on the current projects deadlines... normally I dont care about weekends, but when I need a break I just take some free days
This last week I spent more than 80 hours hacking. Most weeks I hack for about 65-70.
What else is there to do every day, watch that STUPID crap on TV? Slap the rat? Drink beer and scratch myself? I'd rather hack 12 hours a day, thankyouverymuch.
Regarding productivity increasing with shorter work-weeks... I've also read that many comparisons of how many hours from arriving at work to departing work don't take into account the question of how much of that time is actual work. That is, I'm at work right now, and posting to /. is not a part of my job description, unfortunately enough.
A friend of mine visitted Germany, and said that while they only work 45/50 hours a week at rough companies, they barely have a non-work related thought, much less a non-work related action. a more interesting comparisson would not be how many hours we're at work, but how many hours we're actually working.
michael
/global33/
I'm a student.
In the period between weekends, ie Tuesday lunchtime 'til Thursday afternoon, I normally spend about 30 hours at my computer.
Of this, about 5 hours are spent planning the next weekend on AIM, 10 are spent talking about how great the previous one was. Of the remaining 15, I spend about 2 reading the news, and 10 surfing for porn.
I figure that leaves me about 3 hours actually 'working', typing out grammatically incorrect papers and reading course notes.
-- The avalanche has started. It is too late for the pebbles to vote.
Fridays I do tend to slack off and only work 4-5 hours. It is just something about sleeping in and going home early on fridays that help.
I attend 'work' in a warehouse from 11PM to 7:30AM, 5 days a week, and one Saturday a month. I don't actually do much most of the night, but neither does anyone else here. I can actually see the economic slowdown in our inventory, which is why I don't do anything. I'm bracing for layoffs.
Someone hates these cans.
Speaking as the only (probably) Colombian Slashdotter, Im probably putting in a good 65 hrs. a week. Although I have an important place in the company, I sometimes wish I could get out of here at regular hours, which is 50 for the rest of the employees (sigh).
Not complaining, though. I love this job.
This seems to be the standard for most IT companies down here, too.
Anyone else from S.A. have these hours?
I couldn't fail to disagree with you less.
I think it's INSANE that you guys only get 2 weeks annual leave per year. How can you survive with that? I live in Australia where annual leave is 4 weeks a year. It's the same in Europe and most other industrialised countries - in some it's even 6 weeks a year! The government sets a minimum wage, why not a minimum annual leave period? Surely it's better to have happy, more productive workers and give them a reasonable time off per year. It's better for society too.
but wouldn't another pool settle the matter?
Linux *is* user friendly. It's not idiot-friendly or fool-friendly!
This post of "how many hours to you work" seems just to be a forum for the ego. What /. reader doesn't brag or complain about how much they work. At one time in life everyone has worked some mind-boggling amount of hours in a week/month. The kicker is; was it worth it? Did your project rise from the ashes because of your selfless dedication to the company or did your efforts go to waste when you realized that no one noticed?
"Get them before they get....
I'm down to 35-40 a week, unless the weather's really nice...Then it's just enough hours to pay the bills...Consulting Rocks!!!!
my
But I am a litiagtion paralegal at a firm that does extensive IP work, from biotech to hardware. A typical week will see me bill about 50 hours. If we are in trial, however, that number jumps to roughly 90. The most I have billed in a week is 103.5, the least is about 15. Do the rest of you have such varience, or is it a legal world thing?
I work 1.5 hrs a day, 3 days a week. My pay is, not surprisingly, nothing to speak of, but I love my job. Of course, I'm not in the tech field, I'm a fine arts teacher at a small private school. I just do tech stuff as a hobby. My spouse makes enough to support us so I am lucky to have the luxury of working for the fun of it. I can honestly say that I do my job for the love of art and children (but that would be sappy, wouldn't it?).
How Calvinist of you.
Attributing American prosperity (a questionable assertion itself, given the disparities of wealth and the absence of strong social benefits in this country) to simple demographics and geography is equally naive.
A Harvard economist named Juliet Schor wrote an analysis of American work and leisure patterns several years ago called The Overworked American. Weak unions, consumerism, and corporate downsizing are some of the reasons cited for the dramatic comparative difference with Europe, *and* with the American work and leisure in the late 1960s (when workers worked an average of about a month less than in the late 1980s).
As for Calvinism, a funny little man named Max Weber advanced an argument along that line some years ago ...
Of course, Weber was discussing the implications of the already existing "Calvinist" viewpoint, wasn't he?
and your point is ...?
Actually, looking at the national average, the more education the worse it gets. The "sweet spot" appears to be a High School graduate with some college. On average, a person with a Bachelors earns more than a High School graduate, but once you get a Masters you have dropped below the HS grad, and a PHD drops you even lower. Multiple PHDs would probably put you below poverty level.
I think we all knew, going into the tech industry, that long hours are part of the trade. While hours and cost of living are crucial, what about asking
I just graduated as the tech market tanked - and myself and many of my friends either lost our jobs with a few weeks or had offers we had accepted withdrawn before we even started. Though I feel underpaid, right now I am happy to be employed, able to pay the bills, and to do my job well.
I don't mind the hours - I work only 55-60 a week, but even more just before a release. *But* just about everyone works long hard hours, from the cleaning staff to the checkers at the coffee shop all the way up to our ceo. We are all paid very differently - not based on how hard we work - everyone is busting their butt - but our level of expertise. It is easy to forget there are billions of people getting by with much less but working at least as hard...
I haven't been at my job long enough to know if my accomplishments will be appreciated. I guess I will find out at my performance/comp review. The people I work with a nice, intelligent and good fooze ball players :-) My only complaint is lack of a challenge. I didn't go into the tech industry for the money (though it is nice), but because I love the intellectual stimilation, the theoretical problems and obscure issues perhaps only a computer science major can love. But I teach myself and program more interesting things on my own time, and of course, there is always /.!
RC
RC
I'm a consultant in New Mexico and based on my billing records for the past 12 months it looks like an average of 22 hours of billable work per week. I would guess about 10 hours of non-billable work per week (keeping up with technology and internal projects). I prefer to split up the work hours into seven days per week instead of five or six. I never have figured out what I do with the rest of the hours in the day.
I work atleast 50 hours a week, into a 4 day work week. Started taking off Friday's when the work was just getting to be to much, and needed a 3 day weekend each week. Now I try to do around 12 hours a day for 4 days, but it's allways over that... and I never seam to get a full 3 day weekend either. Damn 'remote access', can we kill the admin that thought of that?
I got tired of the whole 60-80 hours a week thing a couple of years ago, and have been a relative "slacker" ever since (for the same pay). I currently average 40 hours a week, and though I still do 9-10 hour days sometimes they get balanced out by 6-7 hour days. Throwing yourself head first into work is just not worth it, considering the physical and social consequences.
Never mind that the Japanese have pretty much cornered the market on office workers working themselves to death. I don't see many American office workers dropping dead at 35 from overwork (thank God).
Reboot macht Frei.
are pretty routine in the computer industry. I think Slashdot taking a poll is probably much more biased toward longer hours. Take a poll of say your average construction worker, mailman, or car salesman and you might find they go to work every day at 9AM, have lunch at 12PM, take a crap at 4PM, and go home by 4:59PM. I'd say the statistics are probably fairly correct in saying a good number of people work longer hours, but does that really mean most people do?
I work about 40 hours a week.
----
----
Stop eyeball fucking me, asshole.
55-60 hours a week.
At the risk of repeating an old cliche.. we need to work smarter, not harder. For instance I work about 45 hours a week and I make a very nice six figure salary. It's "the myth of incompetence" that the tech industry loves to propagate with regards to working 80 hour weeks. Maybe your working an 80 hour week becasue you are using the wrong tools or trying to implement the wrong solutions, etc...
I see it all the time though, some people will only use Windows because they are a "windows only shop" when it's obvious that Solaris or HP/UX would do the job with half the effort. I also see people jumping on the bandwagon and using languages like java or python when they should be using a RAD language. But hey, I make money because most people attack problems from the wrong direction so I guess I shouldn't bitch.
Wagner LLC Consulting Co. - Getting it right the first time
This is just a side thought - does it surprise anyone that the most prosperous nation on earth has the hardest workers? Just an idea.
When nuance becomes the only objective we lose the ability to function
I'm a home-office software consultant living in Canada. I typically work about 5-6 hours a day, and this is real work, not coffee/lunch breaks or meetings. This is also under usual conditions, not heavy deadlines or fire-department support.
I could be doing more, but for my health. I have various chronic conditions which make it difficult for me to handle more than about 6 hours, or high stress. Besides, I like my spare time too. The fact that I can choose my own hours and pace is one of the things that made me choose consulting. Very few employers are flexible enough to hire software developers on a part-time basis. At least this was true 6 or so years ago.
I think this article might have been slightly offbase when it stated that men in particular are overworked due in part to household chores.
It seems to me that women generally are STILL expected to do most of the housework and kid raising, even if they are coders and make considerably more than their spouses.
If anything, WOMEN are more overworked now than they are before.
Build a man a fire, and you keep him warm for a night.
Set a man on fire, and you keep him warm for the rest of his life!
- T. Pratchett
Galileo: "The Earth revolves around the Sun!"
Score: -1 100% Flamebait
Not strictly true, the legal working week in Germany is 39 hours with normally 30 days holiday (there are also 12 additional public holidays), there used to be tons of hookers in Frankfurt a.M, especially around the main train station, but the police cleaned the area up and there are not too many too be seen. However most of the larger brothels have a website... What is good is if you are sick, there is a doctor in our town, that if you visit him and say, 'I don't feel very well' he signs you off for minimum 1 week. When you are signed off sick it is illegal to go to work.
Mr Churchill, If I was your wife I would put poison in your tea! Madam, If I was your Husband I would drink it!
heh heh...looks like amount of work varies inversely with how well the economy is doing.
Either that, or people are doing a lot less work because of layoffs....
I'm on a normal job for once. I do 40-45 hour weeks, with 24x7 on call all the time, though as a systems manager I've had one call in the two months I've been here (make that as a *good* systems manager :). I refuse to work for people who plan on me doing 70-90 hour weeks, so the only times I have to do that is when I screw up.
--
Darthtuttle
Thought Architect
Darthtuttle
Thought Architect
Hey ya'll, This is interesting because I came right up against a situation today where the American work obsession was illuminated- I am a developer at a big, big International computer company. We all work our asses off (I'm at about 50 hours a week of work no foosball, Quake, or coffee breaks- we're not trying to prove our loyalty to the Collective, rather, we're trying to get promoted and get the cash money) and today my office mate was trying to make a deadline and she couldn't get her code from the office in France. Tomorrow is a French holiday and they all cut out early and generally have a way more laid back approach to work. She was all, "This sucks! Those slack ass bastards!", and I'm all, "Dude, it's the Europeans, they have a different work ethic, don't worry about it." So, here's the thing- Her French client is sitting in some bistro sucking down wine and having fun with his pals, and we're sitting in an arid cube in North Carolina obsessing about a V2.1 launch. So, who's the loser here?
"D'oh! Stupid poetic justice!"
thats anybody you know, when you look at national averages, people with more education get better jobs. Who would you hire for a job? Somebody who just graduated high school (education in america sucks ass) or somebody who gives a shit, went to school for four more years and specializes in a trade. I think the choice is obvious.
I didn't think it was physically possible, but this both sucks and blows - Bart Simpson
you may feel more self worth by getting four years of real world experience, but that wont cut it. I gaurentee if me and you were battling it out for a job, I would win. Looking at my resume you see a degree from a respectable university. Yours has nothing, except your real world experience, which you have no way in proving. I however proved my self worth to the company by showing them my degree. School is why people off the street aren't doctors and lawyers. In most cases you have to know things to get a job. Unless you work at McDonalds.
I didn't think it was physically possible, but this both sucks and blows - Bart Simpson
I think your information is biased or just plain stupid. The logic of somebody with a PHD making less money than somebody with just a high school education makes no sense at all. We fail to take into account the type of work the people do also. Somebody with a high school education will most likely slave away in shop for 20 years of his life. Someone with a PHD earns his money with his brain, not his muscles.
I didn't think it was physically possible, but this both sucks and blows - Bart Simpson
I don't know about you guys, but at IBM eBusiness there's no such thing as 40 hour workweeks. I'm a part time employee at IBM Service Delivery Center NorthEast, Commerical Webhosting, and I work 40 hours/week. The fulltimers work 60+, and must be there at 3 AM on Sunday mornings very often. Not to mention pagers are a must on everybody. Did I mention I also work 20 hours/week at another job, and go to school full time as well? Fun fun. 40 hours is a dream, as far as I'm concerned.