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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.'"
They're just lucky to have a job at all.
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.
I spend 60 hours a week trolling Slashdot. Do you mean there are ways I could be more effective at it?
Absolutely. Perhaps you should outsource and/or automate your trolling to improve your trolling efficiency. This will allow you to achieve a healthy troll/life balance.
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.
I know, I'm not supposed to read the article, but the idea that a 60 hour work week is too long, is a totally new concept to me. Luckily this author has written about 20 sentences about it on his blog. Excellent.
...is the type that is always *talking* about how much they work, but they are out the door at 4:00 and are never online or responding to emails in the evenings.
Oh for fucks sake... there are always exceptions to any rule. This article is speaking in generalities, and is not saying this is true for everyone, you fuckwit.
God DAMN sometimes I hate this place.
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!
US Per Capita GDP is 51,704. French per capita GDP is 35,392. Americans work about 200 hours more per year.
Just make add 9 more hours for it to be 69 so he can really be proud that his job nailed him on both sides...
I used to work over 100 hours a week once in a while. Not for more than a month at a time though. After that you are pretty useless. Just driving a car becomes dangerous.
... 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.
As I said then.
We just have a generally messed-up attitude toward work and "getting ahead" in the U.S. There may be many proximate causes, but nothing's going to change until you fix the overall cultural attitude.
Neoliberalism
I'm glad I'm out of the race to the bottom.
When I was reading his blog post I was wondering to myself, what planet is this guy from? Then I noticed the .ca and it made sense. I'm from the US and have relatives in around Toronto. They make fun of the labor practices in the US. Most of them have 40 hour work weeks and 6+ weeks of paid vacation a year. It always makes me laugh when I hear US corporations lament the high cost of labor. If labor were free these same corporations would complain that people don't pay to work for them. It's all about maximizing shareholder value and you lower you can drive labor costs the better.
Many people find refuge in work. Else they endure a constant stream of "load/unload the dishwasher", "take out the garbage", "fold the laundry", "walk the dog", "do the taxes", "get some exercise", ...They fire up the VPN, log in and have some gibberish looking text on screen, having mastered the art of sleeping with eyes open while sitting in a chair, (thanks to endless meetings with PHBs) they just relax. Once you learn to fake sincerity, you got it made...
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
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?
I know for the positions i have hired people in for, this sort of experience is something i always considered a good thing. People who have been willing to do what it takes to get things done.
If this is the norm, then as the OP suggests, something is very very wrong.
Occasionally though, ridiculous hours are required - and I don't have a problem with gritting my teeth and taking it. Moreover I (in retrospect normally) am quite proud of those moments when we "made it happen"
What's more interesting to me is how your employer handles these exceptions. Whilst chatting to future employers, I was quite dismayed by the number that point-blank refused to accept these scenarios every occurred, and therefore saw no reason for a policy on their handling.
This is Slashdot, where the edge use case wins, every time.
(sarcasm on)
Oh wait, we're talking about IT. The rules don't apply to us. You know, we don't need a business plan. Lets just wing things, it'll work out and sure 60+ hour weeks make sense.
(sarcasm off)
Did you know 80 to 90% of the moderators on slashdot wouldn't recognize a troll even if one dragged them under a bridge.
What I see is way too many people bending over backwards in order to get bent over forwards in return. Just because you have a smart phone and a laptop doesn't mean you have to reply instantly. It doesn't mean you have to give an ETA on a project or task that requires you to get it done with 60 hours in a week or 14 hours in a day.
And once you start doing that everyone starts expecting it. Don't start! If you do work at home wait until the morning to send it out. Don't reply to email at 8pm. When your boss says "Where were you last night?" You say "Did we have an after hours appointment?" and make a show of looking at your calendar. The next time you say "Taking my son to xyz." Say it like it was wonderful and not like it's an excuse. Don't for a second feel guilty. Do this publicly as much as possible. Nobody else there wants to work 14 hour days either.
It's like an idiotic prisoners' dilemna. We all do it because everybody else is. Even your boss is sick of it, and has wife who is sick of it too.
The only way to win is not to play. If that means moving on to another job so be it. Keep moving until the tide around you moves with you.
Operator, give me the number for 911!
We average about 50 hours a week, but there are weeks when it goes up to 60 or more. These aren't too often, however. Plus you know that scene in "Office Space" where we hear that there's a good amount of staring into space? There's some of that too. Take that out of my day and it's a more normal 40 hours of actual work.
The problem is in finding people. I interviewed over twenty candidates last year but no matter that the resumes read "Linux expert", many couldn't change a password expiration or expand an LV.
When I did contract work, we put in 60+ hour weeks because we wanted to. Rather than trying to find another "star" programmer, our team made do with the resources that we had and worked our butts off because of little issues like having to train any new hires on the techniques we were using. It would have been a good 3-4 months before a new hire would be productive, by which time the project would be almost over.
After the project, we'd take a month off and just relax, living off our savings.
Granted, it's not a life for everyone, but when you're living that way by choice because you like taking off a month at a time, it works out for both the client and the contractor.
Working as an employee outside the contractor mentality, I rarely was called upon to work overtime. The rumours of killer hours being demanded by employers are, in my experience, bullshit. The only employees I ever saw working such crunch hours were people who were so incompetent they just flat out couldn't keep up with the rest of the team. They were working overtime because they weren't good enough to be in the industry, not because anyone was forcing them to, unless expecting someone to do their job competently is "forcing" them to work overtime.
Sure there were emergencies where we had to pull all-nighters to fix problems, but those were exceptions and didn't happen more than once a month at most. If you're going to work a job that involves babysitting critical batch jobs, you're going to have the occasional night where the babysitting turns into repair and rerun -- you wouldn't be getting paid to carry a pager/cell phone if it weren't important to the company to have that backup to make sure jobs run to completion.
Startups, however, are another issue. I've worked for a couple of them, and that work environment sucks farts off dead chickens in the August heat. Startups tend to have this mentality that you're "investing" in the company and that you'll "get your rewards" when the company wins it big. But I've never worked for a company that "won it big." Instead, most of them fell over and crashed because they were dreaming big dreams without the cash and capital needed to make it reality, relying on being able to sucker staff into working obscene hours instead of paying them.
I hated working for startups. The pressure is intense, the demands are unrealistic, and the goals are unstable. The bottom line is that unless you own a startup, you're unlikely to ever see the payout. They're a con-job designed to line the pockets of the owner and investors, not to pay you what you're actually worth.
So, in short, if you're working 60 hours a week as a contractor, don't sweat it -- it's your choice. If you're called on to work 60 hours occasionally as an employee, make sure it's for the occasional emergency, not a regular fact of life. And if you're working for a startup, wake the hell up and find another job where you're going to get paid what you're worth.
I do not fail; I succeed at finding out what does not work.
I don't doubt there are people (young, single, apartment renters) who spend 60 hours a week at work, but I suspect that all those 60 hours aren't spent actually producing a work product.
There's a lot of time spent in IT waiting. Waiting for builds. Waiting for downloads. Waiting for installs, updates, restores, data transfer from box A to box B. And waiting is just one category -- there's yakking with co-workers, Google searches for work-related information that end up in some Wikipedia page 6 times removed from what you started looking for. Trips to the cafeteria, vending machines, smoking cigarettes.
I think for a lot of people with few strings attached work just becomes a place to be when they have nothing else to do. It's especially easy for technology people because a lot of them would be doing the same thing at home they'd do at work but it's less lonely in the office.
I have worked 60+ hour weeks only one time in my life. Before I joined this company, two of the three employees separately contacted me to warn that the boss was, in their words, "crazy." Unfortunately, I didn't believe them. I hadn't had any experience with crazy bosses up until that point in my career. The only other employee quit around the same time.
I lasted four months. The pay was good. And the job would not have been that difficult. It didn't even require more people. But the organization had definitely completely broken down. Everyone did five different jobs, everything from electronics repair to customer service to data processing to moving equipment. This was by design, apparently, in order to make the company more "agile."
I spent a lot of time automating simple data processing tasks, and working on improving physical processes that took a lot of time for no real benefit. But I couldn't make improvements quickly enough. Almost the entire time, the "crazy" boss was literally looking over my shoulder, telling me how to do every little thing in whatever particular way he thought was best. Even though I had been a Unix consultant for nearly a decade, he took it as his personal mission to teach me the wonders of Excel as a universal programming tool. Ugh.
I was actually relieved to eventually be fired, after working two weeks straight, including travel and weekends and 10-11 hour days, simply for taking a day off. One of the other employees left at the same time. The last thing I did was to fix an absolutely crippling issue that I had noticed on the first day on the job, but never had the time to properly investigate. They had re-programmed a bunch of wireless routers with the same MAC address. Brilliant.
Last I heard, they had hired a dozen people shortly after I left. Probably all Excel experts.
"I assumed blithely that there were no elves out there in the darkness"
There have been many periods in my career when I worked 60+ per week because I enjoyed it and wanted to. I got a lot accomplished during those times.
I'm from Eastern Europe, and I can't believe that 40-hours a week jobs in America can't feed and house you. I guess it really depends on your expectations about the house and the food.
But since everyone around you has a nice house and car, it would be shameful if you don't - especially if you're married, because then it would be shameful for your wife and children, too. So you're overworking yourself for status in society, so that people don't look down upon you and your family.
Programming 60 real hours in a week is extremely difficult. Try this. Start a timer when you're doing some real work, not goofing off on /. or procrastinating. Trust me, if you can clock 60 real work hours in a week, you'll be mentally exhausted and will have no motivation to do anything for 2 to 3 days.
ayottesoftware.com
Reminds me of an experience I had years ago when working late. An older employee stops by and says "Bob, you are here because you don't have a wife. I'm here because I have a wife."
Some of my co-workers brag about working 12-hour days, as if to say they're more valuable than the rest of us. I think it's important to be able to do that in an emergency, but it's no way to operate for any length of time. I don't care who you are or what you do — nobody puts out quality work for twelve hours a day, at least not for very long. And this is especially true when it comes to code. The very best coders can write truly great code for about six hours a day, tops, before they're mentally exhausted.
The Papa John's Pizza franchise in Minnesota (PJCOMN corp) would pay it's general managers (GMs) a salary based on a 40-hour work week, but required that all GMs schedule themselves for a minimum of 50 hours per week.
At the store I worked at, 2 of our shift leads quit at the same time, leaving only the GM and one shift lead to run it for over a month. This meant that both of those people were working 60+ hours a week. Because shift leads are paid hourly, and GMs were paid fixed-salary, the shift lead ended up making more than twice as much per week as the GM.
In other words, people on salary who work more than 40 hours a week are simply being taken advantage of by their employer, and the employer loves it when you work 60 hours for 40 hours worth of pay
Umm where i live 40 is a single person, so 80 hours would be 2 people, not 60 hours. Where do you live that 30 a hour work week is normal?
---- Booth was a patriot ----
(with apologies to Python's 4 Yorkshiremen) ... now the youngsters only work 72 hours per week plus turnover. For safety reasons, nudge, nudge, wink, wink.
But seriously, what matters is the reason. For the right reasons, long hours are fine. For the wrong reasons or in the wrong environment, 40h can be too much. Decide what matters most to you and follow it.
Then you won't be getting up half an hour before you go to bed!
Why do people blame Obama for this? It's not his fault that the rich bankers built themselves a house of cards. He isn't the one who invented balloon payments, or gave home loans to people who clearly couldn't pay them back.
The only thing he did wrong was trying to bail out the banks instead of just letting them fail
You have no idea. Step outside of your cushioned office and onto, say, a factory floor. Sometimes merely existing in a hostile environment (heat, insane humidity or near zero humidity, noise so loud that even "jawjacking" ends up being too much effort, constantly dodging forklifts, confined spaces, etc) is honestly real work.
And waiting / watching / observing is still "work". It's focusing your attention on the task at hand, ready to respond at a moment's notice, plus not to mention thinking up solutions on-the-fly and meetings with the myriad of by-standing managers about "what the problem is".
And no, it's not about "getting it right the first time". Sometime the environment itself or how people act is incalculable ahead of time.
Then there are the people who really do need to spend 60 hours working - to achieve what everyone else manages to produce in 35. Slow, incompetent, indolent or simply easily distracted? You choose.
Finally we have the individuals who actually prefer to be at their job - rather than at home, either on their own, getting an earful of "verbal", or simply staring at the wall becuase they have no friends and less imagination about what to do with the empty voids between sleeping and working.
There are plenty of people who work these long hours for the reasons above. Whether they brag about it, or whether others see them as the pathetic specimens they are would depend. But if you do work tose hours, maybe it's because it's either your own fault or it's your way of escaping.
politicians are like babies' nappies: they should both be changed regularly and for the same reasons
in which case it is mandatory, thus impressing nobody and depressing you.
Didn't this use to be standard?
I mean, this author is generalizing from his experiences at a graphic design company to the entire American workforce. Does anyone else see a problem with this? Historically, everyone used to work a ton on a farm or in manufacturing. Maybe it makes sense for people to work a ton on a farm, or in (industrializing, pre-robot) manufacturing. Maybe it doesn't make sense for people to work a ton at paper-leaf.com.
I don't think it's possible to generalize accurately. I'm totally happy, and productive, working 60 hour weeks split between programming and construction projects.
Yeah, that's also my reaction. I regularly do between 50 and 60 hrs a week by working 11 - 12 hrs a day the whole week (and nothing the week end cause I would otherwise go insane), I've been doing occasonially 70 hrs (that is, add 10 hrs during the WE), and I think my max was around 80 hrs for some relly tough deadline near the end of my PhD. Right now, I finished a hard period, and I'll be calming things down to around 40 hrs a week in the few next month to regain some health. Seriously, 60 is hard, around 70 is just insane, and over that is ruining your health more quickly than anything else I've ever seen.
I've never met someone who was at work before me in the morning (8am) and still there when I quit (9pm) every day, and I'm "only" doing between 50 and 60. Of the friends that say they do big weeks, most of them try to call me before 8pm, so they're lying. So yeah, basically people count commute and lunch when they say over 60, and I am pretty sure not a lot of people have experienced a real 60 hrs week of work, without counting lunch, commute and pauses (which makes it around 14 hrs a day when you add these moments).
And anyone who has a kid and says he does over 50 is just lying...
Video of some good progressive thrash music
Indeed it can. the Bureau of Labor reports that the percentage of people that are poor in the US AND working at least 1000 hours per year is just 4%. Considering a full time year is 2000 hours, the % of those that are poor and working full time is practically 0.
Also, the average hours worked a week for a poor person in the US is 16.
So, being poor in the US is largely because you can't find work.
In sure somewhere in here is a relevant Dilbert... http://search.dilbert.com/comi...
I also turn OFF my cellphone and refuse to even look at email after 5pm. Those that deserve the badge of honour are the ones that have the balls to stand up for themselves and force their employer to not be assholes.
Why 39.2? because I go home 10 minutes early every day but get paid for it anyways. IF they can stand around smoking outside the office 6 times a day on the clock, then I can take a 10 minute "smoke break" at the end of the day.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
Many people here need to read 'in praise of idleness' from Bertrand Russell'.
"I don't doubt there are people (young, single, apartment renters) who spend 60 hours a week at work, but I suspect that all those 60 hours aren't spent actually producing a work product."
So you argument says 'You don't believe it, and if people say it is happening, it's not happening"
Well done, sharp thinker!
"There's a lot of time spent in IT waiting. Waiting for builds. Waiting for downloads. Waiting for installs, updates, restores, data transfer from box A to box B. And waiting is just one category -- there's yakking with co-workers, Google searches for work-related information that end up in some Wikipedia page 6 times removed from what you started looking for. Trips to the cafeteria, vending machines, smoking cigarettes."
Sound like you are projecting you lazy ass onto others.
Who the hell doesn't nothing else while A build is happening?
A) Builds are really fast.
B) There is documentation to be done
C) This isn't 1985. You can build and work on other code.
D) Yes, there is some communication between workers. This is a great way to exchange information. So what?
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
Letting them fail would have been a disaster.
This isn't an Obama thing. Previous administration new it, economist knew it. The problem is banks are allowed to have their fingers in too many pies.
You could have bank collapse and take a whole serious of commodities with it. Five the price up, and/or collapse of several industries.
At the time I though they should just fail, but I know some experts in the field, and talking with them gave me some information that made me reevaluate my position.
OTOH, all the loans sold under false pretenses should have the loan done away with and full ownership returned to the person who borrowed.
That would have been a long term market force that would have made the financial institution police themselves in the future.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
I normally work 70/wk average. Last year, I had a 3 month run averaging 90/wk, peak was 119 hrs. Yes, organizational dysfunction was at fault, but I've very rarely worked at jobs without such dysfunction.
When I completed my general surgery residency we were working 90-100 hours per week. 60 hours per week would have been a piece of cake. I lost all of my sympathy for people complaining about how hard they work, even when it's 60 hours per week. Even today's residents that are limited to an 80 hour work week are wusses.
I don't get overtime pay, but I do get "incentive" pay for anything over 32 hours per week. Since my job can't be done in bad weather, I kinda like having my base salary during those slow times. In good weather I can double my pay with only a little bit more effort.
I like to joke that I'm paid twice a month weakly. I'll never make what I think I'm worth; it would drain the Federal Reserve Bank!
Overworking is the reason why we had all those 40-hour-workweek iniatives in the late 1800s. It applies to all industries. I happen to be a teacher, and you can expect 60-80 hour weeks as a matter of course (no pun intended). I fully agree that organizational failures show up as overwork in this fashion, and have to look no further than schools.
In this country if you finish at 6 o'clock they think you are a stupid that is not grateful with the company and the job you have. The bosses expects you work 1 hour for free after all. So this article is again made for a guy with PhD. and is a boss of his own company, who has a huge muzzle for imagine a fantasy world for himself.
The poster you replied to did not specify what level of management had failed. He is correct that a regular 60 hour work week is a management failure. As previous posters have pointed out, numerous studies have shown that working more than 8 hours a day yields progressively lower productivity. So that a person working somewhere between 10 and 14 hours a day for any length of time is less productive than someone working only 8 hours a day (I no longer remember the number of hours a day where that change occurs).
The truth is that all men having power ought to be mistrusted. James Madison
I've done a couple of 100s, but I'm hoping that never happens again. I was working Quality Assurance and Systems Engineering on a project for a major customer when 9/11 hit, and exactly 1 month later, the entire team was laid off except me and the documentation writer (all four devs and both full time QA people). We had a fixed deadline to ship to that customer, Jan 1 with 1 month manufacturing lag, so I had to be done by Dec 1, and coding wasn't even complete. The substitute programmers burned the midnight oil and handed me a first working copy mid-November and I worked 117 hours that week first configuring the environment to be like the customers and then testing (tests which were thankfully mostly scripted, but there were 1100 of them), sleeping all but one night in the office, usually about 2-3 hours. Round 2 (after bugfixes) was the next week, where I tallied 106 hours, mainly because I was not allowed to work on Thanksgiving day.
I couldn't go to my managers to ask for help because a) my manager and his direct report got laid off, b) my new manager didn't know the project at all and had just been bumped from peon into management (but she eventually turned out to be the best manager I ever had), and c) training alone would suck up two weeks of my time... but 70% of QA was laid off, so there was nobody to train - everyone else had to be on board for a March product release that had just lost 1/2 its staff (again a customer commitment).
Two months after that, we hired our first 1000 workers (roughly) in India and it probably took 2 months to ramp them up. They may cost 1/3-1/4 as much, but early on many of them were worth what you paid for, which is not much. The cultural taboo of reporting bugs being an insult to the programmers that wrote the code didn't help. After about 5 years, their quality improved and then we started hiring Chinese and had a similar ramp up. Now I think both groups are quite decent, but I don't think firing over 60% of the US workforce without transitioning knowledge was the brightest way to transition to that (and yeah, that is jumping in with both feet...).
Where I work, the corporate policy for salaried workers is 45 hours. We recently got some new hires and they told us that they got a pep-talk from the boss when they were hired that they are "expected a minimum of 60 hours and that 80 is normal". Of course, this is the same boss who drones on and on about how much he loves the Chinese work ethic. That they will work from 5 in the morning until 11 at night, they eat while working and take all their business calls after hours to ensure productivity. All this for a fraction of the pay of an American worker.
Needless to say the office has become hell since this guy took a more direct role in our affairs. Lots of good people were fired, even more have left for greener pasture$. Apparently engineers with family lives are make for worthless engineers.
Slow Down Cowboy! It's been 1 hour, 47 minutes since you last successfully posted a comment
Or we could force your boss to not be such an asshole.
Yourself Inc.
No WAY would I work those hours unless my name was on the front door.
Don't do it for anyone else except yourself.
Got Geometrodynamics? Awe, too hard to figure out? Too bad.
I did that sort of time once for a very unethical boss but most of it was sitting around and waiting. It was with a non-destructive testing crew during a prolonged plant shutdown. The prick would have us turn up at 7am, sit around waiting most of the day, may doing 1 or 2 hours actual work, than at 5pm after the safety inspectors had gone home we'd do stuff, often being interrupted at intervals and told to go slow. At 3am we went home, got some sort of sleep, then started it all over again. It turned out that we were getting paid a flat hourly rate but the client was getting charged shitloads for overtime. A couple of times I fell asleep high up on scaffolding. I certainly wasn't in a fit state to drive, but did anyway. I stuck it out for six weeks for some reason, I'm still not sure how or why, probably because the shutdown was only supposed to be for two weeks so the end always seemed to be in sight. Before I went in I thought it would have been like previous well run jobs where you get in, work as quickly as possible for 12-14 hours, then get out with enough time for sleep.
Anyway, the lesson of that anecdote is that if you are doing those sort of hours something is very badly broken, often deliberately. Even in life and death situations efforts are made to relieve medical staff or troops long before it gets that far.
Long hours make sense during maintainance shutdowns, tight change windows or when things go seriously wrong. It's only making a habit of it that's the problem.
However it's not something you should do for free.
Some people brag about working long hours but may just not be good time managers or may not perform efficiently with their jobs. Many jobs work in "waves" of activity with requirements for more hours when the shit hits the fan and time for slacking or working on discretionary projects when things mellow out. I've worked in such a job. It's actually pretty fun to work in this atmosphere. The bottom line is to get the job done. If one is constantly working long hours, it can be a result of several factors. Perhaps someone just likes working long hours. Perhaps they don't have a good family life at home and work is their escape. They could be stupid and it just takes them a long time to get stuff done. It is possible for their management to be under-staffing. In that case, adapting to the situation by permanently working long hours masks the problem of under-staffing. However, if one allows this to continue, it'll likely become status quo. There's really no "one answer" to this situation. In my case, I worked in a small engineering team for "one of those big computer companies" and really enjoyed my job. Most of the time (in my case) I didn't have to work 40 hours to get things done. This was primarily because of effective time management and experience with my skill. YMMV
American workers get zero vacation days when they start a new position unless they were smart enough to negotiate a week or two during the hiring process. Even so, with these high pressure 60+ hour/week jobs, they frown on workers who dare to take their accrued vacation times. Some of these workers would rather lose their vacation time then appear to be "slackers" to their managers. In contrast workers in certain other countries are given a boatload of vacation from day one.
"1 month later, the entire team was laid off except me and the documentation writer (all four devs and both full time QA people). We had a fixed deadline to ship to that customer [...] I don't think firing over 60% of the US workforce without transitioning knowledge was the brightest way to transition"
Unless you are the company owner, no, "we" didn't have a fixed deadline, your company, the one that laid off 60% of the employees, had a fixed deadline. And given the results, your are wrong: the way they managed the transition was brilliant because it was cheap and sucessful... thanks to a simpleton that was working 2.5x for free.
As an American, I'd rather work 40hrs/wk and would happily take a lower salary to do so. Wish it was feasible (without working for myself, which in and of itself wasn't even an option until Obamacare passed due to the inability to get healthcare coverage for myself + family). So many people I know would consider this lazy. But it's not. It's just another way to live. A better way, in my opinion.
My God can beat up your God. Just kidding...don't take offense. I know there's no God.
I get paid by the hour though.
When I interviewed for my current job, I told them I worked 40 hrs a wk in my prior job and that if they were expecting more than 45 hrs a wk from me than it wouldn't a good fit. I've since been there a long time and I've rarely worked over 40 hrs and never over 45 hrs.
My God can beat up your God. Just kidding...don't take offense. I know there's no God.
No, add 8 hours. That way his boss cans say "You blow me and I'll owe you one."
I work from home ~95% of the time. I try to stick to a 40-hour week, but quite often I push into 45 or 50 hours.
The thing is, I don't have a commute. I start working almost immediately after waking up; eat breakfast while going through emails from the US; take a few breaks during the day (including for lunch), and usually finish around 3pm.
But if I'm heavily involved in something (I'm a software developer), I might keep working until 5pm, or even dinner. If I do that a couple of times in the week, I've hit 45+ hours.
I had a commute, that would be 40 hours a week *plus* 5-10 hours depending on traffic. Plus as a contractor I'm billing for all the hours I work ...
How about 169? :)
I notice there are only 168 hours in a week - please share your time technology!
A lot of this badge of honour BS sounds a lot like my Japanese friends. Where they are made to feel guilty if they leave on time as betraying the country. As a result there is something called Karoshi death from overwork, people literally dying at their workstation. I've done some crazy stuff in my time. Working in accounts around tax season 100+ hour weeks were normal but then we got time off in lieu. Working for myself I maxed out at 126 hours a week when my company was first starting up, this went down to 90 and then 56 as I bought in more and more staff it fell to 45 after I got enough staff. However being squeezed by inflation and tax increases I found myself saving money by letting staff go and covering more for myself. I found myself back at 80+... I realised my company was untenable and I was trading my health for my business. I threw in the towel and shut the company.
Imagine
"Your 60-hour police work is not a badge of honor" and then in the text: "it's a sign that favelas are screwed up organizationally".
I do not believe in karma. "Funny"=-6. Do good and forbid evil. Yours, Oft-Offtopic Flamebaiting Troll.
Give me a 2x,3x,4x,5x multiplier on an hourly wage above $25 an hour and I'll gladly work 60-80 hours a week for 6-12 months straight.
You want me to work that on a salary that is less than $80-100K? How about no. Happily I am in a good place in life right now. After working my ass off for 20 years, work now is an option not a requirement.
To be fair, a month after 9/11 who wasn't afraid of losing their job? Management could ask for anything back then.
Why should we care about that?
I am not responsible for my co-worker's happiness or contentment. They are responsible for their own happiness and contentment.
If you are happy being 'another brick in the wall, then bully for you! But at the same time, you should not resent others for the choices you made.
If you want a valid target for your resentment, look into a mirror.
I'm strictly mercenary in attitude when it comes to 'work'.
You get my time, abilities, effort, and motivation for 'work' for a negotiated pay, and in proportion to said pay.
That means that at scheduled quitting time, I go home, unless my employer can offer enough extra pay to convince me to stay longer....no matter what else is happening.
That also means that any time off(vacation, or whatever) I take, I also take as needed(the time off being part of the negotiated pay for the job), again no matter what else is happening.
That also means, that while I'm at 'work', I work. That is also part of the deal, often overlooked in my experience. But that is a separate issue that will cause the resentment you speak of.(and justified, IMO)
I view my job as a way to have money for living life.
Your approach seems the opposite to me:
"I have a life in order to work."
(note: I am not claiming that is your viewpoint- only that is how I see your viewpoint just from your comment, and probably does not actually represent your viewpoint-just trapped by that attitude/viewpoint)
In a nutshell, instead of resentment, you should try contemplation instead. Think about it. It's your life, maybe you should take it seriously, and try to enjoy a little of it.
Down With Slashdot BETA!!! I've been around the corner and seen the oliphant; you can only abuse me from your perspecti
Gee, look at me! I get to spend 96 hours a week helping thousands of us build our Pharaoh's pyramid. I get all the millet I can eat. I will be provided for, and history will remember and honor my family. It's all about me, and no one will remember the pyramid.
Maybe if you werent using the beta, it would cut time.
Pfft... Until you start getting bored and tired of it, and lose your outlet for frustration and stress. I happen to know a lot of musicians, skydivers and dispatch riders. Musicians in orchestras, if they aren't the lead chair they get maybe two or three bars with one or two notes. You get sick of the same set over and over and over and over again. Travel to a new city same set over and over. Skydivers... some become instructors, some become tandem masters. But have a look at the many youtube videos of tandem jumps. A lot of them have forced smiles because they are so incredibly bored out of their minds having done it 10,000+ times. Dispatch riders, I've been one, I used to love riding motorbikes.... I don't anymore...
I worked those hours because I liked my job! My boss was well aware of the work I did. As a result I was given great flexibility and freedom as well as advancements...and pay. I worked for good people and had good people working for me. 20 years ago, I spent as much time logged in, working from home as I did at the plant, often more. OTOH I sometimes went to work at 10:00 and left early to make up for it. They knew they would get another 6 or 8 hours of productive work from me at home.
I totally agree on the pride thing... I have a small business myself and I work over 60 hours a week, but that's of my own choice, and how I like it. I'm just a project driven person - even when I don't work 50+ hours a week, I find projects to work on to keep me from getting bored. But while I understand that networking is good for my business, I do very little of it... I just can't stand most "startup culture" people. Nearly all of my clients are regular small business people, and while I'm a lot younger than them - I enjoy their company a hell of a lot more than those who have pipe dreams of slapping together some startup, taking a pile of money to develop some new app or website, then selling to Google or whoever. I'm much more in tune with the people who have an idea, and love it so much that they make a living out of it... and (like the Snapchat people - who I have a great deal of respect for because of this) wouldn't sell it to anyone, even for a billion dollars.
"We must hold the just balance and set ourselves as resolutely against improper corporate influence on the one hand, as
"Many" economists may believe that, but certainly not all - probably not even the majority.
If you are going to pay someone a benefit, do so: send them a check or a bank transfer every month. Hiding subsidies and benefits as "reverse taxes" has lots of problems, but the biggest one is that it is a deliberate attempt to hide welfare benefits so that no one can be entirely sure who is receiving how much. It also adds to the complexity of tax returns and expands the IRS bureaucracy - both of which are goals that benefit only the existing bureaucracy.
Enjoy life! This is not a dress rehearsal.
Per the BLS, the quit rate is continuing to rise.
http://www.bls.gov/news.releas...
I'm hoping that employee abuse will be forced to decline as a result.
My last job before I retired, they worked us 70+ hours per week (multiple heart attacks, divorces, etc) with the implied promise we'd pick up SAP skills and have nice jobs after the implementation. Then (as happens with MANY SAP implementations), at the end they laid 95% of us off and upgraded Infosys (who had been "helping") to support the entire project.
I had to work thru it since I was so close to retirement (and they were paying us very well and providing free lunch and dinner while working us in 20 day long "weeks" of 12 hour days ) but my advice is- if Infosys is brought in to "help", start looking for a new job. Many of the people let go have not found work and it's been over a year.
I met a ex co-worker on the plane back from Winter Park last night and she said the conditions are better (40-50 hour weeks for six months now) but Infosys has been a challenge to work with. They are very literal and they never ever say no to anything. They just say they'll "do their best" and you have to understand that means "no, I can't do this." Upper management still plans on this as a "yes." so there have been repeated failures to meet targets.
Get your certs and find a new job if your employer is abusing you. You don't have to take it right now and sometime soon we are going to have another 6-18 month long downturn. The current cycle is 62 months long-- that's historic in length.
She was like chocolate when she drank... semi-sweet at first and then increasingly bitter.
Who told me that until I work a 70+ hour week I'm not even trying...
This is definitely a problem, this is the D measuring contest of the IT world.
If anyone ever says this to me in real life I'm going to laugh them out of the room...
I "work" around 44 hours a week, I do about 20 hours of actual work, browse Reddit/Imgur/Hackernews/Slashdot the rest of the time...and I make 60K.
I am fine with this, I am never joining this D measuring contest in IT, so I hope you all die from work exhaustion soon....
Don't worry, if the good people are being fired or leaving, it's just a matter of time until the whole shithouse comes crumbling down.
Of course, the psychopath who caused the problem will not be blamed he will just be promoted or transferred to another cushy job.
Start looking for another job, as soon as possible.
Was it two weekends or two months? How were people with family or other commitments treated? Was hard work rewarded with bonuses, comp time, cool parties?
I don't think it's reasonable to expect any manager to get timeline of a half a year project down to a couple of days, or hire people only needed for 10 days per year. As long as corporate culture is heathy, hard work CAN be a badge of honor.
Actually, working 60 hours a week is pretty easy, especially for people with multiple jobs. Part of this is a side-effect of employers preferring part-time jobs over full-time. This results in people needing to work two jobs to get decent hours, because each job is only 25-30h and won't pay the bills, but cumulatively the two jobs may be 50-60h+, and end up with back-to-back shifts and little time for more than sleeping in-between.
How about 169? :)
I notice there are only 168 hours in a week - please share your time technology!
Fall DST changeover week gets an extra hour.
Should have become a Yanky football player and gotten a scholarship and bullied your nerds to do your assignments whilst you are off on a fratternity booze up.
Yeah... professional sports isn't a career path either. They're a pyramid with very few spots at the top.