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Working Hard?
Two related stories about working hard in the U.S.: U.S. workers are granted less (and take less) vacation time than workers in other industrialized nations. And if that wasn't enough, changes to the overtime laws will eliminate overtime pay for many workers.
Kinda scary loading up slashdot at work and seeing a headline that sounds like it's scolding you for not working....
-A
I think this is probably not the right crowd to be asking this question ... a ton of us tech types are unemployed, those that have jobs sit at work playing solitaire and the ones that both have a job and actually do it are far too busy to join in this crappy discussion :P
-Rylfaeth
...and eventually, no job.
Avarice, treachery, greed, lying, gluttony, cheating and petty office politics have become their own justification in the average workplace. Unless you "fit in," you will eventually be fired. In order to fit in, you must:
1) Do exactly as you are told: no more, no less.
2) Accept every lunch and meeting invitation
3) Reply enthusiastically to every e-mail, especially if it has a colorful signature.
4) Agree, even when the people you are agreeing with are wrong.
5) Never offer an opinion, or attempt to think about your job or the company.
The educations of an entire generation are being destroyed in the rush to below-average mediocrity.
Only the very few companies actually accomplish anything truly innovative. The rest simply exist, like tree moss, consuming resources and producing very little. This better get fixed, because this process is called "eating your own seedcorn."
Someday, hope will be born of something other than a business case.
Business isn't willing to pay for products, innovation and careers, so we get brands, mortgage commercials and layoffs.
The US also has one of the highest rates of burnout in the world. Japan who was 2nd lowest in the chart also has the same problem.
When will American compaines understand that having their workers take acations is good for the company. People who take time off, do more effecent work. It like the recent studies that show once workers start putting in more hours their productivity can increase to about 10 hours a day but an office worker that is doing 12 hr days less productive than when they were doing 8 hour days since they spend so much work time doing other things.
It will be interesting to see what happens in New Zealand. Its my understanding that they used to have a European model for holiday time but have recently removed some of thouse requirements so they are more like the US model. Maybe that explains why at least 50% of their labor pool is in Australia.
I've currently have 34.5 unused vacation days. Over the next year, I'll collect 20 more. I think its time for a round the world trip.
But not anymore. I grew up and got out of that rat race. Work/jobs basically are an agreement where you trade your time for money. I realized that by passing up on upgrading my machine every 12 months and buying all of the cds and movies I wanted, instead eating in more than going out, and driving an older car I could live quite well working only part time.
So what do I do with all of this free time?
I spend it with my family, I go backpacking, skiing, etc. I indulge in hobbies in everything from laser light shows to weaving. I donate time to non-profits like the local farmer's market, church groups, Habitat for Humanity, the Community Farm Aliance, and local theatres.
Living on less is far more rewarding the getting caught up in life as a consumer where the only dominant more or social value is work more to buy more.
Opt out!
Just as an example, as an ex-US employee and now a French one (Dubya made me flee ;^), I'd like to outline the difference in the vacation package for the approximate same work in the same company.
In the US, after 6 years in the company I was entitled to 18 days off. Each day you are sick is decounted on your vacation days. I only got a handfull of 'US Holidays' free vacation days (New year, Memorial day, Independance day, Thanksgiving and Christmas). That's it. And that's considered fairly generous.
In France it doesn't matter how long you've been in the company, we all get the same package:25 days of vacations plus another 12 days of RTT (you cannot cumulate those RTT with regular vacations days, and you can't take more than 5 consecutive RTTs). In addition there is a mountain of free 'French Holiday': New Year, Easter Monday, Labor Day, WWII veterans' day, Ascension, Whit Monday, Bastille day, Assumption, All Saints' Day, WWI Veteran day, Christmas. 11!
Total?
Us: A grand total of 23 days off.
France: 48 days off.
Guess where I choose to live?
Vacations are good though, but you have to think of it this way, you should have a job you actually WANT to do, and you wont have a problem working 12 hours a day. Of course if you work at Mc Donalds you'll hate working 12 hours a day.
BZZZT. Wrong answer.
I have a job for one reason: to pay the bills. If I'm looking for something I want to do, I'll spend time at home (or maybe at Lake Powell) with my wife and kids. 12 hours a day seriously detracts from that. Therefore, 12 hours a day is out of the question.
Where is the wisdom we have lost in knowledge?
Where is the knowledge we have lost in information?
That's nice for you, I'm glad you are happy with your life. Some of us, however, want the satisfaction of seeing our children grow up and have other intersts. So while you voluteer to bust your ass, please don't think that's normal and that you should force everone else into your lifestyle. One day, when the non-technical managers decide to screw you in some kind of SCO like blaze of bullshit and stock manipulation, you might have regrets.
Slave driving is a bad sign. Some fields really are competitive like this. Most are not and an honest day's work brings an honest day's profits. Management that tries to squeze normal occumpations to frenzies like this are simply greedy. If your management is willing to screw you, the stockholders and cutomers are next and it's time to go.
DMCA, Hollings, Palladium. What might have sounded like paranoia is now common sense.
Say your a grocery clerk earning $12.00 an hour stocking shelves. You work 4 days a week and you work on a sunday. You opt to NOT work that 5th weekday because you know that you can make double time, or time and half on sundays. So you work your way up the ladder and get that sunday as a "cherry" day where you could have simply worked that "normal day". There is SO MUCH of this, it's crazy.
If you think that typifies the experience of the average American, you're nuts. I'm unemployed, and my neighbors on either side both work two full time shit-jobs to stay ahead of their bills. And I live in a middle class neighborhood. Don't be so hard on the minimum wage earners, since you might be one yourself pretty soon. yeah, you think you're untouchable but scores mighter than you have fallen.
Give me a break! You speak if the "low wage earners" lounge around working 4 day weeks at 15 and 32 dollars an hour? You're fucking nuts. Around here, people are waiting in line for a chance to work at Wal-Mart. Earth to NIMROD, we're having trouble translating your message.
These are bad times, fella. And if that hasn't sunken into your head by now, there is something wrong with you.
Just want to throw this out there, see if anyone else has had similar experiences...
I work for a company in a Boston suburb, hit three years there this June. At the beginning of this year I was finally given an explanation of my paid time off (10 days vacation, 0 days sick). In early January, my grandmother had a stroke, and asked for a few days off to go back to Maine to visit family. The CEO said I could and I wouldn't have to worry about losing vacation days. I came back the following Monday to find a message from the CEO asking to talk to me. The long and the short of it was, in the 4 days I was away, I had forfeited all my vacation days. Fine, I can deal I suppose. In April, my grandmother passed away. Again, I asked for time off to go to Maine to visit family again. It was granted, including by the person I was working under on a project at the time. I went to Maine again for 4 days, returned the following Monday. This time the CEO was furious that I didn't have the current project I'd been working on done, and suffered a 20% pay cut that week, 'to compensate for lost time.'
Fun fun. If I recall (I don't have the paper at the moment) I will gain an additional 5 vacation days per year when I hit 5 years at the company, if I last that long...
American workers are also more stressed, shorter lived, more irate, more likely to commit suicide, more likely to murder someone else, less fulfilled, and more likely to trade their humanity for The Company than their German and British counterparts.
I wonder if there's a correlation?
Java coders are the same way. I'm all about making it easier to write good software, garbage collection and clean syntax rules. Nothing against java or the people who use it but I'm just amazed at how many of these guys call themselves software engineers and have no idea what is actually happening in the system on with the hardware. I was working with a team working on a tomcat based JSP web application, the question came up, why does this app need 512MB of RAM and a 800Mhz Pentium-III to run slowly with only 2 clients attached? We need it to work with at least 20 clients attached. Does that strike anyone as a little heavy? (It just reads a few tables from a SQL database and formats them in to html, not even fancy shit yet... it's practically serving up static HTML) silence, has anyone done any performance work? How about memory consumption, how can we improve it? silence. Do we need to rewrite this using a different technology? Panic! "Maybe if we bump it up to a dual or quad processor machine with 2GB of RAM...
I'm not a superstar. I did well at a good university, there is a lot more that I don't know than I do, I've only got about 15 years of professional experience, but there are a shit load of people who know next to nothing, and they are trying to draw down $70k, $80k, $100K a year and the job simply doesn't get done with that kind of talent flooding the workplace.
I can count the number of top notch professionals I've worked with. I care about my craft, I'm always learning and like to keep current and know about things, there just more people who like to play video games and surf the web and somehow equate that to being a professional tech worker. 10 years ago there was a lot more talent amongst the people in this biz, I looked up to people I worked with knowing I could learn from them. Now I'm just floored by the kids we bring in, they want the money, they want the sexy work, they just can't do it and they think that they can.
So why do we work long hours? Well now the teams are twice as big if not bigger than they were in the 80's and early 90's, the expenses are higher, the costs are higher, we have to produce more. The talent is dilluted. The expectation is there but there isn't the talent to deliver on it. Result? Fewer people can actually do the work, you'll be damned if they will stand by and let you cut out after a rough 6 hours or web browsing. We're working dumber. People do shit manually. People write code that get's rewritten because they can't read their own damn perl. People do things the only ways they know how and then they get redone completely because the web based calendar system takes the biggest computer in the client's office to serve up 2 calendars at a time... I hope 4 of the 50 employees don't want to see the vacation schedule too close to the same time.
Maybe I'm getting too old for it but the people in this biz aren't as good as they were as a whole, there are just more of them and they make a lot more money. You do the math, why don't we get overtime pay?
If the business plan is fundamentally flawed, no amount of above-and-beyond effort will save the company. Take what you can, punch out, try again.
Eventually, you'll land at a company whose business model isn't fundamentally flawed, and where you still get most, if not all, of the perks of the fuckedcompany.com bait.
> Work/jobs basically are an agreement where you trade your time for money. I realized that by passing up on upgrading my machine every 12 months and buying all of the cds and movies I wanted, instead eating in more than going out, and driving an older car I could live quite well working only part time.
Extend and escape. You'll still work part-time for the rest of your life.
I've discovered the same thing, except that as long as times are good (and after a few jumps, I've been lucky enough to land in a pretty fucking nice niche in this here economy of ours :), stick around and make hay while the sun shines.
In 10 years, my skills will be obsolete. 15 if I really push at keeping up with my industry. Then I become unemployable.
But after about 10 years of work and living "beneath my means" (like you - limited system upgrades, drive the car until it falls apart, etc), I've accumulated about 5-10 years of savings. Good investments (yes, even during the bear market, one can make money) have added about two or three more years to that.
In short, if a girder fell on my head, nuking the part of my brain that I use for work, I could pull the plug on my job today and last a good 10 years, with no change in lifestyle, on what I've accumulated.
By the time my skills are well and truly obsolete, that figure will be "the rest of my probable lifespan".
And since I'm not in the game to rack up the highest score (Bill, for all his evil, has already done that. Larry was the only guy who could have come close, but the dot-com fiasco took Oracle down to the point that the best use of his capital is buying his competitors out of the market ;), it'll be time to sit back, crack open a cold one, and figure out what to do with half a lifetime of freedom.
> Living on less is far more rewarding the getting caught up in life as a consumer where the only dominant more or social value is work more to buy more.
As you say - work is where you trade your time for money. Opting out is much easier when you trade that money back for time.
(We're doing the same thing - the only fundamental difference is that you're doing it a few hours a day, and I'm gambling that I won't get hit by a bus before I cash in a two-decade time card. To the reader - whichever option is "better" is up to you to figure out. IMO there's no right answer to this one; I'm just tossing out an alternative version of the same strategy.)
QUOTE: "Because of so much work and overtime, American workers are the most productive in the world. Cut this productivity by 20%, and you automatically increase the variable cost for a product by 20%. Legislate vacation time, and everything will become more expensive, the foreign trade deficit worsens, the dollar devaluates and everything will become even more expensive. True, we work hard, but our hard work reflects in the low product prices and high standard of living." END QUOTE
Hmmm, I found this which states that "overtime leads to an average drop in worker productivity of about 15 percent for work weeks exceeding 40 hours." from the Penn State College of Engineering.
Increased time at work != increased output.
-> Increased time at work != cheaper output.
-> Decreased time at work != more expensive output.
~Tetravus
Ya know, I swore I wasn't gonna get involved in this, but reading all these posts, I just didn't have a choice.
...He wakes in the night in a cold sweat and puts something on paper that looks silly in the morning. All day he shivers at the thought of the bugs which will inevitably appear to jolt his smooth consumation. ...unlike the doctor his is not a life among the weak. Unlike the soldier, destruction is not his purpose. Unlike the lawyer, quarrels are not his daily bread. To the engineer falls the job of clothing the bare bones of science with life, comfort and hope. ...as years go by people forget which engineer did it, even if they ever knew. Or some politician puts his name on it. Or they credit it to some promoter who used other people's money with which to finance it. But the engineer himself looks back at the unending stream of goodness that flows from his successes with satisfactions that few professions may know. And the verdict of his fellow professionals is all the accolade he wants.
I am 50 years old. I have an engineering degree. About 20 years ago, an engineering student, whose assignment was to interview a working engineer, interviewed me about my career. Well, having just come off a series of 80 hour weeks, trying to meet unrealistic schedules assigned by unknowing bosses, I blasted him. The poor kid probably switched majors. The one question I remember clearly (probably assigned verbatim by the teacher who dreamed up the assignment in the first place) was "exactly what has your engineering degree meant to you in your career?".
My answer was: "My engineering degree is nothing but a license to work free overtime. Sure, I make some money but, if you divide the number of hours I work by the pay I get, I probably make less than factory workers!"
Engineers, at least in my work experience, have always been exempt from overtime pay. And that has led to nothing but abuse by the companies I have worked for. I burned out, left engineering as a career, and then returned to engineering.
I returned because there is nothing else I would rather do. I don't have he words, but let me leave with a quote from someone who does:
Engineering: it is a great profession. There is the satisfaction of watching a figment of the imagination emerge through the aid of science to a plan on paper. Then it moves to realization in stone or metal or energy. Then it brings jobs and homes to men. Then it elevates the standards of living and adds to the comforts of life. That is the engineer's high privilege. The great liability of the engineer compared to men of other professions is that his works are out in the open where all can see them. His acts, step by step, are in hard substance. He cannot bury his mistakes in the grave like the doctors. He cannot argue them into thin air or blame the judge like the lawyers. He cannot, like the architects, cover his failures with trees and vines. He cannot, like the politicians, screen his shortcomings by blaming his opponents and hope that the people will forget. The engineer simply cannot deny that he did it. If his works do not work, he is damned. [It] haunts his nights and dogs his days.
Herbert Hoover
The Profession of Engineering (from his memoirs)