Slashdot Mirror
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.'"
I'm amazed that he managed to get through that entire essay without mentioning the proverbial elephant in the room: Unless you are working on a project you own, or being paid as befits your schedule (in which case it still may be a bad idea for the reasons the essay does mention) your 60-hour workweek isn't merely 'not a badge of honor' it's a sign that you are doing two jobs for one salary because haha, what the fuck are you going to do about it, sucker?
The merely pragmatic considerations of fatigue degrading certain cognitive functions of various important sorts aren't false, and may even be the primary concern in the cases of self-employed contractors and startup jockeys with equity stakes(that they might even keep after the VCs are finished with them...); but if you are working for a paycheck and reporting to a boss, your bigger problem isn't whether working those additional hours makes you a less visionary creative or whatever. It's the fact that your effective pay, per hour, is plummeting (and in the way that annihilates your life outside of work, and sucks you dry, rather than just making you feel poorer, as working 40 hours for a stagnant or declining salary would).
Probably good practice for the bold future!
Average American monthly wage is $3769. Average French monthly wage is $3698. Even though they're working about 15 hours less per month.
Twice I've put in 3 consecutive 80 hour weeks. And both times, as soon as the deadline was passed and everything signed off, I basically collapsed and slept for most of the next 2 days.
I certainly couldn't do anything close to that on an ongoing basis, not even when I was younger, fitter, and considerably dafter.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
More intersting countries to investigate:
Luxembourg and Denmark; Much greater per capita GDP than the USA / shorter working week.
Greece and Mexico; Some of the longest working hours. Much less GDP than the USA.
I think the point was about people who TALK about how much work they do but only put in 40 hours a week (hold on to comments about that "only").
Essentially those people are doing PR for the 60 hour week that the other people are putting in.
So not only do you have to convince management that more workers are needed BUT you also have to convince management that you aren't the problem because Bob says he's working all the time but he's not complaining like you are.
so let me get this straight. If i am in an interview and i explain to them how well i held up under the pressure of ongoing 60 hour work weeks at my current or previous positions, this does nothing for me to get the next job?
Not if they have any degree of intelligence. The oldest study that I know of by Hans Eysenck in war-time Britain showed that people working 57 hours a week produced less than people working 48 hours a week. That was about people producing weapons, who you would assume would have been very highly motivated. Working over 40 hours a week doesn't achieve anything. Six weeks at 60 hours a week produces the same work as six weeks at 40 hours. Except after working 60 hours for six weeks you are so tired that you can't keep up with the 40 hour worker anymore.
Whenever my boss demands I work more than 40 hours per week I do so, but I spend 50% of the time just sitting around doing nothing* and taking 1 hour lunches.
Like I give a fuck. Don't like it? Fire me.
I work so I can afford to do other stuff. If I don't have time to do that stuff what the fuck is the point of working so hard?
* Note that here I'm assuming regular demands of working more than 8 hours per day. Not a week long rush to get things ready for release.
Or you are middle class, and can't quit your job because you took out a huge loan to pay 3 times too much for a house.
Unfortunately, it's not a USA thing anymore, you've successfully exported it to at least Europe.
Here in Germany, more than one million employees are receiving a special form of unemployment benefits, because without it they would actually earn less than the unemployment benefits are. That's just insane, and the solution to compensate for the difference with tax money is so psychotic that it is my honest believe each and every one of the politicians who came up with that should be put into a closed mental institution and kept there for life.
Assorted stuff I do sometimes: Lemuria.org
There's an Swedish radical socialist song about this from 1972, by a band called Blå Tåget: "Each hand knows what the other does" (which of course, is a clever title in Swedish). Below is a somewhat crappy translation (the original fits a rhyme scheme, and a metre).
"The capital raises the rents, and the state the rent benefits
In this way one fiddle with the Iron Law of Wages
and even pay less wages than the price of food and rent,
for the state merrily pitches in should the living expenses grow to great".
They then go on to give further examples of how a welfare society merely masks fundamental injustices in capitalism and how it is something which alleviates symptoms instead of going for democratic control of the means of production. I've long wanted to translate this song into English properly, because it's insightful and the ideas in it are somewhat foreign to most English speakers.
Our policies could learn something from the military (at least the Canadian army where I served): shareholders shouldn't get profits until the people generating the profits have a livelihood. When I served the troops eat first. Then the sergeants, then the officers. If the food ran out or you ran out of time etc. too bad for the higher ups. A similar pecking order can be seen in a lot of religious groups, leaders are meant to be the first of the servants not the reason why the whole thing exists.