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.'"
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 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.
Neoliberalism
I'm glad I'm out of the race to the bottom.
Average American monthly wage is $3769. Average French monthly wage is $3698. Even though they're working about 15 hours less per month.
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.
Why is America a super power? Because we work our asses off. Nuff said.
What benefit does that give you, as an American, over a Canadian?
Other than thumping your chest and saying "We're a superpower (that pats down grannies at checkpoints) BOO YAH!" what benefit does that yield *you*, as a person compared to a Canadian?
...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.
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.
Complete bollocks. Americans get 0 weeks of vacation, French have mandated 6. There's your difference, ignoring the differences in hours per week.
Also take into account the fact that the US Per Capita GDP is extremely bloated; median income is near equal.
Believe it! That's why Walmart and McDonald's HR include people to help you get food stamps. They know they don't pay well enough to actually live. The expectations are food that is legal to buy for human consumption and housing that hasn't been condemned as uninhabitable.
The car thing is seriously variable. Housing where public transportation is available tends to cost more than housing without it, but then you need a car.
Cheaper books, apparently. Suck it, Canada!
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
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
Too bad that's all there is for the people working there trying to feed their families. There is simply no excuse for any full time job (and yes, 39.5 hours is close enough to full time, it's just a dodge to avoid benefits) to not pay enough to at least get by without needing government assistance. No excuse whatsoever.
The minimum wage should be set such that no person working full time qualifies for any sort of food stamps or welfare AT LEAST. If we set it at any less than that the taxpayer ends up subsidizing employer's payroll. The press costs what it costs to run and if you pay less it dies. An employee costs what he costs to run and if you don't pay enough, he dies (except for public assistance since we don't want dead Wallmart employees littering the streets).
Boo Hoo, a Big Mac might cost an extra quarter (yes, that would actually be enough to cover raising minimum wage to a barely livable wage).
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?
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.
Well, that's all of us subsidising these corporations to pay lower wages through our taxes and gov services through our social services. People shouldn't put up with that. I'm in favor of needed social services, but not so that companies can pass the buck.
My God can beat up your God. Just kidding...don't take offense. I know there's no God.
You might not have noticed, but a lot of people lost their decentish jobs over the last few years and have had to take minimum wage jobs. What is your suggestion, sell the kids for experiments?
Meanwhile, it is hardly unreasonable to expect 40 hours of ANY job to be enough to have a family (perhaps you didn't notice, but that is a normal part of human life).
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.
It's simply called "Arbeitslosengeld" - unemployment money. That is the regular unemployment benefits as you probably know them from your country.
However, after the Agenda 2010 reforms, after one year of unemployment (irrespective of reasons) or under a variety of other conditions (which largely affect especially young people, like not having worked for at least one year in the job you just lost), you will be moved to "Arbeitslosengeld II" - yes, that's just the same with a roman numeral. In colloquial german it is mostly called "Hartz 4", because a Mr. Hartz was the industrialist/lobbyist who came up with the whole concept and convinced the government of it and it was the 4th part of a multi-part reform.
Hartz 4 is very low, in fact it has been raised at least twice because our highest court has ruled that it violates human rights and doesn't allow for humane living conditions. It is tied to a long list of conditions and regulations and even though it is already set as a minimum living expenses, not meeting those conditions can result in further reductions or non-payment for up to three months.
The "idea" behind it is that unemployed people are just lazy and need to be pushed to get back into work. Somehow, people living in ivory towers never got the newsflash that in most industries the number of available jobs is less than the number of available workers.
Oh yes, they can also force you to work for âÂ1/h. That is not a typo. One Euro per hour. If you refuse, your Hartz 4 money will be cut.
50 years ago, there would've been blood in the streets if they had tried this system. But they were smart and spent a decade (and three different government coalitions) to establish it, and like the frog in the story about boiling waters, the country didn't jump out.
The idea works, that's for sure. I have friends who have been on Hartz 4, and one of them is right now afraid of losing her job because it would mean she loses the small appartment she just rented a few months ago and everything she's worked for for the past years. She has panic attacks and is deathly afraid. I'm not using that term lightly, the german word is "Existenzangst" - existential fear.
It would work if it weren't based on a flawed assumption - that the reason for unemployment is that people don't want to work and much rather enjoy unemployment benefits. That kind of people probably exist. Almost certainly, they are like 1% of the unemployed. For the rest, more force doesn't magically generate jobs.
The hidden agenda (what a fitting term!) is of course to increase pressure on the workforce so people accept worse jobs for less money. And that has worked very well. Wages are actually declining, and a lot of people work in part-time work and a lot of people work for money that nobody sane would've worked for one or two decades ago, because it simply isn't enough to feed and house a family.
Assorted stuff I do sometimes: Lemuria.org
What convinces you that someone working full time should not necessarily be able to have a normal life? I'm not talking McMansion and two new cars, just the basics needed to live without government assistance.
A full time job should provide all the basics for a normal life (which means a reasonable size family). Keep in mind, many of the adult minimum wage employees aren't there because they have no more skills, but because that's the only job available and the employer has used their desperation for income against them.
Minimum wage during the Clinton presidency went further than it does today. Minimum wage has stayed put while inflation marches on.
Unskilled labor has never paid well, but not paying enough for even a small family is a fairly recent development. A long term labor surplus is also fairly new on the scale of written history.