Of course no one objects - that would be losing status. In the job I just mentioned there was one guy who, due to a carpool, had to leave at a normal time every day. When we had to give one person an unsatisfactory rating due to company policy, guess who got it? He didn’t work for me, and his boss objected strongly, but our boss just insisted.
What is the upside of working 62 hours a week at this place? Do people get a piece of the company or the profits? Or do they just get to do it some more?
When I worked for E*Trade in the mid 90’s to early 2000’s when it was starting up, I regularly worked 50+ hrs a week (overtime after 40). I was in my late-20’s to early 30’s, married and with a small child. My hours were 5 or 6am to 3 or 4pm, often working through lunch, and sometimes on the weekend. Depending on how much work there was. Officially I was 6am-3pm with an hour for lunch. I was making a lot of money and we needed it. I would not have done it w/o compensation. When I switched departments and became salaried, I worked my 5am to 1pm and was out of the office at the closing bell.
My husband does 60-65 a week most weeks as a graduate student in clinical psychology. We tolerate it because we know it’s temporary. But man, he works his ass off. It’s exhausting to watch.
I did about 55 in grad school and it damn near killed me, but again - temporary. I do 40 now but commute 3 hours a day. I really love my job, but I don’t really want to spend more than 40 hours at work. I understand it’s sometimes necessary from time to time, but every week? No. My ideal job would be 25-30 hours a week. I guess I’m lazy.
My husband averaged that many hours for years. Of course, he had a wife who did all the family and school stuff. Everyone else was in the same boat, so it was just expected that the kids don’t see Dad at certain times of the year.
Yes, to some extent. Even if you don’t have much work, you still are socially obligated to be there a lot of time. They also end up giving you a lot more work than you could reasonably handle during the busy times. I’ve had corporate friends who camped out in the office sometimes because they either worked until after the last trains were running (somewhere around midnight, depending on location) or because it would be pointless to go home for a measly few hours of sleep. Those times were filled with real, actual work to do, for most people at least.
Japanese businesses are horribly inefficient in general. What’s even worse is the practice of false economies, like using salaried personnel for doing flyers or collating papers. From the point of view of pure money, it makes sense. Why pay a bit extra for temps to spend a couple of days doing the job when we can just make our salaried workers who we’re paying a flat rate work a few more hours during the week? From a time-for-value standpoint, it’s stupid to have your more highly paid and highly qualified personnel stuffing envelopes at 4x the pay rate of the temps when they could be doing something more productive, and would have higher morale. For some reason, those elements don’t make it into the calculus of business decisions here.
I’ve ranted on stuff like false economies and Japanese working conditions, as well as Japanese tech business at length on my blog. (One of the reasons my update schedule is so irregular is because of the work hours.)
I quite secondary school teaching because the hours were just ridiculous - holidays were OK, just a few (ten or so) hours marking and prepping, but term times meant 75 hours a week and still struggling to catch up - none of which was stuff that could have been done in the holidays. I had no time for my own kid because I was spending so much time with other peoples’. My daughter asked me to never go back to that again, and she was only about 8 years old.
Well, the OP wasn’t saying that the single people should be prepared to work longer hours, just that they appeared to be willing to. And people who have a family (or other caring responsibilities, like looking after elderly parents) also deserve to simply have a life.
I wouldn’t sign a contract that specified more than 40 hours per week (and my current contract specifies just 36.5 hours per week). That’s not to say I don’t work more than 40 hours per week from time to time as required, but I wouldn’t take on a job where the expectation was I put in those hours every single week.
I want to be measured on what I deliver, not how long it takes me to deliver it. I don’t stay in workplaces that place more emphasis on hours than output.
I’ve worked in the market research and advertising fields for over 20 years; it’s very common, in these industries, for career-focused people to put in very long hours (very typically 50-60 hours a week or more). Personally, I can’t work more than 45-50 hours a week for any serious length of time and stay sane.
I had one client, who was a very senior marketing executive in the restaurant industry. Not only did he work the very long hours described above, but he usually was not even in the same city as his family. Turnover at that level in that industry is very high; he was taking a new job every 2-3 years, almost always in a different city. When his kids got to a certain age, he said, “screw it”, and kept the family (IIRC, he had a wife and 3 kids) in Chicago, while he’d get an apartment in whatever city the new job was in, then commute back-and-forth on the weekends. Obviously, the lion’s share of responsibility for the day-to-day raising of the kids was on his wife, though he undoubtedly made a very handsome salary, and they could afford help, private schools, etc. When he had us as his ad agency (we were located in Chicago), one perk he requested was a small office in our building; he worked out of our offices probably one day a week, so he could have an extra night per week at home. It’s an extreme lifestyle, and I’d be miserable doing it, but it apparently worked for them (and, again, he made a crapload of money).
When I worked at Safeway at one point I worked 1000 hours in just over 2 months. I was a nightstocker and we got cut down to just 2, formerly 5, then after a week the other guy quit, so I was stocking the entire grocery department by myself. I would get there at 900pm and leave about noon the next day, for about 70 consecutive days. I was paid hourly (about $18/hr), with OT, so I was earning HUGE paychecks but I was seriously hating life. I was seriously considering drifting into oncoming traffic on the way there every night.
Anyhoo, to address the OP’s question (“OK Dopers, what’s the maximum amount of time you would feel comfortable spending at work without jeopardizing your family life?”), I’d say I could stand to do 6 8-hour days, or 5 10-hour days max if I had a family.
My wife has made it clear that she expects me to handle some of the load of family responsibilities, so I have to bear that in mind when juggling work priorites. Family, at least in the long term, is always more important than a job.
I wonder how much of that is being the “team player” so they can keep their job rather than being canned for someone who will play along. You can’t deny that as it stands, the current cultural expectation is that the only “good” excuse for leaving work early (or in this case, on time) is for child or family-related issues.
I agree with you there. What I disagree with is the Corporate America expectation that your life rightly belongs to the company you work for, and if they let you leave early to take care of a sick kid, they’re doing you this huge favor. (And if you don’t have a kid to get sick, well screw you – not like you have anything important to do outside of the office.)
Yes, for gods sake. Why is this not the default reasonable metric?
As others have said, having a family isn’t the only reason to work or not work. It’s all a matter of priorities and how much you should work all depends on where your priorities are. The thing is, for most people who have kids, they’re going to be a higher priority than a little more money or career advancement. For me, I used to basically be booked every hour of the day and even into the night depriving myself of sleep and I even managed to keep it up for a couple years, but it eventually burned me out and something had to give.
So, really, figure out what your priorities are, and work down from there. If your kids are younger, you probably want or need to spend a bit more time with them and can’t work as much. If they’re older and doing other activities and spending time with friends, you can probably get away with working more. But I still don’t think that, unless you live close to work and/or have some other way of taking care of a lot of the other errands, that working more than maybe 45 hours or so would be very doable.
That said, even though I’m single, I couldn’t imagine working 60 hours a week. Even if I loved the work I was doing, I have other things I need to get done, and plenty of thigns I want to get done, and working 5x12 pretty much means I’d barely have enough time to get everything I need to get done and almost no time for the stuff I want to do, which is important to avoid burning out.
I’ve worked warehouse jobs where I put in 60 hour weeks. Ten-hour days Monday-Saturday. It was all night-shift so it was very difficult to live anything like a “normal” life, nevertheless as a single guy I was able to make it work. But I definitely didn’t have much time to hang out with any hypothetical kids/wife. They would have seen me for about 2 hours around dinner time before I left for work, and that’s it. On my day off I was usually so tired that I spent most of the day (night for me) in bed. But this was 60 hours of hard manual labor, if I was sitting behind a desk all day (like I did sometimes in grad school) I would have had much more energy.
At my last job I was pissed if I couldn’t fit in at least 84 hours a week (12 hour watch 7 days a week). Ninety-four hours was juuust about right. But I was working offshore, so it’s not like I could go home at the end of my shift anyway. If I was going to be on a boat in the middle of the goddamn ocean, I was going to be paid for as much of it as possible! Was usually out for 2-4 weeks at a time, with anywhere from 6 to 14 days off between cruises.
Many of my coworkers had SOs or families and they seemed to make it work, but they almost invariably took more time off than I did. I’m not good at the long-distance thing in relationships, so it’s likely that job would have killed the relationship had I been in one. Heck, I would miss my cat enough by the end of a cruise that I couldn’t wait to get home.
My first 3-4 years teaching I worked 60-70 hours a week pretty reliably: 6:30-5:30 M-F, and then another 8 hours of grading on the weekends, and usually a football game or some other extracurricular at some point during the week. It didn’t feel like work: I loved my job, and what I was doing was so varied (teaching, tutoring, planning, grading, organizing, working with kids in an extracurricular fashion) that it never felt like a slog: I was using all parts of my brain throughout the day and because I had a lot of autonomy I could do what seemed best to me at any given time. I could not have done any one of those things for 60 hours a week.
That said, it would have been too much with a baby. When you don’t have children at home, you can make work your hobbies. I worked my butt off because work was the most interesting thing I had going on. Now my kid is the most interesting thing that I have going on, but it’s ok because all the work I did also made me a lot more efficient and I’m now a more effective teacher in 50-55 hours a week than I used to be in 65. I am less involved with outside-of-school stuff.
By definition, if you’re working 60+ hours a week, I’d call that a “lifestyle job”.
Plenty of people in law, high tech, investment banking and management consulting work those hours and more. Especially when they are young. Typically they get in around 9:30am and may have sustained stretches where they don’t leave the office until 10pm or even later. Plus with the ability to VPN from home or respond to Blackberry messages any time, any where, the job can become 24-7. So even if you leave at 7 or 8pm, a client, partner or MD might suddenly call you to respond to some request. Add another hour to your workday. By the way we need you to come in on Saturday as well. Plus a lot of people who work in consulting firms like Accenture, Deloitte or Mckinsey travel every Monday through Thursday. So what does it matter how long your workday is if you’re just going back to a Courtyard Marriot anyway?
As for having a family, a lot of those people don’t. Or they have a stereotypical “kept wife” situation where the wife is content to live in the Park Avenue apartment or house in Westchester taking care of the kids while the husband works his ass off. I also knew a lot of senior types in my old firm who were divorced.
I think an obvious exception is people who own and run their own small business. Let’s say I own a small store. Most likely, I’m going to operate it myself rather than hire somebody to work for me. So I’ll be there working the entire time my store is open.
Let’s say I open my store at 9 am and close at 8 pm and I’m open six days a week and closed on Sundays (not an unrealistic set of business hours) - I’m working sixty-six hours a week.
Yuck. That’s terrible. I’m in high tech, but I won’t tolerate such a lifestyle. For one thing, I’m married, and I don’t have a “kept wife”.
That was the great thing about working in prison. Our goal was to keep things from happening. When my boss called me up and asked me what I had done all day and I told him I hadn’t had to do anything, he’d say “Good job. Keep it up.”
In many cases, if these people have families the whole family operates the business. So for example the husband could take some time off to run an errand while the wife minds the store. So it’s hard work but doesn’t divide families like those other kinds of long hour jobs do.
It depends what you do in high tech. If you work in a startup environment or a so called “high performance company”, they often expect that you spend every waking hour grinding through code. Douglas Coupland coined the term “microserfs” in his book of the same name in 1995 to describe this culture.
High tech is different from investment banking and law where people work similarly crazy hours. I-bankers and lawyers at top firms tend to get paid a lot more a lot earlier in their career while tech workers often have to wait for their “options” to go public an vest…and actually be worth something. They also have a lot higher social status. The wealthiest guys running the top high tech firms still get called “geeks” and “nerds”.