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.'"
Umm... (Score:4, Interesting)
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!
Re:GDP (Score:5, Interesting)
Average American monthly wage is $3769. Average French monthly wage is $3698. Even though they're working about 15 hours less per month.
60? Pah, come back when you're in triple digits. (Score:2, Interesting)
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.
Re:When I hear "I work 60 hours a week"... (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
Re:GDP (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
Re:Another type that is interesting... (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
Re:wow really (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
Re:Your Boss (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
Re:American poor (Score:2, Interesting)
I work a 40 hour week and no more. I do just fine and don't spend more than 30% of any given paycheck.
Congratulations! You have just made an entirely pointless post that says nothing, and proves nothing!
Re:American poor (Score:4, Interesting)
Or you are middle class, and can't quit your job because you took out a huge loan to pay 3 times too much for a house.
Re:It's a status thing (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
Re:It's a status thing (Score:0, Interesting)
WM and MD jobs are not there for you to "actually live" on them, most of them are not. WM has over 2,000,000 employees, those are starter jobs, as in: you have no skills, you are at the beginning of your professional career, or maybe you are a new immigrant and need the first job in the country, type of jobs.
Just because gov't destroyed the economy in USA (and other countries) doesn't change the fact that WM and MD jobs were never meant to be anything else but starter jobs where even the current minimum wage is likely 2x-4x higher than it should be based on the number and qualifications of the applicants.
Now, if we are going to talk about 60hour weeks, I can talk about myself, I run my own company and my work day starts at 8:30AM and often doesn't end until 1:30AM or even later. Yes, I do have people working for me, no, I don't require them to stay past 6PM, in fact it's very rare that somebody stays event past 5PM. No, I don't pay minimum wage, I pay more than minimum wage, that's because the people I hire can get similar deals somewhere else and I in fact also hire mostly new guys, out of schools or even those who never finished college, I don't care about the degree. Yes, I train them myself, the company is small, so I don't have levels of management, I am the management. Maybe if I grow to over 40 people then it would be different.
My point is, /. is full of shit when it comes to talking of the economy, employment, business in general, it's a slice of general population here with higher than average arrogance levels but nothing much beyond that.
Re:It's a status thing (Score:3, Interesting)
"The capital raises the rents, and the state the rent benefits
In this way one fiddle with the Iron Law of Wages
and even pay less wages than the price of food and rent,
for the state merrily pitches in should the living expenses grow to great".
They then go on to give further examples of how a welfare society merely masks fundamental injustices in capitalism and how it is something which alleviates symptoms instead of going for democratic control of the means of production. I've long wanted to translate this song into English properly, because it's insightful and the ideas in it are somewhat foreign to most English speakers.
Re:When I hear "I work 60 hours a week"... (Score:3, Interesting)
K-12 teachers do it all the time.
As a former teacher, I can tell you right now that the claim is bullshit. For three months of the year, they're not working at all (unless they volunteer for summer school or suchlike, for which they get extra pay). Then we get to remove the snow days, weekends, holidays, the occasional bi-annual NEA-goaded strike, etc. On the adding portion, there are PTA meetings, and suchlike, but they don't really make up for much.
By the time you're done removing all that, it comes down to 32 weeks a year or so of actual workweeks. Of those, you would have to work 12 hours a day for five days a week just to make that assertion for just the 32 weeks, but there's a problem with that too: Most school hours are usually open 7:30am-3:00pm at the most, and most schools are ghost towns before 7am and after 4pm. Teachers from grade 6 on up (e.g. Middle/High School) alternate quiet periods (with no students) with active periods (students) so that they can grade papers, plan upcoming curriculum and syllabi, etc. Oftentimes, school districts will extend that alternating period schemata all the way down to the 2nd grade. ( As for the younger kids? Any teacher for grades 5 and under who cannot whiz through 45 test papers in 30 minutes for their kids really should not be teaching.)
Long story short, if you find a teacher working "60 hours a week", one of three things are wrong: Either the district sucks balls, the principal is shit, or the teacher is incompetent.
Re:It's a status thing (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
Re:American poor (Score:2, Interesting)
Car/Gas/Insurance (required by most jobs): $200/mo
Monthly bus pass $100
A (cheap) 2 bedroom apt: $900/mo
Get a roommate
Utilities (no longer included, thanks 2008 housing collapse :( ) : $200/mo
Step back to basic cable (or even broadcast TV) and drop the unlimited data phone plan. Never seen an apartment yet that split out HVAC by unit, and it's hard to spend that much heating/cooling a 2-BR, unless you leave the doors open all winter.
Health Care (with a kid): $400/mo
You're raising 2 kids on $27k: you qualify for Medicaid
Food / Toiletries (3 ppl): $600/mo (eating very poorly)
Number 1: if the best work you can get is minimum wage, maybe you should put off that second kid or ask your SO to help out with expenses. Number 2: $20/day will feed dad+2 kids pretty well, as long as he cooks. Seriously: that's 2 pounds of chicken + 2 pounds of rice + 4 pounds of carrots and a gallon of milk, with enough left over for salt, pepper and ketchup
If you're working 2 minimum wage jobs, you don't get the American Dream. You adjust your lifestyle. Those sacrifices will make your eventual success all the more sweet and motivate your kid(s) to rise above.
Any emergency (car [wreck], and the other guy drove off) and you're basically boned. I think I heard some economist call it a "Fragile Existence"
Yes, if you're living on the edge, then small calamities become disasters. One hopes those are the circumstances where your community (church, neighborhood, or government) pulls together and helps you through.