What I’m reading here is crazy to me. It may be my Canadian perspecitve, though.
I work in one of the hottest business environments in North America - Calgary - and I work 40 hour weeks. Almost without fail. Most of my co-workers work the same hours.
The executives work longer hours, some MUCH longer, but I would estimate that 90% of the workforce in my company (mid-sized oil and gas company) work under 60 hours a week.
It’s hard to argue against longer hours without sounding judgemental, but most companies say that they respect a work/life balance and have policies that state in black and white that workers don’t have to work more than 40 hours a week.
I value my family time. Probably not more than a job, especially in these times, but I would push back against any attempt to make me work more than 40 hours a week on a regular basis over a long time period.
So, I guess I ask, why do you work so many hours? Those who are self-employed have more of an excuse, but those on salary, why do you allow it? Are you afraid for your job? Do you ever tell your superiors that you don’t want to work so much? Is a 40 hour week a fantasy that could never become a reality for many of you?
I don’t mean to offend, as my situation may be somewhat unique, but I’m curious why so many of you are willing to give up so much of your lives to an employer.
For a year or two, I worked 50-60 hours a week. 10 hours a day standard. I eventually told my boss I couldn’t do it any more, and after some struggling and threatening to leave he finally rearranged the infrastructure. Now working past 40 hours is unusual for us. (I suspect the job may have gotten too easy, as I find myself spending a lot of time online these days.)
I’m in the same boat as you; I can’t fathom giving over so much of one’s life to work. I suspect, and this is wholly assertion and I could probably be proved wrong, that most people used to doing so are older and remember when one spouse handled home chores and the other brought in money. The breadwinner could afford to give over most of his life during the week, as the weekend didn’t hold many chores for him to worry about and so could be used as downtime. These days, it’s more likely both spouses work, and so each needs a larger share of home life to handle both chores and downtime. Both my parents worked, so I’m used to that environment (although my dad did work plenty hard).
Granted, all that aside, it makes sense in certain situations. Sometimes the work just can’t be completed in 8 hours. If something takes 100 man-hours a week, it may be more sensible to have two employees working 50 hours a week instead of three employees. However, I was in this situation as the employee, and my stance (which I guess the boss agreed with) was that if we waited until, say, we needed 120 man-hours a week before hiring a third person, we’d be overworked prior, plus we had to train the newbie, plus we’d only just be running at capacity again, and as the business grew we’d just be in the same boat. Far easier to hire a third person when the work doesn’t quite call for it but is expected to, so we can have some time to get the newbie acclimated and also to leave room for expansion. Right now we could probably grow by another 25-40% and not be crushed by work.
I have a friend who routinely works 70-80 hour weeks (2 jobs one retail one white collar). He’s had several small strokes (and he’s not even 40). Suffice it to say my suggestions that he cut back on that a bit falls on deaf ears.
I’d think the opposite. My wife works from home, so when I come home she’s there. If she worked in an office, I’d think there would be an incentive for both of us to push coming home a bit later - if I needed an extra half hour, she’d be able to stay later without feeling guilty.
As for chores, there are lots of ways to pay people for them - cleaning the house, mowing the lawn, getting takeout for dinner instead of cooking. I think a bigger disincentive to working really long hours would be kids. When I was working crazy hours, I’d get home just in time - sometimes, to read a story to my kids, and I didn’t like that very much.
I have a question for those of you who work 70 hours a week - do you have a way of measuring the effectiveness of your work those last hours? Is it rote, or can you make mistakes? If you can, how often do you have to fix up what you screwed up at 8 pm?
I have learned that there are some times when I am well advised not to try to write any code, because if I do it will be such a mess that it would take me three times as long to fix it up.
Believe it. On my last job if I had a program running that took more than 5 minutes I would switch to another project. I took work home. My boss would not want me to work more than 50 hrs unless we were up against a wall but 50 was an acceptable number. I had to upgrade my internet service to be able to work at home. While it was unusual to be working at 3 am it was not unusual to have a conference call at 9pm due to time zone differences. If I emailed my boss at home I usually got a response pretty quick so I know he worked longer hours than I did.
I know people who consistently work 65 hr weeks. I would not want to do their job.
FYI, 50 hrs/week didn’t bother me but I also spent 20 hrs driving to/from work and that made my week more like 70 hrs. I didn’t get much done on weekdays. On snow-days I stayed home and the extra time was noticeable.
I work from 8am to 5pm (or 10am to 7pm), which would constitute a 40 or 45 hour work week depending on whether or not your count lunch. However, I commute 3 hours a day. Today I got up at 5:30am, left the house at 6am, arrived to work at 8, left at 5pm and got home at 6:30. That’s 12 hours away from home I spend every day (13 if the trains are running slow or I miss the express.) I don’t really consider commuting work per se, but it kind of punches holes in your theory that a 12 hour work day 5 days a week is an impossible life. It’s annoying and exhausting, but it’s certainly very possible. I just do everything on the weekends and have 1-3 hours of down time every weekday evening. I’ve seen people do far more demanding things. I’m not generally for the ‘‘work for work’s sake’’ mentality, but sometimes people just don’t have a choice.
Can’t speak for anyone else, but I worked that much because that’s what the job required . I supervised an office of about thirty people, I was new to the job ( and therefore got the most difficult assignment), two of my subordinate supervisors were even newer than I was and they needed to be trained. Why did I allow it? Because my kids were 17 and 18, I was at the top of my pay grade and couldn’t get any more raises without a promotion, and I knew it wouldn’t last forever.
I work on average about 50 hours a week (not counting lunches… I am usually at the office from about 8:15 to 7:15 or so). Sometimes I get down towards 40-45 if everything is under control - it usually isn’t. It’s not that bad now because I live about a 10 minute commute from work. The first six months I was at this job I was living at home with my parents to save up a bit of money before I moved out. That was a 1:10 or so commute each way, and that SUCKED. The way things are now doesn’t really bug me though, especially because those above me recognize the work I’m doing, the quality of it, and the fact that I’m always willing to show people things when they need help (which is where the extra hour or two a day comes from, more often than not). It’s not a bad gig for someone in their 20s in a long distance relationship.
When I was in high school, my dad worked from 3 a.m. until 3 p.m. every day at a Ford plant. The Taurus family was selling very well, and he helped build the transmissions for them. He was considered a short-timer by only working 12 hours per day; he had coworkers who routinely worked 16-20 hour days.
My senior year (1998-1999), he became one of those guys. It pissed me right off when I had to fill out my FAFSA! However, unlike many of his friends, my dad (and, of course, my mom) decided not to splurge and blow all of the money he earned. Instead, he paid off the house (a modest 998 sq. ft. ranch) and put a bunch of money away into his retirement funds/401(k).
As a slight hijack, this is why I get so pissed off at the anti-auto-worker posters here and everywhere else. I can’t even reply to threads about it, because I can’t set aside my emotions. My dad did everything the right way (from his generation’s perspective): he served his country when called upon (1967-1969), he worked a steady job for 34 years (1971-2005), he didn’t buy extravagant things (my parents still live in the house they bought in 1981, the year I was born), and he put away a ton of money into his retirement accounts. Yet, everyone thinks he doesn’t deserve his pension or health care package because he got “paid too much”. Look, the guy has lost over $30k from his 401(k) since October. My parents rarely go out, and have only come to Arizona twice: once to move me out here and once to visit. What else is he supposed to do? He’s 61 years old and had to have a stent installed to prevent him from having a heart attack; his back sucks and his knees, shoulders, and elbows are blown out from the factory. I’m frustrated by the lack of humanity that I’ve seen all over the internet when people talk about “those greedy UAW guys”.
Whoa… that was way more than a slight hijack. Sorry!
No one bitches about people like your father in the U.S. That is the American ideal and, to a lesser extent, the American dream although it sometimes sounds like more of a nightmare for many people. The United Auto Workers union doesn’t have anything to do with that and the problems are dissociated. He would be equally noble if he opened up a small chain of stores and did the same thing. The union itself may very well have serious problems that don’t relate to great people like him. I would be very proud but also separate the different issues.
My mother had a 125 mile one-way commute most of the time I was in high school in the late 1980’s. She literally drove 250 miles round trip every day and I had a so-callled part-time job that almost ran to 32+ hours a week including going to high school. I was self-supporting at age 16 including a new, small, pickup truck that I loved and carried me to freedom. The only thing that was paid for was the roof over my head and I came and went as I pleased without answering to anyone mainly because no one was ever around.
I think Americans do work way too much especially now that I have too small daughters and I (almost literally sometimes) have to push bosses out of my way when I leave my building at night to pick them up at exactly the right time down to the minute with a 45 minute commute. My wife works insane hours as well so we do tag-team parenting and both serve mainly as single parents.
Many if not most office workers have an official hour shift including nominal hour break for lunch, e.g. 8-5. Work through lunch, and another hour, every day, and there you are at fifty.
The place where my husband works(a foundry), had quite a few years where all the workers were working “12 on, 2 off” for 10 hours a day. That equals 120 hours in 2 weeks. My nephew worked there during that time. So many of the workers got used to all that overtime, that when the company slowed down to a normal 40 hour week, tons of workers freaked out because they couldn’t afford the expensive house or all toys that they had accumlated anymore.
My older brother just spent the last 3 years working 6 days a week, for 10 or more hours a day as a switchman in a train yard. He is really happy that he only works 5 days a week now. He still has 10 hour days though.
I never worked 50 or 60 hours a week. But for years I worked as much as 45 hours in 3 days!
I was a Nanny for a couple who are both Dr.s. for 10 years.
They have some VERY long hours. So mine were long too. I worked 3, 15 hour days a week some weeks. And sometimes I just worked 2 days a week for 15 hours.
The woman Doc worked 3 days a week for 15 hours. Every 3 weeks or so, she worked a fourth day a week.
And her husband worked 4 days for about 12-15 hours. A lot of Dr.s who are full time put in 70+ hours for a full week. That doesn’t even include all the “on call” hours. That is why this couple chose to work part-time. If they didn’t do that they would never see their kids. In order for both parents to work hours like these they have to have help.
They couldn’t even have children if they didn’t have people to step in. There were many days when I woke the kids up in the morning, spent the whole day caring for them, and then put them to bed, without the parents ever seeing them.
They also have a cleaning person, and hire people for lawncare, and odd jobs quite often.
Some companies (usually software related) have, ahem amenities in order to convince you to stay at work forever. But I heard some of EA’s (and Google’s) buildings have bunks, game rooms with billiards etc, I heard of one with a freaking POOL. I’m not sure what the official policy is about clocking hours while goofing off in those buildings, but one of the people I met said he once spent an entire WEEK at work (to be fair, this isn’t unheard of in the game industry, at crunch time before launch sometimes things get… hectic with people literally using sleeping bags at their desk. The webcam footage is ADORABLE, I know this happened to both Black and White 2 and Age of Conan).
Again, I’m not sure how much of this is actually logged as WORKING, but between tons of places to goof off and crunch-time status people in software can get pretty close to, and exceeding that amount of time at work (and the latter mostly IS work). However, and someone can correct me if I’m wrong (I kinda hope I am), I think most programming jobs in those companies are salary pay so it sort of sucks to be them, they may work 80+ hours a week when it’s a month before release but they get payed normally.
Good questions, really, and ones I have asked myself from time to time. What it comes down to is a balance between expectations, needs and market conditions.
On average, I spend between 50 and 55 hours a week in the office. Not 100% of that time is work, so I don’t feel completely crushed. I’ve done this for many years, basically since I started working in the financial sector.
I’m a computer programmer and spent my first two years out of college working at a software shop in the Defense industry, doing missile and flight planning systems and digital map analysis. I lived and worked in NJ but really wanted to be back in NYC where I grew up. I got cold-called by a recruiter, and landed an entry level job that paid me literally double what I was making as an entry level software engineer, in my first year. I could afford an apartment in NYC and still have lots of disposable income.
As a young twenty-something, working 55-60 hours a week wasn’t the biggest deal. I’d get home around 8:30pm, watch TV, play Quake on my computer, go catch a movie, whatever, and go to bed around midnight or later. I had plenty of time to do what I wanted. My apartment was about 20 minutes away from my office by subway. And the firm paid for food if you worked past 7pm, and a cab ride if you worked past 9pm.
After I proved my chops, the money got even better! My net income (including bonus) at the end of my third year at Big Global Financial Institution (when I got a promotion) was 75% more that from my first year, or 3.5 times what I had been making three years earlier as an entry level S/W engineer. So yes, it’s the money, which is addictive.
Now I have a family with three children, and have bought a house that entails a longer commute. The time away from my family can be stressful. I leave the house at 7:15am (6am if I want to get to the gym before going in to the office), and I normally get home between 7-7:30pm. My kids go to bed at 8:30. Some days, during a hectic period at work, I don’t see them (awake) at all: I leave the house before they get up, and get home after they’re in bed. That’s when I feel it the most.
On the other hand, my firm (not the one I started out at) is pretty generous with the time off: I get 5 weeks of paid vacation plus a few personal days. And after 10 years in the industry, my income is at least double what it would be in a traditional technical or engineering role of similar seniority.
There is no way I could have afforded to buy my current house, and have so much equity in it, without that extra income. I’ve always been something of a spendthrift, yet I’m net cashflow positive every month, while also putting away money for retirement and the kids going to college. Other than the mortgage on my house, I carry no debt. We take nice vacations and go out to eat all the time.
So in my calculus, it comes down to asking myself: is it worth working an extra 2+ hours a day, in a challenging and results-oriented environment that I find interesting and am well used to, in return for more vacation time and 2+ times the pay? It’s an easy answer. It’s yes.
A few weeks back I had an opera load into my theatre. I hit the 40 hour mark on Tuesday afternoon. 4 hours of prep on Sunday night, 8AM-Midnight Monday, 8AM-Midnight Tuesday. Wednesday I got a break and came in at 9AM. All together I hit 102 hours for the Sunday to Sunday period.
It was a heck of a week. The next week was back down around 50 hours and it felt like vacation.
And if I quoted the rest of robardin’s post it would almost mirror my own career.
I started as a computer programmer over 30 years ago, and easily put in 50+ hours a week without blinking. Through many advancements and promotions and increased responsibilities, if anything I’ve regularly put in closer to 60 hours per week. Particularly if I travel, or have late night or early morning conference calls with clients or partners overseas.
Now some might say the travel time wouldn’t classify as “work”, but it is certainly a direct consequence of the job – and I wouldn’t call it “pleasure”.
There have been a lot of war stories told in this thread, so I’ll add my own. Early in my career I volunteered for a special project that lasted about 9 months. At the time I had to fill in a timesheet, so I know exactly how much time I put in. Over the course of those 9 months, working 7 days a week, I averaged just under 90 hours per week. Fortunately I was not married (or I probably would’ve gotten divorced. :eek: )
None of these companies I’ve worked for have any sort of clocks. To a certain extent you’re working (by thinking) even when you are goofing off.
As for the sleeping bags, hours can get long at Intel also - but one of the first things we were told during orientation was that sleeping at your desk was an immediate firing offense. Someone immediately asked about the case where someone worked past midnight. The official policy was tough luck. I doubt it ever got enforced in design, but them even bringing it up is one of the many reasons I didn’t stay there long.
That is an excellent point. I have a knowledge job as well and I will not sit at my desk for more than one hour at a time without standing up or walking around. The nearest bathroom and the cafeteria are both less than a 45 second walk away. I got criticized for walking away from my desk so often by a very high level person during a performance review this week. That did not go over well on my side. My job is mainly just to think and I often solve problems by stepping away for 1 - 3 minutes and letting my brain do its thing. I have know idea how you can quantify that.
I know far more people than not who exaggerate the amount they work, but my wife legitimately works about 75 hours a week. She is a chef and has 2 jobs. Doesn’t get a break at either one of them (yes she could probably protest and cite some statute and get a break but she is not a complainer.)
It’s all a matter of circumstances. Before I had kids I worked 6 10’s in the middle east oilfields (need help with the math?), followed by 7 10’s in the Prudhoe Bay oilfields. Lots of money.
After kids, I “settled down” to life as a mid-level software manager, and with discipline I managed to keep the lid on at between 50-60 hours per week.
Now that my kids have grown up, I’m free to follow my heart and I’m a first year high school math teacher. I put in OVER 100 HOURS PER WEEK EASILY every week since summer school. For less pay than I’ve made in over 30 years. I love it. Blow me.
