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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.
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.
...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.
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.
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.
This is Slashdot, where the edge use case wins, every time.
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!
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.
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.
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."
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
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
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.
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.
Quote from a Microsoft manager: "You can make people be in the office for more than 40 hours a week. You can't make them work more than 40 hours a week. "
"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
I spend 40 hours a week at work and about 30 of those in front of a computer and at most 1/2 of that time actually programming. The rest of that time is clearing my mind so I can think strait.
During my most productive days, I may spend 3 hours actually programming, and I will be completely burnt out from it. Mental work is quite draining.
I've recently developed a strange kind of insomnia. If I do not get mentally worked during the day, I have a very hard time getting to sleep. Can take me hours, leaving me with under 5 hours of sleep, and I hate taking drugs of any kind. My mind gets stuck in a creative mode and I can't stop thinking. It ultimately stems from boredom. I cannot get bored, otherwise I can't sleep, I need to challenge myself.
I've posted earlier that I don't like vacation time much, and this is partially why. I must keep learning and must be challenged, otherwise sleep eludes me. My job helps me in both of those areas. I do a lot of thinking and research for my projects. I almost have to work, otherwise I would go crazy. I do have a hobby, but it's nearly the same as my job and is unfortunately expensive. My work pays for the resources I need, but at home, I have to pay myself. Server hardware is expensive.
Seriously? I know full well that at least in SFO, ATL and PDX that a solid sysadmin, DevOps, or DBA has no shortage of openings to pursue. I get pestered at least 6-10 times a week with reputable offers (and don't ask how many fly-by-night Indian outfits I've had to spam-can).
I think I know what's going on... or at least part of it. It's because the market is short-handed in many areas.
I'm trying to hire sysadmins right now - once we weed out the bullshitters and the obviously incompetent, the rest demand one hell of a high salary (call it at least $95k/yr outside of SFO, and $150k/yr inside SFO), and odds are good that management is going to be forced to cut loose with the funds to do it (and for myself as well, damnit). We managed to hire exactly one out of the four slots we have open... in the past 5 months. Meanwhile, I'm trying to make do with the staff I got. We avoid pushing anyone above 50hrs/week, but I often catch a lot of them working 60+ hours anyway.
IMHO, given the amount of work that is out there (at least in my neighborhood of tech), any employer who thinks they can treat employees like crap will quickly find that they're stuck with either no staff, or incompetent staff - either way they're screwed. Example? No problem. A local company around here tried to recruit me as a DevOps (they call it a "Systems Engineer" position.) However, not only was it named as one of the worst companies in tech to work for, but nearly everyone in the local area I asked has warned me off from 'em (there was plenty to say about them, and little of it good. To top that off, my own research backed it up.)
Quo usque tandem abutere, Nimbus, patientia nostra?
I think farm work traditionally has long days during planting and harvest periods, but in between is a lot less time intensive than we think. I don't think there's a shortage of work to be done in between, but a lot of it is dependent on daylight. You just can't get much done in a field in the dark.
In climates with anything approaching winter, there's even less to be done. Livestock may need tending, cows need milking, but there's no field or garden work to be done. I think a lot of winter work now involves machine maintenance.
And I'm sure there's a lot of variation depending on the era; technology substantially changes the labor equation.
Ok, is that irony?
It's reality.
In IT fields it is not reality. There are a ton of jobs out there, and it's easy to get one if you're good at what you do.
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.
"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.
No, add 8 hours. That way his boss cans say "You blow me and I'll owe you one."
Wait until your resume shows you're over 40.
Most of our best candidates so far are well past 40.
Unlike programmers, age really doesn't have the same impact in employability for everyone else... in fact it seems to enhance it in many aspects (e.g. you're less likely to find the 'cowboy' type in older sysadmins.)
Quo usque tandem abutere, Nimbus, patientia nostra?