For some people, being at work is more exciting and fulfilling than being at home. It depends on the job and it depends on the person. It also depends on the home and the family. The problem the OP seems to have is that he assumes everyone has the same priorities, the same shitty job, and the same loving family waiting at home.
Other people may have no kids, and a spouse who also works 100+ hours per week.
Being financially secure provides its own inherent leisure and comfort. My parents spent a lot of time at home with the family, but they lived pay check to pay check and a single unexpected expense would derail them for months or longer. They never owned a house and never enjoyed the kind of stability that monetary wealth can bring. I’m grateful for them. But I’d never want a life like that.
Leisure time isn’t just about quantity, but also quality. Some people would prefer one or two planned vacations to exotic destinations, rather than 52 weekends a year sitting on the couch or walking around the neighborhood with their family. It’s not strange to me that opinions are so varied.
I worked in an ad-hoc programming group for a while (I loved it --very fast paced), but they were always trying to cut our numbers to the bone and then were forced to supplement with contractors when we got slammed. We tried to tell them – the coding isn’t the issue. It’s the data knowledge. That could literally take years to know well enough. You can get a program to work and produce output, but if you didn’t understand the data it was really easy to make misconceptions that would spoil anything you came up with.
That’s the nut IMO. There are increasing marginal returns on your hourly rate when you’re willing & able to work the stupid hour jobs. Not all such jobs, but enough of them that that’s the predominant archetype people are imagining when we talk about such stupid hour jobs.
Would it be better if salary was an illegal idea in the USA and absolutely everybody punched a timeclock and had to be paid 1.5x overtime? Probably. But that’s not the world we live in. TPTB gain immense leverage and income from having a smaller crew of overworked experts they ride hard. So we’re stuck with it until substantially everyone flat out refuses to play that game.
With newbies graduating from school every year, there’s a continuous crop of fresh-faced eager folks thinking they can play the system rather than being played by the system. Most will be shown the truth in due time. Whether they’ll learn from that is a different question.
I’m not sure who you’re responding to, but the objection is not to financial success - it is to destroying your life today in the hope of financial success tomorrow.
Now, the person working two MW jobs to feed the family is one thing, but working a double shift to make some more money is another, especially if you could have a good well rounded life with less stress.
Great marriage that is. Sure to last.
Most people in jobs that make you live paycheck to paycheck aren’t going to be able to get 100 hour a week jobs even if they want them. Or their expenses are out of line with their income, which might still happen if you make more money. Remember during the 2009 crash when the stockbrokers moaned and groaned about how poor they were since they could hardly afford their nanny?
sure, but the antidote to that does not have to be “ridiculously long hours” we are again faced with the excluded middle.
I don’t think my position has ever been that it is impossible for some people to make it work and even thrive on it. As you say, everyone is an individual. My point is more a caution againt thinking that, past a certain point, more money and more “things” makes you any happier.
Based on personal experience with people in those elevated echelons I don’t see any evidence of a correlation between long hours, higher pay and increased happiness generally.
I took a very well rewarded job with a consultancy firm about decade ago. The promises made about the line of work I’d be in and the hours required were not being met and I was beginning to have my doubts.
At a lavish christmas “do” in the first few months the champagne flowed and the 10 colleagues around my table slowly became much more free and open about how their lives revolved around work and how turning down hours wasn’t acceptable, how they never took holidays and had very little free time.
They were brilliant, wealthy, dripping with status symbols and a collective fucking car-crash.
Of the 6 people near my age not one of them was on their first marriage and of the other four there was only one guy who was in a long-term relationship (and he’d only been with the company six months).
I left very soon after when it became clear that those pressures were beginning to bear down on me too. I took a job that paid a third of the wage and haven’t regretted that decision for a single second.
There is no position on that sliding work/life/reward scale that is inherently wrong but not truly recognising what really matters to you and not being honest to yourself about what truly makes you content seems to me to be a real tragedy. I think far too many people never gain that self-awareness or allow themselves to have that calibration made for them by others.
I guess the real trick is just having a job you enjoy doing. If your job truly brings you happiness and fulfillment, it doesn’t really matter how much time you spend at it each week.
I cleaned out my broad brush, and wouldn’t mind taking another swipe at the canvas.
This isn’t to say that your position excludes this, but …
I’ve known a good number of people who came from homes with one/both parents in jobs like this (high powered, high stress, high comp).
And they were pretty thoroughly screwed up. Not all, but a shocking number – people who you would, at a glance, assume they had led charmed lives.
My old GF is the child of a real estate magnate. She’s a wonderful lady but deeply troubled. Dad was the stereotypical workaholic until the very end (a good, long life). Mom was so bored that she began chain smoking, starting happy hour early in the day, and popping benzo’s like Tic-Tacs.
And this was basically considered ‘normal’ in their world ("we’re not messed up. This is how everybody we know lives).
Lots of people with zero resources raise a totally different kind of messed up child. Lots of middle class people, similarly, don’t win trophies on that score.
But the friends I have who came from wealthy homes as described above … wanted for nothing … except time, love, attention, approval, and affection of one or both parents.
And tended to chase it for the rest of their lives.
It isn’t one size fits all, but I do think it’s worthwhile to understand the tradeoffs with the various lifestyles that tend to look greener from over here.
FWIW … young and single ? Go nuts. That’s what that period in your life is for. But there are still no end of tradeoffs that are too often ignored at one’s peril.
I disagree. I had a boss a couple of years ago who felt similarly and decided all of his engineers and architects would be paid hourly. Then when there was no work he would send us home, lots of half day Fridays that I wasn’t paid for. When we got to the crunch time of the year he would bitch about the overtime and say that we should go home and spend time with out families. In the almost three years I work there I never earned what the equivalent salary would be. Being paid hourly is just a way for employers to shove the downside risk on to their employees. I’m more than happy to get paid for those down time hours an have a steady paycheck and give up my overtime for free or comp time. Especially when the salary is paired with a bonus that pays extra on those years when things are crazy.
That is the deal with my employees we do salary plus bonus and pair that with 14 paid holidays and two weeks vacation and two weeks sick time but I expect the guys (and gals) to work nights and weekends whenever I or a client needs them to. I generally expect them to work 20-80 hours per week with the 80 hour weeks when they are on site which is 16 hour days for 5 days and then travel on Sunday and Saturday. The on-sites are generally every other month or so. All of my employees have families and they have all been with me for years at this point.
It’s not “destroying your life”. It’s putting in some long hours when you are young for a few years and then deciding if you want to continue that lifestyle or if you want to take those new skills and experience to find a more reasonable job maybe at a higher salary. A lot of companies look for previous “100 hour a week job” experience when hiring for management positions.
I think “fear” is a legitimate motivator in this country, don’t you?
This is how I see it. People working “everyone else” jobs, even comfortable ones in the offices of big companies, never have enough money. They often have long commutes so they can live where they can afford. They are subject to the whims of fickle and petty middle managers. And that might be fine for them. Maybe they lead rich lives with their family, living within their means, pursuing affordable hobbies. And that’s fine as long as things are going well. But if they get sick, the roof needs fixing (assuming they live in a house), the rent goes up, or they get laid off from their job, then they have real problems.
So a lot of people go into these demanding industries like finance, law, Big-4 accounting, consulting, tech, even medicine because they pay well and offer a path to seven, even eight figure compensation. Contrary to popular belief, you can’t just decide to work in these fields for a couple of years and cash out on some big pay day. You get paid well for many of them. Very well in some cases. But then once you get a taste of the lifestyle, you find out how “poor” you are.
And it’s a rat race. Being just an associate in a law firm, “VP” in an investment bank, or “Director” in a consulting firm isn’t a “high powered” job, even if you are getting paid $200 - $400k. It’s “high powered” for your middle class parents to tell their friends about or for your high school reunion (depending on what kind of high school you went to). You’re still an employee of the firm, subject to the whims of the managing partners. And even when you make “partner” or “managing director”, there are still hierarchies within that band,
And, of course, there is the “keeping up with the Jones” aspect of it. Dressing in the right clothes, living in the right neighborhoods, etc.
And the ironic thing is most people won’t reach the “high powered” part. They will get to a point where they simply get burned out, plateau, or just get fired. Most will just spend their careers working long hours for relatively high wages.
Which is not to discount the benefits of a high salary. It’s nice at this point to have a bunch of money socked away.
It’s probably just my current job but I work with a lot of people who did these jobs for twenty odd years and have walked away. A couple of years ago one of my clients was a successful dermatologist who had several million saved up and wanted to get out and make booze all day. These are typically my most successful clients because they are smart willing to work hard and have a pile of cash.
I certainly don’t have stats to back it up but about a third of my clients fit this profile. From talking to competitors my client base skews to the poorer side of the industry.
I’m not sure the choice is always so stark, as in people are given some sort of red pill/blue pill type choice where they make minimum on one hand, and $100k plus on the other. If nothing else the people given the option to make $100k and move into management & higher hours are usually already college graduates probably making 50k or so.
I don’t know… salary has its advantages if you’re not overworked, which isn’t the case for everyone. I mean, in general my work-week has been consistently around 38-40 hours a week for my entire career, and in general while I’ve had to work my share of overtime/weekends/off hours unpaid, I’ve probably balanced that out with enough doctor’s appointments, times I left at 3:30 or 4 on Fridays, took long lunches with friends, or just got to work late because of traffic, weather, or just not firing on all cylinders that particular morning. All of which I was paid for.
That’s what salary is about; the assumption is that you’re being paid for a job, not for working hours, and that as long as you get your job done, the hours aren’t important. Of course, some managements try to take advantage of that and overload their workers, but in my experience that’s the exception, not the rule. And where it has been in my career (consulting), there were alternate compensation paths for bonuses, etc… that valued the hours you worked.
Personally I like the idea that my check doesn’t vary each week depending on whether I have to stay late, or leave early or get hung up in traffic or whatever.
The problem is really with asshole management- I’m sure the types that deliberately overload salaried workers are the same ones who work their hourly people to 39 hours and 58 minutes, and then send them home after having them work a 2 hour shift so they don’t get overtime. And they probably also do all the other bullshit to make sure they’re counted as ‘part-time’ and don’t get benefits as well.
This is really the point. Asshole managers / management / culture.
Eliminating salary isn’t a sensible goal or even a sensible suggestion. But ti does move the lowest of low hanging exploitation fruit out of reach of the worst of the assholes.
100% of my experience as a salaried worker was that accomplishing the workload took 50-60 hours a week before they added in distractions and interruptions. Yes, one could take 2 hour lunches every day. But then you’d be spending that extra 10 hours even later at the shop doing what you didn’t do between 1pm & 2pm.
That’s the shit that ought to be a slam-dunk conviction by the state labor board & put that manager (or owner) on the do not allow to be a manager/owner of anything anywhere list. If only such a n enforcement mechanism existed.
There seems to have been a shift in the past 20 years or so from companies looking at workers essentially as investments- someone to train and get well inculcated into the corporate culture and way of doing things, to companies looking as workers as entirely fungible, and as “resources” that can be used in the same way that lumber or some other supply can be used. In many cases, they go so far as to hire contractors to come in and work on specific projects, with the express intent of cutting them loose when the project is over.
I think this shift in viewpoint has a LOT to do with the asshole management thinking- why treat your workers well, if they’re essentially temporary, and the relationship is transactional? Your job in that case is to extract as much work as you can out of them, as you’re not expecting to have to deal with them for the rest of your career, and nobody above you is judging you on whether or not you retain your hires, but rather on whether your project gets done.
Five years ago before I retired we were giving new employees (with PhDs) over $100K in starting salary, and they sure as hell weren’t expected to work 100 hours a week, or even 60.
And great point about flexibility. I didn’t mind staying late for meetings when I could go to doctors appointments without filling out forms or getting approvals. And I really didn’t mind staying late to finish up something I wanted to work on.
The problem with working insane hours young, even for insane money, is how do you break out of the loop? You’ve given up a social life, obviously. If you get promoted, your hours won’t go down. I bet you get adjusted to having the money, so retreating to a sane schedule means you won’t have the money to pay off your mortgage or rent. And I doubt you have enough to retire on at 35 unless you get real lucky. I preferred a sustainable lifestyle.
Yeah. About that time I read an interview with a CIO bemoaning that the universities taught useless stuff like the fundamentals of computer science and not important stuff like how to use the application they company was using right then. Train new employees? Perish the thought - they might leave.
He wanted the universities to do his training for him, so when they dumped the app they could dump the employees also and hire a new set who knew the new app.
I’ve seen corporate education centers go from major operations which trained lots of employees to almost nothing.
The one in the next building from where I worked got turned into a customer visit center, and when I wanted to learn a mainstream application my company sold, I had few choices, most of which involved going to Europe.