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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.'"
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.
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
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.