Your 60-Hour Work Week Is Not a Badge of Honor 717
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.'"
GDP (Score:4, Informative)
US Per Capita GDP is 51,704. French per capita GDP is 35,392. Americans work about 200 hours more per year.
Re:It's a status thing (Score:5, Informative)
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.
Re:GDP (Score:2, Informative)
In my 20 years in the workforce (mostly service jobs) I have NEVER had even a single day of paid vacation.
Hours worked is the key (Score:3, Informative)
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.
Re:Your Boss (Score:0, Informative)
Sucks to be American, right? In the (rest of the) civilised world unions are protected by law.
Re:No one is proud of overwork (Score:5, Informative)
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 [huffingtonpost.com], 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 [glassdoor.com] backed it up.)
Re: No one is proud of overwork (Score:4, Informative)
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.)