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Your 60-Hour Work Week Is Not a Badge of Honor
An anonymous reader writes "We've all had to deal with long, tough work weeks, whether it's coming in on the weekend to meet a project deadline, pulling all-nighters to resolve a crisis, or the steady accretion of overtime in a death march. It's fairly common in the tech sector for employees to hold these tough weeks up as points of pride; something good they achieved or survived. But Jeff Archibald writes that this is the wrong way to think of it. 'If you're working 60 hours a week, something has broken down organizationally. You are doing two people's jobs. You aren't telling your boss you're overworked (or maybe he/she doesn't care). You are probably a pinch point, a bottleneck. You are far less productive. You are frantically swimming against the current, just trying to keep your head above water. ... We need to stop being proud of overworking ourselves.'"
Or you are poor in America, working 3 part-time minimum jobs 60+h a week just to pay for food and housing with nothing left over at end of the week.
Doesn't want to hear it. Its his fault you are working 60 hour weeks instead of the business hiring another worker. He approved it, he is aware of it, and he could give half a shit as long as you keep working. You get sick? Not his fault. You get burned out, well you should have taken steps to prevent that but still stayed and worked to get things done.
You will never win. If you are working 60 hour weeks and want to stop doing so, just stop. Take a day and do some interviews, find another job. Cause the second you stop giving 150%, they are going to fire you anyways.
The corporation has no loyalty to its employees. You can all be replaced. What YOU need to start doing, is to think of the corporation as being replaceable. Shop around, find a better deal, and take it for a couple years, then shop around again, find a better deal, and take it. You owe them nothing, they need you, not the other way around. You can leave all this and buy land and subsistence farm and sell produce to city-dwellers for the rest of your life if you want. The corporation cannot, it dies without workers.
Never forget, they need you. To work for them. To buy from them. Stop doing both and they die. Its that simple.
... my BS meter begins to go off the scale. While I've done my fair share of brutal weeks (I'm an IT guy), it's been my experience that 99% of people who claim that they regularly work 60 hrs a week are full of crap. If you work an extra hour a day, and then put in five more over the weekend, you're still only at 50. You need to work five ten hour days and then STILL put in ten more hours over the weekend. Humans just aren't built for that. When people have boasted that in interviews, I've drilled into them and I'll get excuses like, "I was on call, so even though I wasn't actually working, I was still working..." or "Technically I have a home office so when I drive every day, I count my commute..." or "Well, it was 60 hours for the last three weeks before go live, but before that it was 45-50!" Yes, there are legitimate workaholics that do 60 hours a week. Average Joes doing it? Rarely.
...and the french have a longer and healthier life, as W.H.O.'s data prove. And they are also far slimmer and better looking.
Working 60 hrs a week is just stupid, stupid, stupid. It causes heart diseases, fast aging, stomach problems, etc...
People who work so much should be mocked and laughed at, rather than respected for it.